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“Yes,” Pato said impatiently. “And yet he’s still flesh and blood like all the rest of us.”
She shook her head, and looked down at the bed. She’d done this. She understood that, if nothing else. This was the Righetti curse. This was her fault. Her head felt heavy again, and it pounded, but she knew it wasn’t a leftover from last night. It was the generations of Righettis running wild in her blood, and her silly notion she could be any different.
“Do people really think that I’m his mistress?” she asked, sounding like a stranger to her own ears. She was afraid to look at Pato then, but she made herself do it anyway. His eyes seemed darker than usual, and they glittered.
“Of course.” There was an edge to his low voice then, a darker sheen to that intent way he looked at her. “You are a Righetti, he is a Kitzinian prince, and one thing we know about history, Adriana, is that it repeats itself until it kills us all.”
Suddenly, the fact that she was practically naked with this man seemed obscene, disgusting. As if her flesh itself were evil, as if it had made her do this—her body ignoring her brain and acting of its own accord. She slid out of the bed and looked around wildly, her eyes falling on the nearest chair. She walked over and grabbed the oversize wrap that she’d worn against the cool London weather, dropped the sheet that made everything seem too sexual, and covered herself.
It didn’t make her feel any better.
Adriana couldn’t understand how she’d been so blind, so stupid. How she hadn’t known that of course people would think the worst of her, no matter if the tabloids had eased off—out of respect for Lenz, she understood now in a miserable rush of insight. No one had cared that she was good at her job, that she’d never so much as touched the future king. Why had she imagined any of that would matter? Because you wanted to pretend. Because you wanted to believe you could be someone else.
But she was a Righetti. There was never any mistaking that. She should have known it would poison everyone and everything she came into contact with. Even Lenz.
She turned then, and Pato still watched her, sitting there on his bed, a vision of indolent male beauty. Every inch of him royal, gorgeous and as utterly, deliberately corrupt as it was assumed she was. He’d chosen it. He was the Playboy Prince, scandalous and dissolute. But he was still a prince.
Adriana blinked. “So are you,” she said slowly, as an idea took root inside her, and began to grow. “A Kitzinian prince, I mean.”
Pato’s mouth crooked. “To my father’s everlasting dismay, yes.”
It was so simple, Adriana thought then, staring at him as if she’d never seen him before. It could fix everything.
“Then we should make them all think that I’m your mistress,” she said in a rush. She clutched the wrap tighter around her, drifting closer to the bed as she spoke. “The tabloids are halfway there already.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“No one would be at all surprised to discover that you were sleeping with a Righetti,” she continued excitedly, ignoring the odd, arrested look on his face. “Your brother is much too responsible to make that kind of mistake. But you live for mistakes. You’re famous for them!”
“I’m not following you,” he said, and she noticed then that his voice had gone low and hot, and not with the kind of heat she’d heard before.
“It wouldn’t even take that much effort.” She was warming to the topic as her mind raced ahead, picturing it. “One paparazzi picture and the whole world would be happy to believe that history was indeed repeating itself, but with a far more likely candidate than your brother.”
Pato only looked at her for a long moment, and Adriana found herself remembering, suddenly, that he was second in line to the throne. One tragedy and he would be king. All of a sudden he looked as commanding, as regal, as a man in such a position should. Powerful beyond measure. Dangerous.
It was as if she hadn’t seen him before. As if he’d been hiding, right there in plain sight, beneath the dissipated exterior. But how was that possible?
“It wouldn’t be real, of course,” she said quickly, confusion making her feel edgy. Or maybe that was him. “All we’d need was a few pictures and some good PR spin.”
He laughed then, but it was a low, almost aggressive sound, and it made her whole body stiffen in reaction.
“You can’t possibly be suggesting that we pretend you’re sleeping with me to preserve my brother’s reputation,” he said softly, and Adriana didn’t miss the fact that the tone he used was deadly. It made her stomach twist. “You are not actually standing here in my bedroom, wearing almost nothing, and proposing such a thing.”
She searched his face, but he was a stranger, dark and hard.
“That’s exactly what I’m proposing.”
His jaw worked. His golden eyes flashed. “No.”
She scowled at him. “Why not?”
“Do you really require a reason?” he demanded, and then he got to his feet, making everything that much more tense. “You’d be much better served making certain we both forget this absurd conversation ever happened.”
That was when Adriana realized, in a kind of shock, that he was angry. Pato, who famously never got angry. Who was supposed to be carefree and easy in all things. Who had laughed off every sticky situation he’d ever been in.
But not this one. Not today. He was angry. And she had no idea why.
She watched him warily as he roamed around the foot of the bed, so close to naked, and now that temper she hadn’t known he had spilling out around him like a black cloud. But she couldn’t stop. Not when she’d figured out a way to fix things. And what did he care, anyway? It wasn’t as if his reputation was at stake.
“I don’t understand,” she said after a moment, trying to sound reasonable. Rational. “You’ve gone out of your way to link yourself to every woman with a bad reputation you’ve ever come across. Why not me? My bad reputation goes back centuries!”
“I actually did those things,” he replied, that dark temper rich in his voice, in the narrow gaze he aimed at her. “I didn’t pretend for the cameras. I don’t apologize for who I am, but I also don’t fake it.”
Adriana blinked. “So your issue isn’t the idea itself, then. It’s that you need your debaucheries to be honest and truthful. Real.”
The way he looked at her then made a low, dark pulse begin to drum in her, panic and heat and something else she’d never experienced before and couldn’t name. It took everything she had not to bolt for the door and forget she’d ever started this.
“My reputation is my life’s work,” Pato said, and there was a certain harshness in his voice then, dark and grim and tired, that made something clutch hard in Adriana’s chest. “It’s not a cross I’m forced to bear. It’s deliberate.”
“Fine,” she blurted out. She’d never felt so desperate. She only knew this had to happen, she had to have the opportunity to fix one thing her family name had ruined, just one thing—
“Fine?” he echoed, his golden eyes narrowing, focusing in on her in a way that should have made her fall over in a dead faint. Incinerate on the spot. Run.
Something.
But she met his gaze squarely instead.
“We don’t have to fake it,” Adriana said, very distinctly, so there could be no mistake. “I’ll sleep with you.”
All the air in the room evaporated into a shimmer of heat. Into the intensity of Pato’s gaze, the electricity that arced between them, the tension bright and taut and very nearly painful.
He laughed, low and dark and wicked, and Adriana felt it like a touch, as if his strong, elegant hands were directly on her skin. It made her feel weak. It made her want to drop the wrap and press herself against him, to see if that might ease the heavy ache inside her, the pulse of it, the need.
But who was she kidding? She knew it would. And so did he.
“You have no idea what you’re asking, Adriana,” he scoffed. His mouth curved mockingly, knowingly, and that ache in her only grew sharper, more insistent. She suddenly wasn’t at all sure what she was desperate for. But she couldn’t look away. “You wouldn’t know where to start.”
Adriana couldn’t stop the shivering, way down deep inside her.
Her bones felt like jelly and she didn’t know what scared her more—that she might really follow through and throw herself at him, and God only knew what would become of her then, or that the terrible ache inside her might take her to the ground on its own, and then he’d know exactly how much he tormented her.
Though she suspected he already did.
Pato was coming toward her, that sun-kissed skin on careless display, the faint brush of dark hair across his hard pectoral muscles seeming to emphasize his fascinating, unapologetic maleness. And he watched her so intently as he moved, his golden eyes gleaming as if all the wickedness in the world was in him, dark and rich and his to use against her if he chose. All his.
She shouldn’t find that at all intriguing. She shouldn’t wonder, now that she’d glimpsed a different side of this man, what else he hid behind his disreputable mask.
This is about Lenz, she reminded herself sharply. She refused to think about Pato’s claim that her beloved crown prince had wanted her as his mistress all those years she’d believed they’d been working together in harmony. She couldn’t let that matter. This was about saving the one thing she could save, the one thing her family name had blackened that she could actually wash clean.
She couldn’t save herself, perhaps. But she could save Lenz’s reputation.
“Your brother—” she began.
“Rule number five,” Pato said smoothly, but with that alarming kick of dark fire beneath. “When attempting to negotiate your way into my bed, don’t bring up my brother. Ever.”
Adriana felt her pulse beating too hard inside her neck, her wrists. And lower, where it mixed with that ache in her, gave it bite. She forced herself to stand still as Pato roamed toward her. Forced herself to act as if he didn’t, in fact, intimidate her—even when he stopped so close to her that she had to tilt her head back to look at him.
He crossed his arms over his chest, his eyes unreadable.
“Are we negotiating?” she asked, her voice so much smaller than it should have been. Telling him too much she shouldn’t let him know.
“I don’t take trembling virgins to my bed, Adriana,” Pato said, with all that gold in his gaze and that curve to his lips, but still, that new hardness beneath. It almost made her miss what he’d said. Then it penetrated, and her body seemed to detonate into a long, red flush of humiliation—but he wasn’t finished. “Particularly not trembling, terrified virgins who imagine themselves in love with my brother and view my bed as a sacrificial altar.”
“I—” She’d never stammered in her life. She had to order herself to snap her mouth closed, to calm herself. Or at least to breathe. “I’m not terrified.” His gaze never wavered, and yet she was sure it was consuming her where she stood. “And, of course, I’m certainly not a virgin.”
His dark brows rose. “Convince me.”
“How?” she demanded, bright red and humiliated. And trembling, just as he’d accused. He missed nothing. “Not that it would matter if I was or that it’s any of your business, let me point out.”
“But it is.” He was merciless, his hard gaze hot. “You want in my bed? Then I want to know every last detail of your vast sexual experience. Convince me, Adriana. Consider it a job interview—your résumé. After all, you’ve read all about me in the tabloids. You said so yourself.”
She told herself he couldn’t possibly be asking that. This couldn’t possibly be happening. But then, what part of this day so far was at all possible? She didn’t drink to excess and wake up in men’s beds. She didn’t have extended conversations with royal Kitzinian princes in her underwear. And had she really told this man she would sleep with him?
So she took a deep breath and she told him what she thought he wanted to hear.
“I couldn’t possibly count them all,” she said primly, lifting her chin. “I stopped keeping track when I passed into triple digits.”
He only shook his head at her.
“For all I know you and I have already slept together, in fact,” she continued wildly. “Didn’t you once tell an interviewer that you blacked out the better part of the last decade? Well, you’re not alone. Who knows where I’ve been? You were probably there, too, making a spectacle of yourself.”
“And somehow,” Pato said mildly, “I remain unconvinced.”
“Everybody knows I’m a whore,” Adriana forced herself to say, not wanting to admit how limited her sexual experience really was. She wasn’t a virgin, true—but that was more or less a technicality, and deeply embarrassing to boot. “They’ve been calling me that since I was a child, before I even knew what the word meant. Why shouldn’t I embrace it? You do.”
“That doesn’t answer the question, does it?” His gaze bored into her, not relenting at all. Not even the smallest bit. “You have not had sexual partners numbering in the triple digits, Adriana. I’d be very much surprised if you’ve had three in the whole of your life.”
And then he simply stood there, staring down at her, somehow knowing these things that he shouldn’t. It made her feel almost itchy, as if her skin had stopped fitting her properly. As if she was seconds away from exploding, humiliated and laid unacceptably bare.
“One.” She bit out the admission, hating him, hating herself. And yet still as determined to go through with this as she was filled with that terrible, gnawing ache that she worried might consume her alive. Do it for Lenz, she ordered herself. “There was only one and it—”
He waited, his eyes intent and demanding on hers, and she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t tell this sleek, sensual, unapologetically carnal creature about that fumble in the dark, the shock of searing pain and then the unpleasant fullness that followed. That vulnerable, exposed feeling. She’d been seventeen. It had taken all of three unremarkable minutes in a bedroom at a party she shouldn’t have gone to in the first place, and then he’d bragged to the whole school that the Righetti girl was as much of a whore as suspected.
“And?” Pato prompted her.
“It was mercifully brief.”
“I feel seduced already,” he said drily. “What a tempting picture you paint. How can I possibly resist the sacrificial near-virgin who wishes to prostrate herself in my bed for my brother’s benefit? I’ve never been so aroused.”
Each dry, sardonic word, delivered in that deliberately stinging way of his, made Adriana’s fists tighten where she held the wrap around her. She felt that flush of heat that told her she was getting redder, broadcasting the fact he was getting to her. She felt that twist in her gut and still, that ache below. This was a disaster.
But you have to do it. You’ll never be able to live with yourself if you don’t. This might be the only opportunity you ever have to do something good with all this notoriety...
“Then teach me,” she exclaimed, cutting him off before he could continue ripping her to shreds one sardonic word at a time.
For a moment, Pato only looked at her.
And then he closed the distance between them, reaching out to spear his hands into the wild tangle of her hair, making her go up slightly on her toes and brace her hands against the hot, hard planes of his chest or fall completely against him. Her wrap floated to the floor between them, and she forgot it as he held her face still, keeping her captive, a mere breath away from his beautiful mouth.
She heard a sharp, high sound, some kind of gasp, and realized only belatedly that she’d made it. The echo of it made her tremble, or perhaps that was the wildfire in his eyes.
“Teach me everything,” she whispered, spurred on by some dark thing inside her she hardly recognized. But she saw the way his eyes flared, and the ache inside her bloomed in immediate response.
His mouth was so close to hers, his face dark and dangerous, that lethal fire in his gaze. And yet he only held her there, taut and breathless, while sensation after sensation shook through her. Towering flames in her throat, her breasts, her belly. That shocking brightness between her legs.
Her lips parted slightly, and she recognized it as the invitation it was. His gaze dropped to her mouth, hungry and hard, and she felt her nipples pull tight. Nothing existed but that pulse of heat that drummed in her, louder and wilder—
And then he dragged his gaze back to hers and let her go.
She caught herself before she staggered backward, but she was shaky, unbalanced, and for some reason felt as if she might burst into tears. She couldn’t seem to form the words she needed, and his eyes darkened because, of course, he knew that, too. He’d done this to her deliberately.
“You can’t handle me, Adriana,” Pato growled. “Look at you. I’ve barely touched you and you’re coming apart.”
That dark thing inside of her roared through her, making her bold. Making her stark, raving mad. But she couldn’t hold it in check. She couldn’t stop.
She didn’t want to stop, and she didn’t want to think about why.
“It looks like you’re the one who’s coming apart, Your Royal Highness,” she hissed. Taunting him. Poking at him, and she knew it. She wanted it—she wanted him—and the obvious truth of that was like another explosion, bathing her in a white-hot heat. Adriana had no choice then but to keep talking despite the way he looked at her. “Maybe your reputation is all lies and misdirection. Maybe the truth is you can’t handle me.”
When he laughed then, it was darker than what was inside her, darker and far wilder, and it connected to that ache in her, hard. So hard she stopped breathing.
And then he moved.
His arms came around her and his hands slid over her bottom with an easy command, as if he’d touched her a thousand times before and just as carnally, slipping directly into her panties and pausing to test her curves, her flesh, against the heat of his palms. She made a wild sort of sound, but as she did he hauled her to him and lifted her against him, pulling her legs around his waist even as her back hit the wall behind her.
The room seemed to spin around, but that was only Pato, pressing her to the wall of his chest and the wall at her back, molding his hips to hers, the hardest part of him flush against her. Skin. Heat. Fires within fires, and she was afraid she was already burned to a crisp. Everything hurt—but was eased by the heat of him, only to hurt again. And again.
She expected an explosion. A detonation. Something to match that searing blaze in his gaze, the drum of anticipation beneath her skin, that hunger between her legs that he was only making worse. Her eyes were glazed and wide, and she could feel him everywhere. That perfect, lean body pressed against her, into her, so powerful and male, holding her steady so far from the ground.
His hands moved over her skin, leaving trails of fire in his wake. He traced the curve of her breasts, teased the hard tips with his thumbs until she moaned. He moved his hips, rocking against her, making her breath come in desperate pants even as her core ignited into a glorious, molten ache that she never wanted to end, that she wasn’t sure she’d survive.
Adriana couldn’t think. She could only hold on to his broad, hard shoulders and surrender to the dark exultation that roared in her, that made her try to get closer to him, that made her think she might die if she couldn’t taste him. That made her want things she’d only read about before. That made her want everything.
He leaned in close, so close that when his wicked mouth curved again, she felt it against her own lips, and it made her shake against him, the small moan escaping her before she could stop it.
“Let me see if I can handle this,” he mocked her.
“I don’t think you can,” she heard herself say. “Or you already would have.”
