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A moment ago she’d had a sob inside her chest, so big she’d been afraid it would burst straight out through her ribs like some kind of alien creature and engulf them both, and now she wanted to laugh. She loosened the fists she still had clenched against him, uncurling her fingers and then smoothing them over the elegant morning coat he wore. Almost as if she was comfortinghim.

She opted not to analyze that.

“I haven’t yet determined whether or not I’ll live through this,” she pointed out after a moment, and though her voice was thicker than normal, there were no tears in it.

She could feel him, hard and so astonishingly hot, still wedged deep inside her. The very thought of it made her a little bit breathless, and then there was how itfelt. Or maybe it was just him, braced above her so that thick hair of his fell down his forehead the way it always did. But there were still no tears. And then his mouth curved, and Brittany couldn’t imagine why she’d ever felt like crying.

Cairo lowered himself to his elbows and cradled her face in his hands. It made him move the slightest bit inside of her, the faintest bit of friction where she was nothing but tender and new and scared, and it hurt again. She stiffened in the same instant she recognized that the pain was far less than before.

“You will live,” he assured her. He held himself still again. “I promise.”

He was heavy and hard, and her dancer’s thighs, which she’d thought could handle any amount of stretching, felt...different. They almost ached from this strange position, pressed down and wide open by another person so much larger and more solidly muscular than she was. Still, it wasn’t a painful ache. Not quite.

“It is your maidenly virtue that we must mourn here today,” Cairo continued, sounding almost as lazy as he normally did, despite that caramel gleam in his dark eyes. “That and your penchant to lie directly to my face are two topics I imagine we will spend some time discussing in the days to come.”

“Let’s not get carried away.” She frowned at him. “I might not have had sex before, but that doesn’t make me—”

“A virgin? I think you’ll find that is, in fact, the textbook definition.”

“Virtuous.” Her frown deepened. “I haven’t been remotely virtuous since I was a kid and I was never much of a maiden, either. I have three husbands who would agree.”

“Three husbands, yes.” His gaze held hers, hot and gleaming, and he moved then. A simple little slide. An adjustment, nothing more, and it made her breath catch as she clutched at him. But it didn’t hurt. Not at all, this time. “But no one has ever been here but me.”

She scowled at him.

“I will take that as the confirmation I do not actually require,” he murmured.

He pulled her closer to him, and Brittany was astounded to feel herself begin to melt all around him again. That look in his eyes changed again, and this time, the flush she felt was from something that felt a great deal like shame.

“You should have told me.” Cairo’s voice was reproving, and there was that edge to it she didn’t quite understand. Once again, she had the wild notion she was looking at a Cairo no one else had ever seen, this man who looked at her with something akin to tenderness in his gaze. Deep inside, she trembled. “I did not wish to hurt you. I am not quite that monstrous. Not quite.”

“I...” This was so far outside her experience. She didn’t know what to do, what to say. She’d neverfeltso many things at once, physical sensation mixed with a flash flood of emotion, and all the while Cairo simply held himself there. Not hurting her. Not rushing her. Not leaving her. As if he could stay like that forever. “I didn’t want you to know.”

“Because you thought I would mind?” he asked, and though his voice was mild enough she thought she heard an edge in it. He still didn’t move. “Or because you thought it would give you better leverage to throw your virginity at the highest title in your vicinity?”

She tipped her chin up as if she wanted to fight him for saying that. Maybe she did. Or maybe that was her only defense when he accused her of something so outside her imagining that she felt lacerated.

“I can’t imagine a single person alive who would imagine that Cairo Santa Domini, patron saint of the lascivious, would have the slightest interest in whether or not someone was a virgin. You are whatever the opposite of a virgin is. Times a million.”

His dark eyes gleamed. “As it turns out, I find myself deeply interested and also deep inside you. Perhaps they are related states.”

She tilted her head back to glare at him more fully. “If I’d known the possibility of a truly white wedding mattered to you, because you are apparently a giant cliché masquerading as a man, I would have made certain to demand more money for going through with it.” Her voice was as icy as possible, and yet even she could hear she sounded much too rough. And that it was far too revealing. She soldiered on, “And if I’d known you were a walking caveman, I would have turned you down the way I wanted to do from the start, no matter how many provocative pictures you sold to the tabloids.”

“I am a king, Brittany.”

That rang out between them, and she thought she saw something like amazement on his face for a moment, though he blinked it away. He seemed to get harder, bigger. Propped over her like that, still lodged inside of her, he became the whole world.

And Brittany found she couldn’t seem to say another word.

“Not a cliché, not a caveman, not common in any way,” he told her, in that same quietly ringing tone. “And I may not have a kingdom or the subjects I deserve, but I will have a wife before this day is done. I will have you. Like this. As long as we are together, I will have you exactly like this.”

Cairo said it as if they stood at the altar already and these were the promises he was making to bind them together. She shook again, deep inside. Then, following an urge she didn’t entirely understand, she moved her hips. She rocked them against his. His eyes darkened. And she pulled in a breath.

Because that didn’t hurt at all. In fact, it felt...interesting.

“And whatever games we play in public, Brittany, what we do in private is ours. More specifically, mine.”

“Cairo,” she whispered. “I think I want you to start moving now.”

Source: www.allfreenovel.com
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