AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Because he was the king, she understood. She was his scandal.
“I don’t understand why I was here for this,” the actor told her, annoyed. “Why would anyone pay that much money to have me just...sit around for a week?”
“Rich people are strange,” Brittany said coolly. “Royals are worse.”
Then she’d dismissed him and waited for the car to take her to the plane that would deliver her to her own fate.
She landed in Santa Domini the following morning.
Aides whisked her from the plane into a fleet of gleaming black cars with tinted windows, hurrying her into the palace as if they were trying to hide her from the public. She imagined that was exactly what they were doing. It was exactly what she’d expected they’d do.
Cairo might have been instantly forgiven his scandalous past by virtue of his being, in fact, a king. But she was a girl who’d taken her clothes off for a living and then married a few men for obvious practical reasons. There was no forgiveness for her. Especially when the king himself didn’t love her.
She told herself it didn’t hurt, because it shouldn’t. This wasn’t about her or her feelings or her battered heart. It was about the baby that grew inside her daily. It was about a different sort of love altogether.
She told herself that had to be enough.
Brittany didn’t see Cairo again until they led her out onto the balcony high above the palace’s famous square, where kings had addressed the nation for centuries. She had been dressed and styled by a pack of palace attendants, then brought here to wait for him with everyone else.
He strode from the great doors and did nothing more than slide a swift, intense look her way on his way to his podium. She made herself smile. Because what mattered was that he claimed his throne and took back his kingdom so that his child would never have to hide as he’d done.
She smiled dutifully in her lovely silver gown, her hair sleek and sophisticated, as if she really was a queen. And then watched the man she’d never meant to fall in love with, the father of the baby she carried within her, take his rightful place before his people.
It didn’t matter that he didn’t love her, that no one could or ever had. What mattered, she told herself as he stood there so proud and tall and beautiful, was that she loved him. She hadn’t known she could. She’d worried she’d been broken by her family, her squalid, public life. But she loved him, and that was a good thing, regardless of what happened next.
“I have been hiding in plain sight the whole of my adult life,” Cairo told the huge, cheering crowd, and all the world. “I believed I served my country by disappointing it, day after day. By rendering myself the least likely king, I ensured not only that I survived, but that the vile enemies of this kingdom could not vent their spleen on any who supported me.”
He stood there in the same sort of suit he’d always worn, the very height of male elegance and every inch of him royal. He was the same man he’d always been, so beautiful it almost hurt to look at him. But now, Brittany knew, the whole world saw what she’d always seen beneath all of that. The real man within him, brave and true, who had always been more than the role he’d played.
The man she loved desperately and totally, with every fiber of her being, but could never truly have as she had during those stolen weeks on the island.
He was the King of Santa Domini.
She was a jumped up stripper whose own mother was ashamed of her antics.
His voice was sure and true as he addressed his subjects. Brittany called on all her years of pretending, all the acting she’d done and all the situations she’d had to weather, and stood there smiling as if her world wasn’t ending right there in front of her.
The pain of it would pass. Or fade, anyway. She was sure it would, some day. She would always be his footnote. And the mother of his child.
But because she loved him, she would step aside as soon as she could do so without causing him any further scandal, and let him marry the sort of woman fit for a king.
It wouldn’t make her child any less his heir, and that, she told herself firmly, was the only thing that mattered. That and the life the child could live, a life not on the run, a life that Cairo hadn’t had.
Out there in front of her, Cairo was still speaking. He talked of his parents. He talked of his sister, the lost princess, Magdalena. He mourned the dead and promised that he would see to it that any citizen of the kingdom who had suffered under the general’s rule would meet with him if they wished, so he could personally see to it that their suffering was ended.
Brittany thought she’d never seen a man better suited to be a king.
That was why, when her phone had rung beside her while she’d been getting ready earlier, flashing her mother’s number and promising the usual punishment, she’d ignored it.
She didn’t need that abuse anymore. She didn’t need to feel badly about herself to know who she was.
She would survive this. She would do more than merely survive this. She loved a man who loved his country, and she wasn’t afraid of the sacrifices ahead of her, no matter that they might prove difficult. Life was often difficult. That didn’t mean it wasn’t good.
For the first time since she’d left that island, and since she’d found out she was pregnant, Brittany felt at peace.
And Cairo was still speaking, his voice ringing out over those famous palace steps, down into the fairy-tale courtyard, and all across the world that had always hung on his every word, but never so much as today.
“Some have asked, why now? What prompted me to find my way back to my people, my country, my life?” He shifted, and glanced over his shoulder, his caramel gaze grazing hers. It was a swift, quick glance, and yet it was as if he looked straight into her soul. Brittany found she was holding her breath. “It was not the ignominious fall of a vicious man who fancied himself a dictator, let me assure you. It was something far less noble than the urge to do my duty. I found myself a woman who wasn’t the least bit impressed with me and I made her my queen.”
