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CHAPTER EIGHT
THEYLANDEDONthe small, private island in the Vanuatu archipelago as the South Pacific dawn eased its deep blue and fresh pink way across the sky.
“Vanuatu,” Brittany murmured as they made their way down the jet’s stairs to the private runway. She sounded shell-shocked. “You brought me to Vanuatu.”
Cairo found he couldn’t look away from her as she stopped at the bottom. There was the sea and the white sands and the sprawling house he’d bought on this faraway spot, but all he could see was his wife in a crumpled yellow dress and her hair in a tangled coil at her nape.
His wife, who he’d had to force himself not to pursue when she’d barricaded herself in that cabin for the whole of their twenty-hour flight. He’d reasoned she needed time. Space. Some peace and quiet after the circus that was their wedding. To come to terms with what had happened between them in that castle, perhaps—before they’d exchanged vows. To accept that they were truly married, in the classic sense of the term that involved the kind of consummation she’d never experienced before.
And if he allowed her space, he could pretend he hadn’t needed it himself. That he wasn’t shaken by what had happened. That it was nothing but sex, that moment she’d given herself to only him. That this marriage was yet one more circus sideshow, nothing more.
But she was his wife even so. The morning breeze from the sea all around them was cool and soft, and teased the ends of the hair she’d braided to one side and tossed over her shoulder. She swallowed hard as she looked around, and he found himself watching the lovely line of her throat as if there were clues there. Answers to questions he didn’t know how to ask.
“It looks exactly as I imagined it would,” Brittany said quietly. Perhaps too quietly.
“Did you not wish to come here?” Cairo asked.
His own voice sounded unduly harsh in the quiet morning, with no other sounds but the surf and the breeze. He felt like a parody of himself. Even the clothes he wore seemed to brand him a fraud. A T-shirt that clung to his torso. Casual linen trousers. He felt like a beach bum instead of a king, or even the Euro-trash version of a king he’d been playing to the hilt all these years, and he found that made him...uneasy.
As if she would forget who he was if he gave her the chance. Or he would.
“I’ve always wanted to come here.” She swallowed again, then blinked, as if she was shaking something off. Him? Their wedding? He didn’t much care for that notion. “Eventually, I wanted to come here and stay forever.”
“The island is yours,” he said shortly. Gruffly.
Her gaze moved to his and he didn’t like that it was troubled. He didn’t like that at all.
“Mine? What do you mean, ‘mine’?”
Cairo nodded to the waiting servants to handle their baggage and then took Brittany’s arm, threading it through his. She didn’t resist, and he found himself turning that over and over in his head like some hapless boy obsessing over his first sweetheart. It appalled him. Deeply. He was frowning as they started up the winding path toward the house that waited at the widest part of the small island, all rolled-up walls and high ceilings to let the tropics inside. An island paradise, if he said so himself.
But all he could concentrate on was the feel of her skin against his. Her arm on his. The smallest, most innocuous touch he could imagine, and yet it pounded through him like fire.
He had never felt so naked in all his life.
“Consider this place a wedding gift.” His voice was even rougher then.
Cairo didn’t know what was wrong with him. He’d spent twenty hours sitting on a jet plane becoming more and more of a stranger to himself. As if he’d left every careful mask he’d ever worn behind at that castle in Italy. As if here, with this woman, he was a man. Not an exiled king. Not a disgrace.
He didn’t have the slightest idea what that meant, only that it spun in him, making him feel something like drunk.
Brittany was frowning now. At him. “You can’t hand out islands as presents. That’s insane.”
Cairo ignored that. He reveled in the simple feel of her arm against his. Her lithe body moving beside him as they walked through the gathering daylight. The silky tropical breeze that danced around them and over them, making him remember those moments he’d been deep inside her—
Rememberthem. Who was he kidding? He hadn’t thought of anything else since it had happened. He hadn’t really tried.
“I was beginning to think I’d married Sleeping Beauty.” He thought he felt her stiffen slightly beside him, and he thought there must be something deeply wrong with him that he’d view that as a good thing. Or any other reaction she had, for that matter. As long as he got to her. “And here I am, a king without a country instead of the necessary Prince Charming. It would have been quite the PR disaster, don’t you think?”
She glanced at him, then back toward the path that stretched ahead of them. “I was tired.”
“Are you certain?”
“Am I certain I was tired?” She frowned at him then. “Yes. But if I’d been confused, the fact I’ve slept for hours and hours would have cleared it up for me.”
“It was a twenty-hour flight, give or take.”
“Then, yes, Cairo. I’d say I was tired.”
