A Royal Without Rules

But that was silly. Pato was a monument to wastefulness, nothing more. A royal pain in the ass. Her ass, now, and for the next two months.

“I don’t recall any other martyrs in the Righetti family line,” he drawled after a moment. “Your people run more to murderous traitors and conniving royal mistresses, yes?” A quirk of his dark brow. “I’m happy to discuss the latter, in case you wondered. I do so hate an empty bed.”

“Evidently,” Adriana agreed acidly, nodding toward the overflowing one behind him.

“Rule number two,” he said, sinful and dark. “I’m a royal prince. It’s always appropriate to kneel in my presence. You could start right now.” He nodded at his feet, though his gaze burned. “Right here.”

And for a helpless moment, she imagined doing exactly that, as if he’d conjured the image inside her head. Of her simply dropping to her knees before him, then pulling that sheet away and doing what he was clearly suggesting she do… . Adriana felt herself heat, then tremble deep inside, and he smiled. He knew.

God help her, but he knew.

When she heard one of his bedmates call his name from behind him, Adriana jumped on it as if it was a lifeline—and told herself she didn’t care that he knew exactly how much he’d got to her. Or that the curve in his wicked mouth mocked her.

“It looks like you’re needed,” Adriana said, pure adrenaline keeping her voice as calm and unbothered as it should have been. She knew she couldn’t show him any fear, or any hint that she might waver. He was like some kind of wild animal who would pounce at the slightest hint of either—she knew that with a deep certainty she had no interest at all in testing.

“I often am,” he said, a world of sensual promise in his voice, and that calm light of too much experience in his gaze. “Shall I demonstrate why?”

She eyed the pouty redhead, who was finally sitting up in the bed, apparently as unconcerned with her nudity as Pato was.

Adriana hated him. She hated this. She didn’t know or want to know why he’d succeeded in getting to her—she wanted to do her job and then return to happily loathing him from afar.

“I suggest you get rid of them, put some clothes on and meet me in your private parlor,” she said in a clipped voice. “We need to discuss how this is going to go.”

“Oh, we will,” Pato agreed huskily, a dark gleam in his gaze and a certain cast to his mouth that made something deep inside her quiver. “We can start with how little I like being told what to do.”

“You can talk all you want,” Adriana replied, that same kick of adrenaline making her bold. Or maybe it was something else—something more to do with that odd hunger that made her feel edgy and needy, and pulsed in her as he looked at her that way. “I’ll listen. I might even nod supportively. But then, one way or another, you’ll behave.”

Pato rid himself of his companions with as little fuss as possible, showered, and then called his brother.

“All these years I thought it was true love,” he said sardonically when Lenz answered. “The descendant of the kingdom’s most famous traitor and the besotted future king in a doomed romance. Isn’t that what they whisper in the corners of the palace? The gossip blogs?”

There was a brief silence, which he knew was Lenz clearing whatever room he was in. Pato was happy to wait. He didn’t know why he felt so raw inside, as if he was angry. When he was never angry. When he had often been accused of being incapable of achieving the state of anger, so offensively blasé was he.

And yet. He thought of Adriana Righetti and her dark brown eyes, the way she’d spoken to him. He pressed one hand against the center of his chest. Hard.

“What are you talking about?” Lenz asked, after a muttered conversation and the sound of a door closing.

“Your latest discard,” Pato said. He stood there for a moment in his dressing room, scowling at his own wardrobe. What the hell was the matter with him? He felt…tight. Restless. As if this wasn’t all part of the plan. He hadn’t expected her to be…her. “Thank you for the warning that this was happening today.”

“Do you require warnings now?” Lenz sounded amused. “Has the Playboy Prince lost his magic touch?”

“I’m merely considering how best to proceed,” Pato said, that raw thing in him seeming to tie itself into a knot, because he knew how he’d like to proceed. It was hot and raw inside him. Emphatic. “Yet all I find myself thinking about are those Righetti royal mistresses. She looks just like them. Tell me, brother, what other gifts has she inherited? Please tell me they’re kinky.”

“Stop!” Lenz bit out the sharp command, something Pato very rarely heard directed at him. “Have some respect. Adriana isn’t like that. She never…”

But he didn’t finish. And Pato blinked, everything in him going still. Too still. As if this mattered.

“Does that mean what I think that means?” he asked. It couldn’t. He shouldn’t care—but there was that raw thing in him, and he had to know. “Is it possible? Was Adriana Righetti, in fact, no more than your personal assistant?”

Lenz muttered a curse. “Is that so difficult to believe?”

“It defies all reason,” Pato retorted. But he smiled, a deep satisfaction moving through him, and he thought of the way Adriana had looked at him, determination and awareness in her dark eyes. He felt it kick in him. Hard. “You kept her for three whole years. What exactly were you doing?”

“Working,” Lenz said drily. “She happens to be a great deal more than a pretty face.” He cleared his throat. “Speaking of which, the papers are having a grand time attempting to uncover the identity of your mystery woman.”

“Which one?” Pato asked, still smiling.

Lenz sighed. “And still the public adores you. I can’t think why.”

“We all have our roles to play.” He heard the restlessness in his voice then, the darkness. It was harder and harder to keep it at bay.

His older brother let out another sigh, this one tinged with bitterness, and Pato felt his own rise to the surface. Not that it was ever far away. Especially not now.

“I thought it would feel different at this point,” Lenz said quietly. “I thought I would feel triumphant. Victorious. Something. Instead, I am nothing but an imposter.”

Pato pulled on a pair of trousers and a shirt and roamed out of his dressing room, then around the great bedchamber, hardly seeing any of it. There was too much history, too much water under the bridge, and only some of it theirs. Chess pieces put in place and manipulated across the years. Choices and vows made and then kept. They were in the final stages of a very long game, with far too much at stake. Far too much to lose.

“Don’t lose faith now,” he said, his voice gruff. “It’s almost done.”

Lenz’s laugh was harsh. “What does faith have to do with it? It’s all lies and misdirection. Callous manipulation.”

“If you don’t have faith in this course of ours, Lenz,” Pato said fiercely, the rawness in his brother’s voice scraping inside him, “then all of this has been in vain. All of it, for all these years. And then what will we do?”

There was a muffled noise that suggested one of Lenz’s aides had poked a head in.

“I must go,” his brother said after another low conversation. “And this is about sacrifice, Pato, though never mine. Don’t think it doesn’t keep me awake, wondering at my own vanity. If I was a good man, a good brother…”

He didn’t finish. What would be the point? Pato rubbed a hand over his eyes.

“It’s done,” he said. “The choice is made. We are who are and there’s no going back.”

There was a long pause, and Pato knew exactly which demons danced there between them, taunting his brother, dark and vicious. They were his, too.

“Be as kind to Adriana as you can,” Lenz said abruptly. “I like her.”

“We are all of us pawns, brother,” Pato reminded him softly.

“Be nice to her anyway.”

“Is that a command?” The raw thing in him was growing, hot and hungry. And Lenz had never touched her.

“If it has to be.” Lenz snorted. “Will it work?”

Pato laughed, though it was a darker sound than it should have been. He thought of all the moving parts of this game, all they’d done and all there was left to do before it was over. And then he thought of Adriana Righetti’s sharp smile on her courtesan’s mouth, then the dazed expression on her face when he’d told her to kneel. And the heat in him seemed to simmer, then become intent.

“It’s never worked before,” he told his brother. “But hope springs eternal, does it not?”

His certainly did.

He found Adriana waiting for him as promised in the relatively small reception room off the grandiose main foyer of his lavish palace apartment. It was filled with fussy antiques, commanding works of art and the gilt-edged glamor that was meant to proclaim his exalted status to all who entered. Pato much preferred the flat he kept in London, where he wasn’t required to impart a history lesson every time a guest glanced at a chair.

She was every bit as beautiful as her famously promiscuous ancestors, Pato thought, standing in the doorway and studying her. More so. She stood at the windows that looked out over the cold, blue waters of the alpine lake surrounding the palace, impatient hands on her hips and her stiff back to the door, and there was nothing in the least bit beige about her. Or even henlike, come to that. She’d refastened her jacket, and he appreciated the line of it almost as much as he’d enjoyed ruining that line when he’d unbuttoned it earlier. It skimmed over the elegant shape of her body before flaring slightly at her hips, over the narrow sheath of the skirt she wore and the high heels that made her legs look long and lean and as if they’d fit nicely wrapped around his back.

And she had in her genetic arsenal the most celebrated temptresses in the history of the kingdom. How could he possibly resist?

Anticipation moved in him, hard and bright. He needed her with him to play out this part of the game—but he hadn’t expected he’d enjoy himself. And now, he thought, he would. Oh, how he would.

There were so many ways to be nice, after all, and Pato knew every last one of them.

CHAPTER TWO

TEN DAYS LATER, Adriana stood in the middle of a glittering embassy ballroom, a serene smile pasted to her face, while inside, she itched to kill Pato. Preferably with her very own hands.

It was a feeling she was growing accustomed to the more time she spent in his presence—and the more he pulled his little stunts. Like tonight’s disappearing act in the middle of a reception where he was supposed to be calmly discharging his royal duties.

Please, she scoffed inside her head, her gaze moving around the room for the fifth time, holding out hope that she’d somehow missed him before, that he’d somehow blended into a crowd for the first time in his life. As if he has the slightest idea what the word duty means!

“The prince stepped out to take an important phone call,” she lied to the ambassador beside her, when she accepted, finally, what she already knew. Pato had vanished, which could only bode ill. She kept her smile in place. “Why don’t I see if I can help expedite things?”

“If you would be so kind,” the ambassador murmured in reply, but without the sly, knowing look that usually accompanied any discussion of Pato or his suspicious absences in polite company. Nor did he look around to see if any women were also missing. Adriana viewed that as a point in her favor.

She had kept the paparazzi’s favorite prince scandal-free for ten whole days. That was something of a record, if she did say so herself. Her intention was to continue her winning streak—but that meant finding him. And fast.

Because Adriana couldn’t kid herself. She hadn’t contained Pato over the past ten days. He’d laughed at her when she’d told him she planned to try. She’d simply babysat him, making sure he was never out of her sight unless he was asleep. That had involved frustrating days with Pato forever in her personal space, always teasing her and testing her, then doing as he pleased, with Adriana as his annoyed escort. It had meant long nights unable to sleep as she waited for the inevitable phone call from the guards she’d placed at his door to keep Pato in and the parade of trollops out. All she really had going for her was her fierce determination to bend him to her will—his brother’s will, she reminded herself sternly—whether he wanted to or not.

Naturally, he didn’t want to do anything of the kind.

Though he was always laughing, always shallow and reckless and the life of the party, if not the party itself, Adriana had come to realize that Pato had a fearsome will of his own. Iron and steel, wholly unbendable, beneath that impossibly pretty face and all his trademark languor.

Tonight he’d simply slipped away from the embassy receiving line, showing Adriana that he’d been indulging her this whole time. Allowing her to think she was making some kind of progress when, in fact, he’d been in control from the start.

She could practically see his mocking smile, and it burned through her, making her flush hot with the force of her temper. She excused herself from the ambassador and his aides, then walked calmly across the ballroom floor as if she was headed nowhere more interesting than the powder room, nodding by rote to those she passed and not even paying attention to the usual swell of her loathed surname like a wake of whispers behind her as she went. She was too focused on Pato, damn him.

He would not be the reason she failed Lenz. He would not.

But Pato wasn’t corrupting innocents in the library, or involved in something sordid in any of the receiving rooms. She checked all of them—including every last closet because, the man was capable of anything—then stood there fuming. Had he left? Was he even now gallivanting about the city, causing trouble in one of the slick nightclubs he favored, filled as they were with the bored and the rich? How would she explain that to Lenz when it was all over the tabloids in the morning? But that was when she heard a soft thump from above her. Adriana tilted her head back and studied at the ceiling. The only thing above her was the ambassador’s residence… .

Of course. That bastard.

Adriana climbed the stairs as fast as she could without running, and then smiled at the armed guard who stood sentry at the entrance to the residence. She waved her mobile at him.

“I’m Prince Pato’s assistant,” she said matter-of-factly. “And I have His Majesty the King on the line…?”

She let her voice trail away, and had to fight back the rush of fury that swirled in her when the guard nodded her in, confirming her suspicions. She’d wanted to be mistaken, she really had.

And now she wanted to kill him. She would kill him.

Once on the other side of the ornate entryway, Adriana could hear music—and above it, a peal of feminine laughter. Her teeth clenched together, making her jaw ache. She marched down the hallway, stopped outside the cracked door where the noise came from, and then had to take a moment to prepare herself.

You already found him in bed with two women, a brisk voice inside her pointed out. You handled it.

She tucked her clutch beneath her arm, and wished she was wearing something more like a suit of armor, and not a sparkly blue gown that tied behind her neck, flowed to her feet and left her arms bare. For some reason, it made her feel intensely vulnerable, a sensation that mixed with her galloping temper and left her feeling faintly ill.

He was sleeping when you saw that, another voice countered. He is probably not sleeping now.

God, she hated him. She hated that this was her life. Adriana steeled herself and pushed through the door.

The music was loud, electronic and hypnotic, filling the dimly lit room. Adriana saw the woman first. She was completely naked save for a tiny black thong, plus long dark hair spilling down to the small of her back, and she was dancing.

If that was the word for it. It was carnal. Seductive. She moved to the music as if it was part of her, sensual and dark, writhing and spinning in the space between the two low couches that took up most of the floor space of the cozy room.

Performing, Adriana realized after a stunned moment. She was performing.

Pato lounged on the far couch, his long legs thrust out in front of him and crossed at the ankle, his elegant suit jacket open over his magnificent chest, and his lean arms stretched out along the back of the seat. He was fully clothed, which both surprised and oddly disappointed Adriana, but he looked no less the perfect picture of sexual indolence even though his skin wasn’t showing.

Her throat went dry. The woman bent over backward, her hips circling in open, lustful invitation, her arms in the air before her. The music was like a dark throb, moving inside Adriana like a demand, a caress.

She swallowed hard, and that was when she realized Pato was looking straight at her.

Her heart stopped. Then kicked, exploding into her ribs, making her stomach drop. But Adriana didn’t—couldn’t—move.

The moment stretched out between them, electric and fierce. There was only that arrogant golden stare of his, as if the woman before him didn’t exist. As if the music was for Adriana alone—for him. She had the panicked thought that he’d wanted her to find him like this, that this was some kind of trap. That he knew, somehow, the riot inside of her, the confusion. The heat.

Adriana didn’t know how long she stood there, frozen on the outside and that catastrophic fire within. But eventually—seconds later? years?—Pato lifted one hand, pointed a remote toward the entertainment center on the far wall and silenced the music. All without looking away from Adriana for an instant.

The sudden silence made her flinch. Pato’s mouth curved in one corner, wicked and knowing.

“It’s time to go, Your Royal Highness,” Adriana said stiffly into the quiet. She was aware, on some level, that the other woman was speaking, scowling at her. But Adriana couldn’t seem to hear a word she said. Couldn’t seem to see anything but Pato.

“You could come sit down, Adriana.” His dark brows rose in challenge as he patted the sofa cushion beside him, and she was certain he knew the very moment her nipples pulled taut in a reaction she didn’t understand. He smiled. “Watch. Enjoy. Who knows what might happen?”

“Not a single thing you’re imagining right now, I assure you,” Adriana said, struggling to control her voice.

She forced her shoulders back, stood straighter. She would not let this man best her. She couldn’t let herself feel these things, whatever they were. She had too much to prove—and too much too lose. Adriana jerked her gaze away from him, ignoring his low chuckle, and frowned at the woman, who still stood there wearing nothing but a black thong and an attitude.

“Aren’t you the ambassador’s daughter?” she asked sharply. “Should we call downstairs and ask your father what he thinks about your innovative approach to foreign policy?”

The woman made an extremely rude and anatomically challenging suggestion.

“No, thank you,” Adriana replied coolly, unable, on some level, to process the fact that she was having this conversation while gazing at this woman’s bared breasts. Not the first set of naked breasts she’d seen in Pato’s company. She could only pray it was the last. “But I’m sure that if you walked into the ballroom dressed like this you’d have a few takers. No doubt that would delight your father even further.”

Pato laughed then, rising from the couch with that sinuous masculine grace he didn’t deserve, and straightened his suit jacket with a practiced tug. He did not look at all ashamed, or even caught out. He looked the way he always did: deeply amused. Lazy and disreputable. Unfairly sexy. His darker-than-blond hair was long enough to hint at a curl, and he wore it so carelessly, as if fingers had just or were about to run through it. That wicked mouth of his made him look like a satyr, not a prince. And those golden eyes gleamed as he held her gaze, connecting with a punch to all that confused heat inside her. Making it bloom into an open flame.

“There is no need for threats, Adriana,” he said, sardonic and low, and she felt it everywhere. “Nothing would please me more than to do your bidding.”

The ambassador’s daughter moved then, plastering herself to his long, lean body, rubbing her naked breasts against his chest as she flung her arms around his neck, hooked one leg over his hip and pressed her mouth to his. He didn’t kiss her the way Adriana had once seen him kiss one of his paramours in an almost-hidden alcove in the palace—carnal and demanding and an obvious, smoking-hot prelude to what came next. This was not that, thank goodness. But he didn’t exactly fight her off, either.

“Then by all means, let’s have you do my bidding, Your Royal Highness,” Adriana said icily, everything inside her seeming to fold in on itself, like a fist. “Whenever you can tear yourself away, of course.”

Pato set the other woman aside with a practiced ease that reminded Adriana of the same dexterity he’d showed in his bed that other morning. It made that fist curl tighter. Harder. He murmured something Adriana couldn’t hear, that made the ambassador’s thonged daughter smile at him as if he’d licked her. And then he smoothed down his tie, buttoned his jacket and sauntered toward the doorway as if there wasn’t a nearly naked woman panting behind him and a formal reception he was supposed to be attending below.

Adriana stepped back to let him move into the hallway, and took more pleasure than she should have in snapping the door shut behind him. Perhaps with slightly more force than necessary.

“Temper, temper,” Pato murmured, eyeing her with laughter in that golden gaze. “And here I thought you’d be so proud of me.”

“I doubt you thought anything of the kind.” She’d never wanted to hit another human being so much in all her life. “I doubt you think. And why on earth would I be proud of this embarrassing display?”

He propped one shoulder against the closed door and waved a languid hand down the length of him, inviting her to take a long look. She declined. Mostly.

“Am I not clothed?” he asked, taunting her. Again. “‘Keep your clothes on, Your Royal Highness,’ you said in that prissy way of yours in the car on the way over tonight. I am delighted, as ever, to obey.”

“You wouldn’t know how to obey if it was your job,” she snapped at him. “Not that I imagine you know what one of those is, either.”

“You make a good point,” he said, and that was when it occurred to Adriana that they hadn’t moved at all—that they were standing entirely too close in that doorway. His face shifted from pretty to predatory, and her head spun. “I’m better at giving the orders, it’s true. Rule number three, Adriana. The faster you obey me, the harder and the longer you’ll come. Consider it my personal guarantee.”

She couldn’t believe he’d said that. Her entire body seemed to ignite, then liquefy.

“Enough,” she muttered, but she didn’t fool him with her horrified tone, if that flash of amused satisfaction in his gaze meant anything. Desperation made her lash out. “You shouldn’t share these sad rules of yours, Your Royal Highness. It only makes you that much more pathetic—the dissipated, aging bachelor, growing more pitiable by the moment, on a fast track to complete irrelevance.”

“Yes,” he agreed. He leaned closer, surrounding her, mesmerizing her. “That’s exactly why you’re breathing so fast, why your cheeks are so flushed. You pity me.”

Adriana ducked around him and started down the hall, telling herself none of that had happened. None of it. No dancing girl, no strange awareness. No rules that made her belly feel tight and needy. And certainly not the look she’d just seen in his eyes, stamped hard on his face. But her heart clattered in her chest, it was as hard to breathe as he’d suggested, and she knew she was lying.