One Night With The Prince: A Royal Without Rules

But Pato was still looking at her. There was no escape.

“Of course it wasn’t my first,” she managed to say, but she couldn’t look at him while she said it. She couldn’t believe she was answering such a personal question—but then, he’d had his mouth between her legs. What was the point of pretending she had any boundaries? Any shame? “I might not have cut a swathe across the planet like some, but I didn’t take a vow of celibacy.”

“With a man,” he clarified, and there was the slightest hint of amusement in his eyes then, the faintest spark. “A private grope beneath the covers, just you and your hand in the dark, isn’t the same thing at all. Is it?”

Adriana didn’t understand how she could have forgotten how much she hated him. She remembered now. It roared through her, battling the treacherous, traitorous embers of that fire he’d licked into a consuming blaze, filling her with the force of it, the cleansing power—

But it burned itself out just as quickly, leaving behind the emptiness. That great abyss she’d been skirting her whole life, and there was nothing holding her back from it anymore, was there? She had spent three years with Lenz, thinking her dedication proved she wasn’t what her surname said she was. And hardly more than a month with Pato, demonstrating exactly why Righetti women were notorious.

She had betrayed herself and her family in every possible way.

And he was still simply looking at her, still sitting there before her as if sprawling on the floor made him less threatening, less diabolical. Less him.

Worse, as if he expected an answer.

“Adriana,” he began evenly, almost kindly, and she couldn’t take it.

She was horrified when tears filled her eyes, that hopelessness washing over her and leaving her cruelly exposed. She shook her head, lifting her hands and then dropping them back into her lap.

He had destroyed her. He’d taken her apart and she’d let him, and she didn’t have any idea how she would survive this. She didn’t know what to do. If she wasn’t who she’d always thought she was, if she was instead who she’d always feared she might become, then she had nothing.

Nothing to hold on to anymore. Nothing to fight for. Nothing at all.

“What do you want from me?” she asked him, and she didn’t sound like herself, so broken and small. She felt the tears spill over, the heat of them on her cheeks, and she was too far gone to care. Though her eyes blurred, she focused on him, dark and male and still. “Is this it—to make me become everything I hate? Everything I spent my whole life fighting against? Are you happy now?”

He didn’t answer, and she couldn’t see him any longer, anyway, so she stopped pretending and covered her face with her hands, letting the tears flow unchecked into her palms, her humiliation complete.

She didn’t hear him move. But she felt his hands on her, lifting her into the air and then bringing her down on his lap. Holding her, she realized when it finally penetrated. Prince Pato was holding her. She tried to push away, but he only pulled her closer, sliding her across his legs so that her face was nestled into the crook of his neck. There was the lightest of touches, as if he’d pressed a kiss to her hair.

He was warm and strong and deliciously solid, and it was so tempting to pretend that they were different people. That this meant something. That he cared.

That she was the kind of woman someone might care for in the first place.

It was shocking how easy it was to tell herself lies, she thought then, despairing of herself—and so very, very sad about how eager she was to believe them. Even now, when she knew better.

“We don’t always get to play the versions of ourselves we prefer,” Pato said after a long while, when Adriana’s tears had faded away, and yet he still held her.

He smoothed a gentle hand over her hair as he spoke, and Adriana found that she didn’t have the strength to fight it off the way she should. She couldn’t seem to protect herself any longer. Not from him. Not from any of this. She could feel the rumble of his voice in his chest, and had to shut her eyes against the odd flood of emotion that rocked through her.

Too much sensation. Too many wild emotions, too huge and too dangerous. Too much.

“I don’t think you understand,” she whispered.

“The army was the only place I ever felt like a normal person,” he replied. Did she imagine that his arms held her closer, more carefully, as if she really was something precious to him? And when had she started wanting him to think so? “None of the men in my unit cared that I was a prince. They cared if I did my job. They treated me the same way they treated each other. It was a revelation.” He traced the same path over her hair, making her shiver again. “And if I like Pato the Playboy Prince less than I liked Pato the Soldier, well. One doesn’t cancel out the other. They’re both me.”

There was nothing but his arms around her and the solid heat of him warming her from the inside out. Making her feel as if everything was somehow new. Maybe because he was holding her this way, maybe because he’d told her something about him she hadn’t already read in a tabloid. Maybe because she didn’t have the slightest idea what to do with his gentleness. Adriana felt hushed, out of time. As if nothing that happened here could hurt her.

It wasn’t true, she knew. It never was. But she couldn’t seem to keep herself from wanting, much too badly, to believe that just this once, it could be.

“Yes,” she said, finding it easier to talk to that strong neck of his, much easier when she couldn’t see that challenging golden gaze. She could fool herself into believing she was safe. And that he was. “But none of the versions of you—even the most scandalous and attention-seeking—are called a whore with quite the same amount of venom they use when it’s me.” He sighed, and she closed her eyes against the smooth, hot skin of his throat. “You know it’s true.”

She felt him swallow. “What they call you reflects far more on them than on you,” he said gruffly.

“Perhaps it did when I wasn’t exactly what they called me. But I can’t cling to that anymore, can I?”

She pushed herself away from him then, sitting up with her arms braced against his chest so she could search his face, and the way he frowned at her, as if he was truly concerned, made her foolish heart swell.

“You said it yourself,” she continued. “Kitzinian princes and Righetti women. History repeating itself, right here on this plane.” His frown deepened and she felt his body tighten beneath her, but she kept going. “I held my head up no matter what they said because I knew they were wrong. But now...” She shrugged, that emptiness yawning inside her again, black and deep. “Blood will tell, you said, and you were right.”

Pato’s gaze was so intense, meeting hers, that it very nearly hurt.

“What happened between us does not make you a whore.”

“I think you’ll find that it does. By definition.”

His eyes moved over her face, dark and brooding, almost as if she’d insulted him with that simple truth.

“But,” he said, his tone almost careful, “you were happy enough to risk that definition when it was your suggestion, and when you thought it would benefit Lenz.”

There was no reason that should hurt her. She didn’t know why it did. I don’t think you love him, he’d told her in that low, sure voice.

“That was different,” she whispered, shaken. “That was a plan hatched in desperation. This was...”

She couldn’t finish. Pato looked at her for a long moment, and then his eyes warmed again to the gold she knew, his mouth hinted at that wicked curve she’d tasted and felt pressed against her very core, and she didn’t know if it was joy or fear that twisted inside her, coiling tight and making it difficult to breathe.

“Passion, Adriana,” he said with soft intent. “This was passion.”

She told herself she didn’t feel that ring inside her like a bell. That there was no click of recognition, no sudden swell of understanding. She didn’t know what he was talking about, she told herself desperately, but she was quite certain she shouldn’t have anything to do with either passion or princes. There was only one place that would lead her, and on this end of history she very much doubted she’d end up with her portrait in the Royal Gallery. Like her great-aunt Sandrine, she’d be no more than a footnote in a history book, quietly despised.

“Passion is nothing but an excuse weak people use to justify their terrible behavior,” she told him, frowning.

“You sound like a very grim and humorless cleric,” Pato said mildly, his palms smoothing down her back to land at her hips. “Did my mouth feel like a justification to you? Did the way you came apart in my hands feel like an excuse? Or were you more alive in those moments than ever before?”

Adriana pushed at his chest then, desperate to get away from him, and she was all too aware that she was able to climb out of his lap and scramble to her feet at last only because he chose to let her go.

“It doesn’t matter what it felt like.” She wished her voice didn’t still have that telltale rasp. She wished Pato hadn’t made it sound as if this was something more than the usual games he played with every female who crossed his path. More than that, she wished there wasn’t that part of her that wanted so badly to believe him. “I know what it makes me.”

Pato shoved his hair back from his face with one hand and muttered something she was happy she didn’t catch. She wanted to make a break for the bathroom and bar herself inside, but her legs were too shaky beneath her, and she sat down on the chair instead, as far away from him as she could get. Which wasn’t far at all. Not nearly far enough to recover.

“My mother was a very fragile woman,” he said after a long moment, surprising Adriana.

She blinked, not following him. “Your mother?”

Queen Matilda had been an icon before her death from cancer some fifteen years ago. She was still an icon all these years later, beloved the world over. Her grave was still piled high with flowers and trinkets, as mourners continued to make pilgrimages to pay their respects. She had been graceful, regal, feminine and lovely. Her smile had once been called “Kitzinian sunshine” by the rhapsodic British press, while at home she’d been known as the kingdom’s greatest weapon.

She had been anything but fragile.

“She was so beautiful,” Pato said, his voice dark, skating over Adriana’s skin and making her wrap her arms around herself. “From the time she was a girl, that was the only thing she knew. How beautiful she was and what that would get her. A king, a throne, adoring subjects. But my father married a pretty face he could add to his collection of lovely things and then ignore, and my mother didn’t know what to do when the constant attention she lived for was taken away from her.”

Pato’s eyes were troubled when they met hers, and Adriana caught her breath. That same celebrated beauty his mother had been so famous for was stamped all over him, though somehow, he made it deeply masculine. He was gilded and perfect, just as she had been before him, and Adriana would never have called him the least bit fragile, either. Until this moment, when he almost looked...

But she couldn’t let herself think it. There was too much at stake and she couldn’t trust herself. She didn’t dare. What he felt wasn’t her concern. It couldn’t be.

He smiled then, but it wasn’t his usual smile. This one felt like nails digging into her, sharp and deep, and she wanted to hold him the way he’d held her, as if she could make him feel safe for a moment, however fleeting.

You’re such a fool.

“You don’t have to tell me this,” she said hurriedly, suddenly afraid of where this was going. What it would do to her if he showed her things she knew he shouldn’t. “It’s your family’s private, personal business.”

She wanted him too much. She’d proved it in unmistakable terms, with her legs flung over his shoulders and her body laid open for his touch. Somewhere inside of her, where she was afraid to look because she didn’t want to admit it, Adriana knew what that meant. She knew.

He gave half the world his body. She would survive that; his women always did. But if he gave her his secrets, she would never recover.

“So she did the only thing she knew how to do,” Pato said, his gaze never leaving Adriana’s, once again that different, harder version of himself, every inch of him powerful. Determined. Bleak, Adriana thought, and ached for him. “She found the attention she needed.”

Adriana stared at him, not wanting to understand what he was saying. Not wanting to make the connection. He nodded, as if he could see the question she didn’t want to ask right there on her face.

“There were always men,” he said, confirming it, and Adriana hugged herself that much tighter. “They kept her happy. They made her smile, laugh, dance in the palace corridors and pick flowers in the gardens. They made her herself. And my father didn’t care how many lovers she took as long as she was discreet. He might not have wanted her the way she thought he should, the way she needed to be wanted, but he wanted her happy.”

Adriana found it hard to swallow. She could only stare at Pato in shock. And hurt for him in ways she didn’t understand. He leaned forward then, keeping his eyes on hers, hard and demanding. She felt that power of his fill the space between them, pressing at her like a command.

“Was my mother a whore, Adriana?” he asked, his voice a quiet lash. “Is that the word you’d use to describe her?”

She felt too hot, then too cold. Paralyzed.

“I can’t— You shouldn’t—”

Pato only watched her, his mouth in that serious line, and she felt the ruthlessness he hid behind his easy smiles and his laughter pressing into her from all sides and sinking deep into her belly. How had she ever imagined this man was careless?

“Of course not,” she said at last, feeling outside herself. Desperate. As if what she said would keep her from shaking apart from the inside out. “She was the queen. But that doesn’t mean—”

“It’s a word people use when they need a weapon,” he said, very distinctly, and that look in his eyes made Adriana feel naked. Intensely vulnerable. As if he could see all the ugliness she hid there, the encroaching darkness. “It’s a means of control. It’s a prison they herd you into because they think you need to be contained.”

She shook her head, unable to speak, unable to handle what was happening inside her. Some kind of earthquake, rolling long and hard and destroying foundations she hadn’t known she’d built in the first place.

“That’s all well and good,” she whispered, hardly aware of what she was saying, seeing only Pato and that look on his face, “but there’s no one here but you and me and what happened between us, the way I just—”

“Don’t do it,” he warned her, cutting her off, his eyes flashing. “Don’t make it ugly simply because it was intense. There was nothing ugly about it. You taste like a dream and your responsiveness is a gift, not a curse.”

What moved in her then was so overwhelming she thought for a long, panicked moment that she might actually be sick, right there on the floor. She was too hot again, then freezing cold, and she might have thought she’d come down with a fever if she hadn’t seen the way he looked at her. If she hadn’t felt it deep inside her, making so many things she’d taken for granted crumble into dust.

But she couldn’t bring herself to look away. She was falling apart—he was making sure she did—and she didn’t want to look away.

“Don’t use their weapons on yourself,” he told her then, very distinctly, the royal command and that brooding darkness making her shiver as his gaze devoured her, changed her, demanded she listen to him. “Don’t lock yourself in their prison. And don’t let me hear you use that word to describe yourself again, Adriana. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a declaration of war.”

But Adriana knew that the war had started the moment she’d been sent to work with this man, and despite what she’d told herself all these weeks, despite what she’d so desperately wanted to believe, she’d already lost.

* * *

Pato couldn’t sleep, and he could always sleep.

This was one more thing that had never happened to him before Adriana had walked into his life and turned it inside out. He’d entertained a number of very detailed ideas about how he’d enjoy making her pay for that as he sprawled there in his decidedly empty bed—none of them particularly conducive to rest.

Damn her.

It was her insistence that she was, in fact, all the things the jackals called her that had him acting so outside his own parameters, he knew. It was maddening. Pato had handled any number of women over the years who had used their supposed fragility as a tool to try to manipulate him. He could have piloted a yacht across the sea of tears that had been cried on or near him, all by women angling for his affection, his protection, his money or his name—whatever they thought they could get.

He’d never been the slightest bit moved.

Adriana, by contrast, wanted nothing from him save his good behavior. She was appalled that he’d touched her, kissed her, made her forget herself. She’d now offered herself to him twice while making it perfectly clear that doing so was an act of great sacrifice on her part. A terrible sacrifice she would lower herself to suffer through, even after he’d brought her to a screaming, sobbing climax more than once.

She was killing him.

No wonder he was wide-awake in the middle of the night and storming through his rooms in a fury. If he’d been possessed of the ego of a lesser man, she might very well have deflated it by now. He’d even altered his behavior to please her. He, Pato, Playboy Prince, tabloid sensation and scandal magnet, hadn’t even glanced at another woman unless it was specifically to annoy Adriana, since he didn’t seem to be able to do without the way she took him to task.

He was like a lovesick puppy. He was disgusted with himself.

And he would never be able to fly on that plane again without being haunted by her. Her taste, her silken legs draped over his back, her gorgeous cries. He cursed into the dark room, but it didn’t help.

The list of things he shouldn’t have done grew longer every day, but tasting the heat of her, making her shatter around him, twice, was at the very top. It wasn’t only that he’d tasted her at last and it had knocked him sideways, or that it had taken every shred of willpower he possessed to keep himself from driving into her and making her his in every possible way right there and then, again and again until they both collapsed. It wasn’t only that he’d been unable to stop thinking about the fact that he was more than likely the first man to pleasure her, which made a wholly uncharacteristic barbarian stir to life inside him and beat at his chest in primitive masculine triumph. That was all bad enough.

But it went much deeper than that, and Pato knew it.

He’d known it while they were still in the air. He’d known it when he’d started telling her things he never spoke about, ever. He’d known it when the plane had finally landed and he’d sent her off in a separate car and had found himself standing on the tarmac, staring at her disappearing taillights and wanting things he couldn’t have.

He’d known for some time, if he was honest, but tonight it had all come into sharp and unmistakable focus.

Pato didn’t simply want her in his bed.

He liked her. She made him laugh, she challenged him and she wasn’t the least bit in awe of him. From the very start, she’d treated him as if she expected him to be the educated, intelligent, capable man he was supposed to be rather than the airy dilettante he played so well. He wanted to teach her every last sensual trick he’d ever learned, and bathe them both in that scalding heat of hers. He wanted to prove to her that the passion that flared between them was rare and good. He wanted to take away the pressure of all that family history she wore about her neck like an albatross.

Worst of all, most damning and most dangerous, he wanted to be that better man she deserved.

“It isn’t even my dirt, but I’m covered in it,” she’d said tonight, breaking the heart he didn’t have all over again, and he’d wanted nothing more than to be the one who showed her that she had never been anything but beautiful and clean, all the way through. Pato never should have let himself get lost in the fantasy that he might be that man. He wasn’t. There was no possibility that he could be anything to her, and couldn’t allow himself to forget that again.

Not until the game he and Lenz had played for all these years reached its conclusion. He couldn’t break the faith his brother had placed in him all those years ago. He couldn’t break the vow he’d made. He wouldn’t.

And he’d never been even remotely tempted to do so before.

Pato found himself on one of his balconies that looked out over the water to the mainland beyond and the city nestled there on the lakeshore. His eyes drifted toward the sparkling lights of the old city, the ancient quarter that had sprawled over the highest hill since the first thatched cottages were built there in medieval times. It was filled with museums and grand old houses, narrow little lanes dating back centuries and so many of Kitzinia’s blue-blooded nobles in their luxurious, historic villas. And he knew precisely where the Righetti villa stood on the finest street in the quarter, one of the kingdom’s most famous and most visited landmarks.

But tonight he didn’t think about his murdered ancestor or Almado Righetti’s plot to turn the kingdom over to foreign enemies, all in service to long-ago wars. It was only the house where she lived, where he imagined her as wide-awake as he was, as haunted by him as he was by her. He didn’t care what her surname was. He didn’t care if this was history repeating itself. He certainly didn’t care about the malicious gossip of others.

The ways he wanted her almost scared him. Almost.

And of all the things he couldn’t have while this game played on, he understood that she was going to hurt the worst. She already did.

Pato slammed his fist against the thick stone balustrade. Hard. As if that might wake him up, restore him to himself. It did nothing but make his knuckles ache, and it didn’t make him any less alone.

He hated this game, but he couldn’t lose his focus. There was one week left until the wedding, and she’d served her purpose. He had to let her go.

CHAPTER SEVEN

ADRIANA WALKED INTO the palace the following morning on shaky legs, trying with all her might to feel completely unaffected by what had happened the night before. And if she couldn’t quite feel it, to appear as if she did. Cool. Calm. Professional. Not riddled with anxiety, her body still humming with leftover desire.

“I wanted to know how you tasted,” she could hear him say, as if he whispered it into her ear. Her skin prickled at the memory.

Nothing had changed, she assured herself, save her understanding of her own weakness and her ability to tell herself lies. And nothing would change, because this was Pato. Careless, promiscuous, thoughtless, undependable for the whole of his adult life, and proud of it besides. No depth, she reminded herself. No conscience and no shame. Those hints she’d seen of another man—that ruthless power, that dark focus, that devastating gentleness—weren’t him.

They couldn’t be him.

And the things he’d said, which she could still feel running through her like something electric...well. She’d lost herself in a sensual storm. She’d never experienced anything like it before and she’d decided it was entirely possible she’d made it all seem much more intense than it had been. Pato had made her sob and writhe and fall to pieces. He’d made her body sing for him as if she were no more than an instrument—and well he should. Passion, he’d called it, and he would know. Sex was his occupation, his art. He was a master.