It would have been easier if he had been, she recognized on some level. It would have been unambiguous. But instead he was only touching her, barely touching her, and she couldn’t seem to form the words to demand he let her go. She only trembled. Inside and out.
And he knew. His eyes gleamed, and he knew.
“At least let me get back under the sheet,” she said desperately.
“Why?” He shrugged again, so lazy. So at ease. “You’re showing less skin than you would if you were wearing a bikini.”
“You’ve never seen me in a bikini,” she managed to say. “It would be inappropriate.”
His fingers traced the faintest pattern along the curve of her body, and she could no more help the shiver of goose bumps that rose on her skin than she could turn back time and avoid this scenario in the first place. He looked at the telltale prickle of flesh, his hand tightened at her waist and she let out a tiny, involuntary sound that made his golden gaze darken and focus on her, hot and hungry.
But when he spoke again, his voice was light.
“I hate to be indelicate, Adriana, but I’ve already seen all of this. You’re about eight hours too late for modesty.”
“It’s time for me to leave,” she said, desperate and determined in equal measure. “You never wanted an assistant in the first place, and I think it’s high time I rethink my career prospects.”
Pato only raised a dark brow.
“I have no business being at the palace,” she said urgently. “The princess was right. If I’d had any idea that working for your brother would harm his reputation, I never would have taken the job in the first place. I would never want people to think less of him because of me. I would never want to compromise his reputation, or—”
“You can’t possibly be this naive.”
Something Adriana had never seen before moved over Pato’s face. His hand tightened briefly, and then he released her and sat up in a smooth roll.
He shoved his hair back and pinned her with a glare when she scrambled away from him and to her knees on the far side of the bed, pulling the sheet back over her as she went. She had never seen him look like that. Brooding, dark. No hint of his famous laughter, his notorious smile.
“I’m being rational, not naive,” she countered, unable to tear her eyes away from him when he looked like this, as if he was someone else. Someone ruthless and hard. Not like easy, careless Pato at all. “Your brother was the first person to believe in me, but it was wrong of me to take advantage of that.”
Pato shook his head, rubbing at his jaw with one hand as if he was keeping words back manually.
“I abused his kindness,” she continued, her unease growing. “His—”
“For God’s sake, Adriana,” Pato spat out. “He wasn’t being kind. He was grooming you to be his mistress.”
CHAPTER FOUR
FOR A LONG, breathless moment, Adriana could only stare at him, another piece of her world crumbling into dust in this bed, shattering in that relentless golden gaze.
“That’s absurd.” She felt turned inside out. “He would never do something like that.”
“You know all about his previous assistants, I’m sure,” Pato said, in that same blunt way, a hard gleam in his gaze and no hint of a curve on that mouth of his. “Did you never question why he cycled so many of them through that position? And why they all had such different sets of credentials? One an art historian, another a socialite? Lenz prefers his mistresses be accessible.”
Adriana felt as if she’d slipped sideways into some alternate reality, where nothing made sense any longer. Lenz had wanted her, all this time, as she’d so often daydreamed he might—but not as his mistress. She’d never wanted that. And now she sat too close to naked in the morning sun with Pato, of all people, who looked like some harsher version of himself, and she was terrified that he might be right. Hadn’t her father said the same thing only yesterday?
“He’s a good man,” she whispered, shaken.
“Yes,” Pato said impatiently. “And yet he’s still flesh and blood like all the rest of us.”
She shook her head, and looked down at the bed. She’d done this. She understood that, if nothing else. This was the Righetti curse. This was her fault. Her head felt heavy again, and it pounded, but she knew it wasn’t a leftover from last night. It was the generations of Righettis running wild in her blood, and her silly notion she could be any different.
“Do people really think that I’m his mistress?” she asked, sounding like a stranger to her own ears. She was afraid to look at Pato then, but she made herself do it anyway. His eyes seemed darker than usual, and they glittered.
“Of course.” There was an edge to his low voice then, a darker sheen to that intent way he looked at her. “You are a Righetti, he is a Kitzinian prince, and one thing we know about history, Adriana, is that it repeats itself until it kills us all.”
Suddenly, the fact that she was practically naked with this man seemed obscene, disgusting. As if her flesh itself were evil, as if it had made her do this—her body ignoring her brain and acting of its own accord. She slid out of the bed and looked around wildly, her eyes falling on the nearest chair. She walked over and grabbed the oversize wrap that she’d worn against the cool London weather, dropped the sheet that made everything seem too sexual, and covered herself.
It didn’t make her feel any better.
Adriana couldn’t understand how she’d been so blind, so stupid. How she hadn’t known that of course people would think the worst of her, no matter if the tabloids had eased off—out of respect for Lenz, she understood now in a miserable rush of insight. No one had cared that she was good at her job, that she’d never so much as touched the future king. Why had she imagined any of that would matter? Because you wanted to pretend. Because you wanted to believe you could be someone else.
But she was a Righetti. There was never any mistaking that. She should have known it would poison everyone and everything she came into contact with. Even Lenz.
She turned then, and Pato still watched her, sitting there on his bed, a vision of indolent male beauty. Every inch of him royal, gorgeous and as utterly, deliberately corrupt as it was assumed she was. He’d chosen it. He was the Playboy Prince, scandalous and dissolute. But he was still a prince.
Adriana blinked. “So are you,” she said slowly, as an idea took root inside her, and began to grow. “A Kitzinian prince, I mean.”
Pato’s mouth crooked. “To my father’s everlasting dismay, yes.”
It was so simple, Adriana thought then, staring at him as if she’d never seen him before. It could fix everything.
“Then we should make them all think that I’m your mistress,” she said in a rush. She clutched the wrap tighter around her, drifting closer to the bed as she spoke. “The tabloids are halfway there already.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“No one would be at all surprised to discover that you were sleeping with a Righetti,” she continued excitedly, ignoring the odd, arrested look on his face. “Your brother is much too responsible to make that kind of mistake. But you live for mistakes. You’re famous for them!”
“I’m not following you,” he said, and she noticed then that his voice had gone low and hot, and not with the kind of heat she’d heard before.
“It wouldn’t even take that much effort.” She was warming to the topic as her mind raced ahead, picturing it. “One paparazzi picture and the whole world would be happy to believe that history was indeed repeating itself, but with a far more likely candidate than your brother.”
Pato only looked at her for a long moment, and Adriana found herself remembering, suddenly, that he was second in line to the throne. One tragedy and he would be king. All of a sudden he looked as commanding, as regal, as a man in such a position should. Powerful beyond measur
e. Dangerous.
It was as if she hadn’t seen him before. As if he’d been hiding, right there in plain sight, beneath the dissipated exterior. But how was that possible?
“It wouldn’t be real, of course,” she said quickly, confusion making her feel edgy. Or maybe that was him. “All we’d need was a few pictures and some good PR spin.”
He laughed then, but it was a low, almost aggressive sound, and it made her whole body stiffen in reaction.
“You can’t possibly be suggesting that we pretend you’re sleeping with me to preserve my brother’s reputation,” he said softly, and Adriana didn’t miss the fact that the tone he used was deadly. It made her stomach twist. “You are not actually standing here in my bedroom, wearing almost nothing, and proposing such a thing.”
She searched his face, but he was a stranger, dark and hard.
“That’s exactly what I’m proposing.”
His jaw worked. His golden eyes flashed. “No.”
She scowled at him. “Why not?”
“Do you really require a reason?” he demanded, and then he got to his feet, making everything that much more tense. “You’d be much better served making certain we both forget this absurd conversation ever happened.”
That was when Adriana realized, in a kind of shock, that he was angry. Pato, who famously never got angry. Who was supposed to be carefree and easy in all things. Who had laughed off every sticky situation he’d ever been in.
But not this one. Not today. He was angry. And she had no idea why.
She watched him warily as he roamed around the foot of the bed, so close to naked, and now that temper she hadn’t known he had spilling out around him like a black cloud. But she couldn’t stop. Not when she’d figured out a way to fix things. And what did he care, anyway? It wasn’t as if his reputation was at stake.
“I don’t understand,” she said after a moment, trying to sound reasonable. Rational. “You’ve gone out of your way to link yourself to every woman with a bad reputation you’ve ever come across. Why not me? My bad reputation goes back centuries!”
“I actually did those things,” he replied, that dark temper rich in his voice, in the narrow gaze he aimed at her. “I didn’t pretend for the cameras. I don’t apologize for who I am, but I also don’t fake it.”
Adriana blinked. “So your issue isn’t the idea itself, then. It’s that you need your debaucheries to be honest and truthful. Real.”
The way he looked at her then made a low, dark pulse begin to drum in her, panic and heat and something else she’d never experienced before and couldn’t name. It took everything she had not to bolt for the door and forget she’d ever started this.
“My reputation is my life’s work,” Pato said, and there was a certain harshness in his voice then, dark and grim and tired, that made something clutch hard in Adriana’s chest. “It’s not a cross I’m forced to bear. It’s deliberate.”
“Fine,” she blurted out. She’d never felt so desperate. She only knew this had to happen, she had to have the opportunity to fix one thing her family name had ruined, just one thing—
“Fine?” he echoed, his golden eyes narrowing, focusing in on her in a way that should have made her fall over in a dead faint. Incinerate on the spot. Run.
Something.
But she met his gaze squarely instead.
“We don’t have to fake it,” Adriana said, very distinctly, so there could be no mistake. “I’ll sleep with you.”
All the air in the room evaporated into a shimmer of heat. Into the intensity of Pato’s gaze, the electricity that arced between them, the tension bright and taut and very nearly painful.
He laughed, low and dark and wicked, and Adriana felt it like a touch, as if his strong, elegant hands were directly on her skin. It made her feel weak. It made her want to drop the wrap and press herself against him, to see if that might ease the heavy ache inside her, the pulse of it, the need.
But who was she kidding? She knew it would. And so did he.
“You have no idea what you’re asking, Adriana,” he scoffed. His mouth curved mockingly, knowingly, and that ache in her only grew sharper, more insistent. She suddenly wasn’t at all sure what she was desperate for. But she couldn’t look away. “You wouldn’t know where to start.”
Adriana couldn’t stop the shivering, way down deep inside her.
Her bones felt like jelly and she didn’t know what scared her more—that she might really follow through and throw herself at him, and God only knew what would become of her then, or that the terrible ache inside her might take her to the ground on its own, and then he’d know exactly how much he tormented her.
Though she suspected he already did.
Pato was coming toward her, that sun-kissed skin on careless display, the faint brush of dark hair across his hard pectoral muscles seeming to emphasize his fascinating, unapologetic maleness. And he watched her so intently as he moved, his golden eyes gleaming as if all the wickedness in the world was in him, dark and rich and his to use against her if he chose. All his.
She shouldn’t find that at all intriguing. She shouldn’t wonder, now that she’d glimpsed a different side of this man, what else he hid behind his disreputable mask.
This is about Lenz, she reminded herself sharply. She refused to think about Pato’s claim that her beloved crown prince had wanted her as his mistress all those years she’d believed they’d been working together in harmony. She couldn’t let that matter. This was about saving the one thing she could save, the one thing her family name had blackened that she could actually wash clean.
She couldn’t save herself, perhaps. But she could save Lenz’s reputation.
“Your brother—” she began.
“Rule number five,” Pato said smoothly, but with that alarming kick of dark fire beneath. “When attempting to negotiate your way into my bed, don’t bring up my brother. Ever.”
Adriana felt her pulse beating too hard inside her neck, her wrists. And lower, where it mixed with that ache in her, gave it bite. She forced herself to stand still as Pato roamed toward her. Forced herself to act as if he didn’t, in fact, intimidate her—even when he stopped so close to her that she had to tilt her head back to look at him.
He crossed his arms over his chest, his eyes unreadable.
“Are we negotiating?” she asked, her voice so much smaller than it should have been. Telling him too much she shouldn’t let him know.
“I don’t take trembling virgins to my bed, Adriana,” Pato said, with all that gold in his gaze and that curve to his lips, but still, that new hardness beneath. It almost made her miss what he’d said. Then it penetrated, and her body seemed to detonate into a long, red flush of humiliation—but he wasn’t finished. “Particularly not trembling, terrified virgins who imagine themselves in love with my brother and view my bed as a sacrificial altar.”
“I—” She’d never stammered in her life. She had to order herself to snap her mouth closed, to calm herself. Or at least to breathe. “I’m not terrified.” His gaze never wavered, and yet she was sure it was consuming her where she stood. “And, of course, I’m certainly not a virgin.”
His dark brows rose. “Convince me.”
“How?” she demanded, bright red and humiliated. And trembling, just as he’d accused. He missed nothing. “Not that it would matter if I was or that it’s any of your business, let me point out.”
“But it is.” He was merciless, his hard gaze hot. “You want in my bed? Then I want to know every last detail of your vast sexual experience. Convince me, Adriana. Consider it a job interview—your résumé. After all, you’ve read all about me in the tabloids. You said so yourself.”
She told herself he couldn’t possibly be asking that. This couldn’t possibly be happening. But then, what part of this day so far was at all possibl
e? She didn’t drink to excess and wake up in men’s beds. She didn’t have extended conversations with royal Kitzinian princes in her underwear. And had she really told this man she would sleep with him?
So she took a deep breath and she told him what she thought he wanted to hear.
“I couldn’t possibly count them all,” she said primly, lifting her chin. “I stopped keeping track when I passed into triple digits.”
He only shook his head at her.
“For all I know you and I have already slept together, in fact,” she continued wildly. “Didn’t you once tell an interviewer that you blacked out the better part of the last decade? Well, you’re not alone. Who knows where I’ve been? You were probably there, too, making a spectacle of yourself.”
“And somehow,” Pato said mildly, “I remain unconvinced.”
“Everybody knows I’m a whore,” Adriana forced herself to say, not wanting to admit how limited her sexual experience really was. She wasn’t a virgin, true—but that was more or less a technicality, and deeply embarrassing to boot. “They’ve been calling me that since I was a child, before I even knew what the word meant. Why shouldn’t I embrace it? You do.”
“That doesn’t answer the question, does it?” His gaze bored into her, not relenting at all. Not even the smallest bit. “You have not had sexual partners numbering in the triple digits, Adriana. I’d be very much surprised if you’ve had three in the whole of your life.”
And then he simply stood there, staring down at her, somehow knowing these things that he shouldn’t. It made her feel almost itchy, as if her skin had stopped fitting her properly. As if she was seconds away from exploding, humiliated and laid unacceptably bare.
“One.” She bit out the admission, hating him, hating herself. And yet still as determined to go through with this as she was filled with that terrible, gnawing ache that she worried might consume her alive. Do it for Lenz, she ordered herself. “There was only one and it—”
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