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CHAPTER SEVEN
THELASTOFthe Santa Dominis married his stripper bride in a private chapel that dated back to the Italian Renaissance, the first of his family to marry in a place other than the Grand Cathedral in Santa Domini’s capital in centuries.
Three whole centuries, to be exact.
As the old hymns were sung and the old words intoned, Cairo stood at an altar his ancestors had built with a woman for whom he felt entirely too many complicated things to name and found it hard to remember that he was baiting a trap. It was much too difficult to focus on the real purpose of this performance.
Because all he could think of, all he could see, all he could concentrate on was Brittany.
Who had somehow seen beneath every last mask he wore. And was already his.
Princes and counts and the assorted minor arcana of Europe sat in the pews arranged behind him, yet all Cairo could think about was the fact of her innocence and his taking of it. Her sweet heat and her addictive taste. The untutored rawness of the way she’d moved beneath him and the greedy little sounds she’d made as she’d found her release. He had to shift slightly as he stood to mask his body’s response to the onslaught of memory, lest he appall the gathered throng of European nobles even more than he already had by making them bear witness to this ceremony in the first place.
Pay attention to the game, you fool, he ordered himself as the priest waved his hands over his bride’s elegantly veiled head and intoned sacred words down the length of the chapel.
He was making this woman his in every conceivable way today, and despite the niggling sense that he was forgetting something critical, he exulted in it. If was up to him, he thought, he’d lock her up somewhere far away and out of the public eye, and indulge himself in her forever.
But that, of course, was not the game they played. No matter that she wasn’t at all the practiced trollop she’d pretended she was for years. Nobody alive could possibly know that except Cairo—and in any case, it changed nothing.
The fact he felt he could show her the truth in him didn’t mean he should, or that it altered the course they’d set out. It only made him hate himself that much more.
“I don’t understand,” Brittany had said weeks ago. It had been a few days after their engagement dinner. Enterprising paparazzi were attempting to scale the gates of his Parisian residence and the sketches he’d commissioned from his preferred Italian dressmaker had been spread out between them on the coffee table in one of his salons. “This looks like something a proper English princess would wear. I assumed we’d be taking the loud and tacky route.”
“Everyone will be expecting that, of course.” He’d eyed her, all copper fire and that distance in her gaze. He’d had the fleeting notion she’d been protecting herself—but he’d dismissed it. Why should she need protection? She was the one marrying up. “I have something else in mind.”
A different sort of color bloomed high on her lovely cheeks, his mother’s ring gleamed on her finger and it was a dangerous game he’d been playing. He’d known that all along, but perhaps never so keenly as in that moment.
“I don’t understand.” He’d had the impression she’d thought about how to respond. Her words were too precise. “I thought the point was to horrify the entire world with your marriage to a bargain-basement upstart like me.”
“I want something slightly more complicated than a circus of a ceremony and a parade of bad taste,” he’d said quietly. “That would be an obvious stunt. And not only because that was how you did it the last time you married above your station.”
There had been a hint of misery in her dark hazel gaze. Then she’d blinked it away and lifted her chin, and he’d wondered if he’d only wanted that kind of reaction from her. If that was why he kept baiting her.
If he’dwantedher to feel all the things he was terribly afraid he felt himself.
“You want them to pity you,” Brittany had said softly.
She hadn’t met his gaze then. The iconic ring he’d slid onto her finger so recently had seemed to dance in the Parisian morning light between them, hoarding the sunshine and then sending it cartwheeling across the room.
Like joy, he’d thought. Not that he would know.
Brittany had still been talking. “You want them to think you believe that the sheer force of your feelings for me makes me somehow appropriate. You want to present a sow’s ear all dressed up like a silk purse and pretend you can’t tell the difference. You want them to laugh at you. At me.”
She’d met his gaze then and it had taken everything he had to keep from flinching. He, who had never so much as blinked at all the tawdry things he’d done in his lifetime. He, who had always known precisely what his mission was and how best to achieve it, no matter how many reports he received that the general’s health continued to decline.
“I do,” he’d said, and he’d pretended that he hadn’t seen her pretty eyes go darker at that. Or, more to the point, he’d pretended he didn’t care.
He said the same words now.
His voice was strong and sure to carry throughout the chapel and dispel any possible doubt that he was marrying this woman—his woman.He kept his fingers clasped tight around hers. And he waited.
But it wasn’t until she replied in kind, sending relief arrowing through him, that Cairo realized he hadn’t known what she’d say. Some part of him had truly believed that Brittany might change her mind at the last moment and take off running, like some captured bride of old. Another part of him wouldn’t have blamed her if she had.
Here in this church, as he slid a new ring onto her finger to proclaim her his without any doubt or wiggle room, Cairo found absolutely nothing amusing about the idea of Brittany anywhere but here. With him.
The whole world thought they knew her, but only he did.
She was his in every possible way.
