A Royal Without Rules

She had to stop imagining that anything would ever be different.

“If you want to be rid of me, Pato,” she said, fighting to keep her voice cool and her head high, “you don’t have to play these cruel little games. All you have to do is dismiss me, and you could have done that with a text. No unpleasant scene required.”

He reached over and ran the back of one hand along her cheek, his knuckles slightly swollen, and Adriana fought to keep from jerking her head away. His touch was confusingly tender. It slid through her like honey. And it was at complete odds with everything he was saying.

“That’s the first time you’ve used my name,” he said, as if it shook him. And Adriana wanted to lean into him, to turn her head and kiss his hand, as if this was about affection.

But she knew better. This was another game. It couldn’t be anything else—and she was finished playing. No matter what she thought she saw in his eyes then, as if using his name had been some kind of invocation. As if it had changed something.

“I’ll take that as a yes, I’m dismissed,” she said somehow, and moved to step around him. The need to escape, to flee this place and him and never look back, was like a drumbeat inside her skin. “I’ll leave my formal resignation letter on the desk in your office.”

But he reached out and took her arm as he had once before in London, holding her against his side though they faced different directions.

“Adriana,” he whispered, as if her name hurt him.

It hurt her.

But all this would pass. It would, it always did. All she had to do was walk out the door, and she’d never be allowed in his presence again. It wasn’t as if she could work for Lenz again, not now. Her access to the palace would be revoked, and she’d never have to worry about her outsize reactions to Pato, her insatiable hunger for him. All that would fade away as if it had never happened, as if he’d never been anything more than a face on a glossy magazine. And she would move far away from Kitzinia, to a place where no one would recognize her name or her ancestors’ faces in hers, and someday, she thought—prayed—she might even forget that she’d fallen in love with him without ever meaning to.

Everything inside her went still then. Quiet. The truth she’d been avoiding for much too long was like a hush, stealing through her, changing everything, making sure she would leave here, leave him, in tatters.

But then she supposed that, too, had always been inevitable. History had repeated itself, and he was right, it might kill her. But not where he could watch, she told herself fiercely. Not where he could see how far she’d fallen.

“Thank you, Your Royal Highness,” she said, jerking her arm from his grasp, amazed that she sounded so calm. So controlled, as if her whole world hadn’t shuddered to a halt and then altered forever. “This has been an educational experience. I particularly enjoyed your need to destroy the entire royal family, living and dead, in my esteem.” She aimed a hard smile at him. “Rest assured, I now think as little of your family as you do of mine.”

He met her gaze then, and what she saw on his face sliced into her, making her feel as if she might shake apart where she stood. Making her think she already had.

“Don’t,” he said, as he had in the car that day. That was all, and yet she felt it everywhere.

But his pain wasn’t her problem, she told herself harshly. She couldn’t let it matter.

“I didn’t need to know any of that,” she whispered fiercely. His secrets, that tempting glimpse of his inner self. As if any of it was real, or hers. She’d known it would lead nowhere good, and she was right. “And why would you risk telling me? I could walk out of here today and sell that story to the tabloids.”

The way he looked at her didn’t make any sense. It made her heart thud hard against her ribs. It made her eyes go blurry.

“You won’t.”

“You have no reason to think that. You don’t know me. You don’t even like me.”

His smile was faint, like a ghost. “I trust you, Adriana.”

It was sad how much she wished he did, despite everything. She was such a terrible, gullible fool. Such a deep and abiding disappointment to herself. Because he was still playing her. She knew it. She was one instrument among many, and he didn’t know how to do anything else.

“Or,” she said slowly, as the ugly truth of it penetrated even her thick skull, the misery crashing over her, into her, making her voice too thick, “you know perfectly well that the last person in the world anyone would believe when it came to accusations of promiscuity is me.”