A Royal Without Rules

by Caitlin Crews

  “But—”

  “I promise,” he whispered against her mouth.

  And then he kissed her, igniting fire and need and that searing joy, and she decided there were far better things to do with the man she loved than argue.

  For now.

  * * *

  Adriana woke the morning before the royal wedding with a smile on her face. She turned off her alarm and settled back against her pillow, smiling at the light pouring in through her windows as if the sun shone only for her. As if it was simply another gift Pato had given her.

  They hadn’t spoken again of his letting her go.

  Pato was not considered a legendary lover by accident, she’d learned. His reputed skills were no tabloid exaggeration. He’d had her twice more before they’d left the cottage that day, reducing her to a sobbing, writhing mess again and again, until she was deliciously limp, content simply to cling to him on the drive back into the city, thinking not of thrones and notoriety but him. Only him.

  “Come to the palace tomorrow,” he’d told her, letting her off on a deserted corner some distance from her family’s villa, out of the circle of light thrown by the nearest streetlamp, safe from prying eyes and gossiping tongues.

  “You sacked me,” she’d reminded him primly. He’d grinned at her, sitting on that lethal-looking motorcycle and holding fast to one of her hands.

  “I changed my mind. I do that.” His wicked brows rose. “It is my great royal privilege.”

  “I’m not sure I want the job,” she’d teased. “My employer is embarrassing and often inappropriately dressed. And the hours are terrible.”

  He’d tugged her to him then, kissing her as slowly and as thoroughly as if he hadn’t done so already that day, too many times to count. He kissed her until she was boneless against him, and only then did he let her go.

  “Don’t be late,” he’d said, his eyes gleaming in the dark. “And I do hope you can behave yourself. I can’t have my assistant throwing herself at me at every opportunity. I take my position as the royal ornament and national disaster very seriously.”

  He’d roared off, splitting the night with the noise his motorcycle made, and Adriana had fairly danced all the way back to the villa.

  And then, the following morning, he’d sauntered into his office wearing nothing but a pair of dark trousers low on his narrow hips. He’d shut the door behind him and had her over his desk before he’d even said good-morning. She’d had to bite her own hand to make sure she stayed quiet while Pato moved inside her, whispering dark and thrilling things in her ear, pushing them both straight over the edge.

  He’d started as he meant to go on, Adriana thought now, rolling out of her bed and padding into her bath. They’d followed his usual schedule, packed this week with extra wedding requirements. The difference was, every time they were alone they’d been unable to keep their hands off each other. The car, his office, even a blazingly hot encounter all of three steps away from a corporate luncheon. He’d simply glanced into what was probably a coatroom, pulled her inside and braced her against a chair that sat near the far wall.

  “Hang on,” he’d murmured, leaning over her back and wrapping his hands around her hips. And then he’d thrust into her, hot and hard and devastatingly talented, and she’d stopped caring about the speech he’d been meant to give. She’d cared about nothing at all but the wild blaze between them and the way they both burned in it, together.

  Adriana left her bedroom then, twisting her hair up into a knot as she walked through the villa in search of her morning coffee. She felt lighter than she had in years. She smiled down the hallways toward that closed-off parlor, and took her time descending the grand stairs.

  Last night Pato had been called upon to entertain visiting dignitaries and royals from across Europe, all in town for the wedding. When the long evening was over and they were alone in his car, he’d pulled Adriana to him. He’d tucked her beneath his arm, arranged her legs over his lap and rested his chin on the top of her head. Then he’d simply held her. When his driver started up the hill toward the Righetti villa, he’d hit the intercom and told him to simply keep driving.

  They’d driven for a long time, circling around and around the city. Pato had played with her hair idly. She’d closed her eyes and let herself enjoy the luxury of time to bask in him. He’d held her close against his heart while the city bled light and noise all around them.

  Inside the car, it had been quiet. Soft. Perfect. And Adriana had never felt more cherished. More loved.

  She didn’t notice the strained silence in the kitchen until she was pouring herself a cup of coffee. She turned to find her father staring at her, an arrested expression on his face she’d never seen before. Even her mother looked pale, one hand clutching at her heart as if it were broken, her eyes cast down toward the table.

  “What’s happened?” Adriana asked, terrified. She left her coffee on the counter and took a step toward the table, looking back and forth between her parents. Was it one of her brothers? “Has there been an accident?”

  Her mother only shook her head as if she couldn’t bear to speak, squeezing her eyes shut, and Adriana went cold.

  “You know what you’ve done,” her father stated in a hard voice. “And now, Adriana, so does the world.”

  It took her a moment to understand what he was saying—and that he really was speaking to her with all that chilly animosity. And when she did understand it, she shook her head in confusion.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

  “I blame myself.” Her father pushed back his chair and climbed to his feet, looking far older than he had the day before. Adriana felt a deep pang of fear. Then he stood there for a moment, his hard gaze raking over her as if she was something dirty.

  And she knew, then.

  That familiar, panicked cold bloomed deep inside her, spreading out and turning black, ripping open that same old wound and letting the emptiness back in.

  He knew about Pato.

  “Papa,” she said softly, reaching out a hand toward him, but he recoiled. Her throat constricted when she tried to swallow, and she slowly dropped her arm back to her side.

  “I knew you were too beautiful,” he told her in that terrible voice, and Adriana felt it like a knife, sinking deep into her belly. “I knew it would ruin us. Beauty like that is only the surface, Adriana, and everything beneath it is corrupt. Sinful. Twisted. I saw it myself in Sandrine, in her contempt for propriety. It runs in this family like a disease. I knew it was in you since the day you were born a girl.”

  She felt unsteady on her feet, as if he’d actually cut her open. Perhaps it would have been better—less painful—if he had. And she was too aware of her mother’s continued silence in place of her usual unspoken support, weighing on Adriana like an indictment.

  “There’s no Righetti family disease,” she said when she could speak. It was hard to keep her voice calm, her gaze steady as she faced her father. “There never was. We’re only people, Papa, and we all make our own choices.”

  His lip curled, and he stared at her as if he’d never seen her before now. As if she’d worn a mask her whole life, until today, and what he saw beneath it disgusted him. It made her feel sick.

  “Tell me he forced you. Coerced you. Tell me, daughter, that you did not betray your family’s trust in you willingly. That you did not follow in the footsteps of all the whores who sullied the Righetti name before you and take Prince Pato—” he spat out the name as if it was the foulest of curses “—as your lover. Tell me you are not so stupid as to open your legs for that degenerate. Tell me.”

  Adriana didn’t understand how this was happening. Her head pounded and her heart felt like lead in her chest, and she didn’t know what to do, how to make this better. How to explain what it was like to be free of her chains to the man who’d he
lped fashion them, because he wore so many of his own.

  “He’s not a degenerate,” she whispered, and it was a mistake.

  Her father let out a kind of roar—enraged and humiliated and broken. It made her mother jerk in her chair. It made Adriana want to cry. But instead, she wrapped her arms around her middle and watched him, waiting for his eyes to meet hers again.

  When they did, she thought the look in them might leave marks.

  “You don’t understand,” she said quickly, desperately.

  “I cannot bear to look at you.” He sounded deeply, irreversibly disgusted. It made her eyes fill with tears. “All I see are his fingerprints, sullying you. Ruining you. Making you nothing more than one more Righetti whore, like all the rest.” He shook his head. “You have proved to the world that we are tainted. Dirty. You have destroyed us all over again, Adriana, and for what? The chance to be one more conquest in an endless line? The opportunity to warm a bed that has never gone cold? How could you?”

  She shook, but she didn’t move, not even when he turned and slammed out of the room, the silence he left behind heavy and loud, pressing into her, making her want to slide into a ball on the floor. But she didn’t do it. She forced herself to look at her mother instead.

  “Mama—” she began, but her mother shook her head hard, her lips pressed together in a tight line.

  “You knew better,” she said in a harsh whisper. “From the time you were small, you knew better than this. Righettis can’t put a single foot wrong. Righettis must be above reproach—especially a girl who looks like you, as if you stepped out of one of those paintings. I took you to meet Sandrine myself—living out her days in a foreign country with a man who should have been a duke, cast out from her home forever. You knew better.”

  It was such an unexpected slap that Adriana took a step back from the table, as if her mother really had hit her.

  “I never did anything to be ashamed of,” she blurted out, something reckless moving in her then, impossible to contain, as if she’d waited all her life for this conversation. “And yet the first thing you taught me was shame. Why do we punish ourselves before anyone else does?” Her voice cracked. “Why did you?”

  But that made it worse. Her mother stood then, straight and sorrowful, both hands at her heart and her eyes like nails, staring at Adriana as if she was a stranger.

  “You’ve made your bed, Adriana,” she said coldly. “We’ll all have to lie in it, won’t we? I certainly hope it was worth it. Sandrine always thought so, but then, she died alone and far away, in a cloud of disgrace. And so will you.”

  Her mother didn’t slam the door when she left. She simply walked away and didn’t look back, which was worse. Worse than a slap.

  And Adriana stood there in all that silence, awful and simmering and ugly, and tried to keep herself from falling apart.

  She looked around desperately, as if a solution might rise up from the tiled floor, and that was when she saw the paper spread out in the middle of the wooden table as if her parents had pored over it together.

  The paper.

  For a moment she couldn’t bring herself to look, because she could imagine what she’d see. She’d been imagining it, in one form or another, since she was a girl. She’d had nightmares about it more than once. She stared at the paper as if it were a serpent coiled up in the middle of the kitchen, fangs extended.

  But in the end, she couldn’t help herself.

  Playboy Pato Succumbs to Witchy Righetti’s Spell! Well known for her notorious wiles, Adriana Righetti—very much an heir to her family’s storied charms—has made a shocking play for the kingdom’s favorite bachelor—

  She couldn’t do it, she told herself, squeezing her eyes shut, her hand at her throat as if her pulse might leap out from beneath her skin.

  But there was more. She had to look.

  There was the helpful sidebar that ran down all the infamous members of the Righetti family, complete with pictures and a few snide lines detailing their sins. Carolina, shameless mistress to Crown Prince and later King Philip. Maria, rumored to have slept with all three royal princes and some assorted cousins with dukedoms in an effort to trade upward, until she reached Eduardo, the future king. Francesca, lifelong consort of Prince Vidal. Sandrine, who’d disrupted the Reinsmark dukedom. And Almado the traitor, who had assassinated King Oktav. And somehow it managed to suggest, without ever doing so directly, that Adriana herself had been mistress to all those Kitzinian royals before going on to personally betray the country, before taking her position in the palace and turning her attention to the easily seduced and obviously beguiled Pato.

  And then there were the pictures.

  They’d been taken the day before yesterday, she saw at once. She reached out to run a shaky finger over the series of photos before her, smudging the newspaper ink. She’d thought they were alone. Pato had spent the morning at an event, and they had been waiting in the antechamber of the hall for his driver to pull around. She’d been certain they were alone.

  And that was why she hadn’t protested when he’d turned to her with that wild and hungry look in his eyes. Why she’d leaned into him when he’d taken her mouth in a lush promise of a kiss. It had been devastating and quick, a mere appetizer to what he’d do once they climbed into the car, he’d informed her with that gleam of gold in his eyes. And he’d kept his word.

  It had been a single kiss. Hot and private. Theirs.

  But the pictures looked openly carnal. The very number of photographs made it seem they’d kissed for a long time, so focused on each other that they were reckless, careless. The paper tutted about the locale and the fact that neither of them had apparently noticed or cared that they’d been in public—“par for the course for Pato, but can Adriana’s history make her anything but a terrible influence on the kingdom’s bad boy?”

  She had no idea how long she stood there in the kitchen, all alone with the newspaper and its malicious recounting and reshaping of her life into nasty little innuendos and silly nicknames. At first she didn’t know what snapped her out of it—but then she heard the banging at the door, harsh and loud. And the shouting.

  Her stomach sank to her feet. Paparazzi.

  She should have expected them. She’d dealt with them a thousand times before—but never when she was the target. Adriana took a deep breath, and then pulled all the curtains shut without letting them get a glimpse of her, took the landline telephone off its hook, making it as difficult as possible for the cockroaches swarming in her street to get what they were after.

  She didn’t seek out her parents. They would expect an apology—an apology Adriana doubted they would accept. And she might feel sick to her stomach, she might feel battered and attacked, exposed and alone, but she wasn’t sorry.

  When she finally climbed back up to her room, her mobile was lit up with messages. Reporters. Supposed “friends” she hadn’t spoken to in years. Her few actual friends, quietly wondering how she was. More reporters. And then the clipped and frigid tones of the king’s private secretary, a man Adriana had seen from afar but had certainly never met, informing her that her services to the royal household were no longer required.

  She was cut off. Dismissed. The Righetti contamination had been officially removed from the palace.

  It was not until dusk began to creep through the streets that Adriana admitted to herself that she’d expected Pato to appear again—to race to the villa and save her, somehow, from this public disgrace. Make it better, even if this public stoning via newspaper was exactly what she’d volunteered for. Twice.

  Because it turned out that being called a whore her whole life had not, in fact, prepared her for what it was like to see it printed in the newspapers and all across the internet, not as speculation this time, but fact. It hadn’t prepared her for that scene in the kitchen with her parents. It hadn’t pr
epared her at all.

  And when she’d wanted to do this, she understood as she sat there, barricaded in her childhood bedroom, she’d thought only about how Lenz or Pato might benefit from this kind of media attention. She hadn’t thought about her family at all, and the guilt of that grew heavier as the day wore on. This wasn’t only about her. It never had been. This was her family’s nightmare, and she’d made it real.

  Pato had been right. She’d been so busy rushing to martyr herself that she hadn’t stopped to consider precisely what that might entail. Or just how many people it would hurt besides her.

  Eventually, she had to accept the fact that Pato wasn’t coming.

  And with it, a wave of other things she didn’t want to think about. Such as how ruthless he really was, how manipulative. He’d told her so himself. How he’d promised this wouldn’t happen, and yet it had. And what his silence today suggested that meant.

  She couldn’t cry. She could hardly move. It simply hurt too much.

  Late that night, Adriana found herself in the parlor with the other harlots. She curled up in the chair below their portraits and stared at them until her eyes went blurry.

  This was inevitable from the start, she told herself. You walked right into it anyway, talking about love and imagining you were better than your past.

  Adriana had no one to blame for this but herself.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ADRIANA WOKE WITH a start, her heart pounding.

  For a moment she didn’t know where she was, but even as she uncurled herself from the chair she found herself in, she remembered, and a glance at the wall before her, and the three portraits hanging there, confirmed it.