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“Ask me in a month,” Brittany replied, grinning as she buried her face in that tempting hollow between his pectoral muscles.
Their days bled one into another, long and sweet. They walked on the beaches in the sun and in the intermittent rains that kept the plants lush. They sat beneath the impossible confusion of stars at night, out on one of the terraces or huddled together on a blanket on the sand. They talked, ate, swam. They argued politics and classic movies. They read books from the house’s eclectically stocked libraries, discussed them, then read more.
And they explored each other, with a ferocity and focus that would have shaken Brittany to her core if she’d stopped to think about it. She didn’t. It seemed part and parcel of these stolen blue-sky weeks. It seemed as inevitable as the afternoon rains, the kick of the tropical winds, the smudged blue line of the horizon far away in the distance. She abandoned herself to Cairo’s touch the same way she lost herself in a novel or sank beneath the sea to listen for whale songs. No thought, no concern, no self-preservation.
There were no kings on this island, no class divisions, no strippers and no scandal. There was only the glory of the way her body took him in, again and again. There was only the sweetness of the way they came together in the lazy heat, the bold explosions of need and hunger they weathered in the pool, on the beach, standing near the trees, down on the floor of the room they liked to read in.
Brittany had never known another person’s body as well as she came to know Cairo’s. Every inch of his skin. Every tiny imperfection that made his intense male beauty that much more fascinating to her. She tasted her way across the acres of his sculpted chest and lost herself in the taut ridges of his abdomen. She licked him where he was salty and slept tangled up with him in that great big bed. She learned how to straddle him and take him into her, how to ride them both blind, and how to tease him with the slow, careful rhythm of her hips until he could only groan. She learned how to love him with her mouth, sucking him and licking him until he sank his fingers in her hair and bucked against her, emptying himself between her lips.
And she had never been known so comprehensively in return.
Oh, the things Cairo taught her about herself. About her appetites and her capacity for both pleasure and need. There was no boundary he wouldn’t cross, no limit he wouldn’t push, if he thought it would make her scream.
It usually did.
He was insatiable. She lost count of the times he reached for her at night, or the times their gazes snagged during the day and led to more of that bone-melting fire they fanned high in each other again and again.
It couldn’t last. She told herself thatof courseit couldn’t last, but perhaps that was what made it so poignant.
Or that was what Brittany told herself as the weeks rolled by, slow and bright and more beautiful than anything she’d ever dared imagine. Better than she ever could have dreamed that night she’d rejected his initial proposal in Monte Carlo. Just...better.
Because the other thing they did with all their time together was talk. Rambling conversations that started one day and ended the next, and that Brittany only realized later were deeply revealing. Stories comparing their very different childhoods, painted in broad strokes and told as if they’d been amusing, when they weren’t. Current events, popular culture in at least three countries, even the odd conversation about sports—all these things, taken together, meant not only that she knew the exiled king of Santa Domini better than anyone alive, but that he also knew her the same way.
Inside and out,that little voice inside her reminded her daily.No masks. No act. Just you.
She told herself it didn’t scare her, such astonishing intimacy. Because she wouldn’t let it.
One night, after they’d had their usual dinner of fresh grilled seafood and an array of perfect fruits, they sat out on one of the terraces beneath the night sky. The flames on the tiki torches danced in the faint breeze from the water, and they were tucked up together on one of the loungers. Brittany sat between Cairo’s legs, her back to his chest, and absently ran her fingers through his.
It had been a month, and the fact of that had been echoing inside her all day. It reminded her that this wasn’t forever. That this relaxed, smiling man who was all caramel and whiskey when he looked at her here would disappear, and soon. They would put on more clothes and walk back onto the stage where they conducted their lives and had already made plans to end their brand-new marriage, and these weeks would be the anomaly.
She would have to wake up, and she didn’t want that. More to the point, she would have to deal with the growing worry deep inside of her that the fact she’d missed her period for the first time in her life, two weeks into their stay, was from something more than the stress of such a major life change.
Brittany didn’t want to consider that, much less what it might mean if her suspicions were correct. All the things it might mean, when their relationship had a built-in expiration date. A child was forever, no matter their messy divorce.
A child would change everything.
“You seem far away.”
Cairo’s voice was rich and lazy, but Brittany knew that, here, it was because he was actually relaxed. She couldn’t bring herself to ruin that. She felt the words on her tongue and swallowed them back.
They had so little time left before they were back in the world. It could wait.
“We only have a week left here.” She blew out a breath and told herself it was kinder to wait until she knew for certain. Better. “It’s going to be hard to leave. To get back onstage and into the headlines.”
Her hair curled as it pleased in the humidity here, and after the first day or two of fighting it she’d simply let it do what it would. Behind her, Cairo wrapped a long curl he found around his finger, winding it tighter and tighter, then let it loose only to start all over again.
“What would you do?” he asked idly. Or perhaps not idly at all. “If there were no headlines. If there was only a normal life to live.”
“A normal good life or a normal bad life?” she asked, tipping her head back to better rest against his shoulder.
His mouth, still the most gorgeous thing imaginable, grazed her forehead in a glancing kiss that still managed to make that glowing heat deep inside her spike.
“I believe that is the trial of normal life, is it not? One cannot tell, day to day. One is without the constant intervention of the press, there to interpret every move and fashion it into a narrative that sells papers. If that is good or bad is up to you.”
“I want picket fences,” Brittany said, surprising herself. But once she said it, she warmed to the idea. “I want to cook things, feed a family, worry about the school run and the ladies at the PTA. I want the life they live in minivan commercials, with golden retrievers and a good soundtrack.”
She felt his laughter, deep in his chest.
