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“If it has to be.” Lenz snorted. “Will it work?”
Pato laughed, though it was a darker sound than it should have been. He thought of all the moving parts of this game, all they’d done and all there was left to do before it was over. And then he thought of Adriana Righetti’s sharp smile on her courtesan’s mouth, then the dazed expression on her face when he’d told her to kneel. And the heat in him seemed to simmer, then become intent.
“It’s never worked before,” he told his brother. “But hope springs eternal, does it not?”
His certainly did.
He found Adriana waiting for him as promised in the relatively small reception room off the grandiose main foyer of his lavish palace apartment. It was filled with fussy antiques, commanding works of art and the gilt-edged glamor that was meant to proclaim his exalted status to all who entered. Pato much preferred the flat he kept in London, where he wasn’t required to impart a history lesson every time a guest glanced at a chair.
She was every bit as beautiful as her famously promiscuous ancestors, Pato thought, standing in the doorway and studying her. More so. She stood at the windows that looked out over the cold, blue waters of the alpine lake surrounding the palace, impatient hands on her hips and her stiff back to the door, and there was nothing in the least bit beige about her. Or even henlike, come to that. She’d refastened her jacket, and he appreciated the line of it almost as much as he’d enjoyed ruining that line when he’d unbuttoned it earlier. It skimmed over the elegant shape of her body before flaring slightly at her hips, over the narrow sheath of the skirt she wore and the high heels that made her legs look long and lean and as if they’d fit nicely wrapped around his back.
And she had in her genetic arsenal the most celebrated temptresses in the history of the kingdom. How could he possibly resist?
Anticipation moved in him, hard and bright. He needed her with him to play out this part of the game—but he hadn’t expected he’d enjoy himself. And now, he thought, he would. Oh, how he would.
There were so many ways to be nice, after all, and Pato knew every last one of them.
CHAPTER TWO (#u42e1f619-d2d7-5205-b1df-9abd9277b5c2)
TEN DAYS LATER, Adriana stood in the middle of a glittering embassy ballroom, a serene smile pasted to her face, while inside, she itched to kill Pato. Preferably with her very own hands.
It was a feeling she was growing accustomed to the more time she spent in his presence—and the more he pulled his little stunts. Like tonight’s disappearing act in the middle of a reception where he was supposed to be calmly discharging his royal duties.
Please, she scoffed inside her head, her gaze moving around the room for the fifth time, holding out hope that she’d somehow missed him before, that he’d somehow blended into a crowd for the first time in his life. As if he has the slightest idea what the word duty means!
“The prince stepped out to take an important phone call,” she lied to the ambassador beside her, when she accepted, finally, what she already knew. Pato had vanished, which could only bode ill. She kept her smile in place. “Why don’t I see if I can help expedite things?”
“If you would be so kind,” the ambassador murmured in reply, but without the sly, knowing look that usually accompanied any discussion of Pato or his suspicious absences in polite company. Nor did he look around to see if any women were also missing. Adriana viewed that as a point in her favor.
She had kept the paparazzi’s favorite prince scandal-free for ten whole days. That was something of a record, if she did say so herself. Her intention was to continue her winning streak—but that meant finding him. And fast.
Because Adriana couldn’t kid herself. She hadn’t contained Pato over the past ten days. He’d laughed at her when she’d told him she planned to try. She’d simply babysat him, making sure he was never out of her sight unless he was asleep. That had involved frustrating days with Pato forever in her personal space, always teasing her and testing her, then doing as he pleased, with Adriana as his annoyed escort. It had meant long nights unable to sleep as she waited for the inevitable phone call from the guards she’d placed at his door to keep Pato in and the parade of trollops out. All she really had going for her was her fierce determination to bend him to her will—his brother’s will, she reminded herself sternly—whether he wanted to or not.
Naturally, he didn’t want to do anything of the kind.
Though he was always laughing, always shallow and reckless and the life of the party, if not the party itself, Adriana had come to realize that Pato had a fearsome will of his own. Iron and steel, wholly unbendable, beneath that impossibly pretty face and all his trademark languor.
Tonight he’d simply slipped away from the embassy receiving line, showing Adriana that he’d been indulging her this whole time. Allowing her to think she was making some kind of progress when, in fact, he’d been in control from the start.
She could practically see his mocking smile, and it burned through her, making her flush hot with the force of her temper. She excused herself from the ambassador and his aides, then walked calmly across the ballroom floor as if she was headed nowhere more interesting than the powder room, nodding by rote to those she passed and not even paying attention to the usual swell of her loathed surname like a wake of whispers behind her as she went. She was too focused on Pato, damn him.
He would not be the reason she failed Lenz. He would not.
But Pato wasn’t corrupting innocents in the library, or involved in something sordid in any of the receiving rooms. She checked all of them—including every last closet because, the man was capable of anything—then stood there fuming. Had he left? Was he even now gallivanting about the city, causing trouble in one of the slick nightclubs he favored, filled as they were with the bored and the rich? How would she explain that to Lenz when it was all over the tabloids in the morning? But that was when she heard a soft thump from above her. Adriana tilted her head back and studied at the ceiling. The only thing above her was the ambassador’s residence....
Of course. That bastard.
Adriana climbed the stairs as fast as she could without running, and then smiled at the armed guard who stood sentry at the entrance to the residence. She waved her mobile at him.
“I’m Prince Pato’s assistant,” she said matter-of-factly. “And I have His Majesty the King on the line...?”
She let her voice trail away, and had to fight back the rush of fury that swirled in her when the guard nodded her in, confirming her suspicions. She’d wanted to be mistaken, she really had.
And now she wanted to kill him. She would kill him.
Once on the other side of the ornate entryway, Adriana could hear music—and above it, a peal of feminine laughter. Her teeth clenched together, making her jaw ache. She marched down the hallway, stopped outside the cracked door where the noise came from, and then had to take a moment to prepare herself.
You already found him in bed with two women, a brisk voice inside her pointed out. You handled it.
She tucked her clutch beneath her arm, and wished she was wearing something more like a suit of armor, and not a sparkly blue gown that tied behind her neck, flowed to her feet and left her arms bare. For some reason, it made her feel intensely vulnerable, a sensation that mixed with her galloping temper and left her feeling faintly ill.
He was sleeping when you saw that, another voice countered. He is probably not sleeping now.
God, she hated him. She hated that this was her life. Adriana steeled herself and pushed through the door.
The music was loud, electronic and hypnotic, filling the dimly lit room. Adriana saw the woman first. She was completely naked save for a tiny black thong, plus long dark hair spilling down to the small of her back, and she was dancing.
If that was the word for it. It was carnal. Seductive. She moved to the music as if it was part of her, sensual and dark, writhing and spinning in the space between the two low couches that took up most of the floor space of the cozy room.
Performing, Adriana realized after a stunned moment. She was performing.
Pato lounged on the far couch, his long legs thrust out in front of him and crossed at the ankle, his elegant suit jacket open over his magnificent chest, and his lean arms stretched out along the back of the seat. He was fully clothed, which both surprised and oddly disappointed Adriana, but he looked no less the perfect picture of sexual indolence even though his skin wasn’t showing.
Her throat went dry. The woman bent over backward, her hips circling in open, lustful invitation, her arms in the air before her. The music was like a dark throb, moving inside Adriana like a demand, a caress.
She swallowed hard, and that was when she realized Pato was looking straight at her.
Her heart stopped. Then kicked, exploding into her ribs, making her stomach drop. But Adriana didn’t—couldn’t—move.
The moment stretched out between them, electric and fierce. There was only that arrogant golden stare of his, as if the woman before him didn’t exist. As if the music was for Adriana alone—for him. She had the panicked thought that he’d wanted her to find him like this, that this was some kind of trap. That he knew, somehow, the riot inside of her, the confusion. The heat.
Adriana didn’t know how long she stood there, frozen on the outside and that catastrophic fire within. But eventually—seconds later? years?—Pato lifted one hand, pointed a remote toward the entertainment center on the far wall and silenced the music. All without looking away from Adriana for an instant.
The sudden silence made her flinch. Pato’s mouth curved in one corner, wicked and knowing.
“It’s time to go, Your Royal Highness,” Adriana said stiffly into the quiet. She was aware, on some level, that the other woman was speaking, scowling at her. But Adriana couldn’t seem to hear a word she said. Couldn’t seem to see anything but Pato.
“You could come sit down, Adriana.” His dark brows rose in challenge as he patted the sofa cushion beside him, and she was certain he knew the very moment her nipples pulled taut in a reaction she didn’t understand. He smiled. “Watch. Enjoy. Who knows what might happen?”
“Not a single thing you’re imagining right now, I assure you,” Adriana said, struggling to control her voice.
She forced her shoulders back, stood straighter. She would not let this man best her. She couldn’t let herself feel these things, whatever they were. She had too much to prove—and too much too lose. Adriana jerked her gaze away from him, ignoring his low chuckle, and frowned at the woman, who still stood there wearing nothing but a black thong and an attitude.
“Aren’t you the ambassador’s daughter?” she asked sharply. “Should we call downstairs and ask your father what he thinks about your innovative approach to foreign policy?”
The woman made an extremely rude and anatomically challenging suggestion.
“No, thank you,” Adriana replied coolly, unable, on some level, to process the fact that she was having this conversation while gazing at this woman’s bared breasts. Not the first set of naked breasts she’d seen in Pato’s company. She could only pray it was the last. “But I’m sure that if you walked into the ballroom dressed like this you’d have a few takers. No doubt that would delight your father even further.”
Pato laughed then, rising from the couch with that sinuous masculine grace he didn’t deserve, and straightened his suit jacket with a practiced tug. He did not look at all ashamed, or even caught out. He looked the way he always did: deeply amused. Lazy and disreputable. Unfairly sexy. His darker-than-blond hair was long enough to hint at a curl, and he wore it so carelessly, as if fingers had just or were about to run through it. That wicked mouth of his made him look like a satyr, not a prince. And those golden eyes gleamed as he held her gaze, connecting with a punch to all that confused heat inside her. Making it bloom into an open flame.
“There is no need for threats, Adriana,” he said, sardonic and low, and she felt it everywhere. “Nothing would please me more than to do your bidding.”
The ambassador’s daughter moved then, plastering herself to his long, lean body, rubbing her naked breasts against his chest as she flung her arms around his neck, hooked one leg over his hip and pressed her mouth to his. He didn’t kiss her the way Adriana had once seen him kiss one of his paramours in an almost-hidden alcove in the palace—carnal and demanding and an obvious, smoking-hot prelude to what came next. This was not that, thank goodness. But he didn’t exactly fight her off, either.
“Then by all means, let’s have you do my bidding, Your Royal Highness,” Adriana said icily, everything inside her seeming to fold in on itself, like a fist. “Whenever you can tear yourself away, of course.”
Pato set the other woman aside with a practiced ease that reminded Adriana of the same dexterity he’d showed in his bed that other morning. It made that fist curl tighter. Harder. He murmured something Adriana couldn’t hear, that made the ambassador’s thonged daughter smile at him as if he’d licked her. And then he smoothed down his tie, buttoned his jacket and sauntered toward the doorway as if there wasn’t a nearly naked woman panting behind him and a formal reception he was supposed to be attending below.
Adriana stepped back to let him move into the hallway, and took more pleasure than she should have in snapping the door shut behind him. Perhaps with slightly more force than necessary.
“Temper, temper,” Pato murmured, eyeing her with laughter in that golden gaze. “And here I thought you’d be so proud of me.”
“I doubt you thought anything of the kind.” She’d never wanted to hit another human being so much in all her life. “I doubt you think. And why on earth would I be proud of this embarrassing display?”
He propped one shoulder against the closed door and waved a languid hand down the length of him, inviting her to take a long look. She declined. Mostly.
“Am I not clothed?” he asked, taunting her. Again. “‘Keep your clothes on, Your Royal Highness,’ you said in that prissy way of yours in the car on the way over tonight. I am delighted, as ever, to obey.”
“You wouldn’t know how to obey if it was your job,” she snapped at him. “Not that I imagine you know what one of those is, either.”
“You make a good point,” he said, and that was when it occurred to Adriana that they hadn’t moved at all—that they were standing entirely too close in that doorway. His face shifted from pretty to predatory, and her head spun. “I’m better at giving the orders, it’s true. Rule number three, Adriana. The faster you obey me, the harder and the longer you’ll come. Consider it my personal guarantee.”
She couldn’t believe he’d said that. Her entire body seemed to ignite, then liquefy.
“Enough,” she muttered, but she didn’t fool him with her horrified tone, if that flash of amused satisfaction in his gaze meant anything. Desperation made her lash out. “You shouldn’t share these sad rules of yours, Your Royal Highness. It only makes you that much more pathetic—the dissipated, aging bachelor, growing more pitiable by the moment, on a fast track to complete irrelevance.”
“Yes,” he agreed. He leaned closer, surrounding her, mesmerizing her. “That’s exactly why you’re breathing so fast, why your cheeks are so flushed. You pity me.”
Adriana ducked around him and started down the hall, telling herself none of that had happened. None of it. No dancing girl, no strange awareness. No rules that made her belly feel tight and needy. And certainly not the look she’d just seen in his eyes, stamped hard on his face. But her heart clattered in her chest, it was as hard to breathe as he’d suggested, and she knew she was lying.
Worse, he was right beside her.
“You’re welcome,” Pato said after a moment, sounding smug and irritatingly male. It made her pulse race, but she refused to look at him. She couldn’t seem to stop herself from imagining what kind of orders he’d give...and she hated herself for wondering.
“I beg your pardon?” she asked icily, furious with herself.
“Someone needs to provide fodder for your fantasies, Adriana. I live to serve.”
She stopped walking, her hand on the door that led out of the residence. When she looked at him, she ignored the impact of that hot golden gaze of his and smiled instead. Poisonously.
“My fantasies involve killing you,” she told him. “I spend hours imagining burying you in the palace gardens beneath the thorniest rose bushes, so I’d never have to deal with you again.” She paused, then added with exaggerated politeness, “Your Royal Highness.”
Pato grinned widely, and leaned down close. Too close. Adriana was aware, suddenly and wildly, of all the skin she was showing, all of it right there, within his reach. All that bare flesh, so close to that satyr’s mouth of his. That wicked mouth with a slight smear of crimson on it, a sordid little memento that did nothing to detract from his devastating appeal. Or from her insane response to him.
“I knew you fantasized about me,” he murmured, his voice insinuating, delicious. Seductive. “I can see it on your face when you think it’s not showing.”
He ran his fingertip down the sparkling blue strap that rose from the bodice of her gown and fastened at the nape of her neck. That was all. That was enough. He touched nothing but the fabric, up and down and back again, lazy and slow and so very nearly innocuous.
And Adriana burned. And shivered. And hated herself.
“Someday,” he whispered, his eyes ablaze, “I’ll tell you what you do in my fantasies. They’re often...complicated.”
Adriana focused on that smear of lipstick on his perfect lips. She didn’t understand any of this. She should be horrified, disgusted. She should find him categorically repulsive. Why didn’t she? What was wrong with her?
But she was terrified that she already knew.
“That’s certainly something to look forward to,” she said, the deliberate insincerity in her voice like a slap, just as she’d intended, but he only grinned again. “In the meantime, you have lipstick all over your mouth.” She kept her expression smooth as she stepped back, away from him. She snapped open her clutch, reached inside with a hand that was not shaking, and produced a tissue. “I know you like to trumpet your conquests to all and sundry but not, I beg you, tonight. Not the ambassador’s daughter.”
“They wouldn’t think it was the ambassador’s daughter who put her mouth all over me, Adriana.” He held her with that golden stare for another ageless moment, so sure of himself. So sure of her. He took the tissue from her hand then, his fingers brushing over hers—leaving nothing behind but heat and confusion, neither of which she could afford. “Small minds prefer the simplest explanations. They’d assume it was you.”
* * *
“You must have done something,” Adriana’s father said peevishly, and not for the first time. “I told you to ingratiate yourself, to be obliging, didn’t I? I told you to be careful!”
“You did,” Adriana agreed. She didn’t look over at her mother, who was preparing breakfast at the stove. She didn’t have to look; she could feel her mother’s sympathy like a cool breeze through the room. She tried to rub away the tension in her temples, the churning confusion inside her. “But I didn’t do anything, I promise. Lenz thinks this is a great opportunity for me.”
There was a tense silence then, and Adriana blinked as she realized her mistake. Her stomach twisted.
“‘Lenz?’” Her father’s brows clapped together. “You’re quite familiar with the crown prince and future king of Kitzinia, are you not? I don’t need to tell you where that leads, Adriana. I don’t need to remind you whose blood runs through your veins. The shame of it.”
He didn’t. He really didn’t, as she was the one who lived it in ways he couldn’t imagine, being male. But he always did, anyway. She could see that same old lecture building in him, making his whole body stiffen.
“Papa,” she said gently, reaching over to cover his hands with hers. “I worked with him for three years. A certain amount of familiarity is to be expected.”
“And yet he insults you like this, throwing you to his dog of a brother like refuse, straight back into the tabloids.” Her father frowned at her, and a small chill tickled the back of her neck. “Perhaps his expectation was for rather more familiarity than you offered, have you thought of that?”
It wasn’t the first time her father had managed to articulate her deepest fears. But this time it seemed to sting more. Adriana pulled her hands away.
“Eat, Emilio,” her mother said then, slipping into her usual seat and raising her brows when Adriana’s father only scowled at the cooked breakfast she set before him. “You hate it when your eggs get cold.”
“It was never like that,” Adriana said, pushed to defend herself—though she wasn’t sure she was addressing her father as much as herself. “Lenz is a good man.”
“He is a man,” her father replied shortly, something she didn’t like in his gaze. “A very powerful man. And you are a very beautiful woman with only a terrible history and a disgraced family name to protect you.”
“Emilio, please,” her mother interjected.
Her father looked at her for an uncomfortable moment, then dropped his gaze to his meal, his silence almost worse. Adriana excused herself, unable to imagine eating even a bite when her stomach was in knots.
She made her way through the ancient villa to her childhood bedroom. It would be easier to leave Kitzinia altogether, she knew. She’d sat up nights as a child, listening to her mother beg her father to emigrate, to live in a place where their surname need never cause any kind of reaction at all. But Emilio Righetti was too proud to abandon the country his ancestor had betrayed, and Adriana understood it, no matter how hard it was to bear sometimes, no matter how she wished she didn’t. Because when it came right down to it, she was the same.
She shut the door to her bedroom behind her and sank down on the edge of her bed. She was so tired, though she didn’t dare let herself sleep. She had to return to the palace. Had to face Pato again.
Adriana let her eyes drift shut, wishing herself far away from the villa she’d grown up in, surrounded by the remains of the once vast Righetti wealth. If she looked out her window, she could see the causeway the kingdom had built in the 1950s, linking the red-roofed, picturesque city that spread along the lakeside to the royal palace that sat proudly on its own island in the middle of the blue water, its towers and spires thrust high against the backdrop of the snowcapped Alps. The villa boasted one of the finest addresses in the old city, a clear indication that the Righettis had once been highly favored by many Kitzinian rulers.
Now the villa was a national landmark. A reminder. The birthplace and home of the man who had murdered his king, betrayed his country, nearly toppling the kingdom with his treachery. Because of him, all the rest of the Righetti family history was seen through a negative lens. There had been other royal mistresses from other noble Kitzinian families—but only the Righettis enjoyed the label of witches. Whores.
There was no escape from who she was, Adriana knew. Not as long as she stayed here. And she didn’t understand what was happening to her now—what was happening in her. What had ignited in her last night at that embassy party under Pato’s arrogant golden stare. What had stalked her dreams all through the long night, erotic and wild, and still thrummed beneath her skin when she woke...
