One Night With The Prince: A Royal Without Rules

But she was a Righetti. There was never any mistaking that. She should have known it would poison everyone and everything she came into contact with. Even Lenz.

She turned then, and Pato still watched her, sitting there on his bed, a vision of indolent male beauty. Every inch of him royal, gorgeous and as utterly, deliberately corrupt as it was assumed she was. He’d chosen it. He was the Playboy Prince, scandalous and dissolute. But he was still a prince.

Adriana blinked. “So are you,” she said slowly, as an idea took root inside her, and began to grow. “A Kitzinian prince, I mean.”

Pato’s mouth crooked. “To my father’s everlasting dismay, yes.”

It was so simple, Adriana thought then, staring at him as if she’d never seen him before. It could fix everything.

“Then we should make them all think that I’m your mistress,” she said in a rush. She clutched the wrap tighter around her, drifting closer to the bed as she spoke. “The tabloids are halfway there already.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“No one would be at all surprised to discover that you were sleeping with a Righetti,” she continued excitedly, ignoring the odd, arrested look on his face. “Your brother is much too responsible to make that kind of mistake. But you live for mistakes. You’re famous for them!”

“I’m not following you,” he said, and she noticed then that his voice had gone low and hot, and not with the kind of heat she’d heard before.

“It wouldn’t even take that much effort.” She was warming to the topic as her mind raced ahead, picturing it. “One paparazzi picture and the whole world would be happy to believe that history was indeed repeating itself, but with a far more likely candidate than your brother.”

Pato only looked at her for a long moment, and Adriana found herself remembering, suddenly, that he was second in line to the throne. One tragedy and he would be king. All of a sudden he looked as commanding, as regal, as a man in such a position should. Powerful beyond measure. Dangerous.

It was as if she hadn’t seen him before. As if he’d been hiding, right there in plain sight, beneath the dissipated exterior. But how was that possible?

“It wouldn’t be real, of course,” she said quickly, confusion making her feel edgy. Or maybe that was him. “All we’d need was a few pictures and some good PR spin.”

He laughed then, but it was a low, almost aggressive sound, and it made her whole body stiffen in reaction.

“You can’t possibly be suggesting that we pretend you’re sleeping with me to preserve my brother’s reputation,” he said softly, and Adriana didn’t miss the fact that the tone he used was deadly. It made her stomach twist. “You are not actually standing here in my bedroom, wearing almost nothing, and proposing such a thing.”

She searched his face, but he was a stranger, dark and hard.

“That’s exactly what I’m proposing.”

His jaw worked. His golden eyes flashed. “No.”

She scowled at him. “Why not?”

“Do you really require a reason?” he demanded, and then he got to his feet, making everything that much more tense. “You’d be much better served making certain we both forget this absurd conversation ever happened.”

That was when Adriana realized, in a kind of shock, that he was angry. Pato, who famously never got angry. Who was supposed to be carefree and easy in all things. Who had laughed off every sticky situation he’d ever been in.

But not this one. Not today. He was angry. And she had no idea why.

She watched him warily as he roamed around the foot of the bed, so close to naked, and now that temper she hadn’t known he had spilling out around him like a black cloud. But she couldn’t stop. Not when she’d figured out a way to fix things. And what did he care, anyway? It wasn’t as if his reputation was at stake.

“I don’t understand,” she said after a moment, trying to sound reasonable. Rational. “You’ve gone out of your way to link yourself to every woman with a bad reputation you’ve ever come across. Why not me? My bad reputation goes back centuries!”

“I actually did those things,” he replied, that dark temper rich in his voice, in the narrow gaze he aimed at her. “I didn’t pretend for the cameras. I don’t apologize for who I am, but I also don’t fake it.”

Adriana blinked. “So your issue isn’t the idea itself, then. It’s that you need your debaucheries to be honest and truthful. Real.”

The way he looked at her then made a low, dark pulse begin to drum in her, panic and heat and something else she’d never experienced before and couldn’t name. It took everything she had not to bolt for the door and forget she’d ever started this.

“My reputation is my life’s work,” Pato said, and there was a certain harshness in his voice then, dark and grim and tired, that made something clutch hard in Adriana’s chest. “It’s not a cross I’m forced to bear. It’s deliberate.”

“Fine,” she blurted out. She’d never felt so desperate. She only knew this had to happen, she had to have the opportunity to fix one thing her family name had ruined, just one thing—

“Fine?” he echoed, his golden eyes narrowing, focusing in on her in a way that should have made her fall over in a dead faint. Incinerate on the spot. Run.

Something.

But she met his gaze squarely instead.

“We don’t have to fake it,” Adriana said, very distinctly, so there could be no mistake. “I’ll sleep with you.”

All the air in the room evaporated into a shimmer of heat. Into the intensity of Pato’s gaze, the electricity that arced between them, the tension bright and taut and very nearly painful.

He laughed, low and dark and wicked, and Adriana felt it like a touch, as if his strong, elegant hands were directly on her skin. It made her feel weak. It made her want to drop the wrap and press herself against him, to see if that might ease the heavy ache inside her, the pulse of it, the need.

But who was she kidding? She knew it would. And so did he.

“You have no idea what you’re asking, Adriana,” he scoffed. His mouth curved mockingly, knowingly, and that ache in her only grew sharper, more insistent. She suddenly wasn’t at all sure what she was desperate for. But she couldn’t look away. “You wouldn’t know where to start.”

Adriana couldn’t stop the shivering, way down deep inside her.

Her bones felt like jelly and she didn’t know what scared her more—that she might really follow through and throw herself at him, and God only knew what would become of her then, or that the terrible ache inside her might take her to the ground on its own, and then he’d know exactly how much he tormented her.

Though she suspected he already did.

Pato was coming toward her, that sun-kissed skin on careless display, the faint brush of dark hair across his hard pectoral muscles seeming to emphasize his fascinating, unapologetic maleness. And he watched her so intently as he moved, his golden eyes gleaming as if all the wickedness in the world was in him, dark and rich and his to use against her if he chose. All his.

She shouldn’t find that at all intriguing. She shouldn’t wonder, now that she’d glimpsed a different side of this man, what else he hid behind his disreputable mask.

This is about Lenz, she reminded herself sharply. She refused to think about Pato’s claim that her beloved crown prince had wanted her as his mistress all those years she’d believed they’d been working together in harmony. She couldn’t let that matter. This was about saving the one thing she could save, the one thing her family name had blackened that she could actually wash clean.

She couldn’t save herself, perhaps. But she could save Lenz’s reputation.

“Your brother—” she began.

“Rule number five,” Pato said smoothly, but with that alarming kick of dark fire beneath. “When attempting to negotiate your way into my bed, don’t bring up my brother. Ever.”

Adriana felt her pulse beating too hard inside her neck, her wrists. And lower, where it mixed with that ache in her, gave it bite. She forced herself to stand still as Pato roamed toward her. Forced herself to act as if he didn’t, in fact, intimidate her—even when he stopped so close to her that she had to tilt her head back to look at him.

He crossed his arms over his chest, his eyes unreadable.

“Are we negotiating?” she asked, her voice so much smaller than it should have been. Telling him too much she shouldn’t let him know.

“I don’t take trembling virgins to my bed, Adriana,” Pato said, with all that gold in his gaze and that curve to his lips, but still, that new hardness beneath. It almost made her miss what he’d said. Then it penetrated, and her body seemed to detonate into a long, red flush of humiliation—but he wasn’t finished. “Particularly not trembling, terrified virgins who imagine themselves in love with my brother and view my bed as a sacrificial altar.”

“I—” She’d never stammered in her life. She had to order herself to snap her mouth closed, to calm herself. Or at least to breathe. “I’m not terrified.” His gaze never wavered, and yet she was sure it was consuming her where she stood. “And, of course, I’m certainly not a virgin.”

His dark brows rose. “Convince me.”

“How?” she demanded, bright red and humiliated. And trembling, just as he’d accused. He missed nothing. “Not that it would matter if I was or that it’s any of your business, let me point out.”

“But it is.” He was merciless, his hard gaze hot. “You want in my bed? Then I want to know every last detail of your vast sexual experience. Convince me, Adriana. Consider it a job interview—your résumé. After all, you’ve read all about me in the tabloids. You said so yourself.”

She told herself he couldn’t possibly be asking that. This couldn’t possibly be happening. But then, what part of this day so far was at all possible? She didn’t drink to excess and wake up in men’s beds. She didn’t have extended conversations with royal Kitzinian princes in her underwear. And had she really told this man she would sleep with him?

So she took a deep breath and she told him what she thought he wanted to hear.

“I couldn’t possibly count them all,” she said primly, lifting her chin. “I stopped keeping track when I passed into triple digits.”

He only shook his head at her.

“For all I know you and I have already slept together, in fact,” she continued wildly. “Didn’t you once tell an interviewer that you blacked out the better part of the last decade? Well, you’re not alone. Who knows where I’ve been? You were probably there, too, making a spectacle of yourself.”

“And somehow,” Pato said mildly, “I remain unconvinced.”

“Everybody knows I’m a whore,” Adriana forced herself to say, not wanting to admit how limited her sexual experience really was. She wasn’t a virgin, true—but that was more or less a technicality, and deeply embarrassing to boot. “They’ve been calling me that since I was a child, before I even knew what the word meant. Why shouldn’t I embrace it? You do.”

“That doesn’t answer the question, does it?” His gaze bored into her, not relenting at all. Not even the smallest bit. “You have not had sexual partners numbering in the triple digits, Adriana. I’d be very much surprised if you’ve had three in the whole of your life.”

And then he simply stood there, staring down at her, somehow knowing these things that he shouldn’t. It made her feel almost itchy, as if her skin had stopped fitting her properly. As if she was seconds away from exploding, humiliated and laid unacceptably bare.

“One.” She bit out the admission, hating him, hating herself. And yet still as determined to go through with this as she was filled with that terrible, gnawing ache that she worried might consume her alive. Do it for Lenz, she ordered herself. “There was only one and it—”

He waited, his eyes intent and demanding on hers, and she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t tell this sleek, sensual, unapologetically carnal creature about that fumble in the dark, the shock of searing pain and then the unpleasant fullness that followed. That vulnerable, exposed feeling. She’d been seventeen. It had taken all of three unremarkable minutes in a bedroom at a party she shouldn’t have gone to in the first place, and then he’d bragged to the whole school that the Righetti girl was as much of a whore as suspected.

“And?” Pato prompted her.

“It was mercifully brief.”

“I feel seduced already,” he said drily. “What a tempting picture you paint. How can I possibly resist the sacrificial near-virgin who wishes to prostrate herself in my bed for my brother’s benefit? I’ve never been so aroused.”

Each dry, sardonic word, delivered in that deliberately stinging way of his, made Adriana’s fists tighten where she held the wrap around her. She felt that flush of heat that told her she was getting redder, broadcasting the fact he was getting to her. She felt that twist in her gut and still, that ache below. This was a disaster.

But you have to do it. You’ll never be able to live with yourself if you don’t. This might be the only opportunity you ever have to do something good with all this notoriety...

“Then teach me,” she exclaimed, cutting him off before he could continue ripping her to shreds one sardonic word at a time.

For a moment, Pato only looked at her.

And then he closed the distance between them, reaching out to spear his hands into the wild tangle of her hair, making her go up slightly on her toes and brace her hands against the hot, hard planes of his chest or fall completely against him. Her wrap floated to the floor between them, and she forgot it as he held her face still, keeping her captive, a mere breath away from his beautiful mouth.

She heard a sharp, high sound, some kind of gasp, and realized only belatedly that she’d made it. The echo of it made her tremble, or perhaps that was the wildfire in his eyes.

“Teach me everything,” she whispered, spurred on by some dark thing inside her she hardly recognized. But she saw the way his eyes flared, and the ache inside her bloomed in immediate response.

His mouth was so close to hers, his face dark and dangerous, that lethal fire in his gaze. And yet he only held her there, taut and breathless, while sensation after sensation shook through her. Towering flames in her throat, her breasts, her belly. That shocking brightness between her legs.

Her lips parted slightly, and she recognized it as the invitation it was. His gaze dropped to her mouth, hungry and hard, and she felt her nipples pull tight. Nothing existed but that pulse of heat that drummed in her, louder and wilder—

And then he dragged his gaze back to hers and let her go.

She caught herself before she staggered backward, but she was shaky, unbalanced, and for some reason felt as if she might burst into tears. She couldn’t seem to form the words she needed, and his eyes darkened because, of course, he knew that, too. He’d done this to her deliberately.

“You can’t handle me, Adriana,” Pato growled. “Look at you. I’ve barely touched you and you’re coming apart.”

That dark thing inside of her roared through her, making her bold. Making her stark, raving mad. But she couldn’t hold it in check. She couldn’t stop.

She didn’t want to stop, and she didn’t want to think about why.

“It looks like you’re the one who’s coming apart, Your Royal Highness,” she hissed. Taunting him. Poking at him, and she knew it. She wanted it—she wanted him—and the obvious truth of that was like another explosion, bathing her in a white-hot heat. Adriana had no choice then but to keep talking despite the way he looked at her. “Maybe your reputation is all lies and misdirection. Maybe the truth is you can’t handle me.”

When he laughed then, it was darker than what was inside her, darker and far wilder, and it connected to that ache in her, hard. So hard she stopped breathing.

And then he moved.

His arms came around her and his hands slid over her bottom with an easy command, as if he’d touched her a thousand times before and just as carnally, slipping directly into her panties and pausing to test her curves, her flesh, against the heat of his palms. She made a wild sort of sound, but as she did he hauled her to him and lifted her against him, pulling her legs around his waist even as her back hit the wall behind her.

The room seemed to spin around, but that was only Pato, pressing her to the wall of his chest and the wall at her back, molding his hips to hers, the hardest part of him flush against her. Skin. Heat. Fires within fires, and she was afraid she was already burned to a crisp. Everything hurt—but was eased by the heat of him, only to hurt again. And again.

She expected an explosion. A detonation. Something to match that searing blaze in his gaze, the drum of anticipation beneath her skin, that hunger between her legs that he was only making worse. Her eyes were glazed and wide, and she could feel him everywhere. That perfect, lean body pressed against her, into her, so powerful and male, holding her steady so far from the ground.

His hands moved over her skin, leaving trails of fire in his wake. He traced the curve of her breasts, teased the hard tips with his thumbs until she moaned. He moved his hips, rocking against her, making her breath come in desperate pants even as her core ignited into a glorious, molten ache that she never wanted to end, that she wasn’t sure she’d survive.

Adriana couldn’t think. She could only hold on to his broad, hard shoulders and surrender to the dark exultation that roared in her, that made her try to get closer to him, that made her think she might die if she couldn’t taste him. That made her want things she’d only read about before. That made her want everything.

He leaned in close, so close that when his wicked mouth curved again, she felt it against her own lips, and it made her shake against him, the small moan escaping her before she could stop it.

“Let me see if I can handle this,” he mocked her.

“I don’t think you can,” she heard herself say. “Or you already would have.”

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.