Font Size:  

Brittany pulled her hand back from the center of the table and told herself this was none of her business.Hewas none of her business. She should never have acted as if she wanted to knowthe real himanyway. What an exiled king chose to hide behind his public mask was his affair, not hers.

“It can’t possibly be as heartwarming as cheeseburgers in a parking lot, or off-color remarks in a strip club,” she replied, and it was a fight to make her voice cool again. As if that strange moment that still spiked the air between them hadn’t happened. “But you do like a challenge, don’t you?”

Cairo’s mouth moved into its usual amused curve, though his eyes remained dark on hers. He reached into the pocket of his suit coat and pulled out a small box. An instantly identifiable jeweler’s box that could really only contain one thing. And still, Brittany found herself staring at it as if she didn’t know what it was. As if she didn’t know what was happening. As if they hadn’t decided he would do this here, now, tonight.

The frightening part was, she was only partially acting. She felt too hot, then too cold. Her tongue felt glued to the roof of her mouth.

He moved then, shifting from his seat to kneel down beside her chair, and her heart started drumming wildly in her chest. She couldn’t tell if the restaurant around them went quiet. She couldn’t tell if the earth had stopped spinning. The point of this was the spectacle he’d mentioned, the endless show that was both their lives—but all she could see was this. Him.

The last man in the world who should ever have been kneeling down before her, and yet there he was, doing exactly that.

The whole world narrowed as he took her hand in his.

Then disappeared entirely.

This isn’t real, this isn’t real, this isn’t real, she chanted at herself.

But the truth was, it felt more than real. It felt like a fairy tale, the kind she’d lectured herself against loving or believing in all her life. It felt like magic and hope and something sweet besides.

His Serene Grace the Archduke Felipe Skander Cairo of Santa Domini smiled at her, Brittany Hollis, from the worst trailer park in Gulfport, Mississippi, as if she thrilled him. As if she really, truly did. That treacherous part of her, not buried as deep inside her as it should have been, wished that was possible. Oh, how she wished it.

He cracked open the small box he held and presented it to her with flourish, and Brittany’s heart stopped.

She knew that ring. Everybody knew that ring. That glorious, incomparable diamond for which songs had been written and blood had been shed, across the ages. She knew its sparkle, its shape, even the delicate, precious stones that surrounded it like a whimsical halo. It had been painted by any number of great masters over the centuries, was known as one of the finest legacy jewels in all of Europe, and was so beloved by so many that various paste representations were sold all over the world.

“It was my mother’s,” Cairo said quietly, his eyes on hers. She knew that. He must have known that everybody alive knew that. “And my grandmother’s before her, going back hundreds upon hundreds of years. It was commissioned a very long time ago, crafted by my kingdom’s finest artisans, and is known as the Heart of Santa Domini. I hope you will wear it proudly.”

“Cairo...” Her voice was a whisper. She couldn’t wear such a ring. She couldn’t bear it. It was a symbol of hope, of love, and this was nothing but a sideshow performance for a baying crowd. But she couldn’t seem to open her mouth and tell him so.

She’d forgotten her internal chant entirely. She’d forgotten her own name. She’d forgotten the fact they were in public, the paparazzi right there outside the window, even the fact that all of this was staged.

There was only the look in Cairo’s caramel gaze. That hot, dark, gleaming thing that wrapped around her and pulled tight. There was only the way he took that fairy-tale ring from the velvet box and then slid it onto her finger, as if she was the princess in the tale, not the joke he was playing on the world.

“Marry me,” he said, and his voice was different, too. Deeper. Richer.

As raw as she felt.

And Brittany understood how foolish this game of theirs was. There was nothing the slightest bit cool about her then. No icicle. Nothing even close. She felt...everything. She didn’t know if she wanted to cry or if she wanted to scream. If she wanted to fall into his arms or run away. She only knew that she’d been married three times and not one of them had ever felt like this. Not one of them had ever made her shake, inside and out.

Not one of them had ever been anything but expedient.

She tried to remind herself that Cairo was the same, if on a grander scale. That it was all he was. She tried to tell herself this was no different from the rest, and no matter that she was wearing one of the most romantic diamonds in the history of the world on her hand.

“Must I beg?” he asked then, though he looked as comfortable on one knee as he did lounging in a chair or sprawled out on a sofa. As if he could inhabit whatever posture he found himself in and make it his own, and easily.

“Of course not,” she said quickly, and she wasn’t faking the way she shook. Or the sting of tears that threatened to spill over from behind her eyes. “Of course you don’t have to beg.”

“Say it,” he ordered her, every inch of him the king he wasn’t, even as he kneeled in what ought to have been a supplicant position. It took her breath away. It made her imagine that all of this was something much, much different than it was, and that, she knew on some distant level, was the most dangerous thing of all. “I find I require it.”

“Yes,” she told him, this exiled king on his knees before her.Her.Brittany Hollis, reality-show villain and scourge of Europe, destined for nothing but infamy and then irrelevance. In that order, if she was lucky. “Yes, I’ll marry you.”

“I hoped you might.” He didn’t move. His eyes were lit up with that drugging heat she didn’t want to recognize, but she did. God help her, but she did. She could feel it echo inside of her, making that sweet, hot knot in her belly bloom into something more like an ache. “Come now, Brittany. We need to sell this scene for our adoring public.”

“I said yes. What more do you want? A song and dance?”

“I think you know.” He smiled when all she did was stare at him, so outside herself she hardly knew where she was, and shivering inside as if she’d never get warm again. She wasn’t sure she wanted to. “Kiss me, please. And make it good.”

Brittany felt dizzy then. Hot and wild and pierced straight through.

Source: www.allfreenovel.com
Articles you may like