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.
“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.�
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“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.
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