One Night With The Prince: A Royal Without Rules

Like surrender, Pato thought, satisfaction moving through him like another kind of need, dark and demanding, like all the ways he wanted her.

“I thought it would help your brother’s reputation,” she said almost too softly, her eyes bright with heat. “I really did.”

He nipped at her jaw, and she shivered.

“But I never would have suggested—” She broke off, bit her lip in agitation, then tried again. “I mean, I wouldn’t have thought of it if I didn’t—”

Pato waited, but she only pulled in a ragged breath, then another. She could hardly sit still. She was flushed hot, shining with the same need he felt pulling at him. Coming apart, right there in the chair, and he’d hardly touched her.

She was going to be the end of him. He knew it.

He couldn’t wait.

“Say it,” he ordered her. “If you didn’t...?”

He felt her give in to it before he saw it, a shift in that tension that tightened the air between them. And then her shoulders lowered, she let out a long breath, and what stormed in him then felt like much, much more than simple victory.

“If I didn’t want you,” she admitted hoarsely.

Pato kissed her, hard and long and deep, his fingers spearing into her sleek chignon and sending pins scattering to the floor.

And she met him, the feel of her mouth beneath his again—at last—like a revelation.

He couldn’t get enough of her taste. He angled his jaw for a better fit and it got hotter, wilder, and then he thought he might explode when he felt her hands running along his arms, trailing over his chest, making him wish he could remove all the layers of his formal clothes simply by wishing them away.

He wanted her mindless. Now. He wanted her falling apart in his arms, lost to this passion that might very well destroy them both. He wanted to claim her.

Pato broke away from the glory of her mouth and sank to his knees before her, making room for himself between her legs. She made a small, dazed sort of sound. He grinned at her, then simply pulled her hips toward him, pushing her skirt up toward her waist and out of his way as he positioned her at the edge of her seat.

He ran his palms up her smooth, satiny thighs, grinning wider as she bit back a moan. He sank his hands underneath her, grasping her perfect bottom and ducking lower, arranging her so that her legs fell over his shoulders and hung down his back. Then he tilted her hips toward him.

“Oh, my God,” she whispered, slumped down in her chair with her skirt around her waist and that delectable flush heating her face, making her dark chocolate eyes melt and shine as they met his.

She was delicious and shivering and his. All his, at last.

God help them both.

“Hold on,” Pato advised her, hardly recognizing his own voice, so stark with desire was it. So focused. “You’ll need it.”

He lifted her to him, smiling at the pretty scrap of blue lace that covered the sweet heat of her, and then he leaned forward to suck her into his mouth.

* * *

The shock of his mouth against the very center of her need took Adriana’s breath, so that the scream she let out sounded only inside her, ricocheting like a bullet against glass and shattering whatever it touched.

The heat. The fire. The terrible, wonderful ache.

His wicked, talented mouth, so hot and demanding, pressed against the tiny layer of lace that separated them. His hard shoulders felt massive and the fabric of his jacket rough against the tender skin behind her knees. His clever hands gripped her and held her fast, and his impossibly beautiful face was between her thighs so that all she could see when she looked down was that thick, wild hair of his, sunshine and chocolate and that delicious bit too long, and her own hands fisted in the mass of it as if they’d gone there of their own accord.

She thought she’d died. She wanted to die. She didn’t know how anyone could take this much pleasure, this much scalding heat, and live through it—

And then he made a low noise of male pleasure, shoved her thong out of his way and licked deep into her molten core.

Adriana burst into a firestorm of white-hot heat and exploded over the edge of the world, lost in a shower of shivering flames.

When she was herself again, or whatever was left of her, she couldn’t seem to catch her breath. And Pato was laughing in dark masculine delight, right there against the heat of her core, making the pleasure curl in her all over again, sweeter and hotter than before.

“Again, I think,” he murmured, each syllable humming into her and making her press against him before she knew she meant to move, greedy and mindless and adrift in need.

And he took her all over again.

He used his tongue and the scrape of his teeth. His mouth learned her, possessed her, commanding and effortless. His jaw moved against the tender skin of her thighs, the faint rasp of his beard making the fire in her reach higher, burn hotter. The hands that held her to him caressed her, a low roll of sensation that made her shudder and writhe against him, into him, wanting nothing in the world but this. Him.

And that coiling thing inside her that he knew exactly how to wind tight. Then tighter. Then even tighter still.

Adriana felt the fire surge into something almost unbearable, her whole body stretched taut and breathless, heard his growl of approval and her own high, keening noise—

And then, again, she was nothing more than the fire and the need, shattering into a thousand bright, hot pieces against his wicked, wicked mouth, and then falling in flames all around him.

* * *

When Adriana opened her eyes this time, reality slammed into her like a hammer at her temples.

What had she done?

Pato had moved to lounge on the floor, his back against the couch opposite her, with his long legs stretched out and nearly tangled with hers. He wasn’t smiling. Those golden eyes were trained on her, brooding and dark, and she didn’t know how long she stared back at him, too shaken and dazed to do anything else.

But that hammer kept at its relentless pounding, and she forced her gaze from his, looking down at herself as if he’d taken her body from her and replaced it with someone else’s. That was certainly what it felt like.

She thought she might cry. Adriana struggled to sit upright, tugging her skirt back down toward her knees, aware as she did so that she could still feel him. That mouth of his all over the core of her, his hands wrapped so tightly over her bottom. It felt as if every place he’d touched her was a separate drum, and each beat in her with its own dark pulse.

Then something else hit her, and she froze. She didn’t have much practical experience, but Adriana recognized that what had happened had been...unequal. She swallowed nervously, sneaked a glance at him and then away.

“You didn’t—” She was still in pieces and wasn’t sure she’d ever manage to reassemble herself. Not the way she’d been before. Not now that he’d demonstrated exactly how much she’d been lying to herself. She cleared her throat. “I mean, if you’d like...”

“How tempting,” Pato said drily when she couldn’t finish the sentence, his gaze harder when she met it, a darker shade of gold she’d never seen before. “But I prefer screams of passion to insincere sacrifices, thank you. To say nothing of enthusiastic participants.”

And the worst part, she realized, as her heart kicked at her and made her feel dizzy, was that she couldn’t run from him the way she had that morning in London. She couldn’t find a far-off corner of his luxurious penthouse and hide herself away until she wrestled her reactions under control. They were on a plane. There was no hiding from what she’d done this time. No rationalizations, no excuses. And she hadn’t had anything to drink but water all night long.

The silence between them stretched and held, nothing but the sound of the jet’s engines humming all around them, and Adriana didn’t have the slightest idea what to do. She was aware of him in ways she suspected would haunt her long after this flight was over, ways she should have recognized and avoided weeks ago. Why had she thought she could handle this—handle him? Why had she been so unpardonably arrogant?

He’d been leading her here all along, she understood. And she’d let him, telling herself that what was happening to her wasn’t happening at all. Telling herself stories about tainted blood and Pandora’s box. Thinking she could fight it with snappy lines and some attitude.

She’d known she was scraped raw by this, by the things that had happened between them. What he’d done and what he’d said. The brutal honesty, the impossible need. But it was her own appalling weakness that shamed her deep into her bones. That made her wonder if she’d ever known herself at all.

“Why did you do that?” she asked, when the silence outside her head and the noise within was too much.

His dark brows edged higher. There was the faintest twitch of that mouth of his, which she now knew so intimately she could still feel the aftershocks.