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“You may kiss the bride,” the priest intoned.

Cairo wanted to do a great deal more than simply kiss her.

But this was a stage, he reminded himself. This was an act. This was his opportunity to paint himself the besotted fool for the cameras.

He told himself he was a lucky man, indeed, that it was so easy.

Brittany tilted her face up to his, her pretty eyes darker than usual. He wanted that to be evidence. He wanted her to be as swept away in this as he was. He hated that he couldn’t quite tell how much of her was real and how much of her was a performance.

It had been different up in that old stone chamber. When he’d been able to feel the truth of her, of them, in the way she shook apart in his hands and then again beneath him. When he’d ridden them both into all that glorious fire and let them burn and burn and burn.

God, how he wanted to do it again.

He pressed his mouth to hers. He felt her tremble against him when he deepened the kiss, holding her against him a beat or two longer than was strictly polite, and he saw the vulnerable cast to her temptation of a mouth when he finally released her.

She was thinking about what had happened between them, too. About him sunk deep inside her and her legs wrapped around him. He knew it as well as he knew his own name.

“Next time,” she murmured, right there against his lips, “why don’t you brand me with your initials instead? Or perhaps urinate in a circle around me, like a dog?”

“Is that a request?” he asked, in a low voice pitched for her ears alone. “Or a dare?”

And then he pulled back and presented her to the assembled crowd, before she could answer back in her usual tart way. His queen at last, and who cared what those vultures thought of her?

He knew what he thought: that his honeymoon couldn’t come fast enough, because one taste of her wasn’t nearly enough.

Cairo couldn’t remember ever wanting a woman the way he wanted this one.His wife,he thought as they made their way down the chapel’s long aisle and then stepped out into the exuberant Italian sunshine. It was such a small word, and yet he couldn’t seem to process it.His wife.

There was only one other thing in all the world he’d ever wanted so badly it had consumed him whole. Thinking of his lost kingdom as they moved, Cairo thought he should be ashamed that he’d lost sight of it for even a moment. No matter how his new queen’s smile caught the sun and made the whole world a little brighter all around her as they walked from the chapel. The wedding breakfast that waited for them, arranged in artistically laden long tables in the old castle keep, was not the place to forget who he was or the role he needed to play here.

Because it had never been more crucial to keep up his usual act than it was today.

“I never thought I’d see the day,” one of his supposed best and oldest friends said with an entirely feigned congratulatory grin, slinging his arm over Cairo’s shoulders in a show of his usual drunkenness as Cairo made his rounds sometime later. Cairo could see right through it, but then, there wasn’t much of Harry Marbury—a man constructed of as many impeccably pedigreed English forebears as cast-off morals—that wasn’t entirely transparent. “It’s not as if you must marry to secure the kingdom, Cairo. It’s been lost all your life and no matter those rumors that the old soldier is on his last legs. Whatisthis preposterous wedding all about?”

“We all must fall in our time,” Cairo replied lazily, as if mention of the general didn’t scrape at him. And he hated himself when he continued, as he knew he must. “Better to cushion that landing in a woman who knows her way around a stripper pole, in my opinion.”

“One does not marry the trash, friend,” Harry said, laughing in his condescending way—and raising his voice just enough that it carried across the gathering and over to where Brittany stood with that fake smile on her face. Cairo saw her stiffen and he hated all of this. These lies, these performances, when what had happened between them had been real. Raw and real and entirely theirs. The most real and unscripted he thought he’d ever been in his life. “One uses it and then one’s servants puts it out. In bins, I’m told.”

Cairo would never know how he managed to keep himself from murdering the man—his supposed oldest, dearest friend—with his own two hands just then, right where they stood in the medieval courtyard of the old castle keep.

But he didn’t, because this was exactly what he’d wanted. What he’d gone to such great lengths to make happen, precisely like this. He had no one to blame but himself if he didn’t like how it felt now.

Now that she was his wife. His exiled queen.

His,damn it.

That was the part that mattered. That and the headlines Harry’s little comment would likely generate from all the hangers-on that Cairo knew full well spent half their time in his presence texting the tabloids with choice snippets that usually bred headlines. And that was why Cairo laughed indulgently and clapped Harry on the back as if he’d told a rousing great joke instead of exterminating him like the cockroach he was.

You deserve a medal of valor for letting him live,he told himself grimly as he smiled and laughed and encouraged all these parasites to pity him as the reception wore on. Just as he’d planned.

Though it was hard to mind any of that when he had Brittany in his arms again.

She tilted her head back as they danced together for the first time as husband and wife, exiled king and nominal queen, smiling up at him for the benefit of the crowd.

“You look as if you are head over heels for me,” he told her, and tried to sound as if he was chiding her when all he could think about was keeping his hands where they belonged. Instead of where he longed to put them. He was sure everyone could see it and with it, his real face. His true self. And yet all he wanted to do was continue to gaze down at her. “The papers will not know whether to call you smitten or materialistic.”

“It must be the romance of the day,” she said dryly. “It’s going to my head. Next thing you know I’ll be reciting poetry and telling all the papers it was love at first sight, right there in that nightclub in the sewers of Paris where they think we met.”

Two things happened then, in an instant.

Source: www.allfreenovel.com
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