difficult. She should have been cataloguing bystander reactions to this meeting and gathering information the way she usually did—but instead, the whole of the casino seemed cast in shadow with Cairo the unlikely sun at its center, a streak of glaring brightness she found unaccountably mesmerizing.
As if he was powerful beyond measure when she knew—when everybody knew—he was at best a modern-day wastrel. He shouldn’t exude anything but the latest party-boy cologne. She told herself he was a snake charmer, nothing more. Why she couldn’t seem to hold on to that thought was a question she’d have to investigate in depth when she was somewhere far, far away from all this insane magnetism of his, which was far too riveting for comfort.
Cairo watched her in his oddly intent way, though every other inch of him shouted out his pure indolence. It gave her the distinct sensation of whiplash.
“I saw your act,” he said after a long, tensely glimmering moment dragged by, and Brittany found she was holding her breath. Again.
He’d been there? In the audience in that grimy little club that Europe’s most pampered imagined was a walk on the wild side of their indulged little lives? Brittany couldn’t believe she hadn’t felt this intensity of his, somehow.
She hated that she felt it now. She caught herself in the act of scowling at him and softened her expression—but she was sure he’d seen it anyway.
She was certain, somehow, that Cairo Santa Domini saw a great deal more than he should.
“You have a very interesting approach to the art of the burlesque, Ms. Hollis. All that stalking about the stage, baring your teeth in such a terrifying manner at the punters. Effectively daring them to deny you their pallid offerings of a few measly bills for a glance at your frilly underthings. You’d be better off cracking a whip and dispensing with the fiction that you are at all interested in appealing to the usual fantasies, I think.”
Brittany tucked her bright gold clutch beneath her arm, as languid as he was, though something in her shook at his horrifyingly accurate picture of the side gig she’d taken to make a few more scandalized headlines, and let her smile flirt with a bit of an edge.
“Are you reviewing my performance?”
“Consider it the studied reaction of a rather ardent fan of the art form.”
“I don’t know what’s more astounding. That you sullied your aristocratic self in a burlesque club in ‘the sewers of Paris,’ as you call them, or that you would admit to such shocking behavior in the glare of all this fussy Monte Carlo elegance. Your desperate acolytes can hear you, you know.” She leaned closer and dropped her voice to a stage whisper she was fairly certain carried all the way across the Italian border less than ten miles to the east. “You’d better be careful, Your Exiled Highness. The chandeliers themselves might shatter at the notion that a man of your known proclivities attended something so prosaic and tedious as a nightclub.”
“I was under the impression my behavior no longer shocked a soul, or so the wearisome British papers would have me believe. In any case, do you really feel as if a return to the dance halls of your storied past are a good investment in your future? I’d thought your latest marriage was a step in a different direction. A pity about the will.” That half smile of his was—she understood as it sliced through her and reminded her of the very public way her most recent husband’s heirs had announced that Brittany had been excluded from the bulk his estate—an understated weapon. “I ask as a friend.”
“I would be quite surprised if you truly had any friends at all.” She eyed him and amped up her own smile. Polite and charming fangs. Her specialty. “But I digress. In some circles a glance at my frilly underthings is considered something of a generous gift. You’re welcome.”
“Ah, Ms. Hollis, let us not play these games.” Something not quite a smile any longer played with that stunning mouth of his, marking him significantly more formidable than a mere playboy. “You did not strip, as widely advertised. You hardly performed at all, and meanwhile the chance to get a glimpse of Jean Pierre Archambault’s disgraced widow in the nude was the primary attraction of the entire exercise. The whole thing was a regrettable tease.”
She shrugged delicately, fully aware it made the gold fabric of her gown gleam and shimmer as if she herself was lit from within. “That must have been a novel experience for a man of your well-documented depravities.”
His head tilted slightly to one side and his gaze was not particularly friendly. Somehow, this made him more beautiful. “You were a high school dropout.”
Brittany knew better than to show any sort of reaction to the shift in topic. Or to what was likely meant to be a hard slap to shove her back into her place. Trouble was, she’d never much cared for her place, or she’d still be in Gulfport scraping out a miserable existence with the rest of her relatives. No, thank you.
“Did they call it something different when you failed to finish one private boarding school after the next?” she asked sweetly. His Royal Jackass wasn’t the only one with access to the internet. “There were how many in a row? Six? I know the obscenely rich make their own rules, but I was under the impression your numerous expulsions meant you and I are both somehow making it through the big, bad world without a high school diploma. Maybe we’ll be best friends after all.”
Cairo ignored her, though she thought there was a certain appreciative gleam in those deceptively sweet-looking eyes of his. “A runaway at sixteen, in the company of your first husband. And what a prime choice he was. He was what we might call...”
He paused, as if in deference to her feelings. Or as if he’d suddenly recalled his manners. Brittany laughed.
“We called Darryl a way to get out of Gulfport, Mississippi,” she replied. She let a little more twang into her voice, as emphasis. “Believe me, you make that choice when it comes along, no matter the drug-addled loser that may or may not come with it. Not the sort of choice you had to make, I imagine, while growing up coddled and adored on one of your family’s numerous foreign properties.”
The word exile called to mind something a bit more perilous than the Santa Domini royal family’s collection of luxury estates; here a ranch, there an island, everywhere a sprawling penthouse in the best neighborhood of any given city. It was hard to muster up any sympathy, Brittany found, especially when her own choices had been to live wherever she could make it work or end up back in her mother’s trailer.
“Your second husband was far more in the style to which you would soon become accustomed. You and he became rather well known on that dreadful television program of yours, did you not?”
“Hollywood Hustle ran for two seasons and is considered one of the less appalling reality shows out there,” Brittany said, as if in agreement. “If we’re tallying them all up.”
“That’s a rather low bar.”
“Said the pot to the kettle.” She eyed him. “Most viewers were obsessed with the heartwarming love story of Chaz and Mariella, not Carlos and me.”
“The tattoo artist.” Cairo didn’t actually crook his fingers around the word artist, but it was very strongly implied. And, as Brittany recalled, deserved. “And the sad church secretary who wanted him to follow his heart and become a derivative landscape painter, or some such drivel.”
“Pulse-pounding, riveting stuff,” Brittany agreed dryly. “As you clearly already know, if you feel you’re in a good place to judge the behavior of others despite every cautionary tale ever told
