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CHAPTER FIVE

“PAYATTENTION,PLEASE,”Cairo said from across the small table, which was how Brittany realized she’d been lost in her own head somewhere. She snapped her gaze back to his and saw that same brooding, amused impatience in those caramel depths that she was starting to crave a little bit too much.

Maybe more than a little bit.

She shoved that thought aside and cranked up her smile to something melting and adoring, as befit the occasion. She assured herself it was completely feigned. She’d worn a gown of glorious red that clutched at her breasts and then tumbled down to flirt with her knees, and the sort of fancifully high and delicate shoes that impressed even the most glamorous French women. She’d pulled back the front part of her hair and let the rest of the heavy mass of it swirl down from that gleaming little clip to tumble past her bare shoulders, a sleek fall of copper that she knew caught the light.

She would look beautiful in all the engagement pictures. Elegant, even; the better for all the nasty “compare and contrast”photos the papers would run the moment they heard the news. This side a future almost-queen dressed for the part, that side a stripper in a G-string and a bikini top upside down on a pole.

The vicious articles wrote themselves.

Brittany told herself, the way she seemed to do more and more these days, that she didn’t mind at all. That this was what she wanted. That she was as pleased with the public persona she’d created as she ever had been, and welcomed the way she and Cairo were using it to their own ends.

I have never been happier in all my life,she told herself now, surrounded by fine china and Michelin stars. Again and again, hoping it would sink in.Not ever.

Cairo looked devastatingly gorgeous. Cairo always looked devastatingly gorgeous. The things the man did to a jacket and a pair of dark trousers defied description. It was as if a light shone upon him from a great height, making him seem something like angelic despite his rather more earthy reputation. He turned heads. He inspired sighs. He couldn’t walk across an empty street without someone gasping aloud, and there’d been a chorus of dreamy sighs all the way across the restaurant floor when they’d entered.

He was the most dangerous man Brittany had ever met, and sometimes, when he lost that smirk of his and stopped saying his usual absurd and provocative things, she was sure it was as obvious to the world as it felt sloshing about inside her.

Tonight he’d chosen the best table in Paris’s current darling of a restaurant, where the paparazzi could crowd about outside and take telephoto pictures of their meal. He’d picked her up from her flat in a flashy sports car, a muscular Italian bit of fancy in a deep, glossy black, and had swept her into the restaurant in a hail of flashbulbs that hardly seemed to register to him at all. A surreptitious glance at the mobile phone in her evening clutch told her the pictures were online before they’d ordered their first course.

There’s no getting out of this,a little voice kept whispering to her from that place, deep inside her, where everything was fluttery and terrified and all because it recognized how susceptible she was to this man. How vulnerable. He made herfeel thingsand that was unforgivable.There’s no taking it back.

“You seem bored,” Cairo said after one silent moment bled into the next. He leaned back in his chair in that exultantly male way of his, a negligent finger tracing the stem of his wineglass as he spoke. “Surely not.”

From a distance she would look enthralled with him, she knew. Or she hoped. She leaned forward and rested her chin on her hand, to underscore that impression. Too bad it made it far too easy to forget that she was supposed to be acting.

“It’s only that I’ve done this so many times before,” she said.

Laughter flashed over his extraordinary face, and that didn’t help. Brittany might as well have plugged herself into an electrical outlet and switched on the power to full blast. Shefeltit when he laughed. Everywhere.

She was in so much trouble. That truth shivered through her, making her stomach flip over and then knot tightly, and it took everything she had to pretend it wasn’t actually happening.

Cairo watched her, close and hot, as if he knew every last thing she wanted to hide from him. “Did your teenage first husband propose to you in the finest restaurant in...wherever you came from?”

“In fact he did,” she said loftily. Brittany forgot herself again and grinned at him, remembering. “It was the parking lot of a McDonald’s with a bag of cheeseburgers from the drive-thru.”

“Be still my heart.”

“That counted as highly romantic to a sixteen-year-old girl with no prospects, I’ll have you know. Darryl had even bought the cheeseburgers, which made the whole thing especially fancy.”

He smiled at that. Brittany looked away. The sapphire ring she wore on her right hand caught the candlelight and reminded her exactly how far she’d come from a fast-food parking lot in Gulfport, Mississippi.

Cairo wasn’t done. “And what about poor Carlos, who you treated so hideously on television like the callous creature the papers tell us daily you truly are?”

“He came into the bar where I was working—”

“Is that a euphemism? Do you mean another strip club?”

“I mean the bar where I was working as a waitress,” she said, shaking her head at him. Then she relented. “The strip club was my second job.”

Cairo’s mouth moved into that smile of his that she’d discovered made her silly straight through. Completely and utterly foolish, and something like shattered besides. The only defense she had against it was to act like an icicle. But somehow, she couldn’t seem to do that tonight. Her ability to freeze had disappeared, lost somewhere in the dancing flames of the candles between them. Or in that smile of his that made her feel like just another flickering bit of the light surrounding him.

Maybe it wasn’t the worst thing, to be caught up in this man. To flicker and dance around him like the candles on the tables, or his loyal subjects, who followed him from party to party without end, or every woman who’d ever laid eyes on him. Maybe she was trying too hard to resist the inevitable. It was possible that giving in to it would make this latest transactional, cold-blooded marriage...easier.

Sweeter, anyway. She had to believe it would make it so much sweeter.

“Carlos came into the bar and he said he was moving to Los Angeles and I should go with him.” She shrugged away the other parts of the story that had little to do with what he’d asked. She didn’t like to think about that time. The usually angry, rough clientele and the places they tried to put their hands. That ever-present sense of danger that, still, had been better than a life dodging Darryl’s fists. She might have been a virgin, but her experiences had made sure she never felt anything like innocent. “He was pretty sure he could get us both on a television show if I did.”

Source: www.allfreenovel.com
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