The Prince's Nine-Month Scandal

by Caitlin Crews

  He summoned their driver with a quick call, and then walked with her all the way back down the red carpet, smiling with his usual careless charm at all the paparazzi who shrieked out his name. Very much as if he enjoyed all those flashing lights and impertinent questions.

  It was Natalie who wanted to curl up into a ball and hide somewhere. Natalie who wasn’t used to this kind of attention—not directed at her, anyway. She’d fended off the press for Mr. Casilieris as part of her job, but she’d never been its focus before, and she discovered she really, truly didn’t like it. It felt like salt on her skin. Stinging and gritty. But she didn’t have the luxury of fading off into the background to catch her breath in the shadows, because she wasn’t Natalie right now. She was Princess Valentina, who’d grown up with this sort of noisy spectacle everywhere she went. Who’d danced on her doting father’s shoes when she was small and had cut her teeth on spotlights of all shapes and sizes and hell, for all she knew, enjoyed every moment of it the way Rodolfo seemed to.

  She was Princess Valentina tonight, and a princess should have managed to smile more easily. Natalie tried her best, but by the time Rodolfo handed her into the gleaming black SUV that waited for them at the end of the press gauntlet, she thought her teeth might crack from the effort of holding her perhaps not so serene smile in place.

  “I don’t need your help,” she told him, but it was too late. His hand was on her arm again as she clambered inside and then he was climbing in after her, forcing her to throw herself across the passenger seat or risk having him...all over her.

  She hated that she had to remind herself—sternly—why that would be a bad idea.

  “Would you prefer it if I had drop-kicked you into the vehicle?” he asked, still smiling as he settled himself beside her.

  There was a gleam in his dark gaze that let her know he was fully aware of the way she was clinging to the far door as if it might save her. From him. As ever, he appeared not to notice the confines or restrictions of whatever he happened to be sitting on. In this case, he sprawled out in the backseat of the SUV, taking up more than his fair share of the available room and pretty much all of the oxygen. Daring her to actually come out and comment on it, Natalie was fairly sure, rather than simply twitching her skirts away from his legs in what she hoped was obvious outrage.

  “I think you are well aware that neither I nor anyone else would prefer to be drop-kicked. And also that there exists yet another option, if one without any attendant theatrics. You could let me get in the car as I have managed to do all on my own for twenty-seven years and keep your hands to yourself while I did it.”

  He turned slightly in his seat and studied her for a moment, as the lights of Rome gleamed behind him, streaking by in the sweet, easy dark as they drove.

  “Spoken like someone who has not spent the better part of her life being helped in and out of motorcades to the roars of a besotted crowd,” Rodolfo said, his dark brows high as his dark eyes took her measure. “Except you have.”

  Natalie could have kicked herself for making such a silly mistake, and all because she’d hoped to score a few points in their endless little battle of words. She thought she really would have given herself a pinch, at the very least, if he hadn’t been watching her so closely. She sniffed instead, to cover her reaction.

  “You’ve gone over all literal, haven’t you? Back on the terrace it was all metaphor and now you’re parsing what I say for any hint of exaggeration? What’s next? Will you declare war on parts of speech? Set loose the Royal Tisselian Army on any grammar you dislike?”

  “I am looking for hints, Valentina, but it is not figurative language that I find mysterious. It is a woman who has already changed before my eyes, more than once, into someone else.”

  Natalie turned her head so she could hold that stern, probing gaze of his. Steady and long. As if she really was Valentina and had nothing at all to hide.

  “No one has changed before your eyes, Your Highness. I think you might have to face the fact that you are not very observant. Unless and until someone pricks at your vanity. I might as well have been a piece of furniture to you, until I mentioned I planned to let others sit on me.” She let out a merry little laugh that was meant to be a slap, and hit its mark. She saw the flare of it in his gaze. “You certainly couldn’t have that.”

  “Think for a moment, please.” Rodolfo’s voice was too dark to be truly impatient. Too rich to sound entirely frustrated. And still, Natalie braced herself. “What is the headline if I am found to be cavorting outside the bounds of holy matrimony?”

  “A long, weary sigh of boredom from all sides, I’d imagine.” She aimed a cool smile his way. “With a great many exclamation points.”

  “I am expected to fail. I have long since come to accept it is my one true legacy.” Yet that dark undercurrent in his low voice and the way he lounged there, all that ruthless power simmering beneath his seeming unconcern, told Natalie that Rodolfo wasn’t resigned to any such thing. “You, on the other hand? It wouldn’t be my feelings of betrayal you would have to worry about, however unearned you might think they were. It would be the entire world that thought less of you, forever after. Is that really what you want? After you have gone to such lengths to create your spotless reputation?”

  Natalie laughed again, but there was nothing funny. There was only a kind of heaviness pressing in upon her, making her feel as if she might break apart if she didn’t get away from this man before something really terrible happened. Something she couldn’t explain away as a latent Cinderella fantasy, lurking around inside of her without her knowledge or permission, that had put a ball and a prince together and then thrown her headfirst into an unfortunate kiss.

  “What does it matter?” she asked him, aware that her voice was ragged, giving too much away—but she couldn’t seem to stop herself. “There’s no way out of this, so we might as well do as we like no matter what the headlines say or do not. It will make no difference. We will marry. You will have your heirs. Our kingdoms will be linked forever. Who cares about the details when that’s the only part that truly matters in the long run?”

  “An argument I might have made myself a month ago,” Rodolfo murmured. “But we are not the people we were a month ago, princess. You must know that.”

  From a distance he would likely have looked relaxed. At his ease, with his legs thrust out and his collar loosened. But Natalie was closer, and she could see that glittering, dangerous thing in his gaze. She could feel it inside her, like a lethal touch of his too-talented hands, stoking fires she should have put out a long time ago.

  “What I know,” she managed to say over her rocketing pulse and that quickening, clenching in her core, “is that it is not I who am apparently unwell.”

  But Rodolfo only smiled.

  Which didn’t help at all.

  The rest of the drive across the city was filled with a brooding sort of silence that in many ways was worse than anything he might have said. Because the silence grew inside of her, and Natalie filled it with...images. Unhelpful images, one after the next. What might have happened if they hadn’t been interrupted on that terrace, for example. Or if they’d walked a little farther into the shadows, maybe even rounding the corner so no one could see them. Would Rodolfo’s hands have found their way beneath her dress again? Would they have traveled higher than her thigh—toward the place that burned the hottest for him even now?

  “Thank you for the escort but I can see myself—” Natalie began when they arrived at her hotel, but Rodolfo only stared back at her in a sort of arrogant amazement that reminded her that he would one day rule an entire kingdom, no matter what the tabloids said about him now.

  She restrained the little shiver that snaked down her spine, because it had nothing to do with apprehension, and let him usher her out of the car and into the hushed hotel lobby, done in sumptuous reds and deep golds and bursting with dramatic flowers arranged in stately vases. Well. It wasn’t so much that she let him as that there w
as no way to stop him without causing a scene in front of all the guests in the lobby who were pretending not to gawk at them as they arrived—especially because really, yet again, Natalie didn’t much want to stop him. Until she’d met Rodolfo, she’d never known that she was weak straight through to her core. Now she couldn’t seem to remember that everywhere but here, she was known for being tough. Strong. Unflappable.

  That Natalie seemed like a distant memory.

  Rodolfo nodded at her security detail as he escorted her to the private, keyed elevator that led only to the penthouse suite, and then followed her into it. The door swished shut almost silently, and then it was only the two of them in a small and shiny enclosed space. Natalie braced herself, standing there just slightly behind him, with a view of his broad, high, solidly muscled back and beyond that, the gold-trimmed elevator car. She could feel the heat of him, and all that leashed danger, coming off him like flames. He surrounded her without even looking at her. He seemed to loop around her and pull tight, crushing her in his powerful grip, without so much as laying a finger upon her. She couldn’t hear herself think over the thunder of her heart, the clatter of her pulse—

  But nothing happened. They were delivered directly into the grand living room of the hotel’s penthouse. Rodolfo stepped off and moved into the room, shrugging out of his jacket as he went. Natalie followed after him because she had no choice—or so she assured herself. It was that or go back downstairs to the hotel lobby, where she would have to explain herself to her security, the hotel staff, the other guests still sitting around with mobile phones at the ready to record her life at will.

  The elevator doors slid shut behind her, and that was it. The choice was made. And it left her notably all alone in her suite’s living room with the Prince she very desperately wanted to find the antithesis of charming.

  There was no Roman sunset to distract her now. There was only Rodolfo, far too beautiful and much too dangerous for anyone’s good. She watched the way he moved through the living room with a kind of liquid athleticism. The light from the soft lamps scattered here and there made the sprawling space feel close. Intimate.

  And it made him look like some kind of god all over again. Not limned in red or gold, but draped in shadows and need.

  Her throat was dry. Her lungs ached as if she’d been off running for untold miles. Her fingers trembled, and she realized she was as jittery as if she’d pulled one of her all-nighters before a big meeting and had rivers of coffee running through her veins in place of blood. It made her stomach clench tight to think that it wasn’t caffeine that was messing with her tonight. It was this man before her who she should never have touched, much less kissed.

  What was she going to do now?

  The sad truth was, Natalie couldn’t trust herself to make the right decision, or she wouldn’t still be standing where she was, would she? She would have gone straight on back to her bedchamber and locked the door. She would have summoned her staff, who she knew had to be nearby, just waiting for the opportunity to serve her and usher Rodolfo out. She would have done something other than what she did.

  Which was wait. Breathlessly. As if she really was a princess caught up in some or other enchantment. As if she could no more move a muscle than she could wave a magic wand and turn herself back into Natalie.

  Rodolfo shrugged out of his jacket and tossed it over the back of one of the fussy chairs, and then he took his time turning to face her again. When he did, his dark eyes burned into her, the focused, searing hunger in them enough to send her back a step. In a wild panic or a kind of dizzy desire, she couldn’t have said.

  Both, something whispered inside of her. And not with any trace of fear. Not with anything the least bit like fear.

  “Rodolfo,” she managed to say then, in as measured a tone as she could manage, because she thought she should have been far more afraid of all those things she could feel in the air between them than she was. Either way, this was all too much. It was all temptation and need, and she could hardly think through the chaos inside of her. “This has all gotten much too fraught and strange. Why don’t I have some coffee made? We can sit and talk.”

  “I am afraid, princesita, that it is much too late for talk.”

  He moved then. His long stride ate up the floor and he was before her in an instant. Or perhaps it was that she didn’t want to move out of his reach. She couldn’t seem to make herself run. She couldn’t seem to do anything at all. All she did was stand right where she was and watch him come for her, that simmering light in his dark eyes and that stern set to his mouth that made everything inside her quiver.

  Maybe there was no use pretending this wasn’t what she’d wanted all along. Since the very first moment she’d crossed the threshold of that reception room at the palace and discovered he was so much more than his pictures. She’d wanted to eviscerate him and instead she’d ended up on his lap with his tongue in her mouth. Had that really been by chance?

  Something dark and guilty kicked inside of her at that, and she opened her mouth to protest—to do something, to say anything that might stop this—but he was upon her. And he didn’t stop. Her breath left her in a rush, because he kept coming. She backed up when she thought he might collide into her, but there was nowhere to go. The doors to the elevator were at her back, closed up tight, and Rodolfo was there. Right there. He crowded into her. He laid a palm against the smooth metal on either side of her head and then he leaned in, trapping her between the doors of the elevator and his big, hard body.

  And there was nothing but him, then. He was so much bigger than her that he became the whole world. She could see nothing past the wall of his chest. There was no sky but his sculpted, beautiful face. And if there was a sun in the heated little sliver of space that was all he’d left between their bodies, Natalie had no doubt it would be as hot as that look in his eyes.

  “I think,” she began, because she had to try.

  “That is the trouble. You think too much.”

  And then he simply bent his head and took her mouth with his.

  Just like that, Natalie was lost. The delirious taste of him exploded through her, chasing fire with more fire until all she did was burn. His kiss was masterful. Slick and hot and greedy. He left absolutely no doubt as to who was in control as he took her over and sampled her, again and again, as if he’d done it a thousand times before tonight alone. As if he planned to keep doing it forever, starting now. Here.

  There was no rush. No desperation or hurry. Just that endless, erotic tasting as if he could go on and on and on.

  And Natalie forgot, all over again, who she was and what she was meant to be doing here.

  Because she could feel him everywhere. In her fingers, her toes. In the tips of her ears and like a breeze of sensation pouring down her spine. She pushed up on her feet, high on her toes, trying to get as close to him as she could. His arms stayed braced against the elevator doors like immovable barriers, leaving her to angle herself closer. She did it without thought, grabbing hold of his soft shirt in both fists and letting the fire that burned through her blaze out of control.

  Sensation stormed through her, making and remaking her as it swept along. Telling her stark truths about herself she didn’t want to know. She felt flushed and wild from her lips to the tight, hard tips of her breasts, all the way to that ravenous heat between her legs.

  She would have climbed him if she could. She couldn’t seem to get close enough.

  And then Rodolfo slowed down. His kiss turned lazy. Deep, drugging—but he made no attempt to move any closer. He kept his hands on the wall.

  After several agonies of this same stalling tactic, Natalie tore her lips from his, jittery and desperate.

  “Please...” she whispered.

  His mouth chased hers, tipped up in the corners as he sampled her, easy and slow. Teasing her, she understood then. As if this was some kind of game, and one he could play all night long. As if she was the only one being burned to a crisp where s
he stood. Over and over again.

  “Please, what?” he asked against her mouth, an undercurrent of laughter making her hot and furious and decidedly needy all at once. “I think you can do better than that.”

  “Please...” she tried again, and then lost her train of thought when his mouth found the line of her jaw.

  Natalie shivered as he dropped lower, trailing fire down the side of her neck and somehow finding his way to every sensitive spot she hadn’t known she had. And then he used his tongue and his teeth to taunt her with each and every one of them.

  “You will have to beg,” he murmured against her flushed, overwarm skin, and she could feel the rumble of his voice deep inside of her, low in her belly where all that heat seemed to bloom into a desperate softness that made her knees feel weak. “So that later, there can be no confusion, much as you may wish there to be. Beg me, princesita.”

  Natalie told herself that she would do no such thing. Of course not. Her mother had raised a strong, tough, independent woman who did not beg, and especially not from a man like this. Prince Charming at his most dangerous.

  But she was writhing against him. She was unsteady and wild and out of her mind, and all she wanted was his hands on her. All she wanted was more. And she didn’t care what that made her. How could she? She hardly knew who the hell she was.

  “Please, Rodolfo,” she whispered, because it was the only way she could get her voice to work, that betraying little rasp. “Please, touch me.”

  His teeth grazed her bare shoulder, sending a wild heat dancing and spinning through her, until it shuddered into the scalding heat at her core and made everything worse.

  Or better.

  “I am already touching you.”

  “With your hands.” And her voice was little more than a moan then, which ought to have embarrassed her. But she was far beyond that. “Please.”

  She thought he laughed then, and she felt that, too, like another caress. It wound through her, stoking the flames and making her burn brighter, hotter. So hot she worried she might simply...explode.