A Royal Without Rules

by Caitlin Crews

  “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.

  “Was that wise, do you think?” The cold, precise tones of Princess Lissette, her faint accent making the words seem even icier. She sounded as blonde and Nordic as she looked, Pato thought uncharitably. And as frigid.

  “I’m not sure what wisdom has to do with it.”

  There was no mistaking his brother’s voice, and the ruthlessly careful way he spoke while in public. The dutiful Crown Prince Lenz and his arranged-since-the-cradle bride stood at the next table, a candle bright between them, the warm glow doing nothing to ease their stiff, wary postures.

  There were worse beds to lie in than his, Pato knew, eyeing his brother. Poor bastard.

  “One must strive to be compassionate, of course,” Lissette continued in the same measured way. “But even I know of her family’s notoriety. Do you worry that it reflects badly on your judgment, your discernment, that you selected her to be your assistant when she is widely regarded as something of a pariah?”

  Pato went still. Adriana seemed turned to stone, a statue, her eyes lowered as she bent slightly forward over her crossed arms.

  “Look at me,” he ordered her in an undertone, but she ignored him.

  Behind her, an uncomfortable silence swelled. Pato saw his brother begin to frown, then remember himself and fight it back. His ice princess fiancée only gazed back at him calmly. Pato wanted to order them to stop talking, to point out that Adriana was right here—but he didn’t trust that the princess would stop. Or that she wasn’t already aware that Adriana stood at the next table. And he didn’t want Adriana to be any more of a target. A dim alarm sounded in him then, questioning that unusual protective urge, but he shoved it aside.

  “This will all go much smoother, I think,” Lenz said finally, an edge to his voice, “if you do not speak of things you don’t understand, Princess.”

  “I believe I understand perfectly,” she replied with cool hauteur. “You took a traitor’s daughter as your mistress and flaunted her in the face of Kitzinian society, for years. What is there to misunderstand?”

  “Adriana Righetti was never my mistress,” Lenz snapped, his tone scathing. Even derisive. “Credit me with slightly more intelligence than that, Lissette.”

  There were other voices then, calling out for the happy royal couple from some distance across the patio, and Pato watched in a quiet fury as his brother pasted on his usual public smile, offered his arm to his fiancée—who smiled back in the same way as she took it—before they glided away. He had the wholly uncharacteristic urge to smack their heads together.

  Then he glanced back at Adriana, who still hadn’t moved a muscle.

  “Look at me,” he said again, with an odd urgency he didn’t understand.

  She lifted her head then and the pain on her face stunned him into silence. He could see it in her dark eyes, slicked not with embarrassment but with a kind of grief.

  For a moment he was lost. This wasn’t the tough, impervious Adriana he’d grown accustomed to over the past days—unflappable, he’d assumed, thanks to growing up a beautiful Righetti girl in the sharp teeth of Kitzinian society. But then, suddenly, he understood.

  And didn’t care at all for how it made him feel.

  “My God,” he said flatly. “You’re in love with him.”

  * * *

  Adriana woke up in a rush and had no idea where she was.

  She was on her stomach on an unfamiliar bed in a sunlit room she’d never seen before. She blinked, frowned, and realized as she did both that her head ached and that she’d neglected to remove her eye makeup the night before. What—

  There was a slight movement behind her, a small shift against the mattress.

  She was not alone in the bed.

  Adriana froze. Then, very slowly, her heart pounding, she turned to look, somehow knowing what she would see even as she prayed she was mistaken.

  Please not him.
Please not him. Please—

  Prince Pato lay sprawled out on his back, the sheets kicked off, naked save for a pair of tight navy blue briefs that clung to his narrow hips. The light from the skylights bathed him in shades of gold, and she couldn’t quite take in that perfect, hard-packed flesh of his, so close beside her she could almost feel the heat he generated, and could see the rough shadow of his beard on his jaw. She couldn’t make sense of all his fine masculine beauty, much less the picture of sheer abandon he made, sun-kissed and golden and stretched out so carelessly against the crisp white sheets.

  She was in bed with Pato.

  Her mouth was too dry; her eyes felt scraped and hollow. She felt fragile and broken, and had no idea how to pull herself together enough to handle this. Adriana was afraid she might be sick.

  In a panic, she whipped her head around, yanked back the sheet and looked down at herself, not sure whether to be horrified or relieved to discover that while she wasn’t naked, she wore only the matching cranberry hip-slung panties and bra she’d had on beneath her gown at the charity ball.

  The ball. Adriana fought to keep breathing as images from the night before began to flood her head. Those strange, intense moments with Pato. His hand on her arm. The way he’d looked at her, as if he could see straight into her. Then Lenz’s voice, so disgusted, so appalled.

  She couldn’t think about Lenz. She couldn’t.

  Had she really done this? Had she decided to become what she’d always been so proud she wasn’t? With the one person in all the world best suited to debauch her—or anyone, come to that—completely? He did it by rote, no doubt. He could do it in his sleep. No wonder she couldn’t recall it.

  Adriana turned to look at him again, as if she might see her own actions tattooed on his smooth skin, and she jolted in shock.

  Pato was awake. And watching her.

  “Oh, my God,” she whispered. She pulled the sheets up to her neck, fought the urge to burst into tears, and stared at him in horror.

  Pato’s golden eyes were sleepy, his hair a thick, careless mess, and still he fairly oozed the same sensual menace he had the night before, when he’d been dressed so elegantly. He studied her for a long moment, and the great, wide bed felt like a tiny little cot, suddenly. Like a trap. Adriana’s pulse beat at her, and she forgot about her headache.

  “I hope you appreciate the sacrifice I made to your modesty,” Pato said in that drawling way of his, as if he was too lazy to bother enunciating properly. He waved at the form-fitting briefs he wore. At that flat abdomen of his, the crisp dark hair that disappeared beneath the fabric. She jerked her eyes away, and his mouth curved. “I think you know very well I prefer to sleep naked.”

  Adriana felt dizzy, and part of her welcomed it. Encouraged it. It would be such a relief to simply faint dead away. To escape whatever morning-after this was. She lifted a hand to her head, only belatedly realizing that her hair had tumbled down from its chignon, and was hanging around her face in a wild mess that rivaled Pato’s.

  Somehow, that made it worse. It made her feel like the wanton slut she must have become last night. Was it possible to share a bed with Prince Pato and not be a wanton slut? Her chest felt tight.

  He watched her as she pushed the mass of blond waves behind her shoulders, his golden gaze like a flame as it touched her. More images from the previous night flashed through her head then, as if the heat of his gaze triggered her memory, and she frowned at him.

  “You got me drunk,” she accused him.

  Blaming him felt good. Clean. Far better to concentrate on that and not the images flickering in her head. Some dark-paneled pub, or possibly the kind of rich man’s club a prince might frequent, thick with reds and woods and the shots of strong spirits Pato slid in front of her, one after the next, his golden gaze never leaving her face. His elegant hands brushing hers. That wicked mouth of his much too close.

  “You got you drunk,” he corrected, shifting over to his side and propping his head up on one hand as he continued to regard her with that lazy intent that made her belly fold in on itself. “Who was I to stand in your way?”

  A dark street, laughter. Her laughter, and the wicked current of his voice beneath it. Her arm around Pato’s waist and his lean, hard arm around her shoulders. Then being held high against his chest as he moved through some kind of lobby...

  This was awful, Adriana thought then, her chest aching with the sobs, the screams, she refused to let out. This was beyond awful.

  “My God.” She said it again, despite the decided lack of any divine intervention this morning. She squeezed her eyes shut, bracing herself for the blow. Preparing herself, because she had to know. “Did you—? Did we—?”

  There was nothing but silence. Adriana dared to open her eyes again, to find that Pato was staring at her in outrage.

  She shuddered. “Does that mean we did?” she asked in a tiny voice.

  “First of all,” he said, in that low voice of his that curled around her like a caress, and she couldn’t seem to shake it off, “I am not in the habit of taking advantage of drunk women who pretend to detest me when they are sober, no matter how much they beg.”

  His gaze was hard on hers, and Adriana felt caught in the heat, the command, that surely a wastrel like Pato shouldn’t have at his disposal. Eventually, his mouth moved into a small, sexy grin that shouldn’t have tugged at her like that, all fire and need in the core of her, then a shiver everywhere else. She couldn’t seem to think, to move. To breathe. She could only stare back at him, her heart going wild, as if he was holding her captive in the palm of his hand.

  “And second,” he said silkily, “if we had, you wouldn’t have to ask. You’d know.”

  “Oh,” Adriana said faintly, not sure she was breathing. “Well. If you’re sure...?”

  Pato shook his head. “I’m sure.”

  She believed him. He was only looking at her now, all that gleaming attention of his focused on her. He wasn’t even touching her, and she felt branded. Scalded. Changed. She had a perfect memory of his hand on her arm, the heat of it, the punch of it, the way everything inside her had wound deliciously tight. She believed him, and yet there was something inside her that almost wished—

  Stop, she snapped at herself, off balance and scared and much too close to falling apart.

  Adriana realized belatedly that far too much time had passed and she’d done nothing but stare at him, while he watched her and no doubt read every last thought that crossed her mind. He was lethal; she understood that now, in a way she hadn’t before. He was lethal and she was in bed with him and somehow by the grace of God she hadn’t succumbed to his darker nature or, worse, hers...

  Adriana frowned. “Did you say I begged?”

  Pato smiled.

  “For what?” she asked in an appalled whisper. “Exactly?”

  He smiled wider.

  “This can’t be happening.” She was barely audible, even to her own ears, but she felt each word like a stone slamming through her. “Did I—” But even as she asked, she shut herself off. “No. I don’t want to know.”

  “You begged very prettily,” he told her then, that wild gleam in his eyes, which made her feel much too hot, too constricted, as if she might burst wide-open. “If it helps.”

  It helped confirm that she hated herself, Adriana thought, that old black wave of self-loathing rising in her and then drenching her, drowning her, in all the ways she’d let herself down. Blood really will tell, she thought bitterly. You’ve been fooling yourself all these years, but in the end, you’re no better than any of them. Righetti whores.

  She managed to take a breath, then another one.

  And then, through her confusion, one thing became perfectly clear: it was time to accept who she was, once and for all. And that meant it was time to change her life.

  “Than
k you, Your Royal Highness,” she said stiffly, not looking at him. “I’m sorry that I let myself get so out of control and that you had to deal with me. How incredibly unprofessional.”

  She scrambled to crawl out of the bed, away from him. This had to end. What was she was doing here, disgracing herself with a prince, when she could be living without the weight of all of this in some happy foreign land like her brothers? She’d been so desperate to prove herself—and now she’d proved only that she was exactly who everyone thought she was.

  Enough, she thought grimly.

  And there was what Lenz had said, the way he’d said it, but she didn’t want to think about that. She didn’t want to let it hurt her the way she suspected it would when she did.

  It seemed to take an hour to reach the edge of the bed, and as she went to swing her feet to the ground, Pato simply reached out and hauled her back by the arm until she was on her side and facing him. No sheet this time to hide behind. Just far too much of her nearly naked body far too near his. Panic screamed through her, making her skin burst into flames.

  “You can’t just...manhandle people!” she exclaimed heatedly.

  Pato shrugged, and the total lack of concern in the gesture reminded her forcefully that, black sheep or not, he was a royal prince. Pampered and indulged. Used to getting whatever he wanted. He wasn’t required to concern himself with other people’s feelings, particularly hers.

  That should have disgusted her. It alarmed her that it didn’t.

  “I think we’re a bit past worrying about professionalism,” he said, his voice mild, though his eyes were intent on hers, and his mouth looked dangerous in a new way with his jaw unshaved and his thick hair so unruly.

  And all of him so close.

  “I need to leave,” she replied evenly. “The palace, the royal family—I should have done it a long time ago.” She started to pull away from him, but he only shifted position and smoothed his hand down to the indentation of her waist. He rested it there, almost idly, and she froze as if he was pressing her to the bed with brute force.