Expecting a Royal Scandal by Caitlin Crews

Author:Caitlin Crews [Crews, Caitlin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarlequinUKLtd
Published: 2016-04-30T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE LAST OF the Santa Dominis married his stripper bride in a private chapel that dated back to the Italian Renaissance, the first of his family to marry in a place other than the Grand Cathedral in Santa Domini’s capital in centuries.

Three whole centuries, to be exact.

As the old hymns were sung and the old words intoned, Cairo stood at an altar his ancestors had built with a woman for whom he felt entirely too many complicated things to name and found it hard to remember that he was baiting a trap. It was much too difficult to focus on the real purpose of this performance.

Because all he could think of, all he could see, all he could concentrate on was Brittany.

Who had somehow seen beneath every last mask he wore. And was already his.

Princes and counts and the assorted minor arcana of Europe sat in the pews arranged behind him, yet all Cairo could think about was the fact of her innocence and his taking of it. Her sweet heat and her addictive taste. The untutored rawness of the way she’d moved beneath him and the greedy little sounds she’d made as she’d found her release. He had to shift slightly as he stood to mask his body’s response to the onslaught of memory, lest he appall the gathered throng of European nobles even more than he already had by making them bear witness to this ceremony in the first place.

Pay attention to the game, you fool, he ordered himself as the priest waved his hands over his bride’s elegantly veiled head and intoned sacred words down the length of the chapel.

He was making this woman his in every conceivable way today, and despite the niggling sense that he was forgetting something critical, he exulted in it. If was up to him, he thought, he’d lock her up somewhere far away and out of the public eye, and indulge himself in her forever.

But that, of course, was not the game they played. No matter that she wasn’t at all the practiced trollop she’d pretended she was for years. Nobody alive could possibly know that except Cairo—and in any case, it changed nothing.

The fact he felt he could show her the truth in him didn’t mean he should, or that it altered the course they’d set out. It only made him hate himself that much more.

“I don’t understand,” Brittany had said weeks ago. It had been a few days after their engagement dinner. Enterprising paparazzi were attempting to scale the gates of his Parisian residence and the sketches he’d commissioned from his preferred Italian dressmaker had been spread out between them on the coffee table in one of his salons. “This looks like something a proper English princess would wear. I assumed we’d be taking the loud and tacky route.”

“Everyone will be expecting that, of course.” He’d eyed her, all copper fire and that distance in her gaze. He’d had the fleeting notion she’d been protecting herself—but he’d dismissed it.

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