A Royal Without Rules

She pushed herself away from him then, sitting up with her arms braced against his chest so she could search his face, and the way he frowned at her, as if he was truly concerned, made her foolish heart swell.

“You said it yourself,” she continued. “Kitzinian princes and Righetti women. History repeating itself, right here on this plane.” His frown deepened and she felt his body tighten beneath her, but she kept going. “I held my head up no matter what they said because I knew they were wrong. But now...” She shrugged, that emptiness yawning inside her again, black and deep. “Blood will tell, you said, and you were right.”

Pato’s gaze was so intense, meeting hers, that it very nearly hurt.

“What happened between us does not make you a whore.”

“I think you’ll find that it does. By definition.”

His eyes moved over her face, dark and brooding, almost as if she’d insulted him with that simple truth.

“But,” he said, his tone almost careful, “you were happy enough to risk that definition when it was your suggestion, and when you thought it would benefit Lenz.”

There was no reason that should hurt her. She didn’t know why it did. I don’t think you love him, he’d told her in that low, sure voice.

“That was different,” she whispered, shaken. “That was a plan hatched in desperation. This was...”

She couldn’t finish. Pato looked at her for a long moment, and then his eyes warmed again to the gold she knew, his mouth hinted at that wicked curve she’d tasted and felt pressed against her very core, and she didn’t know if it was joy or fear that twisted inside her, coiling tight and making it difficult to breathe.

“Passion, Adriana,” he said with soft intent. “This was passion.”

She told herself she didn’t feel that ring inside her like a bell. That there was no click of recognition, no sudden swell of understanding. She didn’t know what he was talking about, she told herself desperately, but she was quite certain she shouldn’t have anything to do with either passion or princes. There was only one place that would lead her, and on this end of history she very much doubted she’d end up with her portrait in the Royal Gallery. Like her great-aunt Sandrine, she’d be no more than a footnote in a history book, quietly despised.

“Passion is nothing but an excuse weak people use to justify their terrible behavior,” she told him, frowning.

“You sound like a very grim and humorless cleric,” Pato said mildly, his palms smoothing down her back to land at her hips. “Did my mouth feel like a justification to you? Did the way you came apart in my hands feel like an excuse? Or were you more alive in those moments than ever before?”

Adriana pushed at his chest then, desperate to get away from him, and she was all too aware that she was able to climb out of his lap and scramble to her feet at last only because he chose to let her go.

“It doesn’t matter what it felt like.” She wished her voice didn’t still have that telltale rasp. She wished Pato hadn’t made it sound as if this was something more than the usual games he played with every female who crossed his path. More than that, she wished there wasn’t that part of her that wanted so badly to believe him. “I know what it makes me.”

Pato shoved his hair back from his face with one hand and muttered something she was happy she didn’t catch. She wanted to make a break for the bathroom and bar herself inside, but her legs were too shaky beneath her, and she sat down on the chair instead, as far away from him as she could get. Which wasn’t far at all. Not nearly far enough to recover.

“My mother was a very fragile woman,” he said after a long moment, surprising Adriana.

She blinked, not following him. “Your mother?”

Queen Matilda had been an icon before her death from cancer some fifteen years ago. She was still an icon all these years later, beloved the world over. Her grave was still piled high with flowers and trinkets, as mourners continued to make pilgrimages to pay their respects. She had been graceful, regal, feminine and lovely. Her smile had once been called “Kitzinian sunshine” by the rhapsodic British press, while at home she’d been known as the kingdom’s greatest weapon.

She had been anything but fragile.

“She was so beautiful,” Pato said, his voice dark, skating over Adriana’s skin and making her wrap her arms around herself. “From the time she was a girl, that was the only thing she knew. How beautiful she was and what that would get her. A king, a throne, adoring subjects. But my father married a pretty face he could add to his collection of lovely things and then ignore, and my mother didn’t know what to do when the constant attention she lived for was taken away from her.”