One Night With The Prince: A Royal Without Rules

“What did you do?” she asked, wide-eyed, no doubt plotting her call to the tabloids as she spoke.

“Haven’t you heard?” Pato asked, his eyes on Adriana and the way her hand tensed around her mobile as she glared out at the crowd. “I’ve been very, very naughty. Again.”

The brunette made some reply, but Pato watched Adriana, who dragged her gaze to his then as if it hurt her to do it. Even better, her meltingly brown eyes shot fire at him.

“There you are,” he said quietly, with a satisfaction he didn’t bother to hide. He smiled when her eyes narrowed. He tried to make his voice sound like a supplicant’s, but what came out was more like lazy challenge. “Am I allowed to dance, Adriana? Is that permitted?”

“Stay where I can see you,” she ordered him, all smooth command, as if she really did have him under her control. His smile deepened when she turned a cool gaze on the brunette. “Please don’t force me to invoke Kitzinian law, ma’am. No leaving the ballroom. No public displays. Keep it clean and polite. Do you understand?”

The woman nodded, looking slightly dazed, and Pato laughed.

“My very own prison warden,” he said, as if he approved. “I am duly chastened.”

He pulled the brunette into his arms as he took to the floor, but he couldn’t seem to take his eyes off Adriana, who stood where he’d left her, looking calm and unruffled. Serene. She even gazed at him across the swell of bodies, a kind of victory in her dark eyes. He felt it like a direct challenge.

When the interminable dance was finished, he murmured the appropriate things to the brunette, forgot her and then prowled back over to the assistant he’d never wanted in the first place. This time, she looked at him as he approached. More than that, she met his eyes boldly. He didn’t know why that should affect him far more than the way the lush brunette had leaned against him throughout the dance, trying to entice him with her curves.

“You don’t know who that woman is, do you?” Adriana asked when he reached her side, her tone mild. Polite. Pato knew better than to believe it.

“I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“But you slept with her.” Something like panic flared in her dark gaze, intriguing him even as she blinked it away. The tips of her ears were red, he noticed, up there near her swept-back blond hair, and her eyes were too bright. “Didn’t you?”

“Probably.” He arched a brow at her. “Are you asking that in an official capacity, Adriana? Or are you jealous?”

“I’m merely curious,” she said with a sniff, sounding as if she was discussing something as dry and uninteresting as his daily schedule. “I imagine, at this point, you can’t walk across a single room in Europe without tripping over legions of former conquests.”

“Well,” he said. “I rarely trip.”

“It must be difficult, at this point, to find someone you haven’t already been intimate with.” She smiled at him, that killer smile he’d seen before, sweet and deadly, which was supposed to be a weapon and instead delighted him. “Then again, it’s not as if you can remember, anyway, can you?”

Pato stood there for a moment, that same jagged restlessness beating at him, making him want things he’d given up a long time ago. Making him hard and wild, and shoving him much too close to a line he couldn’t allow himself to cross.

And still she smiled at him like that, as if she could handle this kind of battle, when he knew she was completely unaware of how much danger she was in.

“Ah,” he said in the low voice he could see made her shiver, and then he smiled as if she was prey and he was already on her. In her. “I see.” And he was closer than he should have been. He was much too close and he didn’t care at all, because her eyes widened and were that intoxicating shade of the finest Swiss chocolate. “You’re under the impression that you can shame me.”

They stared at each other, while laughter and conversation and the music kicked around them. Her lovely face flushed red. He saw the flash of that same panic he’d seen before, as if she wasn’t at all as controlled as she pretended, but she didn’t look away. Brave, he thought. Or foolish.

Pato lost himself in her dark gaze then, electric and alive and focused on him as if nothing else existed. As if he was already buried deep inside her, and she was waiting for him to move.

That image didn’t help matters at all. He blew out a breath.

“Come,” he said shortly, annoyed with himself. He turned on his heel and started across the great ballroom, knowing she had no choice but to follow, to keep him on that absurd leash of hers. And she did.

“Where are you going?” she asked as she fell into step with him. He didn’t think that hint of breathlessness in her voice was from walking, and it carved out something like a smile inside him.

“It’s like we’re chained together, Adriana.” He couldn’t seem to find his footing, and that was a catastrophe waiting to happen. And still, he didn’t care about that the way he knew he should. “Think of the possibilities.”

“No, thank you,” she replied, predictably, and he indulged himself and wrapped his hand around her upper arm, feigning solicitousness as he moved her through the door that led out toward the gardens. She jumped when he touched her, electric shock and that darker kick beneath it. He knew because he felt it, too. Her skin was softer than satin, warm and smooth beneath his palm, she smelled faintly of jasmine, and he shouldn’t have done it. Because now he knew.

Her eyes flew to his, and it punched through him hard, making him want to push her back against the nearest wall, lift her against him, lose himself completely in the burn of it. In her.

“Are you sure?” he asked, as they moved from the bright light of the ballroom into the soft, cool dark outside. He led her across the wide patio, skirting the small clumps of people who stood clustered around the bar tables that dotted it here and there. “Five minutes ago my sexual escapades were foremost on your mind. Don’t tell me you’ve lost interest so quickly.”

He looked down at her, and made no effort to contain the heat in him. The fire. He felt a tremor run through her, and God help him, he wanted her more than he’d wanted anything in years.

“I didn’t realize you were so sensitive about your scandalous past, Your Royal Highness,” she said, in a rendition of her usual cool he might have believed, had he not been looking into the wild heat in her gaze. “I’ll take care not to mention it again.”

“Somehow,” he murmured, his grip on her arm tightening just enough to make her suck in a breath, just enough to torture himself, “I very much doubt that.”

At some point, he was going to have to figure out why this woman got to him like this. But not tonight. Not now.

She pulled her arm from his grip as he steered her between two tables, as if concerned they couldn’t make it through the narrow channel side by side. But she rubbed at the place he’d touched her as if he’d left behind a mark, and Pato smiled.

In the deepest, farthest shadows of the patio, he found an empty table, the candle in the center, which should have been glowing, unlit. But he didn’t need candlelight to see her as she deliberately put the table between them, keeping as far out of his reach as she could. His eyes adjusted to the dark and he studied the flush on her cheeks, the hectic sparkle in her gaze.

And then he waited, leaning his elbows on the table and watching her. Her pretty eyes widened. She shifted from one foot to the other. He made her nervous, and he couldn’t pretend he didn’t like it.

“I wasn’t trying to shame you,” she said after long moments passed, just the two of them in a far, dark corner, all the nerves he could see on her face rich in her voice. And there was something else, he thought as he studied her. Something he couldn’t quite identify.

“Of course you were.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“You did.”

She looked stricken for a moment, then dropped her gaze to the tabletop, and he watched as she crossed her arms as if she thought she needed to hold herself together. Or protect herself.

“What are you ashamed of, Adriana?” he asked softly.

She flinched as if he’d slapped her, telling him a great deal more than he imagined she meant to do, but her expression was clear when she lifted her head. That mask again. She let out a breath and then she opened her mouth—

“Don’t lie to me,” he heard himself say, and worse, he could feel how important it was to him that she heed him. How absurdly, dangerously important. “Don’t clean it up. Just tell me.”

“I’m a Righetti, Your Royal Highness,” she said after a moment, her dark eyes glittering in the shadows. “Shame runs like blood in our veins. It’s who we are.”

Pato didn’t know how long they stood like that, held in that taut, near-painful moment. He didn’t know how long he gazed at her, at the proud tilt of her chin and the faintest tremor in her lips, with that darkness in her eyes. He didn’t know how she’d punched into him so completely that her hand might as well have ripped through his chest. That was what it felt like, and he didn’t want that. He didn’t want this. He couldn’t.

“Adriana,” he said finally, but his voice was no more than a rasp. And then he saw figures approaching from the corner of his eye, and he stopped, almost grateful for the intrusion into a moment that shouldn’t have happened in the first place.

She dropped her gaze again, and hunched her shoulders slightly as she stood there, as if warding off whoever had come to stand at the table a small distance behind her. Pato didn’t spare them a glance. He didn’t look away from Adriana for even a moment, and the fact that was more dangerous than anything that had come before didn’t escape him.

He wanted to touch her. He wanted to pull her against him, hold her, soothe her somehow, and he felt hollow inside because of it. Hollow and twisted, and stuck where he’d put himself, on the other side of an incidental table and an impossible divide, useless and corrupt and dismissable.

A fine bed he’d made, indeed.

And then she stiffened again, as if she’d been struck, and Pato frowned as he recognized the voices coming from behind her.