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After all, it wasn’t as if that was anything new.
The fact that she was no longer a virgin, on the other hand, was.
Lying there on her stomach, she pulled her hand out from beneath the pillow and stared at her rings. She’d worn wedding sets before, of course. Her first husband had been as deficient in that department as in everything else, but Carlos had dutifully presented her with not only the expected solitaire engagement ring and a platinum band to match, but also a bill for her half of the investment they were making in their Hollywood future. Jean Pierre had preferred yellow gold and had given her an ornate ruby he’d claimed was a family heirloom when they’d gotten engaged, then two guard bands of rubies and diamonds at their wedding ceremony. His fifty-year-old matron of a daughter had sneered at the rings and told Brittany it looked like her hand had been dipped in blood.
“Success,” Jean Pierre had murmured into Brittany’s ear, the conniving old fool.
But today she wore the Heart of Santa Domini and next to it, an eternity band of heart-stoppingly perfect diamonds that sparkled with their own, deep fire.
Because this time she was married to a legend. She was Cairo Santa Domini’s queen. Whatever happened next, however their fake little marriage worked and then ended, she would always—always—be the first woman he’d married. She would appear in all his biographical information, in history books and encyclopedias alike.
Just as he would always be the first—something inside her whisperedonly,but she shoved it aside as so much damaging wishful thinking—lover she’d ever taken.
Brittany rolled over and sat up, looking around the compact room as if she expected to see her new husband lurking somewhere. As if Cairo was the sort who lurked. But she was alone. The little room was dark. She had no idea what time it was, how long she’d slept, or even where they were flying. Cairo had announced that they would honeymoon for a month or two and that had been all the information he’d offered. She hadn’t asked where they were headed because it hadn’t much mattered. The Maldives, New York City, the moon—who cared?
Their act was their act wherever they took it.
She scraped her hair back into a knot at the nape of her neck, wishing she’d had time to comb it all out and shower after the wedding. Wishing she hadn’t slept in all her makeup, come to that. She ran her index fingers below her eyes and sighed when they came away smudged with black mascara.How regal and queenly, she chided herself. No wonder Cairo had married her for the sole purpose of parading her embarrassing low-class behavior in front of the whole world. She couldn’t even manage to wash her own face.
None of this felt real to her, the fact she’d married the most famous exile alive, and not just because she didn’t like thinking aboutwhyCairo had married her.
Her other marriages had felt real. Too real, in all the wrong ways. Her first wedding night had been spent locked in the bathroom of the run-down motel Darryl had taken her to before he’d started drinking himself into a rage. She’d been so naive then, thinkingdrunkwas the worst thing a man could be. Darryl had quickly taught her otherwise. Her marriage to Carlos had been pure business all the way through, and their life together had been entirely conducted to be filmed, from their choice of apartment in the gritty outskirts of Los Angeles’s Echo Park neighborhood, a far cry from the Hollywood tourists loved, to their plotted outings to Southern California hot spots. Even her time with Jean Pierre, which had been all about creating a commotion, had been conducted as a shared vision and business enterprise.
Her new marriage didn’t feel particularly authentic in that sense. She certainly didn’t feel like any kind of queen, exiled or otherwise. Butshefelt something far more than real. Cairo knew her deepest, darkest, best-kept secret.
She felt raw all the way through.
Brittany moved to the edge of the bed and helped herself to the bottle of spring water that had been left there, gulping down half of it in greedy swallows, but she still felt parched.
You are going to remember this moment with every step you take down that aisle, he’d promised her, and he’d been right. She’d felt soft and shivery all the way through the ceremony. She’dfeltthe vows he’d made as if he was still moving deep and wild between her legs, and she’d hardly managed to get her own out in turn.
There were a thousand things she should have been thinking about now that she was awake. She knew that. That they hadn’t used any protection, for one thing. But she couldn’t worry about that. Not now. Her mind skidded away from that and she found all she really wanted to know was where her brand-new husband was and why he wasn’t in this bed with her, teaching her more of all the many marvelous things he knew.
She wanted to learn each and every one of them, and she didn’t care how vulnerable it might make her feel. Or she’d care later, she told herself firmly. After he was gone and she had the rest of her life to live without him.
Not that she wanted to think about that inevitability. It would come soon enough. And in the meantime, she could indulge the sensual side of herself she hadn’t known she possessed. Until Cairo.
Brittany heard a muffled buzzing sound then and it took her a long moment to realize it was her mobile phone. She looked around the room, finally spotting her handbag on the floor near the foot of the bed, where she must have dropped it in her earlier exhausted haze. She moved to yank the bag up from the floor, thinking as she did that the fact it was buzzing at all meant they had to be above land somewhere, not an ocean, or there wouldn’t have been a signal.
Brittany glanced at the display, saw it was her mother and then answered the call anyway.
A choice she regretted almost instantly.
“Well, well,” Wanda Mae Hollis said in her gravelly smoker’s voice, thick with its usual resentment. “How nice of your uppity majesty to pick up the phone. I’ve been calling you for weeks.”
“Hi, Mama,” Brittany said, and it was harder than it should have been to mask her emotions. It annoyed her that there were any to mask. Phone calls from her mother were always assaults of one sort or another. She should have been used to it by now—and she was. That was why she usually avoided them. “I’ve been a little bit busy.”
She sounded more Mississippi when she spoke to her mother than she did at any other time, ever. Her voice flattened out into the drawl she’d worked so hard to leave behind her when she’d left home, as if she was still that miserable child trying to make herself small in the corner of her mother’s trailer while another drunken adult fight raged on.
“You don’t need to tell me what you’ve been up to,” Wanda Mae said bitterly. “It’s all anyone can talk about today, no matter where we go. I hope you’re happy with yourself.”
This was why Brittany limited phone conversations. She didn’t know why she’d answered this one. Did she want to punish herself? But she suspected she knew what it was that had made her pick up the call: that tiny little shred of hope she kept tucked away, deep inside of her, and only took out from time to time when it whispered things like, “maybe your mother might be happy for you for once.”
That little shred was always wrong. Hope, she’d discovered long ago, was a big fat liar.
Brittany snuck an arm around her own waist and held on tight, then dug her bare toes into the carpeted floor beneath her as if she needed to remember that she was solid. That she was real. That she had a whole life that had nothing to do with Wanda Mae Hollis, and nothing her mother said could matter one way or the other unless she let it.
But she still didn’t hang up. She didn’t know why.
