AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The women smiled back, the bustling and fussing continued, and then the church bells were ringing out the hour and it was really about to happen. In sixty short minutes she was going to walk outside to the chapel set high above the Mediterranean Sea and marry Cairo Santa Domini.
She dismissed the women from the room and stood there in the middle of it, fighting to keep her breath even and her eyes dry. Fighting to keep upright instead of sinking to her knees and staying there. Or worse, crawling into the four-poster bed that commanded the whole of one wall, hauling the covers up over her head and pretending she was the child she didn’t think she’d ever been. Not really.
“Vanuatu,” she muttered to herself. Fiercely. “Palm trees and white sands. Freedom and mai tais and life in sarongs.”
Get your head into this,she ordered herself, in a pitiless sort of voice from down deep inside her that sounded a great deal like her harsh, bitter mother.Right now. You have no other option.
Brittany only realized her hands were clenched into fists when her fingers started to ache. She straightened them as the door to her chamber opened behind her, and then she smoothed the dress where it billowed out below her waist and—according to the mirror angled on its stand before her—made her look like a confection. She looked past it and out to the Italian hills that sloped toward the deep blue sea, dotted in marvelously colorful houses seemingly piled on top of each other while the staunch cypress trees stood like sentries beside them. She tried to breathe.
She kept trying.
“I’d like a few moments to myself,” she managed to say after a moment, and was proud that her voice sounded much, much calmer than she felt.
“It is my role in life to disappoint you, I am afraid.”
Cairo.
Of course.
Goose bumps swept over her, and she hoped he couldn’t see them through the filmy, gossamer veil she wore pushed back to cascade over her shoulders toward the stone floor. His voice was richer than usual. Deeper and darker, and suddenly there was a lump in her throat that made it hard to swallow.
Then she turned to look at him and it was all much worse.
He was resplendent in white tie, lounging there in the doorway like a decidedly adult version of Prince Charming. The long tails of his morning coat did marvelous things to his lean, powerful frame, as if he’d been born to wear such formal clothes. A bubble of something giddy and inappropriate caught in her chest, and she had to swallow down near-hysterical laughter, because, of course, he had been. Bred for centuries on end to look nothing short of perfectly at his ease in attire most men found confining and strange.
“You are staring at my boutonniere as if you expect it to rise from my lapel and attack you,” he said in his lazy, amused way, as he shut the heavy door behind him.
Brittany had never been a coward. She’d never had that option. And she didn’t think she was one now, no matter how she felt inside. Still, the hardest thing she’d ever done in her life was to lift her gaze to meet his.
This glorious man. This would-be king. This inscrutable creature who was about to become her fourth husband.
Fourth,a small voice whispered deep inside of her, with a certain feminine intuition she chose not to acknowledge,and last.
She shrugged that away, and the shiver of foreboding that crept down her spine, and let herself drink him in.
He looked exactly the way she’d expected Cairo Santa Domini would look on his wedding day. If, perhaps, more stunning. That careless dark hair of his was actually tamed. He’d even shaved his deliberately scruffy jaw, so he looked a bit less like a renegade than usual. He looked every inch the gleaming, impossibly wealthy and powerful royal he was.
And his eyes were more whiskey than caramel again. They seemed to see straight through her, pinning her to the wall like yet another decorative tapestry.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, and she hated that she sounded so much more stern andbotheredby him than she’d intended. Or was wise. She cleared her throat. “Aren’t you supposed to be waiting for me in the chapel?”
“It is not as if they can start without me.” He eyed her, and she had no idea what he saw. No idea what that dark awareness that gleamed in his gaze was, only that it seemed to echo inside of her, growing bigger and wilder by the second. “I wanted to make certain you were not seized with any bright ideas about tossing yourself out the windows. A bridal suicide, while certainly bait for the tabloids, would simply mean I needed to start this process all over again. And I do hate to repeat myself.”
“The papers we signed were clear. Death means no money at all. And if I abandon you at the altar I only get a quarter of what I would if I go through with it.” She made herself shrug, as careless as he always was despite the fact she felt so soft and shivery. “It wouldn’t be in my best interests to climb out the window, even if it wasn’t a steep fall off a very long cliff to the sea.”
Something occurred to her then, and gripped her so hard it was like a brutal fist around her heart.
“Why?” She didn’t want to ask the next question, but she forced herself to do it anyway. “Have you changed your mind?”
Brittany understood far too many things in that airless, endless moment while she waited for his response. Too many things, too late. Too much she didn’t want to admit, not even to herself.
This wedding was nothing like her others, two rushed courthouse visits and the small civil ceremony on the grounds of Jean Pierre’s chateau that had been all about the gown she’d worn specifically to infuriate the old man’s heirs. It had done its job. It had proclaimed her more Vegas showgirl than the solemn bride a man of Jean Pierre’s standing should have been marrying, just as he’d wanted. She’d expected the dress for this even more dramatic performance today to be along those same lines. She’d been prepared for it, despite some drawings Cairo had showed her weeks ago that suggested a more classic approach.
But instead, the gown her attendants had dressed her in really was the one Cairo had showed her. Simple, elegant. It made her look like an actual, blue-blooded princess worthy of marrying a royal, not a tabloid sensation. Her breasts were not the main attraction. They weren’t even on display. Her legs and thighs were not exposed every time she moved. Her veil, handed down in his family for generations and smuggled out of Santa Domini years ago, was almost as old as Cairo’s title.
This wedding—this man—was nothing like the others.
And it made her feel things she’d never felt before.Hedid.
