Loe raamatut: «Expecting A Royal Scandal»

To Maisey, who fixed the book once when it had all turned a bit grim, listened to a lot of ranting on street corners with very broad hand gestures, and then loved it when it was done.

Contents

Cover

Introduction

Wedlocked!

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

Endpage

Extract

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

THERE WERE SOME invitations a wise woman did not refuse.

The invitation in question tonight had been handwritten by one of the most famous men on earth on luxuriously heavy card stock and then hand-delivered to her door by a servant. The message itself had been intriguingly mysterious, asking her only to... Meet me in Monte Carlo.

And Brittany Hollis was many things by the ripe old age of twenty-three—including widely reviled on at least two continents thanks to her collection of strategic marriages, a reality show appearance in which she’d played the widely loathed villain and her trademark refusal to confirm or deny any and all scandalous rumors she heard about herself—but she’d always considered herself wise enough.

Too wise for her own good, in fact, or so she’d always thought. That was how an untouched virgin let herself be known across the planet as one of the most shameless women alive. Yet all the while, she stayed in control and above the snide remarks—because she, and maybe only she, knew the truth.

And no matter what names others called her, like mercenary when they were being polite, her ability to keep her eyes on the prize as if none of that bothered her was the best way she knew to propel her toward the tropical island paradise of her dreams.

She’d get there one day. She knew she would. She’d spend the rest of her life in a flowing caftan sipping pitchers of mai tais with cheerful flowers in her hair, and she’d never spare a single thought for these harsh days of hustling or the cruel tabloid stories in which she was always cast as the evil villain.

Not one stray thought. Not ever again.

Brittany could hardly wait. She’d spent years sending half the money she earned back home to the family members who proclaimed her lost to the devil in public, cashed her sinner’s checks in private and then shamelessly asked her for more. Again and again. Her beloved grandmother would have expected Brittany to do her part after Hurricane Katrina had wiped out what little Brittany’s single mother had possessed over ten years ago, leaving them all wretched and destitute and close enough to homeless in Gulfport, Mississippi.

Brittany had done her best. Year after year, the only way she knew how, with the only weapons she possessed—her looks and her body and the wits she’d inherited straight from Grandmama, though most people assumed she was entirely witless. Her youngest half sibling was ten this year. Brittany figured that meant she had eight years left before she could suggest her family members support themselves for a change.

Though maybe she’d use stronger words.

Meanwhile, the other half of the money she made she hoarded, because one of these days she was headed for a remote Pacific Island to take up residence beneath a palm tree and the deep blue sky on a deserted white sand beach. She’d seen pictures of the archipelago of Vanuatu while still in high school, and she’d decided then and there that she needed to live in that kind of paradise. Once she made it to those perfect islands west of Fiji, she wasn’t coming back to the mess of the world or her place in it.

Ever.

First, however, there was all the elegant splendor of Monaco and the man who had summoned her here to meet with him in the spectacularly iconic Monte Carlo casino where blue-blooded men like him whiled away casual evenings at gaming tables that had been specifically designed to part Europe’s wealthiest from their vast, multigenerational fortunes. To discuss a proposition that would benefit us both, the message he’d had delivered by hand had said, though Brittany hadn’t been able to think of a single thing that could possibly do that. Or anything they had in common, come to that, except a certain international notoriety—and his, unlike hers, was based on documented fact.

Documented and streamed live on the internet more than once.

Still, Brittany entered the casino that evening right on time. She’d dressed her part. Monte Carlo’s achingly civilized sins were draped in the veneer of a certain old-world elegance and therefore so was Brittany. A girl liked to match. Her gown shimmered a discreet, burnished gold, sweeping from a knot on one shoulder all the way down to flirt with the gleam of her sleek heels. She was aware the dress made her look edible and expensive at once, as befitted a woman whose own mother called her a whore to her face. But it also suggested a bone-deep sophistication with every step she took, which helped a white-trash girl from Mississippi blend in with the gold-leaf and marble glory surrounding her in all directions.

Brittany was very, very good at blending.

She felt the impact of the man she’d come to Monaco to meet long before she saw him, tucked away at one of the more high risk tables in the usual throng of lackeys and admirers who cavorted about in his shadow. Even without his selection of courtiers circling him like well-heeled satellites, she would have found him without any trouble. The whispers, the humming excitement whipping through the crowd, the not precisely subtle craning of necks to get a better view of him—it all marked him with a bright red X. He might as well have sent up a flare.

Then the crowd parted, and there he was, sitting at a table in a desultory manner, though his attention was on the crowd—broadcasting the fact that the man formally known as His Serene Grace the Archduke Felipe Skander Cairo of Santa Domini was so supremely wealthy and jaded he need not pay attention to his own gambling endeavors even while he was undertaking them.

Cairo Santa Domini. The exiled hereditary king of the tiny alpine country that bore his surname and the only surviving member of an august and revered family line stretching back some five hundred years. The scourge of Europe’s morally compromised women, the papers liked to call him—though it was also said that a woman of impeccable reputation became compromised merely by standing too close to him at an otherwise staid and boring function. The living, breathing, epic scandal-causing justification for the military coup that had overturned his father’s monarchy and was widely held to have assassinated the rest of his family years later, leaving only Cairo the sybaritic degenerate in their wake, like a profligate grave marker.

Largely because there was no point in targeting him, the pundits had agreed for years. He redefined disgrace. He did an excellent job of reminding the world why the excesses of ancient monarchies should never be tolerated, simply by continuing to draw his pampered and ill-behaved breath and cavorting about the scandal sheets like a one-man bacchanal.

Cairo Santa Domini, right there before her in the sleek, superbly fit, astonishingly handsome flesh.

His had been the name on the invitation she’d received, of course. She’d expected she’d see him here. Yet she was somehow unprepared for him all the same.

Brittany realized she’d stopped walking and had, in fact, stopped dead in the middle of the casino. She knew better than that. Hers was a game of mirrors and sighs, of soft suggestion and affected disinterest. She did not stand about staring in shock like the yokel she hadn’t been in years. That wasn’t the impression she liked to give off. Yet she couldn’t quite make herself move.

And then Cairo glanced over and met her gaze, bold and lazy at once, and she wasn’t certain she’d ever move of her own volition again. She felt bolted to the floor—and painfully, at that.

She’d seen a thousand pictures of this man. Everyone had, and of significantly more of him than necessary. She already knew he was beautiful. Many celebrated things were from a distance, she’d found, only to prove a bit more grimy and weathered and unfortunate up close. Hollywood, for example, and many of its best-known denizens.

But not Cairo.

He had one of those full, captivating, startlingly European mouths that made her feel edgy and hollow down deep inside. That mouth of his made her imagine hot, desperate kisses in cold, unfamiliar cities bristling with baroque architecture and laden with strange pastries, when she hadn’t thought about kissing anyone in years. He had a full head of shaggy dark hair that was obviously left mussed and careless on purpose, yet still managed to make him appear as if it 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 should, of course, feel elevated by my notice in the first place. To say nothing of my invitation.” He shifted against the table at his back, propping himself up on an elbow. It only drew attention to the fact that he had to look down at her, though she stood in three-inch heels that made her nearly six feet tall. “You do not appear to be glorying in your good fortune tonight, cara.”

“I feel very fortunate, of course,” she said in an insultingly overpolite tone, as if attempting to pacify a dimwitted child. “Truly. So lucky.”

Brittany was used to reading rooms, the better to contribute to her own tarnished legend by playing it up whenever possible. A wink here, a smile there and another rumor spread like wildfire and ended up a tabloid headline. But this was different. It wasn’t only that there were no cameras allowed in this place, which made playing to them 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 about glass houses.”

It had all been entirely faked, of course. Carlos had been told the gay character he’d auditioned for had already been cast, but there was an opening for a bad-girl villain and her hapless husband—as long as they were legally married. Brittany was the only woman Carlos had known who’d wanted to get out of Texas as much as he did, so the whole thing was a no-brainer. The truth was that after Darryl, Brittany didn’t think too highly of the institution of marriage anyway. She and Carlos had been together long enough to get reality-show famous—which wasn’t really famous at all, despite what so many people in her family seemed to think—and then, when the show’s ratings started to fade and their name recognition went with them, Brittany had dramatically “left” Carlos for Jean Pierre, so Carlos could complain about it in the tabloids and land himself a new gig.

But to the greater public, of course, she was that low-class slut who had ruined a poor, sweet, good man. A tale as old as time, blah blah blah.

She raised her brows at Cairo Santa Domini now. “I wouldn’t have pegged you for a fan of the show. Or any reality show, for that matter. I thought inhabitants of your social strata wafted about pretending to read Proust.”

“I spend a lot of my time on airplanes, not in glass houses and very rarely with Proust,” Cairo replied, a glint in the caramel depths of his gaze as he waved a careless hand. “Your show was such a gripping drama, was it not? You, the heartless stripper who wouldn’t give up your tawdry dancing for the good of your marriage. Carlos, the loving husband who tried so desperately to stay true to you despite the way you betrayed him on those poles every night. The path of true love, et cetera.”