A Royal Without Rules

The silence between them stretched and held, nothing but the sound of the jet’s engines humming all around them, and Adriana didn’t have the slightest idea what to do. She was aware of him in ways she suspected would haunt her long after this flight was over, ways she should have recognized and avoided weeks ago. Why had she thought she could handle this—handle him? Why had she been so unpardonably arrogant?

He’d been leading her here all along, she understood. And she’d let him, telling herself that what was happening to her wasn’t happening at all. Telling herself stories about tainted blood and Pandora’s box. Thinking she could fight it with snappy lines and some attitude.

She’d known she was scraped raw by this, by the things that had happened between them. What he’d done and what he’d said. The brutal honesty, the impossible need. But it was her own appalling weakness that shamed her deep into her bones. That made her wonder if she’d ever known herself at all.

“Why did you do that?” she asked, when the silence outside her head and the noise within was too much.

His dark brows edged higher. There was the faintest twitch of that mouth of his, which she now knew so intimately she could still feel the aftershocks.

“I wanted to know how you tasted,” he said.

So simple. So matter-of-fact. So Pato.

A helpless kind of misery surged through her, tangled up with that fire he’d set in her that never died out, and she wished she hadn’t asked. She kept her eyes on the floor, where his feet were much too close to hers, and wondered how she could find something so innocuous so threatening—and yet so strangely comforting at the same time.

“Was that your first?” he asked, with no particular inflection in his voice. “Or should I say, your first two?”

“My first...?” she echoed, confused.

And then his meaning hit her, humiliation close behind, and she felt the scalding heat of shame climb up her chest and stain her cheeks. She wanted to curl into a ball and disappear, but instead she sat up straight, as if posture alone could erase what had happened. What she’d done. What she’d let him do to her without a single protest, as if she’d been waiting her whole life to play the whore for him.

Weren’t you? that voice spat at her, and she flinched.

“I apologize if I was deficient, Your Royal Highness.” She threw the words at him, in an agony of embarrassment. “I neglected to sleep with the requisite seven thousand people necessary to match your level of—”

“There was only the one, I know,” he interrupted, his even tone at odds with the storm in his eyes and that unusually straight line of his mouth. No crook, no curve. Serious, for once, and it made it all that much worse. “And I imagine all five seconds of unskilled fumbling did not lead to any wild heights of passion on your part.”

Adriana couldn’t believe this conversation was happening. She couldn’t believe any of this had happened. If she could have thrown herself out the plane’s window right then and there, she would have. A nice, quiet plummet from a great height into the cold embrace of the Alps sounded like blessed relief.

But Pato was still looking at her. There was no escape.

“Of course it wasn’t my first,” she managed to say, but she couldn’t look at him while she said it. She couldn’t believe she was answering such a personal question—but then, he’d had his mouth between her legs. What was the point of pretending she had any boundaries? Any shame? “I might not have cut a swathe across the planet like some, but I didn’t take a vow of celibacy.”

“With a man,” he clarified, and there was the slightest hint of amusement in his eyes then, the faintest spark. “A private grope beneath the covers, just you and your hand in the dark, isn’t the same thing at all. Is it?”

Adriana didn’t understand how she could have forgotten how much she hated him. She remembered now. It roared through her, battling the treacherous, traitorous embers of that fire he’d licked into a consuming blaze, filling her with the force of it, the cleansing power—

But it burned itself out just as quickly, leaving behind the emptiness. That great abyss she’d been skirting her whole life, and there was nothing holding her back from it anymore, was there? She had spent three years with Lenz, thinking her dedication proved she wasn’t what her surname said she was. And hardly more than a month with Pato, demonstrating exactly why Righetti women were notorious.

She had betrayed herself and her family in every possible way.

And he was still simply looking at her, still sitting there before her as if sprawling on the floor made him less threatening, less diabolical. Less him.