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“Ricardo,” he said gently, “what game do you think we’ve been playing here? The goal is to remind the world at every turn that I am not fit to lead. Has that changed?”
“I thought...” Ricardo looked lost. “Sire, that was a game you played, but now it’s ended. I assumed we were merely biding our time.”
“You know what they say about making assumptions, I am certain.”
Ricardo put his coffee down as if he feared he might otherwise drop it. Cairo opened his mouth to say something else, to hammer in the man’s low impression of him even harder and deeper, but heard the faintest sound from behind him.
Cairo knew what he’d see before he turned to confirm it. He’d grown accustomed to the sound of that particular light step. Those particular bare feet against the stones. He’d know her anywhere.
Brittany stood there in the wide-open entry to the lanai, in the deep shadows of the house. She’d thrown on a different dress, this one a bright riot of colors that cascaded from a neat bow around her neck all the way to the ground. Her hair fell in the careless abandon he found endlessly compelling here, copper and bright, but her hazel eyes were too dark and fixed on him.
He’d kept telling himself that he was scratching an itch. Week after week after week. That one of these mornings he would wake up and find himself as bored with Brittany as he’d always been with every other woman alive. But an entire month had passed, and all he felt was this ceaselesshunger.
Cairo wanted to know what she thought. About the book she was reading, about the weather, about what she’d had for her breakfast, about the cloud formations stacked in the sky. He wanted to see what she would say next, on any topic. He loved the stories she’d tell about her Mississippi childhood, the drawl that slipped into her speech and the evident affection she had for the grandmother she’d lost when she was only nine.
He hated not touching her. He hated that she stood across the lanai from him and didn’t come any closer, which felt like a slap after all these weeks. And he felt something very much like shame that she’d seen him transform, so easily and so heedlessly, from the man she’d woken up with into Cairo Santa Domini, professional joke.
“Did you hear?” he asked her, and he thought he was the only one who’d be able to see the way she reacted to that smug, bored voice he used like the weapon it was. The faint widening of her eyes. The quick breath she took, then held. “Ricardo has come all this way to update me on events that cannot concern me in the least.”
“Sire,” Ricardo tried again. “The ministers are the ones most interested in these rumors of your death. They want to move fast and elect another regent while pretending they think you’ve abdicated.”
“Then I should stay where I am,” Cairo said, sounding even more bored than before. “I cannot imagine anything less amusing than a riot. Let them work it out amongst themselves, without my involvement.”
“Don’t be silly.” Brittany’s voice was cool, composed. As sharp as it had been so long ago now, in Monte Carlo. It made him as hard as he’d been then. But this time, it came with a pervasive sense of sorrow at everything they’d lost when that helicopter landed. At all the things that must happen now. They’d agreed on it long before the general had died. “Of course, you must return to Europe.”
“He needs to take his rightful place,” Ricardo said, turning to Brittany as if he expected her to agree with him.
But her eyes met Cairo’s from a distance that seemed much, much farther than merely across the lanai. And he thought he could feel that pressure in his chest cracking into pieces and shattering all around him, so loud and harsh he was surprised no one else seemed to hear it.
“I think my husband’s rightful place is in the tabloids,” she said, and it slid between his ribs like steel. Like a killing blow. Like love, he thought, vicious and deadly. Because she knew him best, this woman. She knew him better than anyone, his destiny and his heart alike. She knew exactly how best to hurt him, and she did it. It made him wonder how he’d hurt her, to make her respond like this. But then it hardly mattered as she kept going. “The more lurid, the better. That is, after all, how we make our money.”
* * *
Brittany waited for Cairo outside his expansive master suite in the historic Parisian residence. The one she didn’t share. The one he’d told her was his before locating her and her things far away from him, down two floors and all the way in the other wing of the grand old house.
It had been a very long handful of days since they’d flown back from the island.
Paris had welcomed them with a glum drizzle and packs of paparazzi, and Brittany had felt...off. She’d assumed it was the culture shock. She’d assumed it was the difficulty in transitioning from a life lived in a sarong and a hammock to all the appearances at parties and balls and charity events that were expected of her, all to be recorded in snide detail in the papers.
She’d assumed it was that little secret deep inside her that she’d still been pretending might be something other than what she’d known, on a deep, feminine level, it was.
“I can’t imagine they think you’ll discuss the lines of ascension here,” she’d said that first night as their car inched closer to the red carpet outside some or other film festival Cairo had insisted they attend. The cameras were everywhere. Squat, grizzled men had poured over the cars like ants, and waiting her turn to be picked apart was making Brittany feel anxious and faintly queasy. “I wish they’d leave us alone.”
“You had better hope they do not,” Cairo had replied from his side of the seat, where he kept his face buried in the paper. “As that would render you obsolete and wholly useless to me.”
He’d been about that charming the entire way back from Vanuatu.
Two nights ago, he’d swept a cutting glance over her when she’d met him in the grand foyer of his museum of a residence.
“You look tired,” he’d said flatly.
“How flattering.” She’d hated that she had to work so hard to sound crisp and unbothered. That she couldn’t switch back into her old role as easily as he had. “That was, of course, my goal for the evening.”
He’d looked impatient. “There is no need to look so tragic.I am thinking only of the photographs.” He frowned faintly as he took in her exquisite gown and the jewelry he’d picked out himself. “Perhaps that shade of red is not your color.”
It had been the precise shade of red as the dress she’d worn at their engagement dinner.
“Cairo.” She’d wished she hadn’t bothered when he’d stared back at her as if he hardly recognized her. As if she was nothing to him. She’d felt like nothing, and later, she’d imagined, she would lie awake in her lonely bed where no one could see her and if she cried a little bit about that, nobody need know. “There is no need for you bequiteso brusque. People might mistake you for a Royal Jackass.”
