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CHAPTER SIX
SOMETHINGSHOOKTHROUGHBRITTANY, long and deep.
She had to stop this. She had to distract him. She couldn’t let him think she was an innocent, not today of all days. She didn’t think she’d manage to survive it if he thought she was anything but the hard-shelled, cold-eyed creature she’d spent so many years pretending she was that she sometimes believed it herself.
Because she couldn’t allow herself to be vulnerable. Not here. Not with him.
She didn’t know how to handle the fact that Cairo was the only person she’d met in years who didn’t see exactly what she wanted him to see when he looked at her.
Masks,she snapped at herself.This relationship is about masks, not what’s beneath them.
“Of course I’m not a virgin,” she said crisply, frowning at him. “Do people still use that word? Did it become the seventeenth century while I wasn’t looking?”
He didn’t look convinced. And Brittany knew, with every last fiber of her being, that she had to convince him he was mistaken and she had to do itright this very minutebefore it was too late—
Some part of her whispered that it already was.
That it had been too late from the moment she’d set foot in Monte Carlo.
And still Cairo looked at her in that deeply unsettling way of his, as if he could see straight through to her battered old soul.
As if he already knew she was a virgin, whether she bothered to confirm it or not. As if a small fact she’d considered essentially meaningless for years told him everything he needed to know about her.
She couldn’t have this. She couldn’t let him think this, especially because it was true. It would ruin everything, she knew it.
“Impossible,” she said when he didn’t respond, but continued to watch her in that same considering way. It was much harder than it should have been to affect her trademark arch, amused voice. “Everyone knows I’m a whore, Cairo, and here’s a news flash. They’re not wrong.”
“Including your own mother, I believe you mentioned.”
Brittany would have said the names her mother had called her over time were a collection of very old scars set over wounds that had long since healed, and yet she ached when he said it. Still, she made herself smirk at him as if there were no scars, no ache, and never had been. Not beneathhermask.
“Especially my own mother.”
That it wasn’t strictly a lie gave her voice a little power, she thought. After all, some members of her family believed that listening to certain kinds of music rendered a woman instantly and irrevocably fallen. It was a slippery, easy slope from that to whoring about. Her mother had always been the first to say so, when it suited her.
Cairo shifted then. He left one hand on the wall as the other moved to trace a lazy pattern along the line of her jaw. Down the length of it, from near her ear to her chin. Then back again. And the look in his eyes was more than simply dangerous, then. It was possessive. Triumphant.
And very, very male.
Brittany felt that shaking thing inside of her again, insistent and terrible. Some part of her wanted nothing more to surrender to it. To tell him the truth he’d already guessed. To stop lying about herself for one little second in all these years of living those lies to the hilt.
Just here. Just to him. Just to the only man whose kiss had made her feel like a woman, not a means to an end.
But that was insanity. That bordered onintimateand she knew better than to risk such a thing. Not withCairo Santa Domini,in the name of all that was holy, given his version of intimacy likely involved cutting down to three orgies a week from seven.
What the hell was she thinking?
She blamed the dress. The elegant princess dress that gave a womanideas,even a woman who should know better.The dress that looked as if it had fallen from the pages of a fairy tale and made even a trailer-park Cinderella like Brittany imagine princes were real and charming and right here in front of her at last.
Life had taught her better than that. Over and over again.
So she smiled at Cairo, suggestively and wickedly. She reached up and covered the hand he held to her cheek with hers, and arched herself into him. She pressed her breasts against his chest and she tilted back her head to keep her gaze on his, and she did her best to ignore the way those things made the fire inside her sear through her.
“I can play a virgin if you want me to,” she murmured, her voice sultry. “Why am I not surprised that the most famous playboy in Europe likes a little role play?”
That hot blaze in his eyes deepened. The air between them seemed to pull tight, as if something huge clenched around her, then squeezed. Hard.
“Are we playing?” he asked quietly.
