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“Better than a sonnet.”
“I asked what the catch was, because who walks around claiming they can get on television shows? He said we had to get married, I said okay. The end.”
Cairo didn’t actually move to put a hand over his heart, but the gesture was implied in the way he watched her then, his caramel gaze looking darker in the candlelight. More like whiskey than candy, and it made Brittany feel a little tipsy, instantly.
Maybe more than just a little tipsy, she thought.
“Sheer poetry,” he said, his mouth in that tempting curve. “And Jean Pierre? Or did he have one of his nurses do the honors as he lay in his sickbed?”
“That one was much more fun.” Brittany couldn’t seem to stop smiling at him tonight, when she knew better. These past weeks had been sheer torture. Cairo was not the sort of man whose potency wore off the longer she spent time with him, like every other man she’d ever known. Not Cairo. He intensified. He gotworse.“He came backstage after one of my shows.”
“This time we really are talking about a strip club again, yes? For the purposes of clarity?”
“He said some lovely, complimentary things.” She raised her brows at him, daring him to comment.
“I’m sure he praised the strip club’s choreographer to the moon and back.” Cairo nodded, that sharp gleam in his gaze telling her he knew very well Jean Pierre had done no such thing. “Or perhaps the set design?”
“Something like that,” Brittany murmured.
Jean Pierre had told her something that bordered on filthy, that he’d somehow made sound charmingly bawdy instead—but Brittany suspected that Cairo, with that sharp gleam still in his gaze as he waited, wouldn’t find it nearly as amusing as she had at the time.
She didn’t want to dig into how she knew that. Much less what it meant.
“And then he told me he had very little time left to live and a handful of deeply ungrateful children. ‘Marry me,cherie,’ he said.” She affected a dramatic French accent and had the enormous, very complicated pleasure of seeing Cairo’s dark amber gaze gleam with pleasure. “‘And we’ll give them hell.’”
“This proved sufficiently compelling for you? I’ll make a note.”
“Jean Pierre had a certain charm.”
“By which, of course, you mean his net worth.”
There was no particular reason for that to slice through her, especially not tonight. Brittany didn’t know what was the matter with her, especially because it was true. She didn’t know why she felt so...fragile. She couldn’t scowl at him with so many people watching them, inside the restaurant and out, so she had to settle for a bright sort of smile that made her own mouth hurt.
“I make no apologies for that or any other choice I made, then or now,” she told him, and she chose not to concentrate on how difficult it was to keep her voice in the neighborhood of calm. “Only people who never have to worry about money look down on those who do nothing but. Besides—” she let her gaze sweep over him, from that reckless dark hair to his careless smile, and the sheer masculine beauty of that body of his he packaged to perfection “—you’re no different from me.”
“I must beg to differ,cara.I do not sell myself to the highest bidder.”
Her smile still hurt. Worse, then. “Keep telling yourself that. Tabloid after tabloid after tabloid.”
Cairo’s eyes flashed with an emotion she couldn’t read. He inclined his head slightly, very slightly. He did not say touché.Brittany supposed he didn’t have to say it out loud. The fact she’d scored a direct hit seemed to simmer in the air between them.
“Cairo,” she said, and she didn’t know what she was doing. She was performing, yes, but all she wanted was to...do something about the fact it seemed she’d hurt him, when she’d have said that was impossible. “You’re not the man you play in public.” She didn’t know where that came from, only that the moment she said it, something shifted inside her. She knew it was true. She reached her hand out across the table, but he didn’t take it. “It won’t kill you to admit that, if only to me.”
He let a bitter sort of laugh, and Brittany had the impression he was as surprised by the sound as she was. He leaned forward. He still didn’t reach for her hand.
“That is where you are wrong,” he told her, and she went still. His dark eyes were so dark and something like tortured, and she realized in the same instant that she’d never seen him look like this. Not remotely indolent. Not the least bit lazy or pampered. No trace of that smirk on his beautiful mouth. “It very well might kill me. Did you imagine this was a game?”
That sat there between them, stark and harsh. Brittany’s head spun. Then he pulled his gaze away and ran an unnecessary hand down the perfect line of his lapel.
“What do you mean by that?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper, her hand still reaching across the table. She couldn’t seem to move a muscle.
“I mean nothing by it.” But it took him another long moment to look at her again, and she didn’t believe him. “I am a creature of well-documented extremes, that is all. The theater of it all goes to my head sometimes and I imagine I am starring in some great tragedy. I think we both know I am not the tragedy sort.”
“Cairo...”
But he changed again, right there before her eyes. He didn’t appear to move a muscle, and yet he changed. He looked as useless and lazy as ever, that stark moment gone as if it had never been.
“This proposal will be unmemorable, I’m sure,” he told her, his voice amused and his gaze more like his usual caramel again. Light. Easy. Why couldn’t she believe it? “Especially for a woman as vastly experienced in this area as you. Are you ready?”
