had happened to him on the way to Monte Carlo.
And his eyes! They looked pretty enough in photographs. More than pretty. This close, a mere stone’s throw across the casino floor, they were nothing short of marvelous. There was no other word to describe them. They were the color of exultantly wicked caramel and made her feel like spun sugar all the way to her toes. Her mouth watered despite herself, and she felt the heat of him in a bright blaze down deep in her belly.
This had never happened to her before. Not ever.
Brittany had been more or less immune to men since her mother’s early, appalling boyfriends had raged drunkenly through their miserable trailer during Brittany’s formative years. The fact she’d married three men of her own volition and for her own very practical reasons hadn’t altered her opinion on the drawbacks of the male sex one bit—and not one of her husbands had affected her blood pressure like this.
Or at all, if she was honest.
It didn’t make sense. She jerked her gaze from Cairo Santa Domini’s too aware, slightly arrested one to take in the rest of him, not surprised to find he wore the usual uniform of all the very wealthy European men she’d ever seen out at night in this city or that, clogging up the nightclubs and restaurants and boulevard cafés. Though his version was...better.
Much better.
His dark, exquisitely tailored shirt clung to that expected glorious male torso of his that no doubt looked equally delicious framed by various Italian coasts or the yacht-choked harbors lining the French Riviera outside. His gorgeously cut dark jacket somehow made his masculine chin, with just a bit more than five o’clock shadow, seem that much more decadent and attractive. His legs, athletic and muscled and longer than most, were packed into the sort of bespoke black trousers that cost more than some people’s mortgages. His shoes whispered with the quiet confidence of Milan as he stretched out his legs, continuing to lounge there, awash in his followers, as if the famed Monte Carlo tables were but a prop for a man like him.
As was she, she understood, when one of his dark brows arched high in some mixture of weary boredom and very royal command. A prop for a game she didn’t yet understand—but she would. That was why she’d come.
That and she’d never before met a man who would have been an actual king, barring all that unfortunate civil unrest when he’d been a child.
Cairo crooked an imperious finger, beckoning her near, and Brittany really, truly didn’t want to go to him. Every instinct inside her screamed at her to turn on her heel and run in the opposite direction. To walk all the way back up north to her efficient little flat in Paris if that was what it took.
Anything to get the hell away from him before he destroyed her.
That thought shivered over her like some kind of prophecy, bone and blood. He will destroy you.
She tried to shake off the feeling. She told herself she was being fanciful. Silly. Two things she’d never been in her entire life, but maybe the sight of a would-be king in a place like Monte Carlo was too much for all the broken shards of the Cinderella fantasies she knew she had rattling around inside her somewhere, scraping at her with their jagged edges when she least expected it. Making it hard to breathe in strange little moments like this one.
She started toward Cairo, affecting a faintly quizzical expression as if she hadn’t recognized him. As if she’d stopped in the middle of the casino floor because she’d been uncertain where to go, not because she’d seen him and been struck by the sight. As if their gazes hadn’t clashed like that, in a tangle of caramel breathlessness that was still scraping through her and making her feel almost...raw.
Brittany ignored all those inconvenient feelings, whatever the hell they were. She sauntered toward her doom, and no amount of shouting at herself to stop being so fanciful convinced her that the dissolute aristocrat who watched her approach was anything but that: her sure destruction packed into a recklessly masculine form.
“Are you Cairo Santa Domini?” she asked brightly as she drew near, letting a little more Mississippi flavor her words than usual. For dramatic effect—because people drew all sorts of conclusions about folks with drawls like the one she’d grown up using. Mostly that they were as dumb as a pile of rocks, which she’d always enjoyed using to her advantage.
As expected, her feigned inability to identify one of the most recognizable men alive was met with gasps, outraged sniffs and muttered condemnations from his entourage. Cairo’s mouth, a study in carved sensuality that seemed to be wired directly into an echoing heat deep her belly, curved in appreciation.
“I regret that I am.” His voice was like melted dark chocolate. Rich. Deep. Faintly, intriguingly accented, as if his use of English was an afterthought or perhaps a gift. He didn’t move from his languid position, though she had the strangest notion that his decadent caramel gaze had sharpened as she approached. “But only because no one else has stepped up to take the position, no matter how I try to give it away.”
“A pity.” She stopped when she was just inside the span of his carelessly outthrust legs. She felt certain he’d appreciate the symbolism. Sure enough, that arrested, aware gleam in his gaze intensified. It told her she was right. And that he wasn’t as bored as he was pretending to be. “Then again, no one else in all the world can boast of your indefatigable penis and its many salacious conquests, can they? What’s a lost kingdom next to that?”
Brittany was aware of the ripple that deliberate slap caused all around them, ruffling the feathers of his courtiers and his more distant admirers alike. She’d meant it to do just that. And yet she couldn’t seem to jerk her gaze away from the man who stood there before her—smiling, though she noticed it went nowhere near his deceptively warm eyes or the cool, calculating gleam there.
“Ms. Hollis, I presume?” he asked.
Brittany was certain he’d known her at a glance. But this was the game. So she merely nodded, all gracious condescension, as if it had been a true inquiry.
“I’ve been in exile most of my life,” he said after a moment, his mild tone at odds with the way he was studying her. “Only the revolutionaries call me any kind of king these days. Best not to invoke their brand of fealty. It comes with toppled governments and ruined cities, generally speaking.” He inclined his head, reminding her with that single, simple gesture that whatever he was now, however far he’d fallen, he’d been raised to rule. “I do hope you found your way here tonight without incident. Monte Carlo is not quite the burlesque halls of the Paris sewers—that is what we call such places in polite company, is it not? I trust you do not find yourself too far out of your accustomed, ah, depths.”
Brittany had misjudged him. She hadn’t expected a playboy royal, draped in well-dressed tarts and trailing scandal behind him wherever he roamed like some kind of acrid scent, to be anything like sharp. It hadn’t crossed her mind that he could possibly insult her with any dexterity.
Or at all, honestly.
Some part of her shifted, deep inside, in what she told herself was grudging admiration. Nothing more.
“Water seeks its own level, I’m told,” she said, and smiled all the brighter as she switched up her tactics on the fly. “And so here I am.”
His impossibly carnal mouth curved again, deeper this time, and she felt it tug at her, low in her belly, where there was nothing but fire and an edgy need she didn’t really understand. It seemed to intensify by the second. With every breath.
“You
