AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I have not changed my mind,” Cairo said.
His gaze was too bright and too assessing at once, and he seemed to fill the whole of the room, stone walls and the four-poster bed and ancient tapestries be damned. Then he stepped closer to her and that was worse. It was as if he took over the entire world while her heart simply hammered at her, telling her things about herself she didn’t want to know.
Brittany had to order herself to stand still. To simply hold her ground, tilt her head back to keep her eyes on his face and keep herself from reacting when he reached over and took her hand in his. Idly, lazily, his fingers found the Heart of Santa Domini and moved the famous ring gently this way and that on her hand.
It was such a small, civilized sort of touch. It was so restrained, so conservative—nothing like that kiss in the burlesque club or the one staged for the slavering press in one of the finest restaurants in Paris. They were both wearing so many fine, carefully crafted clothes today, all of them formal and stuffy and exquisite. There was almost no flesh on display at all, in contrast to almost every other time they’d been together.
Not to mention, they were alone.
That word seemed to pound through her.Alone.
Maybe that was why his seemingly inconsequential touchhummedin her, stark and wildly electric, as if he’d done something far more wicked than take her hand in his. Something in her wished he had. She felt soft and desperate and deep inside her, high between her legs covered in yards and yards of shimmering white, something clenched hard and then pulsed.
She wished she wasn’t a virgin. She wished she was as experienced as she pretended. Then she would know how to handle this. Then she would know what to do.
“Have you?” Cairo asked. Quiet and close, his attention trained on the ring.
“No,” she said. It was not quite the set down she’d wanted to give. She was lucky she got the words out at all. And was that relief she saw chase across his gorgeous face? But that made no sense. It disappeared and she told herself she’d imagined it. “No, I haven’t changed my mind.”
There was no reason on earth that she should. Except, of course, that overwhelming sense of doom and ruin and longing and insane hope that was filling her nearly to bursting. She planned to keep right on ignoring the lot of it, straight on into the financial benefits of this arrangement that would have her feet sunk deep in the South Pacific sand within five years, tops.
All she had to do was keep herself from toppling over. Especially while Cairo was watching her...and touching her.
How could he manage to do this to her with so meaningless a touch?
“The guests have assembled,” Cairo told her, as if none of this was getting to him. She envied him that. “The overbred scions from all the noble families in Europe or their more embarrassing relatives in their place, depending on how personally offended the sitting monarch is by my assorted shenanigans over the years.”
“Of course, your friends and very distant family are here, as expected.”
“In the sense that all of Europe’s aristocratic families were related at some point or another?” He shrugged at that, though Brittany knew that he was listed in the lines of succession of at least five different kingdoms. “I would not call them my family. It would be rather presumptuous, among other things. But I cannot help noticing that your family are nowhere in evidence.”
She wanted to tug her hand from his, but she suspected that would be too telling. Too revealing, when she already felt wide open and much too vulnerable, and this was the man who had showed her his real face in a restaurant in Paris and then claimed she’d misread him. She needed to remember that. Cairowantedthese masks they wore.
She had no idea when she’d stopped wanting it, too.
“Mine weren’t invited,” she said. Abruptly.
Cairo’s brows rose. He opened his mouth to say something that would no doubt cut her to the quick, and Brittany couldn’t take it. She felt too exposed already. And suddenly she didn’t care if he knew it. She pulled her hand back, but that didn’t help. She could still feel that deceptively simple touch everywhere, as if he’d branded her.
“My family didn’t sign up for this spectacle.” She did nothing to ease that snap in her voice. “And it’s not as if our marriage will last long anyway. It would take longer for them to get here than we’ll stay together. Why bother?”
Brittany regretted her words almost the instant she said them. Cairo seemed turned to the same stone as the walls around them, and she knew, deep inside, that she’d offended him.
He looked away for a moment, toward the cliff and the sea and the Italian villages clinging to the hills in the distance as if the view could soothe him. When he looked back, there was a speculative expression on his face.
“You cannot be nervous,cara, can you?” He adjusted his crisp cuffs, one after the next, though his gaze never left hers. “This should be like falling off a log, as you Americans say, should it not? I am the wedding virgin here, after all, not you.”
Later, she would reason that it wasthat word. She hadn’t heard that ridiculous, archaic word in a long time, because who would bother to use it in the vicinity of such a well-known slut and, according to the more salacious papers, possible prostitute? It hardly came up in the strip clubs or dive bars where she used to spend all her time. Much less in Hollywood, the most virginless place she could imagine.
But here, now, in an old castle on the Italian coast, it hardly matteredwhyshe flinched at the sound of the word. Only that she did, right there where Cairo could see her do it.
And then, much worse, she blushed.
Bright red and unmistakable.
She could feel the heat of it sweep over her, making her sweat and let out a harsh, loud breath. Her dress felt itchy all around her, suddenly. The combs that held her swept back veil felt prickly against her skull.
And worse than all of that was Cairo, who watched her with wholly undisguised fascination.
