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“I’m afraid I can’t take credit for it, Your Royal Highness,” she’d said, feeling sick to her stomach. Deeply ashamed of herself and of him, too, though she hadn’t wanted to admit that. She’d been so sure Lenz was different. She’d been so certain. She hadn’t been able to meet his eyes again. “He’s been nothing but cooperative.”
“Pato? Cooperative? You must be speaking of a different brother.”
Lenz had laughed and Adriana had smiled automatically. But she’d been unable to ignore how close he stood to her, how familiar he was when he spoke to her. Too close. Too familiar. Just as her father had warned, and she’d been too blind to see it. Blind and ignorant, and it made her feel sicker.
Worse, she’d been grimly certain that Pato could see every single thought that crossed her mind. And the Princess Lissette had been watching her as well, her cool gaze sharp, her icy words from the ball in London ringing in Adriana’s head.
She is widely regarded as something of a pariah.
Adriana had been relieved when it had been time for the royal entrance. They’d all swept inside to the usual fanfare, the other attendants had disappeared to find their own seats and she’d been left behind in the hall, finally alone. Finally away from all those censorious, amused, aware eyes on her. Away from Lenz, who wasn’t at all who she’d imagined him to be. Away from Pato, who was far more than she could handle, just as he’d warned her.
Adriana had stood there for a very long time, holding on to the wall as if letting go of it might tip her off the side of the earth and away into nothing.
“You seemed so uncomfortable with my brother last night,” Pato had taunted her the very next day, his golden gaze hard on her. She’d been trapped in the back of a car with him en route to another event, and she’d felt too raw, too broken, to contend with the man she’d glimpsed in London, so relentless and powerful. She’d decided she preferred him shiftless and lazy, hip deep in scandal. It was easier. “Or perhaps it’s only that I expected to see more chemistry between you, given that you wish to make such a great and noble sacrifice to save him.”
His tone had been so dry. He was talking about her life as if he hadn’t punched huge holes right through the center of it. Adriana had learned long ago how to act tough even if she wasn’t, how to shrug off the cruel things people said and did to her—but it had been too much that day.
He’d taken everything that had ever meant something to her. Her belief in Lenz. Her position in the palace. Her self-respect. Everything. And finally, something had simply cracked.
“I understand this is all a joke to you,” she’d said in a low voice, staring out the window at the red-roofed city, historic houses and church spires, the wide blue lake in the distance, the Alps towering over everything. “And why shouldn’t it be? It doesn’t matter what you do—the people adore you. There are never any consequences. You never have to pay a price. You have the option to slide through life as pampered and as shallow as you please.”
“Yes,” he’d replied, sounding lazy as usual, but when she’d glanced back at him his gaze was dark. She might have thought he looked troubled, had he been someone else. Her stomach had twisted into a hard knot. “I’m a terrible disappointment. Sometimes even to myself.”
Adriana hadn’t understood the tension that had flared between them then, the odd edginess that had filled the interior of the car, fragile and heavy at once. She hadn’t wanted to understand it. But she’d been afraid she did. That Pandora’s box might have been opened, and there wasn’t a thing she could do to change it after the fact. But that didn’t mean that she needed to rummage around inside it, picking up things best left where they were.
“Your brother was the first man who was ever kind to me,” she’d said, her voice sounding oddly soft in the confines of the car. “It changed everything. It made me believe—” But she hadn’t been able to say it, not to Pato, who couldn’t possibly have understood what it had meant to her to feel safe, at last. Who would mock her, she’d been sure. “I would have been perfectly happy to keep on believing that. You didn’t have to tell me otherwise.”
“Adriana.” He’d said her name like a caress, a note she’d never heard before in his voice, and she’d held up a hand to stop him from saying anything further. There had been tears pricking at the back of her eyes and it had already been far too painful.
He would take everything. She knew he would. She’d always known, and it was that, she’d acknowledged then, that scared her most of all.
“You did it deliberately,” she’d said quietly, and she’d forced herself to look at him. “Because you could. Because you thought it was funny.”
“Did you imagine he would love you back?” Pato had asked, an oddly gruff note in his voice then, his gleaming eyes unreadable, and it had hurt her almost more than she could bear. “Walk away from his betrothal, risk the throne he’s prepared for all his life? Just as the Duke of Reinsmark did for your great-aunt Sandrine?”
“It wasn’t about what Lenz would or wouldn’t do,” she’d whispered fiercely, fighting back the wild tilt and spin of her emotions, while Pato’s words had dripped into her like poison, bitter and painful. “People protect those they care about. If you cared about anything in the world besides pleasuring yourself, you’d know that, and you wouldn’t careen through your life destroy—”
He had reached over and silenced her with his finger on her lips, and she hadn’t had time to analyze the way her heart slammed into her ribs, the way her whole body seemed to twist into a dark, sheer ripple of joy at even so small and furious a touch from him.
“Don’t.”
It had been a command, a low whisper, his voice a rough velvet, and that had hurt, too. The car had come to a stop, but Pato hadn’t moved. He hadn’t looked away from her, pinning her to her seat with too much darkness in his gaze and an expression she’d never seen before on his face, making him a different man all over again.
“You don’t know what I care about,” he’d told her in that low rasp. “And I never thought any of that was funny.”
She’d felt that touch on her mouth for days.
“Ci vediamo,” Pato said into his mobile with a laugh now, ending his call.
Adriana snapped back into the present to find him looking at her from where he lounged there across the plane’s small aisle. She felt as deeply disconcerted as if the scene in the car had only just happened, as if it hadn’t been days ago, and she was afraid he could take one look at her and know exactly what she was thinking. He’d done it before.
If he could, tonight he chose to keep that to himself.
“Good book?” he asked mildly, as if he cared.
“It’s enthralling,” she replied at once. “I can’t bear to put it down for even a second.”
“You haven’t looked at it in at least five minutes.”
“I doubt you were paying that much attention,” she said coolly. “Certainly not while making juvenile plans to wreak havoc across Italy with your highly questionable race car driving friends who, last I checked the gossip columns, think the modeling industry exists purely to supply them with arm candy.”
He laughed as if she delighted him, and she felt it everywhere, like the touch of the sun. He moved in her like light, she thought in despair, even when he wasn’t touching her. She was lost. If she was honest, she’d been lost from the start, when he’d stood there before her with such unapologetic arrogance, naked beneath a bedsheet, and laughed at the idea that she could make him behave.
She should have listened to him. She certainly shouldn’t have listened to Lenz, whose motivations for sending her to Pato in the first place, she’d realized at some point while standing in that hallway after seeing him again, couldn’t possibly be what she’d imagined them to be when she’d raced off to do his bidding. And she couldn’t listen to the tumult inside her, the fire and the need, the chaos that Pato stirred in her without even seeming to try, because that way lay nothing but madness. She was sure of it.
Adriana didn’t know what she was going to do.
“Keep looking at me like that,” Pato said then, making her realize that she’d been staring at him for far too long—and that he was staring back, his eyes gleaming with a dark fire she recognized, “and I won’t be responsible for what happens next.”
* * *
Pato expected her to throw that back in his face. He expected that cutting tongue of hers, the sweet slap of that smile she used like a razor and sharpened so often and so comprehensively on his skin. He liked both far more than he should.
But her eyes only darkened as they clung to his, and a hectic flush spread over those elegant cheekbones he wanted to taste. He was uncomfortably hard within the next breath, the wild, encompassing need he’d been trying to tell himself he’d imagined, or embellished, slamming into him again, sinking its claws deep, making him burn hot, and want.
How could he want her this much?
It had been weeks since London, and his fascination with her should have ebbed by now, as his little fascinations usually did in much less time. And most of those women had not fancied themselves tragically in love with his brother. But Adriana was always with him, always right there within his reach, prickly and unimpressed and severe. He spent his days studying her lovely face and its many masks, reading her every gesture, poking at her himself when he grew tired of the distance she tried to put between them.
This woman was his doom. He understood that on a primal level, and yet couldn’t do the very thing he needed to do to avert it. He couldn’t let her walk away. That was part of the game—but he found he couldn’t bear the thought of it.
And he didn’t like to think about the implications of that.
“Careful, Adriana,” he said quietly. Her chest rose and fell too fast and her hands clenched almost fitfully at the thick paperback she held. If he asked, she would claim she didn’t want him and never had—but he could see the truth written all over her. He recognized what burned in her, no matter what she claimed. It made him harder, wilder. Closer to desperate than he’d been in years. “I’m in a dangerous mood tonight.”
She blinked then, looking down into her lap and smoothing her hands over the abused book, and he had rendered himself so ridiculous when it came to this woman that he felt it like loss.
“I don’t know how you can tell the difference between that and any of your other moods,” she said in her usual sharp way, which Pato told himself was better than that lost, hungry stare that could only lead to complications he knew he should avoid. “They’re all dangerous, sooner or later, aren’t they? And we both know who’ll have to clean up the mess.”
“I expected applause when we boarded the plane,” he told her, smiling when her gaze came back to his, her brows arched over those warm, wary eyes that made him forget about the hollow places inside him. “A grateful speech or two, perhaps even a few thankful tears.”
“You board planes all the time,” she pointed out, her expression smooth, and that decidedly disrespectful glint in her dark eyes that he enjoyed far too much. “I was unaware that you required encouragement to continue doing so. I’ll be sure to make a note of that for future reference. Perhaps the Royal Guard can break from their regular duties protecting our beloved sovereign, and perform a salute.”
“I want only your applause, Adriana,” he told her silkily. “After all, you’re the one who insisted I become chaste and pure, and so I have. At your command.”
“I’m sorry,” she murmured, something that looked like a smirk flashing across her mouth before she wisely bit it back. “Did you describe yourself as ‘chaste and pure’? In an airplane, of all places, where we are that much closer to lightning, should you be struck down where you sit?”
She was a problem. A terrible problem, the ruin of everything he’d worked for all these years, but Pato couldn’t seem to keep himself from enjoying her. He couldn’t seem to do anything but bask in her. Tart and quick and the most fun he’d had in ages. With that sweet, hot fire beneath that would burn them both.
“Shall I tell you what I got up to at this particular benefit last year?” he asked.
“Unnecessary,” she assured him. “The video of your ill-conceived spa adventure is still available on the internet. Never has the phrase ‘the royal jewels’ been so widely and hideously abused.”
He laughed, and spread out his hands in front of him as if in surrender—noting the way her eyes narrowed in suspicion, as if she knew exactly how unlikely it was he might ever truly surrender anything.
“And look at me now,” he invited her. “Not a single lascivious actress in sight, no spa tub in a hotel room that was meant to be private, and I’m not even drunk. You should be proud, Adriana.”
She shifted in her chair, crossing her legs, and then frowning at him when his gaze drifted to trace the elegant line of them from the hem of her demure skirt down to the delicate heels she wore.
“Your transformation has been astonishing,” she said in repressive tones when he grinned back at her. “But you’ll forgive me if I can’t quite figure out your angle. I only know you must have one.”
“I prefer curves to angles, actually,” he said, and laughed again at her expression of polite yet clear distaste at the innuendo. “And it has to be said, I’ve always found lingerie a particularly persuasive argument.”
Adriana let out a breath, as if he’d hit her. Something terribly sad moved over her face then, surprising him and piercing into him. She ran her hands down the length of her skirt, smoothing out nonexistent wrinkles, betraying her anxiety.
Pato knew he was a bastard—he’d gone out of his way to make sure he was—but this woman made him feel it. Keenly. She made him wish he was a different man. A better one. The sort of good one she deserved.
“Perhaps you’ve managed to convince me of the error of my ways,” he said quietly, hating himself further because he wasn’t that man. He couldn’t be that man, no matter how much she made him wish otherwise. “Just because it hasn’t been done before doesn’t mean it’s impossible.”
Her dark eyes met his and made something twist in him, sharp and serrated.
“We both know I did nothing of the kind,” she said, her voice soft and matter-of-fact. She let out a small breath. “All I managed to do was make myself one among your many conquests, indistinguishable from the rest of the horde.”
“I don’t know why you’d think yourself indistinguishable,” he said, keeping his tone light.
He could have sworn what he saw flash in her dark eyes then was despair, but she swallowed it back and forced a smile that made his chest hurt.
“I should have realized,” she said, and he wondered if she knew how bitter she sounded then, how broken. “You’ve always been a trophy collector, haven’t you? And what a prize you won in London. You get to brag that the Righetti whore propositioned you and you—you, of all people—turned her down. My congratulations, Your Royal Highness. That’s quite a coup.”
For a long moment a black temper pulsed in him, and Pato didn’t dare speak. He only studied her face. She was pale now, and sat too straight, too stiff. Her eyes were dark again in exactly the same way they’d been that morning in the car, when he’d felt pushed to confront her about Lenz, and was fairly certain she’d broken his heart. Had he had one to break.
Pato hated this. He was perilously close to hating himself. For the first time since he was eighteen, he wished that he could do exactly what he wanted without having to worry about anyone else. Without having to play these deep, endless games. Adriana sat there and looked at him as if he was exactly the depraved degenerate he’d gone to great lengths to ensure he really was, when she was the first woman he’d ever met that he wanted to think better of him. The irony wasn’t lost on him.
It stung. Congratulations, indeed, he thought ruefully. This was what doom looked like as it happened, and he was doing nothing at all to prevent it.
“Adriana,” he said, trying to keep his temper from his voice. Trying to make sense of his determination to protect her not only from the things he shouldn’t allow himself to want from her, but from herself. “You and I both know you’re no whore. Why do you torture yourself over the lies that strangers tell? They’re only stories. They’re not even about you.”
“On the contrary,” she said after a moment, her voice thick and uneven. “Some of us are defined by the stories strangers tell.”
“You’re the only one who can define yourself,” he countered gently. “All they can do is tell another story, and who cares if they do?”
Emotion moved through her then, raw and powerful. He saw it on her face, in the way her eyes went damp, in the faint tremor of her lips. Her hands balled into fists in her lap and she moved restlessly in her seat, stamping both feet into the floor as if she needed the balance.
“Easy for you to say,” she stated, a raw edge to her voice. “Not all of us can be as beloved as you are no matter what you do, forgiven our trespasses the moment we make them.”
“Fondness is hardly the same thing as forgiveness.”
Her dark eyes seared into him. “You cheerfully admit each and every one of your transgressions,” she said. “There are videos, photographs, whole tabloids devoted to your bacchanals. But you are still the most popular young royal in all of Europe. No one cares how dirty you get. It doesn’t cling to you. It doesn’t matter.”
“I prefer ‘adventurous’ to ‘dirty,’ I think,” he said mildly, watching her closely, seeing nothing but shadows in her beautiful eyes. “Especially in that tone.”
“Meanwhile,” she said, as if he hadn’t spoken, “I happen to be related to three women who slept with Kitzinian royalty over a hundred and fifty years ago, and one woman who ruined a duke more recently. I’m the most notorious slut in the kingdom, thanks to them.” She pulled in a breath. “It isn’t even my dirt, but I’m covered in it, head to toe, and I’ll never be clean. Ever.” Her eyes held his for a long moment, fierce and dark. “It isn’t just another story strangers tell. It’s my life.”
Pato was aware that he needed to shut this down now, before he forgot himself. But instead, he shook his head and continued talking, as if he was someone else. Someone with the freedom to have dangerous conversations with a woman he found far too fascinating, as if both of them weren’t pawns in a game only he knew they were playing.
“You must know that almost all of that is jealousy,” he said, letting out a small laugh at the idea that she didn’t. “You’re a legend, Adriana, whether you earned it or not. Women are envious of the attention you get, simply because you have a notorious name and the temerity to be beautiful. Men simply want you.”
She let out a frustrated noise, and snatched up her book again, that smooth mask of hers descending once more. But he could see right through it now.
“I don’t want to discuss this,” she said, more to the book than to him. “You can’t possibly understand. There’s not a day of your life you’ve been envious of anyone, because why should you be? And you certainly don’t want me. You made that perfectly clear in London.”
Pato didn’t know he meant to move. He shouldn’t have. But one moment he was on the couch and the next he was looming over her, swiveling her chair around and leaning over her, into her, planting his hands on the armrests and caging her between his arms. Risking everything, and he didn’t care.
“I never said I didn’t want you,” he growled down at her.
Pato felt unhinged and unpredictable, capable of anything. Especially a mistake of this magnitude—but he couldn’t seem to stop himself. Adriana still smelled of jasmine and her eyes were that rich, deep brown, and he didn’t have it in him to fight off this madness any longer.
“Not that I want to revisit the most humiliating morning of my life,” she said from between her teeth, “but you did. If not in words, then in actions. And don’t misunderstand me, I’m grateful. I wasn’t myself.”
“The question on the table that morning was not whether or not I wanted you.” He moved even closer, watching in satisfaction as her pretty eyes widened with a shock of awareness he felt like hands on his skin. “The question was whether or not I wanted to sleep with you knowing full well you planned to shut your eyes and imagine Lenz in my place. They’re not quite the same thing.”
She paled, then burst into that bright red blush that Pato found intoxicating. He liked her cheeks rosy, her cool exterior cracked and all her masks useless, the truth of her emotions laid bare before him.
“What does it matter?” Her voice was barely a whisper. “It didn’t happen. Crisis averted. There’s no need to talk about it now.”
“I told you I wouldn’t forget,” he said, intent and hungry, “and I haven’t. I remember the noises you made in the back of your throat when I kissed you, when you rubbed against me like silk, hot and—”
“Please!” Her voice was low. Uncertain. “Stop.”
“What do you want, Adriana? That’s tonight’s question.”
He leaned in closer, so he could hear the tiny hitch in her breath, and so he could find the pulse in her neck that was drumming madly, giving her away, and tease it with his tongue.
She whispered something that came out more a moan, and he smiled against the delicate column of her throat. Her skin smelled of his favorite flowers and her hair smelled of holidays in the sun, and he wanted to be deep inside her more than he wanted his next breath.
“And when I talk about want, I don’t mean something tame,” he said, a growl against the side of her neck, directly into her satiny skin, so he could feel her tremble against his lips. “I mean hunger. Undeniable, unquenchable hunger. Not because you’re drunk. Not because you want to martyr yourself to your great unrequited love. Hunger, Adriana. What do you want? What are you hungry for?”
“Please...” she whispered, desperation thick in her voice. She was right there on the edge, right where he wanted her. He could feel it. He felt it flood through him, dark and thrilling and scorchingly hot.
“I don’t think you love him, Adriana,” he told her then, and she let out a small sound of distress. “Not really. I know you’re not hungry for him. Not like this.”
She trembled. She shook. But she didn’t argue.
“I asked you a question,” he urged her, his mouth at her jaw. “If it helps, I already know the answer. All you have to do is admit it.”
CHAPTER SIX (#u42e1f619-d2d7-5205-b1df-9abd9277b5c2)
ADRIANA’S BREATH CAME out like a sigh. A release.
