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“You would not get to dance in that life. The picket fences forbid it, I think.”

She smiled at that. “I’d dance for fun, not money. That’s the problem with being good at what you love. You turn it into your job and then it can’t be about love anymore. It has to be about bills.” She laughed. “Not that you’d know much about bills, I think.”

“I pay my bills.” Cairo’s voice was ripe with the same laughter she’d felt in his chest, and that wealth of affection that she knew would fade, out there. Out in all those spotlights and flashbulbs. And it would likely happen very quickly if she really was pregnant. She shoved that aside. “Larger ones, I imagine, than most.”

He pulled her closer to him. She could feel the heat of him through the gauzy layer of the flowing dress she wore. The heat and the steel-edged strength that was all Cairo. With his arms around her and his body surrounding her, Brittany felt hollowed-out and whole at once.

“What would you do?” she asked. “If you could choose a normal life, what would it be?”

He was quiet for a long time. Brittany could feel the solid weight of him behind her and feel the soothing beat of his heart against her back. She listened to the waves in the distance as she waited, and tried to tip herself over and out into the stars spread out so thickly above them.

“I do not think I know what normal is,” Cairo said, when she’d stopped expecting that he might respond. He sounded quieter than before. “I do not know what it looks like.”

“You could be an accountant,” she said, crinkling up her nose at the image of his highness, the imperious accountant. “Or, I know, a traveling bard. Can you sing? That would work better if you sang, of course.”

“The only thing I know how to be is me,” Cairo said, and there was a strange note in his voice then.

Brittany didn’t think. She shifted around on the lounger, moving so she could straddle him and loop her arms around his neck. She looked down into his perfect face. Those impossible cheekbones, that purely Santa Domini jaw he deliberately left unshaven, as if that could obscure the truth of him. As if anything could, exile or a thousand mocking headlines or his own penchant for self-destruction.

She felt him stir beneath her, and felt her own body, so attuned to him now, instantly ready itself for his possession. But she made no move to impale herself on him, to throw them both back into that slick, breathless heat. She only searched his royal face in the starlight, and that odd expression in his dark amber eyes.

“Then that’s normal,” she said. “That’s your normal life. Why should you change?”

Cairo’s mouth curved. “I like it when you are fierce on my behalf,tesorina.The truth is I have never adapted.” He shrugged, and she expected him to kiss her. To change the subject with his touch as he usually did. She was shocked when he kept speaking. “I was bred to be the king of Santa Domini. My father might have been exiled, but he always imagined that was a temporary state of affairs. He had every intention of reclaiming his throne.” His jaw hardened, and though his hands were at her hips she could see his attention was far in the past. “Even after he died, nothing changed. I was the unofficial king. I was always me. It didn’t matter how many ways I made it clear I was unfit to rule. Every person I trusted expected that someday, I would take back the kingdom. All these years later, they still do.” His gaze found hers, hard and stirring and filled with a darkness that tugged at her. “What is normal for me, Brittany, is to be the greatest disappointment my people have ever known.”

“No.” The word was out before she knew she meant to speak, but she didn’t stop. She continued, feeling very nearly furious—butforhim, notathim. “Nothing about you is disappointing.”

Something sparked in his gaze then. He lifted a hand to slide it over her cheek, anchoring his fingers in her hair as if he’d hold her there forever. As if he could.

“You cannot be trusted,” he told her softly. “You make me imagine I could be not only a decent man, but the man I was intended to become. You are so far under my spell you cannot see straight.”

“You’re wrong, Your Majesty,” she whispered back, still fierce and sure, and finally using the title that he deserved.Histitle. “You’re pure magic.”

The way he looked at her then, so certain that that was the sex talking and it could never, ever be true, broke her heart.

And that was when she knew. It wasn’t a jolt or a shock. It was as inevitable as the next wave against the gleaming white sand. The sun sinking into the sea. It washed through her, changing her completely from one moment to the next, though nothing had changed. She loved him. She wondered if she always had, even back in that first moment when she’d seen him across a casino floor and had been struck dumb. She’d known this would happen from the start.

This was the ruin, the destruction, she’d feared all along.Love. As simple and as terrifying as that.

She’d spent a month here with absolutely no mask. She’d given him her virginity. She’d opened herself up to him in a thousand ways she hadn’t known were possible, and she thought that no matter what happened next, even if she really was pregnant, she couldn’t regret it. She wouldn’t.

But she couldn’t tell him, either.

Because she knew without having to ask that love was the one thing that could ruin everything between them. Worse, perhaps, than the possibility of a child.

“No,tesorina,” Cairo said, that look in his eyes that made her heart feel shattered. Sad and wise and lost, as if they were already back in Europe. As if she’d already had to give him up, the way they’d planned. As if he’d known all along that this dream of theirs could never last. She’d known that, too. And it hadn’t done a single thing to stop this. Any of this. “You are the magic.”

And then he pulled her mouth to his.

She kissed him back, a sharp desperation snaking through her. Because every kiss was measured now. Every touch was closer to their last.

She wriggled against him, lifting herself up so she could find him in his linen trousers and free the satin length of him between them. The fire that always raged in them both was a madness tonight, the flames wild and almost harsh, and Brittany shook as she waited for him to handle their protection, as he’d done every single time save their first. She let out a soft sound of distress when he pulled his mouth from hers, and he didn’t laugh at her the way he usually did.

Neither one of them was in a playful mood.

She felt the blunt head of his sex against her softness, and she rolled her hips to take him inside of her. She worked herself down, rocking gently until she was seated fully against him.

Cairo let out a long, hard breath. Brittany wrapped her arms around his shoulders and then, giving in to an urge she didn’t want to name, tipped her forehead to his. For an eternity, they sat there like that, drinking each other in. Her husband. Her king. Possibly the father of her child. For as long as she had him.

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