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As if she was as wanton as he was, and as unashamed. As if she knew what she was demanding.
That smile of his deepened, torturing her. Delighting her.
And then, slowly and deliberately, with one hand on her bottom to move her against him in a sinuous rhythm that made her feel weak, the other at her jaw to hold her where he wanted her, Pato took his own sweet time and licked his way into her mouth.
Ruining her, Adriana thought while the world disappeared, forever.
* * *
He never should have tasted her.
That it was a terrible mistake was a certainty, but Adriana clung to him like honey, melting and hot, tasting like sugar and fire with her lithe body wrapped all around him. Pato couldn’t stop himself. For a heady moment—his mouth angled over hers, tasting her again and again and again—he even forgot why he should.
This was supposed to be a lesson to her. A way to decidedly call her bluff, nothing more.
And yet he wanted to take her where they stood, pressed up against the wall, thrusting into the heat of her he could feel scalding him through the thin layers that barely separated them. She was so soft. So responsive.
Perfect.
But she didn’t want him, no matter what her body shouted at him. No matter what he felt in his arms, what he tasted.
She met him even as he grew bolder, hotter, more demanding. She kissed him as if she’d forgotten who it was she truly wanted. She bloomed beneath his hands, incandescent and addicting. She twined her arms around his neck and writhed against him as if she was as desperate as he was, as if she wanted nothing more than Pato deep inside of her.
But she wanted Lenz. She was in love with Lenz. Pato had seen it.
It was that unpalatable fact that he couldn’t make himself ignore, no matter how hard he was and no matter what he would have given, in that moment, to simply drive into her and ride them both into an oblivion where Lenz did not exist. Could never exist.
Where there was only this heat. This need. This delicious electricity, intense and greedy, that made him want to taste every part of her, make her scream out in pleasure while he did, and then take her until she sobbed his name.
His name, not his brother’s.
But he couldn’t stop. He didn’t want to stop. What was this woman doing to him? He’d never acted with so little thought before. He’d never forgot to hide himself. He’d certainly never opened his mouth and let some part of the truth come out. It was as if he’d lost the control that had defined him since he was eighteen....
That couldn’t happen. He couldn’t let it.
He spun around, walking them back to the bed with Adriana still wrapped around him, and then he tortured himself by bringing them down on the mattress—catching himself on one arm so he didn’t crush her, but letting himself revel in the feel of her beneath him the way he wanted her, even for a moment.
Pato had never put much stock in the kingdom’s insistence that Righetti women were akin to witches, temptresses and jezebels without equal, but pulling himself away from Adriana, from all that soft, hot fire, was the hardest thing he could remember doing.
He didn’t understand this. He didn’t understand himself.
“I can handle it, Adriana,” he told her. “I can handle you. But I won’t.”
He stood over her, telling himself it didn’t matter that she sprawled there before him, her lips swollen from his, her breasts spilling from her bra and crying out for his hands, her silken limbs spread out before him like a dessert he hungered for as if he was a starving man. It didn’t matter because it couldn’t.
He smirked, knowing it would hit her like a slap. “But I appreciate the offer.”
Her face blazed red as he’d thought it would, and she looked tense and unhappy as she pushed herself up to a sitting position. Her lovely blond hair fell in a sexy tangle around her pretty face, making her look as if he’d already had her. He wished he had, with an edge of desperation that should have alarmed him. But she sat before him, with all that lust and wild need still stamped on her face, and the only thing he felt was that pounding desire.
She inclined her head at the clear evidence that he wanted her, badly and unmistakably, then looked up to hold his gaze with hers, her chocolate eyes dark and still too hot.
“I can see how much you appreciate it, Your Royal Highness,” she said softly, but with that kick beneath that he couldn’t help but enjoy. He didn’t understand why he liked her edginess. Why he liked how unafraid she was of him, even now.
He could still taste her. He was so hard for her it hurt, and he wasn’t used to denying himself anything. Much less women. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d tried. Pato had slept with any number of women who had assumed he’d be a conduit to his brother, who had cold-bloodedly used him for that purpose. It had never bothered Pato before.
He didn’t know why it bothered him now—why that look on her face in the shadows last night kept flashing in his head. He only knew he wouldn’t—couldn’t—be this woman’s path to his brother, no matter her reasons, no matter how convoluted it all was. He wanted her head to be full of him, and nothing else.
“We can’t always have what we want,” he said quietly. He meant it more than she knew.
“You can. You do.” She frowned at him. “You’ve made a career out of it.”
Pato shook his head. “You’re not going to win this argument with me. No matter how sweetly you pout, or how naked you get. Not that I don’t enjoy both.”
She made a small sound of frustration, mixed, he could tell from the color in her cheeks, with that embarrassment that he found himself entirely too obsessed with. When was the last time he’d met a woman who still blushed?
“Is there any woman alive you haven’t slept with?” she demanded. “Or is it only me?”
“It’s only you,” Pato assured her, not knowing why he was doing this. Not understanding what there was to gain from it. Surely it would be better simply to have her. That was the time-honored approach to situations like this. Chemistry never lasted. Sex was white-hot for only a small while, and then it burned itself out. The only thing denial ever did—or so he’d heard—was make the wanting worse.
But he had never wanted someone like this. And having tasted her, he very much doubted that sex would be a cure. More like his doom.
He didn’t know where that thought came from, and yet it clawed into him.
“You didn’t even know the word no until today!” she snapped at him.
“If I were you,” he said in a low voice that he could see got to her when she shivered again, as if he’d run his fingers down the line of her elegant neck, “I’d quit now, before tempers are lost and consequences become far greater. I’d put on some clothes and remember myself. My place. Just a suggestion.”
She pulled in a breath, and her hands balled into fists, and then she shook her head slightly as if she really was remembering herself.
“I told you I’d resign,” she said after a moment. Her mouth firmed. “And I will. Today, in fact.”
“No, you will not.”
She should resign. He should see to it she was sacked, barred from the palace, kept away for her own good. She should take her melting brown eyes and that impossibly tempting body of hers, her irritating martyr’s love for the undeserving Lenz, and leave Kitzinia far behind. She should protect herself from her family’s history, from the endless, vicious rumor mill that comprised the highest levels of Kitzinian society, and was even nastier than usual when it came to her.
He wished he could protect her himself.
He was, Pato realized then, in terrible trouble. But this was a game, he reminded himself, and Adriana was a part of it. His strange, protective urges didn’t matter—they couldn’t. She wasn’t going anywhere. He needed her to stay right where she was.
“You won’t help me help your brother, and you won’t let me leave,” Adriana said, her voice as stiff as her body had become, her brown eyes rapidly cooling, which he told himself was better. “What will you let me do?”
“I suggest you do your job.” It came out harsher than he’d intended, and he saw her blink, as if it hurt. He tried to force his usual laughter into his voice, that devil-may-care attitude he’d perfected, but he couldn’t quite do it. “If you can. I can’t promise I’ll cooperate, but then, you knew that going in.”
“I don’t want—”
“I am Prince Patricio of Kitzinia and you are a Kitzinian subject,” he said, more himself in that moment than he’d allowed himself to be in years, and that, too, was trouble. Big trouble. It was too soon to be anything but Pato the Playboy, even here—and still, he couldn’t stop. “You serve at my pleasure, Adriana. Yours is irrelevant.”
For a breath, she seemed to freeze there before him. Then she averted her eyes in appropriate deference to his rank, and there was no particular triumph in winning that little skirmish, Pato found. Not when it made him feel empty. Adriana shot to her feet then and started for the door, her spine straight and every inch of her obviously, silently, furious. It hummed in the air between them. He knew it should offend his royal dignity, had he been possessed of any, but it only made him want to taste her again. Taste her temper. Let it take them both on a ride.
“Thank you, Your Royal Highness, for reminding me of my duty. And my place. I won’t forget it again.”
She spoke as she moved, her words perfectly polite if not quite as respectful as they should have been. There was that edge beneath it, that slap, that was all Adriana. It made him hunger for her all over again.
He reached out and snagged her elbow as she passed, pulling her against him, her back to his front, cursing himself as he did it but completely unable to stop.
“I won’t forget this,” he said, directly into her ear, all of her soft skin smooth and warm and delicious against his chest, his aching sex. “As you march around to my brother’s tune and make your doomed attempts to keep me in line, I’ll remember all of this.” He let his gaze drift down over her body, satisfaction moving hard in him when her nipples hardened, when another flush worked over her sensitive skin, when her eyes eased closed and her breath went shallow. “I’ll remember those freckles between your breasts, for example, three in a line. I’ll wonder how they taste. I’ll be thinking about the way you look right now, kissed and wild and desperate, when you’re ordering me around in your conservative little business suits. It will always be there, hanging in the air between us like a fog.”
She shook her head in confusion, and he could feel the fine, delicate tremors that shook in her, the staccato beat of her pulse, all that need and fire and loss. It raged just as brightly in him.
“Then why...?”
Pato leaned closer, spurred on by demons he didn’t recognize, needs he didn’t understand at all. But their teeth were in him. Deep. And he wanted them in her, too.
“My pleasure, Adriana,” he told her fiercely, as if it was some kind of promise. A dark threat. He couldn’t tell the difference any longer. “Not yours.”
CHAPTER FIVE (#u42e1f619-d2d7-5205-b1df-9abd9277b5c2)
ADRIANA EYED PATO across the aisle of his royal jet as it winged its way into the night from the glittering shores of Monaco back to Kitzinia, cutting inward across the top of Italy toward Switzerland, Liechtenstein and home.
He was still wearing the formal black tie he’d worn to debonair effect earlier this evening, causing the usual deafening screams when he’d walked the red carpet into the star-studded charity event. Now he murmured into his mobile phone while he lounged on the leather sofa that stretched along one side of the luxury aircraft’s lounge area. It had been a long night for him, she thought without a shred of sympathy, as he’d not only had to say a few words at the banquet dinner, but had fended off, at last count, three Hollywood actresses, the lusty wife of a French politician, a determined countess, two socialites and one extremely overconfident caterer.
Left to his own devices, Adriana was well aware, Pato would have stayed in Monaco through the night as he had in years past, partying much too hard with all the celebrities who had flocked to the grand charity event there, and running the risk of either appearing drunk at his engagement with the Kitzinian Red Cross the following morning, or missing it entirely.
She’d insisted they leave tonight. He’d eventually acquiesced.
But Adriana didn’t kid herself. She didn’t know why he’d pretended to listen to her more often than not in the weeks since that humiliating morning in his London flat. She only knew she found it suspicious.
And that certainly wasn’t to suggest he’d behaved.
“Your schedule is full this week,” she’d told him one morning not long after they’d returned from London, standing stiffly in his office in the palace. Wearing nothing but a pair of battered jeans, he’d been kicked back in the huge, red leather chair behind his massive desk, with his feet propped up on the glossy surface, looking more like a male model than a royal prince.
“I’m bored to tears already,” he’d said, his hands stacked behind his head and his golden gaze trained on her in a way that made her want to squirm. She’d somehow managed to refrain. “I think I’d prefer to spend the week in the Maldives.”
“Because you require a holiday, no doubt, after all of your hard work doing...what, exactly?”
Pato’s mouth had curved, and he’d stretched back even farther in his chair, making his magnificent chest move in ways that only called attention to all those lean, fine muscles packed beneath his sun-kissed skin.
Adriana had kept her eyes trained on his face. Barely.
“Oh, I work hard,” he’d told her in that soft, suggestive way that she’d wished she found disgusting. But since London, she’d been unable to dampen the fires he’d lit inside her, and she’d felt the burn of it then. Bright and hot.
“Perhaps if you dressed appropriately,” she’d said briskly, forcing a calm smile she didn’t feel, and telling herself there was no fire, nothing to burn but her shameful folly, “you might find you had more appropriate feelings about your actual duties, as well.”
He’d grinned. “Are my clothes what make me, then?” he’d asked silkily. “Because I feel confident I’m never more myself than when I’m wearing nothing at all. Don’t you think?”
Adriana hadn’t wanted to touch that, and so she’d listed off his week’s worth of engagements while his eyes laughed at her. Charities and foundations. Various events to support and promote Kitzinian commerce and businesses. Tours of war memorials on the anniversary of one of the kingdom’s most famous battles from the Great War. A visit to a city in the southern part of the country that had been devastated by a recent fire. Balls, dinners, speeches. The usual.
“Not one of those things sounds like any fun at all,” Pato had said, still lounging there lazily, as if he’d already mentally excused himself to the Maldives.
Adriana didn’t understand what had happened to her—what she’d done. She shouldn’t have responded to him like that in London. She shouldn’t have lost her head, surrendered herself to him so easily. So completely. If he hadn’t stopped, she knew with a deep sense of shame, she wouldn’t have.
And every day she had to stand there before him, both of them perfectly aware of that fact.
It made her hate him all the more. Almost as much as she hated herself. She’d worked closely with Lenz for three years. They’d traveled all over the world together. She’d adored him, admired him. And not once had she so much as brushed his hand inappropriately. Never had she worried that she couldn’t control herself.
But Pato had touched her and it had been like cracking open a Pandora’s box. Need, dark and wild. Lust and want and that fire she’d never felt before in all her life. Proof, at last, that she was a Righetti in more than simply name.
It had to be that tainted blood in her that had made her act so out of character she’d assured herself every day since London. It had to be that infamous Righetti nature taking hold of her, just as the entire kingdom had predicted since her birth, and just as the tabloids claimed daily, speculating madly about her relationship with Pato.
Because it couldn’t be him. It couldn’t be.
“Yours is a life of great sacrifice and terrible, terrible burdens, Your Royal Highness,” she’d said then, without bothering to hide her sarcastic tone. Forgetting herself the way she did too often around him. “However do you cope?”
For a moment their eyes had locked across the wide expanse of his desk, and the look in his—a quiet, supremely male satisfaction she didn’t understand at all, though it made something in her shiver—caused her heart to pound. Erratic and hard.
“Does your lingerie match today, Adriana?” he’d asked softly. Deliberately. Taunting her with the memory of that London morning. “I liked it. Next time, I’ll taste it before I take it off you.”
Adriana had flinched, then felt herself flush hot and red. She’d remembered—she’d felt—his hands on her, slipping into her panties to mold the curves of her backside to his palms, caressing her breasts through her bra. The heat of her embarrassment had flamed into a different kind of warmth altogether, pooling everywhere he’d touched her in London, and then starting to ache anew. And she’d been certain that she’d turned the very same cranberry color as the lingerie she’d worn then as she’d stood there before him in that office.
Pato, of course, had smiled.
She’d opened her mouth to say something, anything. To blister him with the force of all the anger and humiliation and dark despair that swirled in her. To save herself from the truths she didn’t want to face, truths that moved in her like blood, like need, like all the rest of the things she didn’t want to accept.
“I told you how I feel about challenges,” he’d said before she could speak, dropping his hands from behind his head and shifting in his chair, his gaze intense. “Disrespect me all you like, I don’t mind. But you should bear in mind that, first, it will reflect on you should you be foolish enough to do it in public, not on me. And second, you won’t like the way I retaliate. Do you understand me?”
She’d understood him all too well. Adriana had fled his office as if he’d been chasing her, when all that had actually followed her out into the gleaming hall was the sound of his laughter.
And her own deep and abiding shame at her weakness. But then, she carried that with her wherever she went.
Adriana shifted in her seat now, flipping the pages in her book as if she was reading fiercely and quickly, when in fact she hadn’t been able to make sense of a single word since the plane had left the airport in Nice, France. Pato was still on his mobile phone, speaking in Italian to one of his vast collection of equally disreputable friends, his low voice and wicked laughter curling through her, into her, despite her best efforts to simply ignore him.
But she couldn’t seem to do it.
Her body remembered London too well, even all these weeks later. It thrilled to the memories. They were right there beneath her skin, dancing in her veins, pulsing hot and wild in her core. All it took was his voice, a dark look, that smile, and her body thundered for more. More heat, more flame. More of that darkly addictive kiss. More of Pato, God help her. Adriana was terribly afraid that he’d flipped some kind of switch in her and ruined her forever.
And that wasn’t the only thing he’d ruined.
“You are clearly a miracle worker,” Lenz had said as the young royals had stood together outside a ballroom in the capital city one evening with their various attendants, waiting to make their formal entrance into a foundation’s gala event. “There hasn’t been a single scandal since you took Pato in hand.”
Adriana had wanted nothing more than to bask in his praise. Lenz had always been, if not precisely comfortable to be around, at least easy to work for. He’d never been as dangerously beautiful as Pato, but Adriana had always found him attractive in his own, far less flashy way. The sandy hair, the kind blue eyes. He was shorter than his brother, more solid than lean, but he’d looked every inch the king he’d become. It was the way he held himself, the way he spoke. It was who he was, and Adriana had always adored him for it.
Ordinarily, she would have hung on his every word and only allowed herself to think about the way it made her ache for him when she was alone. But that night she’d been much too aware of Pato standing on the other side of the great doorway, with Princess Lissette. Adriana had been too conscious of that golden gaze of his, mocking her. Reminding her.
He was grooming you to be his mistress.
And when she’d looked at Lenz—really looked at him, searching for the man and not the Crown Prince of Kitzinia she’d always been so awed by—she’d seen an awareness in his gaze, something darker and richer and clearly not platonic.
There had been no mistaking it. No unseeing it. And no denying it.
