A Royal Without Rules

by Caitlin Crews

  Adriana stretched out the kink in her neck, the events of the previous day flooding back to her, one after the next, as she stood. Her father’s face. Her mother’s harsh words. The newspapers, the paparazzi. Pato’s obvious betrayal. She shut her eyes against it, as if that might make it all vanish.

  Last night she hadn’t been able to cry. This morning, she refused to let herself indulge the urge. If the women hanging on the wall could smile, she told herself, then so could she.

  She squared her shoulders, told herself she was ready to face the next battle—and that was when she heard the shouting. Her father.

  Adriana threw open the door and stepped into the hall, moving toward the angry sound. Her stomach twisted into a hard knot as she tried to imagine what could be worse than yesterday’s newspaper spread, which hadn’t sent him into this kind of temper—

  “You’ve done enough damage—you can want nothing more! Will you take the house down, brick by brick? Demand our blood from the stones?” Her father sounded upset and furious in a way that scared her, it was so much worse than yesterday. She picked up her speed. “How many of your sick, twisted little games—”

  Adriana reached the stair, looked down and froze solid.

  Pato stood there in the lower hall.

  She didn’t know what poured through her then, so intense it was like an acute flash of pain, and she couldn’t tear her eyes away from him.

  Pato wore the ceremonial military regalia that tradition dictated served as formal wear to a grand state occasion like his brother’s wedding, a dark navy uniform accented in deep scarlet at the cuffs, the neck, and in lines down each leg, then liberally adorned with golden epaulets and brocades that trumpeted his rank. He’d even tamed his hair from its usual wildness, making him look utterly, heartbreakingly respectable. He stood tall and forbidding, staring at Adriana’s father impassively, a trio of guards arranged behind him.

  He looked every inch the royal prince he was. Like the king he could have been. He looked dangerously beautiful and completely inaccessible, and it ripped at her heart.

  Adriana sucked in a breath, and his gaze snapped to hers, finding her there on the landing.

  His gaze was the darkest she’d ever seen it, hard and intense, and she didn’t know how long they stood there, eyes locked together. Her father was blocking the stairs, his voice louder by the second, and yet while Pato looked at her like that, she hardly heard him.

  Pato jerked his gaze away abruptly, leaving Adriana feeling simultaneously relieved and bereft.

  “No more,” he said curtly, cutting into her father’s diatribe with a tone of sheer command. He seemed taller, more formidable, and yet he didn’t change expression as he stared at her father. “You forget yourself.”

  The air in the villa went taut. Thin. Adriana’s father fell silent. Pato waited.

  One breath. Another.

  “Step aside,” Pato ordered, his voice even, but there was no mistaking the crack of power in it. The expectation of obedience. The guards behind him stood straighter. “I won’t ask again.”

  Adriana’s father moved out of his way, and even as he did, Pato brushed past him, taking the steps with a controlled ferocity that made something inside Adriana turn over and start to heat. She couldn’t seem to look away from him as he bore down on her, or even catch her breath, and then he was there. Prince Patricio of Kitzinia, in all his stately splendor, looking at her with the same hard intensity as before, nothing the least bit gold in his gaze.

  “You brought guards?” she asked. Of all the things she might have said to him.

  “I dislike the paparazzi blocking my movements,” he said in that same even tone. Then his head tilted slightly. Regally. “Is there a private room?”

  It was another command, demanding instant compliance.

  Adriana didn’t hesitate any more than her father had. She waved her hand down the hall she’d come from, and Pato inclined his head, indicating she should precede him.

  She did—but not without looking back.

  Her father stood in the lower hall, watching her with the same tortured expression he’d worn yesterday, and the guilt swept through her again, almost choking her. She opened her mouth, as if there was something she could say to take away his horror at what was his worst nightmare come to life, right before his eyes.

  But Pato’s hand was on the small of her back, urging her ahead of him. There was nothing she could say to make this better. Her father wouldn’t forgive her, and on some level, she didn’t blame him. She’d known better than to do this, and she’d done it anyway.

  Adriana couldn’t stand Pato touching her—it was too much to bear, and her body only wanted him the way it always did—so she broke away as she led him back into the parlor, moving all the way across the room before facing him, her back to the far wall.

  Pato stepped inside, closed the door behind him, and his gaze cut immediately to the trio of paintings on the wall. He went still, his mouth flattening into a grim line.

  It took him a long time to look at her again, but when he did, Adriana had recovered herself. Maybe it was the women on the wall, reminding her that she could do this, whatever this was. It took a lot of strength to survive being as hated as they’d been—as she was. She remembered that Sandrine’s eyes had sparkled merrily when she’d met her, that the older woman had looked anything but cowed.

  Adriana could survive these final, painful scenes with Pato. She could.

  “I would have preferred to sacrifice myself, I think,” she said coolly, pulling the familiar defense around her gratefully. She crossed her arms and ignored that flash in his gaze. “Rather than wake up yesterday to find myself burned to a crisp on your little pyre with no warning whatsoever. Call me controlling if you must.”

  He eyed her from across the room in a way that unnerved her, but she refused to back down.

  “You believe I did this?” he asked mildly. But she knew him too well to be fooled by that tone.

  “I don’t know why you didn’t ask for assistance,” she continued, as if this was any other conversation she’d ever had with him. As if it was easy to pretend there was no emotion beneath this, no dark whirling thing that threatened to suck her under. “I’ve been handling your paparazzi encounters for a long time, Pato. At the very least, I might have suggested a better nickname for myself than ‘Witchy Righetti.’”

  Again, he gave her a long look, and it occurred to her belatedly that he was fighting for calm and control as much as she was. It made her heart kick in a kind of panic.

  “I promised you I wouldn’t use you that way,” he reminded her, almost politely. As if he thought she might have forgotten.

  And it was too much. He was here, and the way he was dressed made the difference in their situations painfully clear to her. He would walk away from this a prince. She would crawl away from this the disgraced daughter of a despised family, personally responsible for this new helping of shame and recrimination heaped on her family’s name.

  She used the only weapon she had.

  “You also promised your brother that you wouldn’t reveal his secret, I assume,” she said, very distinctly, and told herself she was pleased when she saw something dark and raw in his gaze. “And yet you did. Why would I think you’d keep a relatively small promise to someone like me?”

  A muscle worked in his jaw. His hands curled into fists. And he looked at her as if she’d torn him wide-open.

  Adriana told herself she was glad. He wasn’t here to save her. He couldn’t undo what she’d done to her family. But if she could make him feel a little bit of what she did, all the better—even if that look on his face clawed into her, shredding her from within.

  He laughed, but it was short. Bitter.

  “This, then, is what you mean when you say you love me,” he said quietly, his dark eyes pin
ning her to the wall behind her. “Is it better this way, Adriana? If you succeed in running me off—if you take that knife and bury it deep enough, twist it hard enough—will that get you what you want?”

  He was moving toward her—one step, then another—dark and furious and something more than that. Something that made him look as destroyed as she felt, and there was nothing good about that at all.

  “I don’t want—” she began, but he laughed again, and this time, it made her shudder.

  “I think you do,” he said, low and intense. Damning her where she stood. “I think you want to hole up in this mausoleum and paint your own portrait to hang on that wall.” He pointed at the trinity of pictures, but he didn’t take his eyes off her. “That’s what Righettis have been doing in this place for the last hundred years, wafting through the kingdom like ghosts, subjecting themselves to whatever punishment is thrown their way—”

  “You don’t have any idea what you’re talking about!” she cried, aware that she was shouting. But there was something hard and itchy and hot inside her, and she had to get it out or it would kill her, she knew. “It’s not as if you have any idea what it’s like to be the most reviled family in the kingdom. And why would you? It wasn’t your ancestor who murdered the king!” She swept her hand toward the portraits. “Or slept with several branches of the royal family tree!”

  His eyes blazed at her, and she realized only belatedly that he’d come much too close to her, as if he’d stalked her without her noticing.

  “Do you imagine that my family took control of the throne of Kitzinia because we asked nicely?” he demanded, sounding as incredulous as he did angry. “Is that how you remember the history of Europe? Because to my recollection, every kingdom that ever was came about in blood and treachery.” He shook his head, and then somehow his hands were on her upper arms and he was even closer, and she knew she should push him away. She knew she should extricate herself—but she couldn’t seem to move. “Your family isn’t the only one in the kingdom with blood on its hands, Adriana. But it is certainly the only one I can think of that’s created a cult out of its guilt!”

  She hung there, unable to breathe, unable to think, suspended between his hands as surely as she was caught in that dark, ferocious glare he kept trained on her.

  “What do mean by that?” she asked in a whisper, and then shivered when he pulled her so close to him that his lips almost touched her as he spoke.

  “You didn’t kill any Kitzinian kings,” he snapped. “And last I checked, the only prince you’ve slept with is me. Stop accepting the blame for history you can’t change.” Something flashed in his gaze then, and she felt the echo deep inside her, deep and threatening, as if might tear her in two. “For God’s sake,” he growled at her. “You are not a painting on the wall, Adriana. You don’t have to shoulder this. Fight back.”

  * * *

  Pato let go of her and stepped away.

  He couldn’t remember the last time he’d lost his temper. Not like this, so that it hummed in him still. And certainly not with that rough edge of need running through it, making him want nothing more than to continue this conversation while naked and deep inside her.

  Even after she’d thrown what he’d told her in his face, he wanted her, with the same desperation as before. More, perhaps. He didn’t know whether to laugh at that or simply despair of himself.

  Adriana was breathing hard, and looking very little like the brazen harlot he’d read so much about yesterday. He could see the smudges of exhaustion beneath her beautiful eyes, the vulnerable cast to her sweet mouth, the flush in her cheeks that failed to disguise the paleness of her face. He let his gaze fall over her, from the blond waves in a messy knot on the back of her head, to a face scrubbed free of cosmetics, to the loose cotton clothes she wore that might very well be her pajamas. And her bare feet.

  For some reason, the fact that he could see her toes made his chest hurt.

  “I didn’t plant that story,” he told her then, biting out the words he shouldn’t have to say. She raised a hand to her mouth as if she thought she might cry, then lowered it again, as if she was still trying to put on a front for him. He hated it. “It was Lissette.”

  “What?” Adriana shook her head. “Why?”

  “Lenz told her the truth.” Adriana’s eyes flew to his, shocked. “He felt she deserved to make an informed decision about whether or not to marry him. She, in turn, felt that my father couldn’t be trusted not to pull a last-minute stunt at the wedding, so she decided to make it clear that he was without options.”

  Adriana swallowed. “Lenz must be happy that she wants him anyway.”

  “That, or she very much wants to be queen of Kitzinia,” Pato retorted. His voice lowered. “But I’m certainly pleased to learn that your opinion of me is as poor today as it ever was. And why is that, do you suppose?”

  She blinked, and when she looked at him again, there was an anguish in her eyes that tore at him.

  “You’ve been working toward this for a very long time,” she said in a hushed tone. “You’ve given up so much. I thought that if you needed to do it, you would. And I’d volunteered, hadn’t I?” He only watched her, until she shifted uncomfortably, her expression pure misery. “It seemed like the kind of thing you’d do.”

  “Why?” he asked quietly, though his voice was like a blade. He could see it cut at her. “What makes me so untrustworthy, Adriana?”

  “I never said that,” she whispered, but she was trembling.

  “I know why,” he told her. “And so do you. At the end of the day, I’m nothing more than a whore myself, and in my case, a real one. And who could possibly trust a whore?”

  She flinched, and then she simply collapsed. Her hands flew up to cover her face and she bent over her knees, and for a simmering moment, Pato thought she was sick. But then he saw the sobs shake her body, silent and racking.

  Pato couldn’t stay away from her, not when she was falling apart right in front of him. Not when he’d pushed her there himself.

  He moved toward her, but she held up a hand to ward him off, and straightened, tears streaming down her face. He considered that for a brief moment and then he simply took hold of her hand and pulled her into his arms.

  “Listen to me,” he said, his voice raw. “I can’t give you what you deserve. I can’t give you anything except tabloid gossip and innuendo, and I hate that. I hate it.” He shifted her against him, taking her chin in his hand and gently bringing her eyes to his, those melting chocolate eyes, wet and hurt and still the most beautiful he’d ever seen. “But you have to know that I love you, Adriana. I love you and I would never deliberately hurt you. You can trust that, if nothing else. I swear it.”

  “Pato...” she said, as if his name was a prayer.

  “I can’t fix this,” he told her, the same fury that had ignited in him when he’d seen the papers yesterday surging in him again. That same dark, encompassing rage that had nearly taken him apart. “I can’t protect you the way I should. The only thing I can do is let you go.” She was shaking her head and he slid his hand from her chin to her soft cheek, holding her there. “You deserve better.”

  He watched her struggle to take a breath, and she didn’t seem to care that her face was wet with tears. She frowned at him.

  “And what will you do while I’m out there somewhere, finding whatever it is I deserve?” she asked. She shook her head again, decisively. “Martyr yourself?”

  “It’s not the same thing.”

  “It’s exactly the same thing,” she retorted.

  “I don’t have a choice,” he exclaimed. “This doesn’t end simply because Lenz marries today. I told you. Thrones are won by treachery. My father will be a threat until he’s dead—or until Lenz produces his own heir. Pato the Playboy isn’t going anywhere.”

  Adriana watched him for a m
oment, then angled herself back to wipe at her eyes. His hand dropped away, and he missed touching her immediately, so much his fingers twitched.

  “The Princess Lissette strikes me as highly motivated,” she said, a hint of that dryness in her voice that he adored, that he knew would haunt him forever. “I give her ten months, maybe a year, before she kicks off the next generation.”

  “You have to live better than this,” he told her softly. “Please.”

  Adriana looked at him for a long time. He thought she might simply agree, and it would kill him, but he would let her leave him. He had no choice. But then she sighed.

  “I thought you told me love was meant to hurt if it mattered,” she said, her gaze on his, hard and warm at the same time. “And who’s the martyr now? If you order me out of the country, does that mean you can wallow on your own crucifix?”

  That dug beneath his skin, straight on into the center of him, making it hard to breathe for a moment. He said her name softly—a warning, or his own version of a prayer? He wasn’t sure he could tell.

  “Make it real or don’t bother calling it love, Pato,” she declared, slicing into him with his own words. Daring him. “It already hurts. It’s already painful. What’s another year of the same?”

  “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “I’m the one they picked apart the most in those papers,” she reminded him, her eyes gleaming wet again. “I know exactly what I’m saying.”

  “This has been one day of tabloid coverage,” he pointed out, determined to make her see reason. “Are you really prepared for the endless onslaught? Day after day after day, until sometimes you wonder if the story they’re telling is the truth and you’re the lie?”

  She moved to him then and put her hands on his chest, leaning into him, making him want nothing more than to hold her close and keep her there forever.

  “I have to think that it’s better if there’s someone else around to tell you which is which,” she whispered. “And yesterday was a bad day in the tabloids, but it wasn’t the first. I’ve been a favorite target since I turned sixteen.”