Valentina had said he talked at her, defending himself—hadn’t she? Natalie couldn’t remember. But she also wasn’t here to poke holes in Valentina’s story. It didn’t matter if it was true. It mattered that she’d felt it, and Natalie could do something to help fix it. Or try, anyway.
“You’re right, of course,” she said softly, keeping her gaze trained to his. “It’s my fault for not foreseeing that your word was not your bond and your vows were meaningless. My deepest apologies. I’ll be certain to keep all of that in mind on our wedding day.”
He didn’t appear to move, and yet suddenly Natalie couldn’t, as surely as if he’d reached out and wrapped her in his tight grip. His dark gaze seemed to pin her to her chair, intent and hard.
“I’ve tasted you,” he reminded her, as if she could forget that for an instant. As if she hadn’t dreamed about exactly that, night after night, waking up with his taste on her tongue and a deep, restless ache between her legs. “I know you want me, yet you fight me. Is it necessary to you that I become the villain? Does that make it easier?”
Natalie couldn’t breathe. Her heart felt as if it might rip its way out of her chest all on its own, and she still couldn’t tear her gaze away from his. There was that hunger, yes, but also a kind of certainty that made her feel...liquid.
“Because it is not necessary to insult me to get my attention, princess,” Rodolfo continued in the same intense way. “You have it. And you need not question my fidelity. I will touch no other but you, if that is what you require. Does this satisfy you? Can we step away from the bloodlust, do you think?”
What that almost offhanded promise did was make Natalie feel as if she was nothing but a puppet and he was pulling all her strings, all without laying a single finger upon her. And what sent an arrow of shame and delight spiraling through her was that she couldn’t tell if she was properly horrified by that notion, or...not.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” was the best she could manage.
“You only confirm my suspicions,” he told her then, and she knew she wasn’t imagining the satisfaction that laced his dark tone. “It is not who I might or might not have dated over the past few months that so disturbs you. I do not doubt that is a factor, but it is not the whole picture. Will you tell me what is? Or will I be forced to guess?”
And she knew, somehow, that his guesses would involve his hands on her once more and God help her, she didn’t know what might happen if he touched her again. She didn’t know what she might do. Or not do.
Who she might betray, or how badly.
She stood then, moving to put the chair between them, aware of the way her magnificent gown swayed and danced as if it had a mind of its own. And of the way Rodolfo watched her do it, that hard-lit amusement in his dark eyes, as if she were acting precisely as he’d expected she would.
As if he was a rather oversize cat toying with his next meal and was in absolutely no doubt as to how this would all end.
Though she didn’t really care to imagine him treating her like his dinner. Or, more precisely, she refused to allow herself to imagine it, no matter how her pulse rocketed through her veins.
“My life is about order,” she said, and she realized as she spoke that she wasn’t playing her prescribed role. That the words were pouring out of a part of her she hadn’t even known was there inside of her. “I have duties, responsibilities, and I handle them all. I like to handle them. I like knowing that I’m equal to any task that’s put in front of me, and then proving it. Especially when no one thinks I can.”
“And you are duly celebrated for your sense of duty throughout the great houses of Europe.” Rodolfo inclined his head. “I salute you.”
“I can’t tell if you’re mocking me or not, but I don’t require celebration,” she threw back at him. “It’s not about that. It’s about the accomplishment. It’s about putting an order to things no matter how messy they get.”
“Valentina...”
Natalie was glad he said that name. It reminded her who she was—and who she wasn’t. It allowed her to focus through all the clamor and spin inside of her.
“But your life is chaos,” she said, low and fierce. “As far as I can tell, it always has been. I think you must like it that way, as you have been careening from one death wish to another since your brother—”
“Careful.”
He looked different then, furious and something like thrown, but she only lifted her chin and told herself to ignore it. Because the pain of an international playboy had nothing to do with her. Prince Charming was the villain in all the stories her mother had told her, never the hero. And the brother he’d lost when he was fifteen was a means to psychoanalyze this man, not humanize him. She told herself that again and again. And then she forged on.
“He died, Rodolfo. You lived.” He hissed in a breath as if she’d struck him, but Natalie didn’t stop. “And yet your entire adult life appears to be a calculated attempt to change that. You and I have absolutely nothing in common.”
Rodolfo stood. The glittering emotion she’d seen grip him a moment ago was in his dark gaze, ferocious and focused, but he was otherwise wiped clean. She would have been impressed if she’d been able to breathe.
“My brother’s death was an unfortunate tragedy.” But he sounded something like hollow. As if he was reciting a speech he’d learned by rote a long time ago. His gaze remained irate and focused on her. “I never intended to fill his shoes and, in fact, make no attempt to do so. I like extreme sports, that is all. It isn’t a death wish. I am neither suicidal nor reckless.”
He might as well have been issuing his own press release.
“If you die while leaping out of helicopters to get to the freshest ski slope in the world, the way you famously do week after week in winter, you will not only break your neck and likely die, you will leave your country in chaos,” Natalie said quietly. His gaze intensified, but she didn’t look away. “It all comes back to chaos, Your Highness. And that’s not me.”
She expected him to rage at her. To argue. She expected that dark thing in him to take him over, and she braced herself for it. If she was honest, she was waiting for him to reach out and his put his hands on her again the way he had the last time. She was waiting for his kiss as surely as if he’d cast a spell and that was her only hope of breaking it—
It was astonishing, really, how much of a fool she was when it counted.
But Rodolfo’s hard, beguiling mouth only curved as if there wasn’t a world of seething darkness in his eyes, and somehow that sent heat spiraling all the way through her.
“Maybe it should be, princess,” he said softly, so softly, as if he was seducing her where he stood. As if he was the spell and there was no breaking it, not when he was looking at her like that, as if no one else existed in all the world. “Maybe a little chaos is exactly what you need.”
CHAPTER SIX
THE CHARITY GALA took place in a refurbished ancient villa, blazing with light and understated wealth and dripping with all manner of international celebrities like another layer of decoration. Icons from the epic films of Bollywood mingled with lauded stars of the stages of the West End and rubbed shoulders with a wide selection of Europe’s magnificently blooded aristocrats, all doing what they did best. They graced the red carpet as if they found nothing more delightful, smiling into cameras and posing for photographs while giving lip service to the serious charity cause du jour.
Rodolfo escorted his mouthy, surprising princess down the gauntlet of the baying paparazzi, smiling broadly as the press went mad at the sight of them, just as he’d suspected they would.
“I told you,” he murmured, leaning down to put his mouth near her ear. As much to sell the story of their great romance as to take pleasure in the way she shivered, then stiffened as if she was trying to hide it from him. Who could have imagined that his distant betrothed was so exquisitely sensitive? He couldn’t wait to find out where else she was this tender. This sweet. “They want nothing
more than to imagine us wildly and madly in love.”
“A pity my imagination is not quite so vivid,” she replied testily, though she did it through a smile that perhaps only he could tell was not entirely serene.
But the grin on Rodolfo’s face as they made their way slowly through the wall of flashing cameras and shouting reporters wasn’t feigned in the least.
“You didn’t mention which charity this gala benefits,” the princess said crisply as they followed the well-heeled crowd inside the villa, past dramatic tapestries billowing in the slight breeze and a grand pageant of colored lights in the many fountains along the way.
“Something critically important, I am sure,” he replied, and his grin only deepened when she slid a reproving look at him. “Surely they are all important, princess. In the long run, does it matter which one this is?”
“Not to you, clearly,” she murmured, nodding regally at yet another photographer. “I am sure your carelessness—excuse me, I mean thoughtfulness—is much appreciated by all the charities around who benefit from your random approach.”
Rodolfo resolved to take her out in public every night, to every charity event he could find in Europe, whether he’d heard of its cause or not. Not only because she was stunning and he liked looking at her, though that helped. The blazing lights caught the red in her hair and made it shimmer. The gray dress she wore hugged her figure before falling in soft waves to the floor. She was a vision, and better than all of that, out here in the glare of too many spotlights she could not keep chairs between them to ward him off. He liked the heat of her arm through his. He liked her body beside his, lithe and slender as if she’d been crafted to fit him. He liked the faint scent of her, a touch of something French and something sweet besides, and below it, the simplicity of that soap she used.
There wasn’t much he didn’t like about this woman, if he was honest, not even her intriguing puritan streak. Or her habit of poking at him the way no one else had ever dared, not even his disapproving father, who preferred to express his endless disappointment with far less sharpness and mockery. No one else ever threw Felipe in his face and if they’d ever tried to do such a remarkably stupid thing, it certainly wouldn’t have been to psychoanalyze him. Much less find him wanting.
He took care of that all on his own, no doubt. And the fact that his own father found his second son so much more lacking than his first was common knowledge and obvious to all. No need to underscore it.
Rodolfo supposed it was telling that as little as he cared to have that conversation, he hadn’t minded that Valentina had tried. Or he didn’t mind too much. He didn’t know where his deferential, disappearing princess had gone, the one who had hidden in plain sight when there’d been no one in the room but the two of them, but he liked this one much better.
The hardest part of his body agreed. Enthusiastically. And it didn’t much care that they were out in public.
But there was another gauntlet to run inside the villa. One Rodolfo should perhaps have anticipated.
“I take it that you did not make proclamations about your sudden onset of fidelity to your many admirers,” Valentina said dryly after they were stopped for the fifth time in as many steps by yet another woman who barely glanced at the princess and then all but melted all over Rodolfo. Right there in front of her.
For the first time in his entire adult life, Rodolfo found he was faintly embarrassed by his own prowess with the fairer sex.
“It is not the sort of thing one typically announces,” he pointed out, while attempting to cling to his dignity, despite the number of slinky women circling him with that same avid look in their eyes. “It has the whiff of desperation about it, does it not?
“Of course, generally speaking, becoming engaged is the announcement.” What was wrong with him, that he found her tartness so appealing? Especially when not a bit of it showed on her lovely, serene face? How had he spent all these months failing to notice how appealing she was? He’d puzzled it over for days and still couldn’t understand it. “I can see the confusion in your case, given your exploits these last months.”
“Yet here I am,” he pointed out, slanting a look down at her, amused despite himself. “At your side. Exuding fidelity.”
“That is not precisely what you exude,” she said under her breath, because naturally she couldn’t let any opportunity pass to dig at him, and then they were swept into the receiving line.
It felt like a great many hours later when they finally made it into the actual gala itself. A band played on a raised dais while glittering people outshone the blazing chandeliers above them. Europe’s finest and fanciest stood in these rooms, and he’d estimate that almost all of them had their eyes fixed on the spectacle of Prince Rodolfo and Princess Valentina actually out and about together for once—without a single one of their royal relatives in sight as the obvious puppeteers of what had been hailed everywhere as an entirely cold-blooded marriage of royal convenience.
But their presence here had already done exactly what Rodolfo had hoped it would. He could see it in the faces of the people around them. He’d felt it on the red carpet outside, surrounded by paparazzi nearly incandescent with joy over the pictures they’d be able to sell of the two of them. He could already read the accompanying headlines.
Do the Daredevil Prince and the Dutiful Princess Actually Like Each Other After All?
He could feel the entire grand ballroom of the villa seem to swell with the force of all that speculation and avid interest.
And Rodolfo made a command decision. They could do another round of the social niceties that would cement the story he wanted to sell even further, assuming he wasn’t deluged by more of the sort of women who were happy to ignore his fiancée as she stood beside him. Or he could do what he really wanted to do, which was get his hands on Valentina right here in public, where she would have no choice but to allow it.
This was what he was reduced to. On some level, he felt the requisite shame. Or some small shadow of it, if he was honest.
Because it still wasn’t much of a contest.
“Let’s dance, shall we?” he asked, but he was already moving toward the dance floor in the vast, sparkling ballroom that seemed to swirl around him as he spoke. His proper, perfect princess would have to yank her arm out of his grip with some force, creating a scene, if she wanted to stop him.
He was sure he could see steam come off her as she realized that for herself, then didn’t do it. Mutinously, if that defiant angle of her pointed chin was any clue.
“I don’t dance,” she informed him coolly as he stopped and turned to face her. He dropped her arm but stood a little too close to her, so the swishing skirt of her long dress brushed against his legs. It made her have to tip her head back to meet his gaze. And he was well aware it created the look of an intimacy between them. It suggested all kinds of closeness, just as he wanted it to do.
As much to tantalize the crowd as to tempt her.
“Are you certain?” he asked idly.
“Of course I’m certain.”
Other guests waltzed around them, pretending not to stare as they stood still in the center of the dance floor as if they were having an intense discussion. Possibly an argument. Inviting gossip and rumor with every moment they failed to move. But Rodolfo forgot about all the eyes trained on them in the next breath. He gazed down at his princess, watching as the strangest expression moved over her face. Had she been anyone else, he would have called it panic.
“Then I fear I must remind you that you have been dancing since almost before you could walk,” he replied, trying to keep his voice mild and a little bit lazy, as if that could hide the intensity of his need to touch her. As if every moment he did not was killing him. He felt as if it was.
He reached over and took her hands in his, almost losing his cool when he felt that simple touch everywhere—from his fingers to his feet and deep in his aching sex—far more potent than whole weekends he could hardly recall with women he would
n’t remember if they walked up and introduced themselves right now. What the hell was she doing to him? But he ordered himself to pull it together.
“There is that iconic portrait of you dancing with your father at some or other royal affair. It was the darling of the fawning press for years. You are standing on his shoes while the King of Murin dances for the both of you.” Rodolfo made himself smile, as if the odd intensity that gripped him was nothing but a passing thing. The work of a moment, here and then gone in the swirl of the stately dance all around them. “I believe you were six.”
“Six,” she repeated. He thought she said it oddly, but then she seemed to recollect herself. He saw her blink, then focus on him again. “You misunderstand me. I meant that I don’t dance with you. By which I mean, I won’t.”
“It pains me to tell you that, sadly, you are wrong yet again.” He smiled at her, then indulged himself—and infuriated her—by reaching out to tug on one of the artful pieces of hair that had been left free of the complicated chignon she wore tonight. He tucked it behind her ear, marveling that so small a touch should echo inside of him the way it did then, sensation chasing sensation, as if all these months of not quite seeing her in front of him had been an exercise in restraint instead of an oddity he couldn’t explain to his satisfaction. And this was his reward. “You will dance with me at our wedding, in front of the entire world. And no doubt at a great many affairs of state thereafter. It is unavoidable, I am afraid.”
She started to frown, then caught herself. He saw the way she fought it back, and he still couldn’t understand why it delighted him on a deep, visceral level. His glass princess, turned flesh and blood and brought to life right there before him. He could see the way her lips trembled, very slightly, and he knew somehow that it was the same mad fire that blazed in him, brighter by the moment.
It made him want nothing more than to taste her here and now, the crowd and royal protocol be damned.
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