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“We have a plan—” he started.
“I love you,” she said, very distinctly.
Again, the world was cleaved in two. And again, he could do nothing about it but mourn the split—and the inevitability of what he had to do.
“No,” he said, very clearly, so she could not possibly mistake the matter. “You do not.”
“Of course I love you.” She scowled at him. “You’re the only man I’ve ever let touch me. I not only let you touch me, I threw myself into it without a single thought about the consequences. Please. I know exactly where babies come from, Cairo. I knew about condoms before I knew my own telephone number. None of these things are accidents.”
“None of those things matter,” he said. He shook his head, trying to clear it. Trying to think. “We will have to fabricate a lover and have him claim the child. It will be a huge scandal. The baby you tried to pass off as mine—”
“No.”
She didn’t scowl. She didn’t shout. She simply stood there, her hand curved over her belly, her face pale, as if she was carved from marble, and as movable.
“No?” he echoed.
“No,” she said again, even more firmly. “This is your baby. I am your wife. I’m done playing these games, Cairo.”
“You already agreed to play them.”
“I agreed to play tabloid tag with a man who doesn’t exist,” she said, and though her voice was still thick with emotion, she didn’t waver. “But then I fell in love with you. The real you. The man who, deep down when everything is stripped away, is a king. The true king of Santa Domini, no matter what happened in the interim.”
“The true king of Santa Domini died in a car crash years ago.” Cairo’s voice was harsh with the past. Bitter. “I am nothing but his embarrassing shadow.”
“The general stole your country. He killed your family. He forced you into this terrible game and, worse than that, somehow got you to believe that the act you put on is who you really are.”
“It is no act. How else can I tell you?”
But he couldn’t bring himself to drop his hands, to step away.
“Is that what you want for this baby?” she asked him softly, her dark hazel eyes hard and beseeching at once. “You want to condemn him to the same game? The same lie of a life in public, until it starts to feel real in private, too?”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about.” But he dropped his gaze to that belly of hers. “You have no idea what is involved.”
“Here’s what I know.” And Brittany pulled herself away from his grasp, stepping back so he had no choice but to let her go. He saw the sheen of emotion in her eyes and the resolve, too. “Neither one of us had any choice. We did what we had to do, and our lives played out in a hundred different tabloids because of it. But our child deserves better.”
“I agree,” he said fiercely. “That is why no one must know it’s mine.”
She drew herself up to her full height and there was no pretending she was anything but regal. She had been from the start.
“I won’t run. I won’t hide and I won’t lie. I am your queen and this baby is the heir to your kingdom. Don’t you understand?”
She searched his gaze and he didn’t want to hide from it any longer. From her. When he knew she was the only one who’d ever really seen him in years.
The only one who had ever known the man he’d hidden beneath a series of masks, each more elaborate than the next.
“It doesn’t matter if you love me,” she told him, and his heart twisted in his chest at the quiet resolve in the way she said that. “What matters is the future. The future you never had, but your child can. The general is dead. It’syourthrone, Cairo. All you have to do is claim it.”
