A Royal Without Rules

His tone had been so dry. He was talking about her life as if he hadn’t punched huge holes right through the center of it. Adriana had learned long ago how to act tough even if she wasn’t, how to shrug off the cruel things people said and did to her—but it had been too much that day.

He’d taken everything that had ever meant something to her. Her belief in Lenz. Her position in the palace. Her self-respect. Everything. And finally, something had simply cracked.

“I understand this is all a joke to you,” she’d said in a low voice, staring out the window at the red-roofed city, historic houses and church spires, the wide blue lake in the distance, the Alps towering over everything. “And why shouldn’t it be? It doesn’t matter what you do—the people adore you. There are never any consequences. You never have to pay a price. You have the option to slide through life as pampered and as shallow as you please.”

“Yes,” he’d replied, sounding lazy as usual, but when she’d glanced back at him his gaze was dark. She might have thought he looked troubled, had he been someone else. Her stomach had twisted into a hard knot. “I’m a terrible disappointment. Sometimes even to myself.”

Adriana hadn’t understood the tension that had flared between them then, the odd edginess that had filled the interior of the car, fragile and heavy at once. She hadn’t wanted to understand it. But she’d been afraid she did. That Pandora’s box might have been opened, and there wasn’t a thing she could do to change it after the fact. But that didn’t mean that she needed to rummage around inside it, picking up things best left where they were.

“Your brother was the first man who was ever kind to me,” she’d said, her voice sounding oddly soft in the confines of the car. “It changed everything. It made me believe—” But she hadn’t been able to say it, not to Pato, who couldn’t possibly have understood what it had meant to her to feel safe, at last. Who would mock her, she’d been sure. “I would have been perfectly happy to keep on believing that. You didn’t have to tell me otherwise.”

“Adriana.” He’d said her name like a caress, a note she’d never heard before in his voice, and she’d held up a hand to stop him from saying anything further. There had been tears pricking at the back of her eyes and it had already been far too painful.

He would take everything. She knew he would. She’d always known, and it was that, she’d acknowledged then, that scared her most of all.

“You did it deliberately,” she’d said quietly, and she’d forced herself to look at him. “Because you could. Because you thought it was funny.”

“Did you imagine he would love you back?” Pato had asked, an oddly gruff note in his voice then, his gleaming eyes unreadable, and it had hurt her almost more than she could bear. “Walk away from his betrothal, risk the throne he’s prepared for all his life? Just as the Duke of Reinsmark did for your great-aunt Sandrine?”

“It wasn’t about what Lenz would or wouldn’t do,” she’d whispered fiercely, fighting back the wild tilt and spin of her emotions, while Pato’s words had dripped into her like poison, bitter and painful. “People protect those they care about. If you cared about anything in the world besides pleasuring yourself, you’d know that, and you wouldn’t careen through your life destroy—”

He had reached over and silenced her with his finger on her lips, and she hadn’t had time to analyze the way her heart slammed into her ribs, the way her whole body seemed to twist into a dark, sheer ripple of joy at even so small and furious a touch from him.

“Don’t.”

It had been a command, a low whisper, his voice a rough velvet, and that had hurt, too. The car had come to a stop, but Pato hadn’t moved. He hadn’t looked away from her, pinning her to her seat with too much darkness in his gaze and an expression she’d never seen before on his face, making him a different man all over again.

“You don’t know what I care about,” he’d told her in that low rasp. “And I never thought any of that was funny.”

She’d felt that touch on her mouth for days.

“Ci vediamo,” Pato said into his mobile with a laugh now, ending his call.

Adriana snapped back into the present to find him looking at her from where he lounged there across the plane’s small aisle. She felt as deeply disconcerted as if the scene in the car had only just happened, as if it hadn’t been days ago, and she was afraid he could take one look at her and know exactly what she was thinking. He’d done it before.