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He tried to smile. That same casual lazy smile he’d used all his life. It should have come easily to him, the way it always had, but his own mouth betrayed him. “Because I was starting to think you were hiding in that bedroom.”
She didn’t pull her arm from his and Cairo didn’t know why that felt like a gift.
“Do I have a reason to hide from you?” she asked. Carefully.
He thought they were both a little too aware that she hadn’t exactly denied it.
“You tell me.”
But she didn’t. They walked for a moment in silence. The waves surged against the shore and the palm trees clattered overhead. Her bright copper hair, thick and wild, unwound itself from her makeshift braid as it moved and flowed around her, and he knew how she tasted, now. He knew how soft and molten she was for him, and the noises she made when he moved deep inside her. He knew her.
Maybe that was why his heart kicked at him, making his whole chest hurt.
“I appreciate the thought,” she said in what he thought was a remarkably stiff voice, here on a tropical island in the middle of a perfect blue sea in all directions. “But I can’t accept an entire island. As a...bridal present for a wedding that has the shelf life of organic fruit.”
A swift glance her way showed him nothing. Her expression was smooth. Composed. The way it always was, as if he’d never held the heat of her in his hand.
His chest hurt. Worse than before. He was fairly certain it was that temper of his he normally kept locked away. Or worse, the truth of himself he’d been hiding from all these years.
“I am afraid it is already done.” He stopped moving when the path ended at the bottom of the sweeping lawn that led up to one of the house’s many lanais. “The island is yours, as is everything on it. My attorneys transferred ownership the moment you said ‘I do.’”
She managed to pull her arm from his without seeming to do it on purpose. Cairo might have admired the sheer efficiency of the gesture if he hadn’t hated that he was no longer touching her.
“No.”
Her voice was low. She crossed her arms and frowned out toward the horizon. And Cairo could have pretended he hadn’t heard her. That she hadn’t spoken.
He didn’t know why he didn’t.
“I apologize that the gift does not please you,” he said stiffly. “Is it the size of the island? The house? Would you prefer something larger or more ornate? Dubai, perhaps?”
“Of course not.” She shook her head, but she still didn’t meet his gaze. “I grew up in a trailer with my mother, whatever boyfriend she had that week and four other kids. Any house containing a room I don’t have to share is like heaven to me. This...” She jutted her chin toward the house and when she finally looked at him again, her eyes were much too dark. “The house is beautiful, Cairo. Everything here is beautiful. It’s so much more than I imagined.”
“Then I fail to see the problem.”
He felt rooted to the ground. Frozen into place. Completely out of his element—and how could that be? How had this woman turned him so upside down? What the hell had she done to him?
But he thought he knew. He hadn’t expected her to be a virgin. To be innocent. There was no place in his sad, soiled life forinnocence.And because he hadn’t been prepared, even after she’d given herself away and he’d guessed the truth, he’d simply...reacted. He hadn’t planned out what he’d do. He hadn’t performedhis usual role.
Those moments with her on the bed in that castle were the most genuine he’d been in at least twenty years, and it was addictive. He wanted more. He wanted her. He wanted to be the man he was with her, not the role he played.
He wanted everything.
“This is the problem,” Brittany said, and her tone was too even. “This is my dream. I told you that.Mine.You have no right to use it as part of this sick little farce we’re acting out for the world’s amusement.”
“By which I am to assume you mean our marriage.”
“Marriage, performance art—whatever you want to call it.” She shrugged. “It’s not real. Coming to Vanuatu is a dream that’s sustained me for years. It’s what I’ve held on to through every single horrible thing that’s written about me or said to my face. It’s what allows me to shrug it all off. How could you possibly imagine I’d want to pollute it with this thing? With—”
She cut herself off.
“Me?” Cairo supplied coolly, because she did not see a man. She saw the game. The roles he played. The creature he’d become.
“I don’t know what you dream about,” she threw at him, and his particular sickness was that he found that to be progress, that little show of temper. “I couldn’t begin to guess.”
“I am a king without a kingdom.” Cairo laughed at that, though the sound was hollow, and he thought the breeze stole it away anyway. “What exactly do you imagine it is I dream about, Brittany?”
“I dream about something that’s mine,” she snapped at him, and he saw the way she gripped herself tighter, as if she was holding herself back. Or holding herself together. “All mine. Where no one is watching me and speculating about me and making up stories about me. I dream about a perfect, unspoiled place a million miles away from the rest of the world, where I can disappear. Do you have the slightest notion what that means?”
