A Royal Without Rules

by Caitlin Crews

  He crossed his arms over his chest and glared at her.

  “You want to love me, Adriana?” he demanded, his voice rough and hot and impatient, welling up from that place inside he’d thought he’d excised long ago, that heart it seemed only she could reach. He’d be damned if he’d let her hide. Not if he couldn’t. He angled himself closer. “Then love me. Make it hurt. Make it jealous and possessive and painful. Make demands. Make it real or don’t bother.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  THERE WERE STAINS of red high on Adriana’s cheeks, a dazed look on her pretty face, and Pato gave in to his driving need to be closer to her. Closer, always closer, no matter how irritated he might be with her and her proclamation of so-called love, as tepid as whatever she’d imagined she felt for Lenz.

  Pato reached over and sat her down on the sofa, then gripped the back of it, pinning her there with an arm on either side of her. Caging her. Putting his face too close to hers. He couldn’t read the way she looked at him then, didn’t understand the darkness in her gaze, that sheen that suggested emotions she’d prefer to conceal from him.

  “I know all about hiding, Adriana,” he said quietly, though he could still hear that edge in his voice. He could feel it inside him. “I can see it when it’s right in front of me.”

  “I don’t know why you want to tell me anything.” There was a raggedness in her voice, and he could see it in her face. “I don’t know why you hunted me down at the villa, why you brought me here. It would have been easier to simply let me go this morning. Isn’t that why you did it?”

  “You know why.” He wanted to touch her. Taste that lovely mouth. Take her again and again until neither of them could speak. But he didn’t. He couldn’t. “I can’t have you, Adriana, but it’s not because I don’t want you.”

  She didn’t say a word, but she was breathing high and hard, as if climbing a steep hill. He could see that same darkness in her eyes, deeper now. Her confusion. He pushed away from the sofa but continued to stand over her, looking down at this woman who might, in fact, be the death of him. She’d already ruined him; that much was certain.

  “My mother left behind some personal papers,” he said then. It was time to finish this, before he forgot why he wanted that, too. “She left them to my father, which seemed an odd choice, given his profound disinterest in her personal affairs while she was alive. But eventually, he read them. And discovered that Lenz was not, in fact, his biological son.”

  It was Pato’s greatest secret, it wasn’t only his secret, and she could use it to topple his brother’s kingdom if she chose. And there it lay, huge and ugly between them, taking up all the air in the cottage.

  Adriana made a small, shocked noise, and covered her mouth with her hands. Pato let her simply stare at him, let all the implications sink in. For long moments she seemed frozen. But eventually, she blinked.

  “Did Lenz know?” she asked in a whisper.

  “We were both called before the king.” Pato could hear the grimness in his voice. He’d never told this story before—he’d never imagined he would tell it to anyone. It certainly wasn’t part of the plan. “He informed us that a great crime had been perpetrated against the throne of Kitzinia, and that it must be rectified. That was how Lenz found out.”

  Adriana’s eyes closed, as if that was too horrible to imagine. Pato had been there, and he felt much the same. He and Lenz had been ordered before the king, commanded to appear, even though Pato had been in England and Lenz in South Africa at the time. Pato remembered how baffled they’d been, jet-lagged and even somewhat concerned about their father. Until the nasty, furious way he had delivered the news, as if Lenz had engineered his paternity himself for the sole purpose of deception.

  “You have no brother from this day forward,” the king had intoned into the stunned, sick silence, glaring at Pato as if Lenz had disappeared into thin air. “You are my heir, and your mother’s bastard is nothing to you.”

  “But,” Pato had begun, his head spinning. “Father—”

  “I have one son,” the king had snarled. “One heir to this throne, Patricio, and God have mercy on this kingdom, but it’s you.”

  Pato had never cared much for his father before that day. He’d always been a distant, disapproving presence who had rarely lowered himself to interact much with his second son, which had always suited Pato well enough, as he’d seen what it was like for Lenz to have all that critical attention focused on him. But after that day, Pato had loathed him.

  “My father cannot bear scandal,” he said now. “He is obsessed with even the slightest speck of dirt anywhere near his spotless reputation. And I had recently landed myself in the tabloids for the first time with an extremely inappropriate British pop star. The king was not pleased about it when I was merely the ornamental second son, or so I heard through the usual channels, but when it turned out I was his heir, he went apoplectic.”

  Adriana was still sitting there, so straight and shocked, her eyes still wide. “Did he plan to simply toss Lenz out on the street?”

  “He did.” Pato moved to the nearby armchair and lowered himself into it. “He thought he’d wait until my pop star scandal faded, exile Lenz from Kitzinia and force me to take on the duties of a crown prince in a sober and serious manner that would indicate my brush with the tabloids was no more than a regrettable, youthful indiscretion, never to be repeated.”

  Adriana only stared at him, shaking her head slightly as if she couldn’t take it in. Or perhaps she was attempting to imagine him in the role of dutiful crown prince—a stretch for anyone, he was well aware. Even him.

  “Lenz’s exile was to be presented as an abdication well before he was to take the throne.” Pato smiled slightly. Darkly. “But I never let the scandal die down. From that day forward, I made it my job to be an embarrassment. To make it abundantly clear that I was and am unfit for any kind of throne.”

  “Pato.” She shifted then, moving forward in her seat as if she wanted to reach over and touch him. Her hands moved, but then she held them together in her lap. “You know I admire your brother. But if you’re the heir to the throne...?” She searched his face. “Isn’t it your birthright?”

  “You sound like Lenz,” Pato said roughly. He had to get up again then, had to move, and found himself staring out the windows that looked down to the peaceful water. “I never envied Lenz his position. I never wished for his responsibilities. And when they were handed to me, I didn’t want them. Can you imagine if it was announced I was supposed to be king? The people would take up arms and riot in the streets.”

  “They might object to the Playboy Prince, yes,” Adriana said after a long moment. “You’ve made sure of that. But that’s not who you are.”

  His breath left him. He ignored the ache in his chest.

  “My choice was a throne or a brother,” he said quietly. He turned to face her. “I chose my brother. And I don’t regret it.”

  “Pato...” she whispered, and the look in her eyes nearly undid him.

  “Since then,” he said gruffly, pushing forward because he couldn’t stay in this moment, couldn’t let himself explore the way she gazed at him, “my father has had to pretend to keep Lenz in his good graces, because his pride won’t allow him to explain the situation to his ministers. Especially when, as you say, I’ve made certain the alternative is so unacceptable.”

  For a moment there was nothing in the room but the sound of his own pounding heart.

  “You’re a good man, Pato,” Adriana said then. There was a scratchy undertone to her voice that made him think she was holding back tears. For him. And he thought it might undo him. “And a very good brother.”

  Pato looked at her, then away, before he forgot what he could and couldn’t have. Before he forgot he’d chosen to be a hollow man, with an empty life. Before he was tempted to believe her.

 
“My father is also unwell,” he said instead, bitterly. “It is, ironically enough, his heart.”

  * * *

  Adriana was worried about her own.

  She hardly knew where to look, what to think. Nothing he was telling her could possibly be true—and yet it all made a horrible sense. It explained the chilliness she’d always sensed between Lenz and the king. It explained Lenz’s extraordinary patience with Pato’s messy escapades. More, it explained how Pato could do all the scandalous things he’d done and yet also be the man who’d held her on the plane, then quietly rid her of a lifetime of shame. It explained everything.

  He stood there at the window so calmly, half-naked as ever, all sun-kissed skin and masculine grace, talking with such seeming nonchalance about things that would overthrow their government. He had given up a throne. He loved his brother more than he wanted what was his by birthright. He had deliberately crafted his own mythology to serve his own ends and to force his father, the king, into doing what he wanted him to do. He’d even hinted at this once before, in London, when he’d said his reputation was his life’s work.

  He was truly remarkable, she thought then. And he was hers.

  It didn’t matter for how long. It didn’t matter if he couldn’t have her, as he’d said. It didn’t matter if all she ever had of him was the distance and the unrequited love that he’d mocked. He’d given her his secrets. He’d stepped out of hiding and shown her who he really was, because he believed she deserved to know. Because he hadn’t wanted to let her leave him the way she had this morning, thinking the worst of him.

  He would rather have her know the dangerous truth than have her think he didn’t care.

  That he cared, that he must or he would never have shared any of this with her, that he really must trust her, dawned inside her like the sun.

  He was hers.

  “His health is deteriorating, he is not a candidate for surgery and he is an unacceptable risk to the kingdom,” Pato was saying. “He should have stepped down already. He will have no choice when Lenz marries Lissette, as she was betrothed at birth to the heir to the Kitzinian throne.” Pato shrugged at Adriana’s quizzical look. “If Lenz marries her, it is an assertion that he is, in fact, that heir. There can be no going back unless my father wants an international incident that could well become a war. He will have no choice but to face the inevitable.” Pato’s mouth moved into a curve that was far darker than usual. “He has grown more desperate by the day for another option.”

  “You,” Adriana said.

  “Me,” Pato agreed, “even though I’ve gone to great lengths to keep myself out of the running.” He sighed, and then leveled a look at her that made something twist in her stomach, made a sense of foreboding trickle down her back. “He had convinced himself that the kingdom would excuse me as a young man sowing his oats, who could in time settle down, as men do. But now he believes I am skulking about with one of Lenz’s cast-off mistresses, which he finds truly distasteful. Worse, he is superstitious enough to believe that Righetti women possess some kind of witchcraft, and that I am weak enough to be under your spell.”

  Adriana couldn’t breathe, as if he’d slammed that straight into her gut. But she couldn’t look away from him, either.

  “Bewitched by a woman descended from traitors and temptresses,” Pato said softly, his golden eyes darker, more intense. “Crafted by the ages to be my downfall.”

  “You want him to think that,” she managed to say, despite feeling as if the room were drawing tight on all sides. “That’s why you decided to behave these last weeks. You wanted him to think I was influencing you.”

  “Yes.”

  His gaze was dark. Demanding. Without apology, and Adriana felt so brittle, suddenly. So close to breaking, and that wave of misery she’d thought she was rid of waited there for her, she knew. In the next breath. Or the one following. And it would crash over her and take her to her knees if she let it.

  But she still couldn’t look away from him.

  “Was it all a game?” she whispered, that familiar emptiness opening again inside her, reminding her how easy it was to be sucked back in. “Was any of it real?”

  “You know that it was both.” His gaze bored into her, challenging her. “Almost from the very beginning.”

  She shook her head, aware that it felt too full, too fragile. That she did. There was too much noise in her ears and that dark pit in her stomach, and all she wanted was to get to her feet and run—but she couldn’t seem to move.

  “I don’t know that.”

  “You do.”

  He pushed away from the wall and came toward her then, imposing and beautiful, and she knew the truth about him now. She knew his indolence was an act, that the powerful, ruthless man she’d glimpsed was who Pato was. Now she couldn’t pretend she didn’t see it. She couldn’t pretend he was lazy, pointless, careless—any of the things he’d pretended he was. He’d manipulated her every step of the way and would no doubt do it again. He’d given up a throne for this. What was one woman next to that? She was nothing but collateral damage.

  And still, she didn’t move. Still, her heart ached for him. No matter what this meant for her, what it said about the last years of her life.

  “This is why you have to leave the palace, Adriana,” he said, that dark urgency in his voice and stamped across his face. “You deserve better than these games. No one comes out of them without being compromised. No one wins.”

  She struggled with the tears that pricked suddenly at the back of her eyes, and then he was right there, sinking down in front of her to kneel on the floor and take her face between his hands.

  “I don’t want to let you go,” he whispered fiercely. “But I will. Somehow, I will. I promise.”

  The same old voices snaked through her then, crawling out of that darkness inside her to whisper the same old poison. He wanted the Righetti whore and he got her, didn’t he? She’d been a means to an end for him, a tool. Another instrument. Something he could use and then toss aside. “Remember who you are, Adriana,” her father had said when she’d first got the job at the palace. “Remember that your disgrace is already assumed—they only seek confirmation.” She was nothing but her surname, her face, her family’s everlasting shame, another headline in another tabloid paper. Temptresses and a traitor, marking her as surely as if she wore their sins tattooed across her cheeks.

  But Pato had trusted her. He’d come for her when he could have simply let her leave, none the wiser. He’d brought her here, and she’d been the one to insist they give in to the wild passion between them, not Pato. He’d wanted to talk and she hadn’t let him. And now he’d told her everything, and yes, it hurt. But he’d told her a story that could rock the whole kingdom, and he wanted to set her free. Again.

  And all she wanted to do, all she could think to do, was run away and hide—which was just what she’d done when she was seventeen. It was what she always did.

  No wonder he’d mocked her declaration of love, she thought then, a different kind of shame winding through her. It wasn’t love at all. It was safe and removed. It was loving the idea of him, not loving the man. The complicated, dangerous man, who wasn’t safe at all and had never pretended otherwise—he only made her feel that she might be safe when she was with him.

  Make it hurt, he’d challenged her, scowling at her, refusing to accept her half measures. Make it real or don’t bother.

  And this was her chance to step out of hiding, just as he’d done. She wanted to be bold. She wanted to feel alive. For once in her life, she wanted to use her infamous name and her notoriety instead of sitting back and letting others use it against her.

  Not as a sacrifice. Pato deserved better than that. He deserved a gift.

  “It sounds like I’m an excellent weapon,” she said. She wrapped her hands around his wrists, tilted her face to
his and lost herself in all that dark gold. “Why don’t you use me? I’m sure your father isn’t the only one who assumes that I’m your mistress as well as Lenz’s. Why not make it public and damn yourself in his eyes forever?”

  “I’m not going to use you that way, Adriana.” Pato’s voice was harsh. “I didn’t accept the offer when it was for Lenz, and I won’t do it now. You are not a whore. You do not wield dark magic that turns unsuspecting men into your slaves. You’re better than this fairy-tale villain they’ve made you, that I’ve helped them make you, and I refuse to take part in it any longer. I won’t.”

  She couldn’t help herself then. She leaned in and kissed him, feeling the electric charge that shuddered through him, then sizzled in her, making what she’d intended to be sweet turn into something else entirely. When she pulled away, his eyes were still dark, but gleamed gold.

  “I’m genetically predisposed to be the mistress of a Kitzinian prince,” she told him, and smiled at him. She could do this. In truth, she already had. “And I’m already notorious. You may not want to accept your birthright, Pato, but I do.”

  He looked at her for what felt like a very long time. His hands still cupped her cheeks, and she was sure he could see through her, all the way down to the deepest part of her soul.

  “I won’t let you sacrifice yourself for this kingdom,” he said finally, his gaze more gold than grim, though his mouth remained serious. “It has never done anything for you but make your life a misery.”

  “It’s no sacrifice,” she said, her hands tightening around his wrists. “I don’t want to martyr myself, I want to help.”

  Another long moment, taut and electric, and then he shook his head.

  “We have a week until the wedding.” Pato stood, drawing her to her feet and into his arms. As he gazed down at her, his mouth began to curve into that wicked quirk she recognized. “Lenz will marry his ice princess, the poor bastard. The spectacle will bring in hordes of tourists, just as my parents’ wedding did a generation ago. My father will finally cede the throne, and will spend the rest of his miserable life faced with the knowledge that the son he raised and then rejected is his king. And life will carry on, Adriana, without a single mention of the Righetti family, traitors and temptresses, or you.”