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“Passion is nothing but an excuse weak people use to justify their terrible behavior,” she told him, frowning.
“You sound like a very grim and humorless cleric,” Pato said mildly, his palms smoothing down her back to land at her hips. “Did my mouth feel like a justification to you? Did the way you came apart in my hands feel like an excuse? Or were you more alive in those moments than ever before?”
Adriana pushed at his chest then, desperate to get away from him, and she was all too aware that she was able to climb out of his lap and scramble to her feet at last only because he chose to let her go.
“It doesn’t matter what it felt like.” She wished her voice didn’t still have that telltale rasp. She wished Pato hadn’t made it sound as if this was something more than the usual games he played with every female who crossed his path. More than that, she wished there wasn’t that part of her that wanted so badly to believe him. “I know what it makes me.”
Pato shoved his hair back from his face with one hand and muttered something she was happy she didn’t catch. She wanted to make a break for the bathroom and bar herself inside, but her legs were too shaky beneath her, and she sat down on the chair instead, as far away from him as she could get. Which wasn’t far at all. Not nearly far enough to recover.
“My mother was a very fragile woman,” he said after a long moment, surprising Adriana.
She blinked, not following him. “Your mother?”
Queen Matilda had been an icon before her death from cancer some fifteen years ago. She was still an icon all these years later, beloved the world over. Her grave was still piled high with flowers and trinkets, as mourners continued to make pilgrimages to pay their respects. She had been graceful, regal, feminine and lovely. Her smile had once been called “Kitzinian sunshine” by the rhapsodic British press, while at home she’d been known as the kingdom’s greatest weapon.
She had been anything but fragile.
“She was so beautiful,” Pato said, his voice dark, skating over Adriana’s skin and making her wrap her arms around herself. “From the time she was a girl, that was the only thing she knew. How beautiful she was and what that would get her. A king, a throne, adoring subjects. But my father married a pretty face he could add to his collection of lovely things and then ignore, and my mother didn’t know what to do when the constant attention she lived for was taken away from her.”
Pato’s eyes were troubled when they met hers, and Adriana caught her breath. That same celebrated beauty his mother had been so famous for was stamped all over him, though somehow, he made it deeply masculine. He was gilded and perfect, just as she had been before him, and Adriana would never have called him the least bit fragile, either. Until this moment, when he almost looked...
But she couldn’t let herself think it. There was too much at stake and she couldn’t trust herself. She didn’t dare. What he felt wasn’t her concern. It couldn’t be.
He smiled then, but it wasn’t his usual smile. This one felt like nails digging into her, sharp and deep, and she wanted to hold him the way he’d held her, as if she could make him feel safe for a moment, however fleeting.
You’re such a fool.
“You don’t have to tell me this,” she said hurriedly, suddenly afraid of where this was going. What it would do to her if he showed her things she knew he shouldn’t. “It’s your family’s private, personal business.”
She wanted him too much. She’d proved it in unmistakable terms, with her legs flung over his shoulders and her body laid open for his touch. Somewhere inside of her, where she was afraid to look because she didn’t want to admit it, Adriana knew what that meant. She knew.
He gave half the world his body. She would survive that; his women always did. But if he gave her his secrets, she would never recover.
“So she did the only thing she knew how to do,” Pato said, his gaze never leaving Adriana’s, once again that different, harder version of himself, every inch of him powerful. Determined. Bleak, Adriana thought, and ached for him. “She found the attention she needed.”
Adriana stared at him, not wanting to understand what he was saying. Not wanting to make the connection. He nodded, as if he could see the question she didn’t want to ask right there on her face.
“There were always men,” he said, confirming it, and Adriana hugged herself that much tighter. “They kept her happy. They made her smile, laugh, dance in the palace corridors and pick flowers in the gardens. They made her herself. And my father didn’t care how many lovers she took as long as she was discreet. He might not have wanted her the way she thought he should, the way she needed to be wanted, but he wanted her happy.”
Adriana found it hard to swallow. She could only stare at Pato in shock. And hurt for him in ways she didn’t understand. He leaned forward then, keeping his eyes on hers, hard and demanding. She felt that power of his fill the space between them, pressing at her like a command.
“Was my mother a whore, Adriana?” he asked, his voice a quiet lash. “Is that the word you’d use to describe her?”
She felt too hot, then too cold. Paralyzed.
“I can’t— You shouldn’t—”
Pato only watched her, his mouth in that serious line, and she felt the ruthlessness he hid behind his easy smiles and his laughter pressing into her from all sides and sinking deep into her belly. How had she ever imagined this man was careless?
“Of course not,” she said at last, feeling outside herself. Desperate. As if what she said would keep her from shaking apart from the inside out. “She was the queen. But that doesn’t mean—”
“It’s a word people use when they need a weapon,” he said, very distinctly, and that look in his eyes made Adriana feel naked. Intensely vulnerable. As if he could see all the ugliness she hid there, the encroaching darkness. “It’s a means of control. It’s a prison they herd you into because they think you need to be contained.”
She shook her head, unable to speak, unable to handle what was happening inside her. Some kind of earthquake, rolling long and hard and destroying foundations she hadn’t known she’d built in the first place.
“That’s all well and good,” she whispered, hardly aware of what she was saying, seeing only Pato and that look on his face, “but there’s no one here but you and me and what happened between us, the way I just—”
“Don’t do it,” he warned her, cutting her off, his eyes flashing. “Don’t make it ugly simply because it was intense. There was nothing ugly about it. You taste like a dream and your responsiveness is a gift, not a curse.”
What moved in her then was so overwhelming she thought for a long, panicked moment that she might actually be sick, right there on the floor. She was too hot again, then freezing cold, and she might have thought she’d come down with a fever if she hadn’t seen the way he looked at her. If she hadn’t felt it deep inside her, making so many things she’d taken for granted crumble into dust.
But she couldn’t bring herself to look away. She was falling apart—he was making sure she did—and she didn’t want to look away.
“Don’t use their weapons on yourself,” he told her then, very distinctly, the royal command and that brooding darkness making her shiver as his gaze devoured her, changed her, demanded she listen to him. “Don’t lock yourself in their prison. And don’t let me hear you use that word to describe yourself again, Adriana. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a declaration of war.”
But Adriana knew that the war had started the moment she’d been sent to work with this man, and despite what she’d told herself all these weeks, despite what she’d so desperately wanted to believe, she’d already lost.
* * *
Pato couldn’t sleep, and he could always sleep.
This was one more thing that had never happened to him before Adriana had walked into his life and turned it inside out. He’d entertained a number of very detailed ideas about how he’d enjoy making her pay for that as he sprawled there in his decidedly empty bed—none of them particularly conducive to rest.
Damn her.
It was her insistence that she was, in fact, all the things the jackals called her that had him acting so outside his own parameters, he knew. It was maddening. Pato had handled any number of women over the years who had used their supposed fragility as a tool to try to manipulate him. He could have piloted a yacht across the sea of tears that had been cried on or near him, all by women angling for his affection, his protection, his money or his name—whatever they thought they could get.
He’d never been the slightest bit moved.
Adriana, by contrast, wanted nothing from him save his good behavior. She was appalled that he’d touched her, kissed her, made her forget herself. She’d now offered herself to him twice while making it perfectly clear that doing so was an act of great sacrifice on her part. A terrible sacrifice she would lower herself to suffer through, even after he’d brought her to a screaming, sobbing climax more than once.
She was killing him.
No wonder he was wide-awake in the middle of the night and storming through his rooms in a fury. If he’d been possessed of the ego of a lesser man, she might very well have deflated it by now. He’d even altered his behavior to please her. He, Pato, Playboy Prince, tabloid sensation and scandal magnet, hadn’t even glanced at another woman unless it was specifically to annoy Adriana, since he didn’t seem to be able to do without the way she took him to task.
He was like a lovesick puppy. He was disgusted with himself.
And he would never be able to fly on that plane again without being haunted by her. Her taste, her silken legs draped over his back, her gorgeous cries. He cursed into the dark room, but it didn’t help.
The list of things he shouldn’t have done grew longer every day, but tasting the heat of her, making her shatter around him, twice, was at the very top. It wasn’t only that he’d tasted her at last and it had knocked him sideways, or that it had taken every shred of willpower he possessed to keep himself from driving into her and making her his in every possible way right there and then, again and again until they both collapsed. It wasn’t only that he’d been unable to stop thinking about the fact that he was more than likely the first man to pleasure her, which made a wholly uncharacteristic barbarian stir to life inside him and beat at his chest in primitive masculine triumph. That was all bad enough.
But it went much deeper than that, and Pato knew it.
He’d known it while they were still in the air. He’d known it when he’d started telling her things he never spoke about, ever. He’d known it when the plane had finally landed and he’d sent her off in a separate car and had found himself standing on the tarmac, staring at her disappearing taillights and wanting things he couldn’t have.
He’d known for some time, if he was honest, but tonight it had all come into sharp and unmistakable focus.
Pato didn’t simply want her in his bed.
He liked her. She made him laugh, she challenged him and she wasn’t the least bit in awe of him. From the very start, she’d treated him as if she expected him to be the educated, intelligent, capable man he was supposed to be rather than the airy dilettante he played so well. He wanted to teach her every last sensual trick he’d ever learned, and bathe them both in that scalding heat of hers. He wanted to prove to her that the passion that flared between them was rare and good. He wanted to take away the pressure of all that family history she wore about her neck like an albatross.
Worst of all, most damning and most dangerous, he wanted to be that better man she deserved.
“It isn’t even my dirt, but I’m covered in it,” she’d said tonight, breaking the heart he didn’t have all over again, and he’d wanted nothing more than to be the one who showed her that she had never been anything but beautiful and clean, all the way through. Pato never should have let himself get lost in the fantasy that he might be that man. He wasn’t. There was no possibility that he could be anything to her, and couldn’t allow himself to forget that again.
Not until the game he and Lenz had played for all these years reached its conclusion. He couldn’t break the faith his brother had placed in him all those years ago. He couldn’t break the vow he’d made. He wouldn’t.
And he’d never been even remotely tempted to do so before.
Pato found himself on one of his balconies that looked out over the water to the mainland beyond and the city nestled there on the lakeshore. His eyes drifted toward the sparkling lights of the old city, the ancient quarter that had sprawled over the highest hill since the first thatched cottages were built there in medieval times. It was filled with museums and grand old houses, narrow little lanes dating back centuries and so many of Kitzinia’s blue-blooded nobles in their luxurious, historic villas. And he knew precisely where the Righetti villa stood on the finest street in the quarter, one of the kingdom’s most famous and most visited landmarks.
But tonight he didn’t think about his murdered ancestor or Almado Righetti’s plot to turn the kingdom over to foreign enemies, all in service to long-ago wars. It was only the house where she lived, where he imagined her as wide-awake as he was, as haunted by him as he was by her. He didn’t care what her surname was. He didn’t care if this was history repeating itself. He certainly didn’t care about the malicious gossip of others.
The ways he wanted her almost scared him. Almost.
And of all the things he couldn’t have while this game played on, he understood that she was going to hurt the worst. She already did.
Pato slammed his fist against the thick stone balustrade. Hard. As if that might wake him up, restore him to himself. It did nothing but make his knuckles ache, and it didn’t make him any less alone.
He hated this game, but he couldn’t lose his focus. There was one week left until the wedding, and she’d served her purpose. He had to let her go.
CHAPTER SEVEN (#u42e1f619-d2d7-5205-b1df-9abd9277b5c2)
ADRIANA WALKED INTO the palace the following morning on shaky legs, trying with all her might to feel completely unaffected by what had happened the night before. And if she couldn’t quite feel it, to appear as if she did. Cool. Calm. Professional. Not riddled with anxiety, her body still humming with leftover desire.
“I wanted to know how you tasted,” she could hear him say, as if he whispered it into her ear. Her skin prickled at the memory.
Nothing had changed, she assured herself, save her understanding of her own weakness and her ability to tell herself lies. And nothing would change, because this was Pato. Careless, promiscuous, thoughtless, undependable for the whole of his adult life, and proud of it besides. No depth, she reminded herself. No conscience and no shame. Those hints she’d seen of another man—that ruthless power, that dark focus, that devastating gentleness—weren’t him.
They couldn’t be him.
And the things he’d said, which she could still feel running through her like something electric...well. She’d lost herself in a sensual storm. She’d never experienced anything like it before and she’d decided it was entirely possible she’d made it all seem much more intense than it had been. Pato had made her sob and writhe and fall to pieces. He’d made her body sing for him as if she were no more than an instrument—and well he should. Passion, he’d called it, and he would know. Sex was his occupation, his art. He was a master.
He’d mastered her without even trying very hard.
It was no wonder she’d concocted some fantasy around that, she told herself as she made her way down the gleaming marble hall that led to Pato’s office. He did things like this—like her—all the time. The number of women who fantasized about him was no doubt astronomical, and none of them hung about the palace, clinging to his ankles. Nor would she.
She would be perfectly serene, she chanted to herself as she let herself into his office. Efficient and competent. And she wouldn’t verbally spar with him anymore, as he obviously viewed it as a form of flirtation, and she found it far too easy to slip into, putting herself at risk. Last night was a mistake, never to be repeated. No conversation was necessary, no embarrassing postmortem. It was done. She marched around the quietly opulent office, turning on lights and arranging the papers he wouldn’t read on his desk. The two of them would simply...move forward.
Or so Adriana told herself, over and over, as she waited for him to appear.
He didn’t come. She waited, she lectured herself more sternly, and still he failed to saunter in, disheveled and lazy and wearing something that violated every possible palace protocol, the way he usually did. When Adriana realized he was going to miss his engagement with the Kitzinian Red Cross—after what she’d gone through to get him back into the country, specifically to meet with them—she braced herself, smoothed her hands over the very conservative suit she’d chosen this morning, which was in no way protective armor, and set off through the palace to find him.
Pato’s bed, she was relieved to find when she made it to his bedroom, was empty.
It was only then, while she stared at the rumpled sheets and the indentation in the pillows where his head must have been at some point last night, that Adriana admitted to herself that maybe she was a little too relieved. That maybe it had hurt to imagine that he could have carried on with his usual depravity after she’d left him last night.
You are nothing but another instrument, she reminded herself harshly, amazed at her capacity for self-delusion. And he happens to be a remarkably talented musician—no doubt because he practices so very, very often.
If only she could make that sink in. If only she could make that traitorous part of her, the part that insisted on wild fantasies and childish hope no matter how many times it was crushed out of her, believe it.
“You look disappointed,” Pato drawled from the doorway behind her. Adriana whirled around to face him, her heart leaping out of her chest. “Shall I ring a few bored socialites and have them fill up the bed? Just think of all the sanctimonious lectures you could deliver.”
He sounded the way he looked this morning: dangerous. Edgy. Dark and something like grim. Adriana’s breath tangled in her throat.
Pato was draped against the doorjamb, looking as boneless as he did rough around his gorgeous edges. His eyes glittered, too dark to shine like gold today, and he hadn’t bothered to shave. His hair stood about his head in a careless mess, and he was wearing an open, button-down shirt over those ancient jeans he preferred, she’d often thought, because they molded so tightly to his perfectly formed body. He looked moody and formidable, that ruthless power he usually concealed a black cloud around him today, making it impossible for Adriana to pretend she’d imagined it.
And the way he was looking at her made her heart stutter.
She’d been so sure that she was prepared to see him again. She wasn’t.
Her whole body simply shuddered into a blazing, embarrassing heat at the sight of him. She felt as if she’d been lit on fire. Her nipples hardened as her breasts swelled against her bra. Her belly tightened, while her core melted into that hot, needy ache. Her skin prickled with awareness, and she could feel the dark heat of his gaze all the way through her, from the nape of her neck to the soles of her feet. Not ten minutes ago she’d vowed she wouldn’t spar with him anymore, but she understood in a flash of insight that it was that or simply surrender to this wildness inside her—and she wasn’t that far gone, surely. Not yet.
“I’m relieved, actually,” she managed to say, making her voice as brisk as she could. “The last thing I wanted to do today was troll about your usual dens of iniquity, looking for you in the dregs of last night’s parties, especially when you are expected to charm the Red Cross in less than hour.”
He looked at her for a long moment, his beautiful face hard and his eyes dark, and yet she had the strangest notion that he was in some kind of pain. She had to grit her teeth to keep herself from doing something stupid, like trying to reach out to him. Like imagining that she of all people could see beneath his surface to the far more complicated man beneath.
Such hubris, a voice inside her hissed, and we all know what comes after pride like yours. Like night follows day.
“It’s amazing,” Pato said in a low voice, something in it raising the fine hairs on the back of her neck. “It’s as if you never wrapped your legs around my neck and let me taste you. You may not remember it, Adriana, but I do.”
Adriana went utterly still.
She should have anticipated this. She should have known. It had been the same when she was seventeen. She could still remember with perfect clarity the faces of all her schoolmates who’d gathered around to point and stare and laugh as she’d walked out of that party alone. Used and humiliated. She could still remember the name they’d called her snaking along with her like a shadow, following her, connected to her, the truth of her as far as they’d been concerned. Inevitable.
The Righetti whore.
Pato was only one person, not a crowd of cruel teenagers, and yet she recognized that this was worse. Much, much worse. She could feel it deep inside, in parts of her that pack of kids had never touched.
But she’d be damned if he’d see her cry again, Adriana thought then with a sharp flash of defiance. She’d rather he executed her alongside Almado Righetti’s ghost in the old castle keep than show him one more tear.
“Is this the part where you call me a whore?” she asked, her stomach in a hard knot but her voice crisp. Her head high. “You’re not doing it right. It works much better when mixed with public humiliation, so you can get the satisfaction of watching me walk a little gauntlet of shame. Would you like me to assemble a crowd? We can start over when they arrive.”
Pato didn’t move, but his eyes went completely black. Frigid and furious at once. Adriana crossed her arms over her chest and refused to cower or cringe. That deep defiance felt like strength, sweeping through her, making her stand tall. She would never bow her head in shame again. Never. Not even for a prince.
“If you want to call me names, feel free to do it to my face,” she told him. “But I should warn you, I won’t fall to pieces. I’ve survived far worse than you.”
It shouldn’t have been possible for his eyes to flash even darker, but they did, and she could feel the pulse of his temper rolling off him in waves. She told herself it didn’t bother her in the least, because it shouldn’t. It couldn’t.
“You think you’re ready to go to war with me, Adriana?” he asked, that mild tone sounding alarms inside her, sending a little chill racing down her back. “I told you what would happen if you used that word again.”
“Here’s a news flash, Your Royal Highness,” she snapped, ignoring the alarms, the chill, that look on his face. “I’ve been at war since the day I was born. I’m hardly afraid of one more battle, especially with a man best known for the revealing cut of his swimming costume and his ability to consume so much alcohol it ought to put him in a coma.” She eyed him while a muscle she’d never seen before flared in his jaw. “Is that what today’s little display of temper is all about? You’re drunk?”
Pato straightened from the door, and her heart kicked at her in a sudden panic, not quite as tough as she was trying to appear. Adriana almost took an instinctive step back, but forced herself to stop. To stand still. He looked nothing less than predatory and the last thing she wanted to do was encourage him to give chase. Because he would, she knew on some primal level. In this mood he might do anything.
“No,” he growled in a voice like gravel, when she’d almost forgotten she’d asked him a question. “I’m not drunk. Not even a little.”
She didn’t like the way he watched her then. Panic and awareness twisted inside her, sending out a shower of sparks, but Adriana didn’t let herself back down. She wasn’t going to break. Not this time. Not here.
