Deceiving Her Prince

“Yet here I am,” he pointed out, slanting a look down at her, amused despite himself. “At your side. Exuding fidelity.”

“That is not precisely what you exude,” she said under her breath, because naturally she couldn’t let any opportunity pass to dig at him, and then they were swept into the receiving line.

It felt like a great many hours later when they finally made it into the actual gala itself. A band played on a raised dais while glittering people outshone the blazing chandeliers above them. Europe’s finest and fanciest stood in these rooms, and he’d estimate that almost all of them had their eyes fixed on the spectacle of Prince Rodolfo and Princess Valentina actually out and about together for once—without a single one of their royal relatives in sight as the obvious puppeteers of what had been hailed everywhere as an entirely cold-blooded marriage of royal convenience.

But their presence here had already done exactly what Rodolfo had hoped it would. He could see it in the faces of the people around them. He’d felt it on the red carpet outside, surrounded by paparazzi nearly incandescent with joy over the pictures they’d be able to sell of the two of them. He could already read the accompanying headlines.

Do the Daredevil Prince and the Dutiful Princess Actually Like Each Other After All?

He could feel the entire grand ballroom of the villa seem to swell with the force of all that speculation and avid interest.

And Rodolfo made a command decision. They could do another round of the social niceties that would cement the story he wanted to sell even further, assuming he wasn’t deluged by more of the sort of women who were happy to ignore his fiancée as she stood beside him. Or he could do what he really wanted to do, which was get his hands on Valentina right here in public, where she would have no choice but to allow it.

This was what he was reduced to. On some level, he felt the requisite shame. Or some small shadow of it, if he was honest.

Because it still wasn’t much of a contest.

“Let’s dance, shall we?” he asked, but he was already moving toward the dance floor in the vast, sparkling ballroom that seemed to swirl around him as he spoke. His proper, perfect princess would have to yank her arm out of his grip with some force, creating a scene, if she wanted to stop him.

He was sure he could see steam come off her as she realized that for herself, then didn’t do it. Mutinously, if that defiant angle of her pointed chin was any clue.

“I don’t dance,” she informed him coolly as he stopped and turned to face her. He dropped her arm but stood a little too close to her, so the swishing skirt of her long dress brushed against his legs. It made her have to tip her head back to meet his gaze. And he was well aware it created the look of an intimacy between them. It suggested all kinds of closeness, just as he wanted it to do.

As much to tantalize the crowd as to tempt her.

“Are you certain?” he asked idly.

“Of course I’m certain.”

Other guests waltzed around them, pretending not to stare as they stood still in the center of the dance floor as if they were having an intense discussion. Possibly an argument. Inviting gossip and rumor with every moment they failed to move. But Rodolfo forgot about all the eyes trained on them in the next breath. He gazed down at his princess, watching as the strangest expression moved over her face. Had she been anyone else, he would have called it panic.

“Then I fear I must remind you that you have been dancing since almost before you could walk,” he replied, trying to keep his voice mild and a little bit lazy, as if that could hide the intensity of his need to touch her. As if every moment he did not was killing him. He felt as if it was.

He reached over and took her hands in his, almost losing his cool when he felt that simple touch everywhere—from his fingers to his feet and deep in his aching sex—far more potent than whole weekends he could hardly recall with women he wouldn’t remember if they walked up and introduced themselves right now. What the hell was she doing to him? But he ordered himself to pull it together.

“There is that iconic portrait of you dancing with your father at some or other royal affair. It was the darling of the fawning press for years. You are standing on his shoes while the King of Murin dances for the both of you.” Rodolfo made himself smile, as if the odd intensity that gripped him was nothing but a passing thing. The work of a moment, here and then gone in the swirl of the stately dance all around them. “I believe you were six.”

“Six,” she repeated. He thought she said it oddly, but then she seemed to recollect herself. He saw her blink, then focus on him again. “You misunderstand me. I meant that I don’t dance with you. By which I mean, I won’t.”

“It pains me to tell you that, sadly, you are wrong yet again.” He smiled at her, then indulged himself—and infuriated her—by reaching out to tug on one of the artful pieces of hair that had been left free of the complicated chignon she wore tonight. He tucked it behind her ear, marveling that so small a touch should echo inside of him the way it did then, sensation chasing sensation, as if all these months of not quite seeing her in front of him had been an exercise in restraint instead of an oddity he couldn’t explain to his satisfaction. And this was his reward. “You will dance with me at our wedding, in front of the entire world. And no doubt at a great many affairs of state thereafter. It is unavoidable, I am afraid.”

She started to frown, then caught herself. He saw the way she fought it back, and he still couldn’t understand why it delighted him on a deep, visceral level. His glass princess, turned flesh and blood and brought to life right there before him. He could see the way her lips trembled, very slightly, and he knew somehow that it was the same mad fire that blazed in him, brighter by the moment.

It made him want nothing more than to taste her here and now, the crowd and royal protocol be damned.

“You should know that I make it a policy to step on the feet of all the men I dance with, as homage to that iconic photograph.” Her smile was razor sharp and her eyes had gone cool again, but he could still see that soft little tremor that made her mouth too soft. Too vulnerable. He could still see the truth she clearly wanted to hide, and no matter that he couldn’t name it. “Prepare yourself.”

“All you need to do is follow my lead, princess,” Rodolfo said then, low and perhaps a bit too dark, and he didn’t entirely mean the words to take on an added resonance as he said them. But he smiled when she pulled in a sharp little breath, as if she was imagining all the places he could lead her, just as he was. In vivid detail. “It will be easy and natural. There will be no trodding upon feet. Simply surrender—” and his voice dipped a bit at that, getting rough in direct correlation to that dark, needy thing in her gaze “—and I will take care of you. I promise.”

Rodolfo wasn’t talking about dancing—or he wasn’t only talking about a very public waltz—but that would do. He studied Princess Valentina as she stood there before him, taut and very nearly quivering with the same dark need that made him want to behave like a caveman instead of a prince. He wanted to throw her over his shoulder and carry her off into the night. He wanted to throw her down on the floor where they stood and get his mouth on every part of her, as if he could taste what it was that had changed in her, cracking her open to let the fascinating creature inside come out and making her irresistible seemingly overnight.

He settled for extending his hand, very formally and in full view of half of Europe, even throwing in a polite bow that, as someone more or less equal in rank to her, could only be construed as a magnanimous, even romantic gesture. Then he stood still in the center of the dance floor and waited for her to take it.

Her green eyes looked a little bit too wide and still far too dark with all the same simmering need and deep hunger he knew burned bright in him. She looked more beautiful than he’d ever seen her before, but then, he was closer than he’d ever been. He couldn’t count those hot, desperate moments in the palace reception room where he’d tasted her with all the finesse of an untried adolescent, because he’d been too out of control—and out of his mind—to enjoy it.

This was different. This—tonight—he had every intention of savoring.

But he wasn’t sure he would ever savor anything more than when she lifted that chin of hers, faintly pointed and filled with a defiance her vulnerable mouth contradicted, and placed her hand in his.

Rodolfo felt that everywhere, as potent as if she’d knelt down before him and declared him victor of this dark and delicious little war of theirs.

He pulled her a step closer with his right hand, then slid his left around to firmly clasp the back she’d left bared in the lovely dress she wore that poured over her slender figure like rain, and he heard her hiss in a breath. He could feel the heat of her like a furnace beneath his palm. He wanted to bend close and get his mouth on her more than he could remember wanting anything.

But he refrained. Somehow, he held himself in check, when he was a man who usually did the exact opposite. For fun.

“Put your hand on my shoulder,” he told her, and he didn’t sound urbane or witty or anything like lazy. Not anymore. “Have you truly forgotten how to perform a simple waltz, princess? I am delighted to discover how deeply I affect you.”

He felt the hard breath she took, as if she was bracing herself. And he realized with a little shock that he had no idea what she would do. It was as likely that she’d yank herself out of his arms and storm away as it was that she’d melt into him. He had no idea—and he couldn’t deny he felt that like a long, slow lick against the hardest part of him.

She was as unpredictable as one of his many adventures. He had the odd thought that he could spend a lifetime trying to unravel her mysteries, one after the next, and who knew if he’d ever manage it? It astonished him that he wanted to try. That for the first time since their engagement last fall, he wanted their wedding day to hurry up and arrive. And better than that, their wedding night. And all the nights thereafter, all those adventures lined up and waiting for him, packed into her lush form and those fathomless green eyes.

He could hardly wait.

And it felt as if ten years had passed when, with her wary gaze trained on him as if he couldn’t be trusted not to harm her somehow, Valentina put her hand where it belonged.

“Thank you, princess.” He curled his fingers around hers a little tighter than necessary for the sheer pleasure of it and smiled when the hand she’d finally placed on his shoulder dug into him, as if in reaction. “You made that into quite a little bit of theater. When stories emerge tomorrow about the great row we had in the middle of a dance floor, you will have no one to blame but yourself.”

“I never do,” she replied coolly, but that wariness receded from her green gaze. Her chin tipped up higher and Rodolfo counted it as a win. “It’s called taking responsibility for myself, which is another way of acknowledging that I’m an adult. You should try it sometime.”

“Impossible,” he said, gripping her hand tighter in his and smiling for all those watching eyes. And because her defiance made him want to smile, which was far more dangerous. And exciting. “I am far too busy leaping out of planes in a vain attempt to cheat death. Or court death. Which is it again? I can’t recall which accusation you leveled at me, much less when.”

And before she could enlighten him, he started to move.

She was stiff in his arms, which he assumed was another form of protest. Rodolfo ignored it, sweeping her around the room and leading her through the steps she appeared to be pretending not to know, just as he’d promised he would.

“You cannot trip me up, princess,” he told her when she relaxed just slightly in his hold and gave herself over to his lead. “I was raised to believe a man can only call himself a man when he knows how to dance well, shoot with unerring accuracy and argue his position without either raising his voice or reducing himself to wild, unjustified attacks on his opponent.”

“Well,” she said, and she sounded breathless, which he felt in every part of his body like an ache, “you obviously took that last part to heart.”

“I am also an excellent shot, thank you for asking.”

“Funny, the tabloids failed to report that. Unless you’re speaking in innuendo? In which case, I must apologize, but I don’t speak twelve-year-old boy.”

He let out a laugh that had the heads nearest them turning, because no one was ever so giddy when on display like this, especially not him. Rodolfo was infamous because he called attention to himself in other ways, but never like this. Never in situations like these, all stuffy protocol and too many spectators. Never with anything that might be confused for joy.

“You must be feeling better if you’re this snappish, princess.”

“I wasn’t feeling bad. Unless you count the usual dismay anyone might feel at being bullied onto a dance floor in the company of a rather alarming man who dances very much like he flings himself off the sides of mountains.”

“With a fierce and provocative elegance? The envy of all who witness it?”

“With astonishing recklessness and a total lack of regard for anyone around you. Much in the same vein as your entire life, Your Highness, if the reports are true.” She lifted one shoulder, then let it drop in as sophisticated and dismissive a shrug as he’d ever seen. “Or even just a little bit true, for that matter.”

“And if you imagine that was bullying, princess, you have led a very charmed life, indeed. Even for a member of a royal house dating back to, oh, the start of recorded history or thereabouts, surrounded by wealth and ease at every turn.”

“What do you want, Rodolfo?” she asked then, and that near-playful note he was sure he’d heard in her voice was gone. Her expression was grave. As if she was yet another stranger, this one different than before. “I don’t believe that this marriage is anything you would have chosen, if given the opportunity. I can’t imagine why you’re suddenly pretending otherwise and proclaiming your commitment to fidelity in random hotel suites. What I do understand is that we’re both prepared to do our duty and have been from the start. And I support that, but there’s nothing wrong with maintaining a civil, respectful distance while we go about it.”

“I would have agreed with you in every respect,” he said, and he should have been worried about that fervent intensity in his tone. He could feel the flames of it licking through him, changing him, making him something other than the man he’d thought he was all this time. Something that should have set off alarms in every part of him, yet didn’t. “But that was before you walked into your father’s reception rooms and rather than blending into the furniture the way you usually did, opted to attack me instead.”

“Of course.” And Rodolfo had the strangest sensation that she was studying him as if he was a museum exhibit, not her fiancé. Hardly even a man—which should have chastened him. Instead, it made him harder. “I should have realized that to a man like you, with an outsize ego far more vast and unconquerable than any of the mountain peaks you’ve summited in your desperate quest for meaning, any questioning of any kind is perceived as an attack.”

“You are missing the point, I think,” Rodolfo said, making no attempt to hide either the laughter in his voice or the hunger in his gaze, not put off by her character assassinations at all. Quite the opposite. “Attack me all you like. It doesn’t shame me in the least. Surely you must be aware that shame is not the primary response I have to you, princess. It is not even close.”

She didn’t ask him what he felt instead, but he saw a betraying, bright flush move over her face. And he knew she was perfectly aware of the things that moved in him, sensation and need, hunger and that edgy passion—and more, that she felt it, too.

Perhaps that was why, when they danced past a set of huge, floor-to-ceiling glass doors that led out to a wide terrace for the third time, he led her out into the night instead of deeper into the ballroom.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

Rodolfo thought it was meant to be a demand—a rebuke, even—but her cheeks were too red. Her eyes were too bright. And most telling, she made no attempt to tug her hand from his, much less lecture him any further about chaos and order and who was on which side of that divide.

“Nothing could be less chaotic than a walk on a terrace in full view of so many people,” he pointed out, not bothering to look behind him at the party they’d left in full swing. He had no doubt they were all staring after him, the way they always did, and with more intensity than ever because he was with Valentina. “Unless you’d like it to be?”

“Certainly not. Some people admire the mountain from afar, Your Highness. They are perfectly happy doing so, and feel no need whatsoever to throw themselves off it or climb up it or attempt to ski down the back of it.”

“Ah, but some people do not live, princess. They merely exist.”

“Risking death is not living. It’s nihilistic. And in your case, abominably selfish.”

“Perhaps.” He held her hand tighter in his. “But I would not underestimate the power of a little bout of selfishness, if I were you. Indulge yourself, princess. Just for an evening. What’s the worst that could happen?”

“I shudder to think,” she retorted, but there was no heat in it.

Rodolfo pretended not to hear the catch in her throat. But he smiled. He liberated two glasses of something exquisite from a passing servant with a tray, he pulled his fascinating princess closer to his side and then he led her deeper into the dark.

CHAPTER SEVEN

MAYBE IT WAS the music. Maybe it was the whirl of so many gleaming, glorious people.

Natalie had the suspicion that really, it was Rodolfo.

But no matter what it was, no matter why—she forgot.

That she wasn’t really a princess, or if she was, she was the discarded kind. The lost and never-meant-to-be-found sort that had only been located by accident in a bathroom outside London.

She forgot that the dress wasn’t hers, the ball inside the pretty old building wasn’t a magical spectacle put on just for her and, most of all, that the man at her side—gripping her hand as he led her into temptation—wasn’t ever going to be hers, no matter what.

He’d danced with her. It was as simple and as complicated as that.

Natalie had never thought of herself as beautiful before she’d seen herself in that mirror tonight, but it was more than that. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone had treated her like a woman. Much less a desirable one. Not a pawn in whatever game the man in question might have been playing with her employer, which had only ever led to her wearing her hair in severe ponytails and then donning those clear glasses to keep the attention off her. Not an assistant. Not the person responsible for every little detail of every little thing and therefore the first one to be upbraided when something went wrong.

Rodolfo looked at her as if she was no more and no less than a beautiful woman. He didn’t see a list of all the things she could do when he gazed at her. He saw only her. A princessed-out, formally made-up version of her, sure. And she couldn’t really gloss over the fact he called her by the wrong name because he had every reason to believe she was someone else. Even so, she was the woman he couldn’t seem to stop touching, who made his eyes light up with all that too-bright need and hunger.

And it was that, Natalie found, she couldn’t resist.

She’d never done a spontaneous thing in her life before she’d switched places with Valentina in that bathroom. Left to her own devices, she thought it was likely she’d never have given her notice at all, no matter how worked up she’d been. And now it seemed she couldn’t stop with the spontaneity. Yet somehow Rodolfo’s grip on her hand, so strong and sure, made her not mind very much at all. She let this prince, who was far more charming than she wanted to admit to herself, tug her along with him, deeper into the shadows, until they were more in the dark than the light.

He turned to face her then, and he looked something like stern in the darkness. He set the two glasses of sparkling wine down on the nearby balustrade, then straightened again. Slowly. Deliberately, even. Natalie’s heart thudded hard against her ribs, but it wasn’t from fear. He pulled her hand that he’d been holding high against his chest and held it there, and Natalie couldn’t have said why she felt as caught. As gripped tight. Only that she was—and more concerning, had no desire to try to escape it.

If anything, she leaned closer into him, into the shelter of his big body.

“Where did you come from?” he asked, his voice a mere scrape against the night. “What the hell are you doing to me?”

Natalie opened her mouth to answer him. But whatever that dark, driving force had been inside her, urging her to poke back at him and do her best to slap down the only real Prince Charming she’d ever met in the flesh, it was gone. Had she imagined herself some kind of avenging angel here? Flying into another woman’s royal fairy tale of a life to do what needed doing, the way she did with everything else? Fighting her mother’s battles all these years later and with a completely different man than the one Erica had never explicitly named?

It didn’t matter, because that had been before he’d taken her in his arms and guided her around a dance floor, making her feel as if she could dance forever when she’d never danced a waltz before in her life. She had a vague idea of what it entailed, but only because she’d had to locate the best ballroom dancing instructor in London when Achilles Casilieris had abruptly decided he needed a little more polish one year. She’d watched enough of those classes—before Mr. Casilieris had reduced the poor man to tears—to understand the basic principle of a waltz.

But Rodolfo had made her feel as if they were flying.

He looked down at her now, out here in the seductive dark, and it made her tremble deep inside. It made her forget who she was and what she was doing. Her head cleared of everything save him. Rodolfo. The daredevil prince who made her feel as if she was the one catapulting herself out of airplanes every time his dark, hungry gaze caught hers. And held.

He took her bare shoulders in his hands, drawing her closer to him. Making her shiver, deep and long. On some distant level she thought she should push away from him. Remind them both of her boundaries, maybe. But she couldn’t seem to remember what those were. Instead she tilted her head back while she drifted closer to his big, rangy body. And then she made everything worse by sliding her hands over the steel wall of his chest, carefully packaged in that gorgeous suit that made him look almost edible. To push him away, she told herself piously.

But she didn’t push at him. She didn’t even try.

His dark eyes gleamed with a gold she could feel low in her belly, like a fiery caress. “The way you look at me is dangerous, princess.”

“I thought you courted danger,” she heard herself whisper.

“I do,” he murmured. “Believe me, I do.”

And then he bent his head and kissed her.

This time, the first brush of his mouth against hers was light. Easy. Electricity sparked and sizzled, and then he did it again, and it wasn’t enough. Natalie pressed herself toward him, trying to get more of him. Trying to crawl inside him and throw herself into the storm that roared through her. She went up on her toes to close the remaining distance between them, and her reward was the way he smiled, that dangerous curve of his mouth against hers.

It seemed to wash over her like heat then pool in a blaze of fire, high between her legs. Natalie couldn’t keep herself from letting out a moan, needy and insistent.