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“Silly girl,” he drawled, and made no attempt to sit up straighter from his lazy position. Or to rein in the desire he was certain she could see stamped all over him, from his face to his sex. “Don’t you know that only makes me want you more?”
“You’ll have to learn to live with the disappointment somehow,” she said dismissively, and Cairo only smiled.
“That,” he murmured, like the threat it was, “is one thing you can depend upon me never, ever to do.”
* * *
Brittany woke late the following morning in her little flat, four narrow flights up in a weathered old building on the outskirts of Montmartre. It was laughably tiny, although if she stood on a chair in her small kitchen there was enough of a view of the Parisian rooftops and the smallest bit of the famous Basilica of Sacré-Cœur that she could forget her worries a while as she craned her head to see a sliver of its pale white dome.
She did not think about what had happened the night before. She did not think about the dreams that had haunted her through the night, waking her again and again until she finally fell into something dreamless and exhausted near dawn.
She didn’t think about any of it and yet she could still feel Cairo’s touch. She could still taste him on her lips.
Her body was still in that insane tumult over him, from her breasts that felt swollen to twice their size, to the shivery hot knot low in her belly that clenched and clenched and clenched. Her body, which was supposed to be entirely hers. Her body, which she’d kept a pristine little fortress ever since her first wedding night, when she’d hidden from the whiny boyfriend turned drunken lout and had decided, there and then, that she’d rather die untouched and alone than let anyone else touch her against her will.
She’d never imagined that her body and her mind could disagree about whather willwas.
Brittany took a very long shower to wash the night away. Then she went on her daily run at her gym, moving much faster than usual today through her usual miles, but the dreams and the memories stuck with her no matter how quick her pace.
It was never a good sign when the treadmill felt more like a metaphor than simple exercise.
Brittany was already in a dark, uneasy mood when she made it back to her flat. It did not improve when she picked up the private mobile phone she’d left plugged in on her bedside table to see her mother had called at least three times.
She was scowling at the screen as she scrolled through the logged calls, no messages, when it lit up with a fourth call from her mother.
Something cold snaked down Brittany’s spine. The last time her mother had called repeatedly like this, Brittany’s former stepchildren—all old enough to be her parents, a fact that perhaps only she and Jean Pierre had found amusing—had taken to the tabloids to sound the trumpets about how shoddily they’d treated her and how they had “expunged that harlot” from the family home at last.
Brittany’s mother had not called to commiserate about yet another tour through the slag heaps of the tabloids. She’d called, as ever, to complain that her daughter’s disgraceful behavior was humiliating the whole of the Hollis clan back in Gulfport andhad Brittany no shame?
“Do you want me to have shame, Mom?” Brittany had asked coolly. Someday, she’d vowed for the nine millionth time, she would stop answering her mother’s calls altogether. Someday when she’d finally come to terms with the fact that the woman was never, ever going to treat her as anything more than a source of income. Much less love her.Someday. “Or do you want me to keep paying your rent?”
Today was notsomeday, regrettably, but Brittany tossed the mobile aside without answering, letting her mother go to voice mail. She powered up her laptop instead.
She didn’t even have to Google herself, as she sometimes did. Oh, no. The headlines were right there on her launch page.
His Royal Stripper?
How Low Can Cairo Go?
Black Widow Brittany Trades Up!
Her heart was already causing a commotion in her chest as she clicked on the first article, as if she already knew what she’d see—
But it was worse.
Someone had taken a series of pictures in the club last night. And the pictures made the whole thing look much more sordid than Brittany remembered it. Much hotter. Much more desperate andmuchmore public. If she hadn’t known better, Brittany might have assumed that Cairo actually had bought her for the evening. The papers certainly insinuated he had.
He might as well have, she thought now. It came to the same thing, and if she’d let him, she’d have a paycheck to comfort herself this morning. Meanwhile, that scraped-raw, heavy feeling in her chest wasn’t going to help a soul. It was better to ignore it. Starting with the little sound she didn’t mean to let out as she sat there gaping at those awful pictures that told her far too many hard truths about herself and her own longings. She lifted up a hand to try to rub that harsh, hollow feeling out of her own chest.
It didn’t really work.
She felt betrayed. By herself, not by the devastatingly handsome man whose entire life was a monument to wreck and ruin. She should have seen this coming. She should have known there was no wayCairo Santa Dominicould turn up in her lifewithoutleaving his dark mark all over her.
This was what he did. Exactly this.
She should have assumed not only that someone would have photographed the whole of their encounter, but also that, of course, they’d sell it to the voracious tabloids. In point of fact, it was likely Cairo had engineered the whole thing and the photographer in question was on his payroll. Why hadn’t she thought of that last night?Of coursehe’d play this up to the paparazzi.This was what he did.
She should have been prepared for this—why wasn’t she?
