Expecting A Royal Scandal. Caitlin Crews

and he’d continued interviewing the other candidates for his very special position, but his heart wasn’t in it once he’d seen Brittany. And that was before he’d read all the unsavory details of her life story, which, of course, rendered her an utterly appalling if not outright ruinous choice for a man some people still dreamed would be king one day. General Estes might have routed Cairo’s father from the throne of Santa Domini when Cairo was still a small child, but the passing of time only ever seemed to make the loyalists more shrill and focused. And that made no one safe—neither Cairo nor the Santa Dominian people, who didn’t deserve another bloody coup in a thirty-year span, much less the empty-headed playboy prince Cairo played for the papers as its figurehead.

      Besides, Cairo knew what the loyalists refused to see—there was nothing good in him. He’d seen to that. There was only shame and darkness and more of the same. Play a role long enough and it ate a man alive. The desperate American stripper who’d made an international game out of her shameless gold digging was an inspired choice to make certain that even if no one listened to Cairo about who he’d become, no coup could ever happen and his people would be spared a broken, damaged king.

      And then she’d walked up to him in a dress of spun gold and pretended not to know him, and he’d forgotten he’d ever so much as considered another woman for this role at all.

      “Was it a lure?” he asked now. He turned to see her rolling her glass of wine between her palms, an action he shouldn’t have found even remotely erotic. And yet... “I asked you to accompany me to my hotel suite and you agreed. A lure is rather less straightforward.”

      “If you say so, Your Semantic Highness.”

      Cairo had expected to find her attractive. He’d expected a hint of the usual fire deep within him and the lick of it in his sex, because he was a man, after all. Despite what he needed to do here. He’d been less prepared for the sheer wallop of her. Of how the sight of her made his breath a complication in his chest.

      And he certainly hadn’t imagined she’d be...entertaining.

      The pictures and even the stage hadn’t done her any justice at all, and the tidy little marriage of convenience he’d imagined shifted and re-formed in his head the longer he looked at her. Cairo knew he should call it off. The last thing he needed in his life was one more situation he couldn’t control, and the blazing thing raging inside of him now was the very definition of uncontrollable.

      And she was something more than a gorgeous redhead who’d looked edible in a down-market burlesque ensemble, or even a former American television star in a shiny dress that made her look far more sophisticated than she should have been. Brittany Hollis should have been little more than a jumped-up tart. Laughable in the midst of so much old-world splendor here in Monaco.

      But instead, she was fascinating.

      Cairo was finding it exceedingly difficult to keep his cool, which had never happened to him before in all the years since he’d lost his family. He hardly knew whether to give in to the sensation, unleashing God knew what manner of hell upon himself, or view it as an assault. Both, perhaps.

      “Is this the part where we stare at each other for ages?” Brittany asked from her position on the crisp white sofa where she perched with all the boneless elegance of a pampered cat. “I had no idea royal intrigue was so tedious.”

      It was time to handle this. To handle himself, for God’s sake. This wasn’t about him, after all, or whatever odd need he felt licking at him, tempting him to forget the dark truths about himself in earnest for the first time in some twenty years.

      “Of course it’s tedious,” he said, drawing himself up to his full height. He brushed a nonexistent speck of lint from one sleeve. “That’s why kings are forced to start wars or institute terror regimes and inquisitions, you understand. To relieve the boredom.”

      “And your family was drummed out of your country. I can’t think why.”

      Cairo had long since ceased to allow himself to feel anything at all when it came to his lost kingdom and the often vicious comments people made about it to his face. He’d made an art out of seeming not to care about his birthright, his blood, his people. He’d locked it all up and shoved it deep inside, where none of it could slip out and torture him any longer, much less trip him up in the glare of the public eye.

      No stray memories of graceful white walls cluttered with priceless art, the dizzy blue sky outside his window in that particular bright shade he’d never seen replicated anywhere else, the murmur of the mountain winds against the fortified walls of his childhood bedroom in the castle heights. No recollections of the night they’d all been spirited away in the dark before General Estes could get his butcher’s hands on them, hidden in the back of a loyalist’s truck across the sharp spine of the snowcapped mountains that ringed the capital city, never to return.

      He didn’t let himself think of his father’s roar of laughter or his mother’s soft hands, lost forever. He never permitted himself any stray thoughts about his younger sister, Magdalena, a bright and gleaming little girl snatched away so easily and so unfairly.

      He didn’t have the slightest idea why the usual barbed comments from yet another stranger should lodge in him tonight like a mortal blow, as if the fact this woman had surprised him meant she could slip beneath his defenses, too. No one could do that. Not if he didn’t let them.

      And he was well aware that even if he’d wanted someone close to him, to that tarnished thing inside of him he called his soul, he couldn’t allow it to happen. He couldn’t let anyone close to him or they’d be rendered so much more collateral damage. One more weapon the general would find a way to use against Cairo and then destroy.

      Why was Brittany Hollis making him consider such things?

      He studied her. Her coppery hair was caught up in a complicated twist, catching the light as she moved. Her neck was long and elegant, and made him long for a taste of her. More than a taste. Her skin looked as if it was dusted a fainter gold than the dress she wore, which on any other woman might have been a trick of cosmetics, but on this one, he thought, was actually her. She was far prettier than her photographs and infinitely more captivating than her coarse appearances on that stupid show. She was all impossibly long legs, those lovely curves shimmering beneath the expert cling of the gown and that enticing intelligence simmering there in her dark eyes.

      That same thing scratched at him, the way it had in Paris when Ricardo had given him her picture, and he knew better than to let it. This was already a mess. A problem, and he had enough of those already. He needed a clear path and a solution, or what was the point of this game? He might as well hand himself over to the general for the execution that had already been meted out to the rest of his bloodline and call it a day.

      Some part of him—a part that grew larger all the time—wished he’d done just that, years ago. Some part of him wished he’d been in that car with the rest of his family when it had been run off the road. Some part of him wished he’d never lived long enough to make these choices.

      But that was nothing but craven self-pity. The least of his sins, but a sin nonetheless.

      “You are very pretty,” he told her now. Sternly.

      “I would thank you, but somehow I doubt it was a compliment.”

      “It is surprising. I expected you to be attractive, of course, in the way all women of your particular profession are.” He waved a hand.

      She smiled, managing to convey an icy disdain that would do a royal proud. “My profession?”

      Cairo shrugged. “Dancer. Television personality. Expensive trophy wife, ever open to the appropriate upgrades. Whatever you call yourself.”

      Her smile took on that edge that fascinated him, but she didn’t look away.

      “I do like an upgrade.” She fingered the rim of her glass and he remembered the feel of her skin under his hand, hot and soft at once. Touching her had been a serious miscalculation, he was aware. One that pounded in him still, kicking up dark yearnings and desperate