He waited, his eyes intent and demanding on hers, and she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t tell this sleek, sensual, unapologetically carnal creature about that fumble in the dark, the shock of searing pain and then the unpleasant fullness that followed. That vulnerable, exposed feeling. She’d been seventeen. It had taken all of three unremarkable minutes in a bedroom at a party she shouldn’t have gone to in the first place, and then he’d bragged to the whole school that the Righetti girl was as much of a whore as suspected.
“And?” Pato prompted her.
“It was mercifully brief.”
“I feel seduced already,” he said drily. “What a tempting picture you paint. How can I possibly resist the sacrificial near-virgin who wishes to prostrate herself in my bed for my brother’s benefit? I’ve never been so aroused.”
Each dry, sardonic word, delivered in that deliberately stinging way of his, made Adriana’s fists tighten where she held the wrap around her. She felt that flush of heat that told her she was getting redder, broadcasting the fact he was getting to her. She felt that twist in her gut and still, that ache below. This was a disaster.
But you have to do it. You’ll never be able to live with yourself if you don’t. This might be the only opportunity you ever have to do something good with all this notoriety...
“Then teach me,” she exclaimed, cutting him off before he could continue ripping her to shreds one sardonic word at a time.
For a moment, Pato only looked at her.
And then he closed the distance between them, reaching out to spear his hands into the wild tangle of her hair, making her go up slightly on her toes and brace her hands against the hot, hard planes of his chest or fall completely against him. Her wrap floated to the floor between them, and she forgot it as he held her face still, keeping her captive, a mere breath away from his beautiful mouth.
She heard a sharp, high sound, some kind of gasp, and realized only belatedly that she’d made it. The echo of it made her tremble, or perhaps that was the wildfire in his eyes.
“Teach me everything,” she whispered, spurred on by some dark thing inside her she hardly recognized. But she saw the way his eyes flared, and the ache inside her bloomed in immediate response.
His mouth was so close to hers, his face dark and dangerous, that lethal fire in his gaze. And yet he only held her there, taut and breathless, while sensation after sensation shook through her. Towering flames in her throat, her breasts, her belly. That shocking brightness between her legs.
Her lips parted slightly, and she recognized it as the invitation it was. His gaze dropped to her mouth, hungry and hard, and she felt her nipples pull tight. Nothing existed but that pulse of heat that drummed in her, louder and wilder—
And then he dragged his gaze back to hers and let her go.
She caught herself before she staggered backward, but she was shaky, unbalanced, and for some reason felt as if she might burst into tears. She couldn’t seem to form the words she needed, and his eyes darkened because, of course, he knew that, too. He’d done this to her deliberately.
“You can’t handle me, Adriana,” Pato growled. “Look at you. I’ve barely touched you and you’re coming apart.”
That dark thing inside of her roared through her, making her bold. Making her stark, raving mad. But she couldn’t hold it in check. She couldn’t stop.
She didn’t want to stop, and she didn’t want to think about why.
“It looks like you’re the one who’s coming apart, Your Royal Highness,” she hissed. Taunting him. Poking at him, and she knew it. She wanted it—she wanted him—and the obvious truth of that was like another explosion, bathing her in a white-hot heat. Adriana had no choice then but to keep talking despite the way he looked at her. “Maybe your reputation is all lies and misdirection. Maybe the truth is you can’t handle me.”
When he laughed then, it was darker than what was inside her, darker and far wilder, and it connected to that ache in her, hard. So hard she stopped breathing.
And then he moved.
His arms came around her and his hands slid over her bottom with an easy command, as if he’d touched her a thousand times before and just as carnally, slipping directly into her panties and pausing to test her curves, her flesh, against the heat of his palms. She made a wild sort of sound, but as she did he hauled her to him and lifted her against him, pulling her legs around his waist even as her back hit the wall behind her.
The room seemed to spin around, but that was only Pato, pressing her to the wall of his chest and the wall at her back, molding his hips to hers, the hardest part of him flush against her. Skin. Heat. Fires within fires, and she was afraid she was already burned to a crisp. Everything hurt—but was eased by the heat of him, only to hurt again. And again.
She expected an explosion. A detonation. Something to match that searing blaze in his gaze, the drum of anticipation beneath her skin, that hunger between her legs that he was only making worse. Her eyes were glazed and wide, and she could feel him everywhere. That perfect, lean body pressed against her, into her, so powerful and male, holding her steady so far from the ground.
His hands moved over her skin, leaving trails of fire in his wake. He traced the curve of her breasts, teased the hard tips with his thumbs until she moaned. He moved his hips, rocking against her, making her breath come in desperate pants even as her core ignited into a glorious, molten ache that she never wanted to end, that she wasn’t sure she’d survive.
Adriana couldn’t think. She could only hold on to his broad, hard shoulders and surrender to the dark exultation that roared in her, that made her try to get closer to him, that made her think she might die if she couldn’t taste him. That made her want things she’d only read about before. That made her want everything.
He leaned in close, so close that when his wicked mouth curved again, she felt it against her own lips, and it made her shake against him, the small moan escaping her before she could stop it.
“Let me see if I can handle this,” he mocked her.
“I don’t think you can,” she heard herself say. “Or you already would have.”
As if she was as wanton as he was, and as unashamed. As if she knew what she was demanding.
That smile of his deepened, torturing her. Delighting her.
And then, slowly and deliberately, with one hand on her bottom to move her against him in a sinuous rhythm that made her feel weak, the other at her jaw to hold her where he wanted her, Pato took his own sweet time and licked his way into her mouth.
Ruining her, Adriana thought while the world disappeared, forever.
* * *
He never should have tasted her.
That it was a terrible mistake was a certainty, but Adriana clung to him like honey, melting and hot, tasting like sugar and fire with her lithe body wrapped all around him. Pato couldn’t stop himself. For a heady moment—his mouth angled over hers, tasting her again and again and again—he even forgot why he should.
This was supposed to be a lesson to her. A way to decidedly call her bluff, nothing more.
And yet he wanted to take her where they stood, pressed up against the wall, thrusting into the heat of her he could feel scalding him through the thin layers that barely separated them. She was so soft. So responsive.
Perfect.
But she didn’t want him, no matter what her body shouted at him. No matter what he felt in his arms, what he tasted.
She met him even as he grew bolder, hotter, more demanding. She kissed him as if she’d forgotten who it was she truly wanted. She bloomed beneath his hands, incandescent and addicting. She twined her arms around his neck and writhed against him as if she was as desperate as he was, as if she wanted nothing more than Pato deep inside of her.
But she wanted Lenz. She was in love with Lenz. Pato had seen it.
It was that unpalatable fact that he couldn’t make himself ignore, no matter how hard he was and no matter what he would have given, in that moment, to simply drive into her and ride them both into an oblivion where Lenz did not exist. Could never exist.
Where there was only this heat. This need. This delicious electricity, intense and greedy, that made him want to taste every part of her, make her scream out in pleasure while he did, and then take her until she sobbed his name.
His name, not his brother’s.
But he couldn’t stop. He didn’t want to stop. What was this woman doing to him? He’d never acted with so little thought before. He’d never forgot to hide himself. He’d certainly never opened his mouth and let some part of the truth come out. It was as if he’d lost the control that had defined him since he was eighteen....
That couldn’t happen. He couldn’t let it.
He spun around, walking them back to the bed with Adriana still wrapped around him, and then he tortured himself by bringing them down on the mattress—catching himself on one arm so he didn’t crush her, but letting himself revel in the feel of her beneath him the way he wanted her, even for a moment.
Pato had never put much stock in the kingdom’s insistence that Righetti women were akin to witches, temptresses and jezebels without equal, but pulling himself away from Adriana, from all that soft, hot fire, was the hardest thing he could remember doing.
He didn’t understand this. He didn’t understand himself.
“I can handle it, Adriana,” he told her. “I can handle you. But I won’t.”
He stood over her, telling himself it didn’t matter that she sprawled there before him, her lips swollen from his, her breasts spilling from her bra and crying out for his hands, her silken limbs spread out before him like a dessert he hungered for as if he was a starving man. It didn’t matter because it couldn’t.
He smirked, knowing it would hit her like a slap. “But I appreciate the offer.”
Her face blazed red as he’d thought it would, and she looked tense and unhappy as she pushed herself up to a sitting position. Her lovely blond hair fell in a sexy tangle around her pretty face, making her look as if he’d already had her. He wished he had, with an edge of desperation that should have alarmed him. But she sat before him, with all that lust and wild need still stamped on her face, and the only thing he felt was that pounding desire.
She inclined her head at the clear evidence that he wanted her, badly and unmistakably, then looked up to hold his gaze with hers, her chocolate eyes dark and still too hot.
“I can see how much you appreciate it, Your Royal Highness,” she said softly, but with that kick beneath that he couldn’t help but enjoy. He didn’t understand why he liked her edginess. Why he liked how unafraid she was of him, even now.
He could still taste her. He was so hard for her it hurt, and he wasn’t used to denying himself anything. Much less women. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d tried. Pato had slept with any number of women who had assumed he’d be a conduit to his brother, who had cold-bloodedly used him for that purpose. It had never bothered Pato before.
He didn’t know why it bothered him now—why that look on her face in the shadows last night kept flashing in his head. He only knew he wouldn’t—couldn’t—be this woman’s path to his brother, no matter her reasons, no matter how convoluted it all was. He wanted her head to be full of him, and nothing else.
“We can’t always have what we want,” he said quietly. He meant it more than she knew.
“You can. You do.” She frowned at him. “You’ve made a career out of it.”
Pato shook his head. “You’re not going to win this argument with me. No matter how sweetly you pout, or how naked you get. Not that I don’t enjoy both.”
She made a small sound of frustration, mixed, he could tell from the color in her cheeks, with that embarrassment that he found himself entirely too obsessed with. When was the last time he’d met a woman who still blushed?
“Is there any woman alive you haven’t slept with?” she demanded. “Or is it only me?”
“It’s only you,” Pato assured her, not knowing why he was doing this. Not understanding what there was to gain from it. Surely it would be better simply to have her. That was the time-honored approach to situations like this. Chemistry never lasted. Sex was white-hot for only a small while, and then it burned itself out. The only thing denial ever did—or so he’d heard—was make the wanting worse.
But he had never wanted someone like this. And having tasted her, he very much doubted that sex would be a cure. More like his doom.
He didn’t know where that thought came from, and yet it clawed into him.
“You didn’t even know the word no until today!” she snapped at him.
“If I were you,” he said in a low voice that he could see got to her when she shivered again, as if he’d run his fingers down the line of her elegant neck, “I’d quit now, before tempers are lost and consequences become far greater. I’d put on some clothes and remember myself. My place. Just a suggestion.”
She pulled in a breath, and her hands balled into fists, and then she shook her head slightly as if she really was remembering herself.
“I told you I’d resign,” she said after a moment. Her mouth firmed. “And I will. Today, in fact.”
“No, you will not.”
She should resign. He should see to it she was sacked, barred from the palace, kept away for her own good. She should take her melting brown eyes and that impossibly tempting body of hers, her irritating martyr’s love for the undeserving Lenz, and leave Kitzinia far behind. She should protect herself from her family’s history, from the endless, vicious rumor mill that comprised the highest levels of Kitzinian society, and was even nastier than usual when it came to her.
He wished he could protect her himself.
He was, Pato realized then, in terrible trouble. But this was a game, he reminded himself, and Adriana was a part of it. His strange, protective urges didn’t matter—they couldn’t. She wasn’t going anywhere. He needed her to stay right where she was.
“You won’t help me help your brother, and you won’t let me leave,” Adriana said, her voice as stiff as her body had become, her brown eyes rapidly cooling, which he told himself was better. “What will you let me do?”
“I suggest you do your job.” It came out harsher than he’d intended, and he saw her blink, as if it hurt. He tried to force his usual laughter into his voice, that devil-may-care attitude he’d perfected, but he couldn’t quite do it. “If you can. I can’t promise I’ll cooperate, but then, you knew that going in.”
“I don’t want—”
“I am Prince Patricio of Kitzinia and you are a Kitzinian subject,” he said, more himself in that moment than he’d allowed himself to be in years, and that, too, was trouble. Big trouble. It was too soon to be anything but Pato the Playboy, even here—and still, he couldn’t stop. “You serve at my pleasure, Adriana. Yours is irrelevant.”
For a breath, she seemed to freeze there before him. Then she averted her eyes in appropriate deference to his rank, and there was no particular triumph in winning that little skirmish, Pato found. Not when it made him feel empty. Adriana shot to her feet then and started for the door, her spine straight and every inch of her obviously, silently, furious. It hummed in the air between them. He knew it should offend his royal dignity, had he been possessed of any, but it only made him want to taste her again. Taste her temper. Let it take them both on a ride.
“Thank you, Your Royal Highness, for reminding me of my duty. And my place. I won’t forget it again.”
She spoke as she moved, her words perfectly polite if not quite as respectful as they should have been. There was that edge beneath it, that slap, that was all Adriana. It made him hunger for her all over again.
; He reached out and snagged her elbow as she passed, pulling her against him, her back to his front, cursing himself as he did it but completely unable to stop.
“I won’t forget this,” he said, directly into her ear, all of her soft skin smooth and warm and delicious against his chest, his aching sex. “As you march around to my brother’s tune and make your doomed attempts to keep me in line, I’ll remember all of this.” He let his gaze drift down over her body, satisfaction moving hard in him when her nipples hardened, when another flush worked over her sensitive skin, when her eyes eased closed and her breath went shallow. “I’ll remember those freckles between your breasts, for example, three in a line. I’ll wonder how they taste. I’ll be thinking about the way you look right now, kissed and wild and desperate, when you’re ordering me around in your conservative little business suits. It will always be there, hanging in the air between us like a fog.”
She shook her head in confusion, and he could feel the fine, delicate tremors that shook in her, the staccato beat of her pulse, all that need and fire and loss. It raged just as brightly in him.
“Then why...?”
Pato leaned closer, spurred on by demons he didn’t recognize, needs he didn’t understand at all. But their teeth were in him. Deep. And he wanted them in her, too.
“My pleasure, Adriana,” he told her fiercely, as if it was some kind of promise. A dark threat. He couldn’t tell the difference any longer. “Not yours.”
CHAPTER FIVE
ADRIANA EYED PATO across the aisle of his royal jet as it winged its way into the night from the glittering shores of Monaco back to Kitzinia, cutting inward across the top of Italy toward Switzerland, Liechtenstein and home.
He was still wearing the formal black tie he’d worn to debonair effect earlier this evening, causing the usual deafening screams when he’d walked the red carpet into the star-studded charity event. Now he murmured into his mobile phone while he lounged on the leather sofa that stretched along one side of the luxury aircraft’s lounge area. It had been a long night for him, she thought without a shred of sympathy, as he’d not only had to say a few words at the banquet dinner, but had fended off, at last count, three Hollywood actresses, the lusty wife of a French politician, a determined countess, two socialites and one extremely overconfident caterer.
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