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She stood, carefully. She smoothed her hands over the sleek line of the dress she wore. She remembered herself, at last. It had been so hard to pull her public persona back onto her and wrap herself up in it again—but look at that. He’d just made it remarkably easy.
“Calm yourself,” she told him, from miles away. Her voice was crisp and cold, and the great thing about the way he’d yanked her heart from her body and crushed it on the floor beneath his shoe was that it couldn’t hurt her any longer. It was simply gone. “I wasn’t forming the queue for a chance in your bed. Been there, done that, thank you.”
His harsh expression didn’t change.
“Then as I said, I will see you tonight. We have a very precise plan, Brittany. I suggest you stick to it.”
“With pleasure,” she replied. Then smiled pure ice at him. “One small wrinkle in the plan, however. I’m pregnant.”
* * *
One sentence and the world crumbled. Cairo knew that better than most.
He’d never thought it would happen again. It had already happened twice. He’d never imagined he would once more find his world divided so tidily intobeforeandafter.
“How?”
That hardly sounded like him.
Brittany looked smooth and perfect, which he’d come to hate. She was so different here in Paris. So far from his island lover she might as well have been a different woman. Her hair was pulled back in a sleek chignon. She wore a tailored dress and her usual impeccable shoes. She looked like a glossy photograph of herself. She looked untouchable, and no matter if she was slightly pale.
She made him ache. She made him wish he was a different man—a better one.
Her expression turned faintly pitying.
“You’re the one with battalions of experience, as you are so happy to share with me and every tabloid reporter in Europe. Surely you can figure outhow.”
Cairo could only stare at her, the world he knew falling apart in great chunks all around him, though the hall was quiet. Deceptively peaceful.
“You cannot be pregnant,” he told her.
Another cool smile. “Funny, that was what I told the doctor. Almost verbatim. Apparently, it’s not up to me.”
“You don’t understand.”
“I assume it was that first time, in the castle before our wedding,” she continued, her voice as falsely merry as her eyes were hard. “How romantic, I’m sure you’ll agree. I took the liberty of paging through our contract this morning and it seems there’s no provision for pregnancy—”
“Of course there isn’t.” Dimly, he understood that he was raging. That he’d shouted that. “I am the last of the Santa Dominis, Brittany. It ends with me. There cannot be another.”
Her composure cracked at that, and all the things he’d tried so hard to ward off and keep at bay swept over him then as her hands crept over her flat belly. As her mouth softened, even trembled.
He had always been so careful. How had he let this happen?
“Cairo.” He had never heard her so tentative, and that tore at him. “Is it really so bad?”
“Do you think I spent my wasted life in the tabloids for fun?” he threw at her. “I did it for protection. The more irredeemable I was, the less likely anyone would ever see me as a king. The moment I became anything like a king, the general would have me killed.”
Brittany shook her head, her eyes flashing. “The general is dead.”
She had to understand. She had to see the danger.
He closed the distance between them, wrapping his hands around her shoulders and putting his face in hers.
“I cannot have a child.” He heard the thickness in his voice, the decades of grief and pain. “I cannot condemn an innocent to this life. I have never been a good man. I have never lived up to a single expectation. But I will not be that kind of monster, selfish beyond imagining. I will not lock a baby in this prison with me.”
He didn’t know when tears had begun to fall from her eyes, only that they tracked down her face. And the hands he’d put on her shoulders to keep her at a distance curved to hold her instead.
“You don’t have to do this alone, Cairo,” she whispered. “Don’t you understand? You’re not alone in this any longer.”
