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Another British paper was far less circumspect:Brittany’s Big-game Hunt in Botswana—Will She Nab Herself a Crown?
And more starkly by far, in the most popular Santa Domini paper over a picture of the two of them gazing adoringly at each other:Queen Brittany?
He should have been pleased, Cairo told himself. Everything was going according to plan. He should have beenexultant.
But he didn’t sleep much on that holiday, and he told himself it had nothing to do with the fact she was in that tent with him, yet a world away. He told himself it was for the best, and he shouldexultin the fact this woman seemed so immune to him.
Exult,he told himself as they smiled and laughed and pretended so well the whole world gasped and carried on over every new photograph.
Exult,he ordered himself when they were in private and she held herself so far away, all cool smiles and distance and her face forever in a book.
He shouldn’t find her a mystery and he shouldn’t want so badly to solve that mystery that he was up half the night. If this was exulting, Cairo thought as the safari wrapped up and they returned to their regularly scheduled lives in Europe, he was going to require a whole lot more caffeine to survive all the nights he spent asking himself if she really was the only woman he’d ever met who saw only the darkness in him.
That and why, if she was, he was masochistic enough to find that attractive.
“I’m getting the sense that the world is not so much rejoicing in our relationship or even avidly watching it unfold so much as they’re craning their necks at us, the way people do at a terrible accident,” Brittany said as they flew back to Paris from an exceptionally glorious charity ball in Vienna one night.
She set aside the paper she’d been reading and eyed Cairo as he lounged on the sofa across from her in his preferred position: lying flat on the white leather sectional with his feet propped up on the far arm, his dark suit in disheveled disarray all around him because the more rumpled he looked, the more the papers speculated about his sexual prowess and giddily imagined he performed sex acts behind every potted plant in Europe.
Who was he to deny his public?
He waved a negligent hand and let the ice cubes rattle around in the drink he held. The more noise the ice cubes made, he’d discovered long ago, the drunker people assumed he was. And it was astonishing, the things people said and did when they assumed another person was too drunk to remember, respond or protest.
Cairo wondered if he’d ever simply live through a moment, without mounting any kind of performance to survive it. Or if he even knew how to do that, when there was nothing in him but lies atop lies.
Then he wondered why, when it had been this way since he was a young man, he found the realities of his life and all its necessary untruths so terribly constricting now.
“We are a delicious accident,cara,” he told her, and experimented with a faint, fake slurring of his words. “That’s the whole point.”
“My mistake,” Brittany replied. “I was starting to think the point was you cavorting about the globe so you could better rub your wealth and careless lifestyle in the face of every last person alive.”
“That is a mere side benefit. One I greatly enjoy.”
Cairo swung around to sit up, raking his hair back from his forehead as he did. He put his drink down on the coffee table in the expansive jet cabin that better resembled a hotel suite, and he told himself there was no reason in the world for thisgnawingthing inside him.
She’d agreed to everything after that night in the strip club. After that kiss he’d been torturing himself with ever since, as if it had been his first. She’d come to his residence in the car he’d sent for her in the middle of the night that week, to keep the meeting a secret. All the hints he’d seen of some kind of vulnerability in the strip club had been gone by then. Long gone, leaving her as smooth as glass. She’d merely discussed their strategy with him, offered her own thoughts and ideas and then signed all the papers. No theatrics. No hint of any emotion at all, as if everything between them was strictly business.
Brittany had insisted that was how it should remain.
“You must be joking,” Cairo had protested after she’d dropped that little bomb. It had been well into the wee hours that night in Paris, and she’d sat there across from him in one of his ecstatically baroque salons as if she’d been carved from stone.
“I rarely joke at all,” she’d replied, deadpan. “And never about sex.”
“But sex is one of the great joys of life. Surely you must know this.”
“No wonder you are widely held to be such a bright beacon of happiness. Oh, wait. Laziness is more your style, isn’t it, Your Indolent Majesty?”
He hadn’t known quite what to make of such a strange, stilted conversation about sex with a woman whose taste was still tearing him apart. A woman who, even then, had that same high color on her cheeks that told him she wanted him as badly as he wanted her, no matter what cold, repressive things she said to deny it.
“I know you want me,” Cairo had said, baldly. As if he’d never finessed a situation in his life. As if he didn’t know how. As if he couldn’t help himself or keep himself from being more alarmingly honest with this woman than he was with anyone else alive. “Do you imagine you’re hiding it?”
“I don’t care who you sleep with, of course,” Brittany had continued as if he hadn’t said a word. She’d waved a negligent hand in the air, but he’d seen the way her eyes glittered. He’d been certain that meant something. Or he’d wanted, desperately, for that to mean something. “I only ask that you keep it discreet, so as not to distract from what we’re trying to accomplish, and that you make certain to keep it far away from me. That’s only courteous.”
“No threesomes, then?” he’d asked. Drawled, really. Entirely to watch her reaction—but she’d given him nothing but that glass exterior of hers, smooth and clear.
“You can have all the threesomes you like.” Her brows had arched and he’d felt skewered on that hard gaze of hers. “Unless, of course, a man of your appetites finds that number restrictive. Believe me when I tell you I couldn’t care less where you put your, ah, royal scepter. As long as it isn’t anywhere near me.”
“That’s hurtful.” He cocked his head to one side as he considered her. “My scepter is considered the toast of Europe, if not the entire world.”
