Expecting A Royal Scandal

CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_5d0ca7f3-f9f2-5b6a-b87f-6bd61c69ccfd)

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.