A Royal Without Rules

And that was why she hadn’t protested when he’d turned to her with that wild and hungry look in his eyes. Why she’d leaned into him when he’d taken her mouth in a lush promise of a kiss. It had been devastating and quick, a mere appetizer to what he’d do once they climbed into the car, he’d informed her with that gleam of gold in his eyes. And he’d kept his word.

It had been a single kiss. Hot and private. Theirs.

But the pictures looked openly carnal. The very number of photographs made it seem they’d kissed for a long time, so focused on each other that they were reckless, careless. The paper tutted about the locale and the fact that neither of them had apparently noticed or cared that they’d been in public—“par for the course for Pato, but can Adriana’s history make her anything but a terrible influence on the kingdom’s bad boy?”

She had no idea how long she stood there in the kitchen, all alone with the newspaper and its malicious recounting and reshaping of her life into nasty little innuendos and silly nicknames. At first she didn’t know what snapped her out of it—but then she heard the banging at the door, harsh and loud. And the shouting.

Her stomach sank to her feet. Paparazzi.

She should have expected them. She’d dealt with them a thousand times before—but never when she was the target. Adriana took a deep breath, and then pulled all the curtains shut without letting them get a glimpse of her, took the landline telephone off its hook, making it as difficult as possible for the cockroaches swarming in her street to get what they were after.

She didn’t seek out her parents. They would expect an apology—an apology Adriana doubted they would accept. And she might feel sick to her stomach, she might feel battered and attacked, exposed and alone, but she wasn’t sorry.

When she finally climbed back up to her room, her mobile was lit up with messages. Reporters. Supposed “friends” she hadn’t spoken to in years. Her few actual friends, quietly wondering how she was. More reporters. And then the clipped and frigid tones of the king’s private secretary, a man Adriana had seen from afar but had certainly never met, informing her that her services to the royal household were no longer required.

She was cut off. Dismissed. The Righetti contamination had been officially removed from the palace.

It was not until dusk began to creep through the streets that Adriana admitted to herself that she’d expected Pato to appear again—to race to the villa and save her, somehow, from this public disgrace. Make it better, even if this public stoning via newspaper was exactly what she’d volunteered for. Twice.

Because it turned out that being called a whore her whole life had not, in fact, prepared her for what it was like to see it printed in the newspapers and all across the internet, not as speculation this time, but fact. It hadn’t prepared her for that scene in the kitchen with her parents. It hadn’t prepared her at all.

And when she’d wanted to do this, she understood as she sat there, barricaded in her childhood bedroom, she’d thought only about how Lenz or Pato might benefit from this kind of media attention. She hadn’t thought about her family at all, and the guilt of that grew heavier as the day wore on. This wasn’t only about her. It never had been. This was her family’s nightmare, and she’d made it real.

Pato had been right. She’d been so busy rushing to martyr herself that she hadn’t stopped to consider precisely what that might entail. Or just how many people it would hurt besides her.

Eventually, she had to accept the fact that Pato wasn’t coming.

And with it, a wave of other things she didn’t want to think about. Such as how ruthless he really was, how manipulative. He’d told her so himself. How he’d promised this wouldn’t happen, and yet it had. And what his silence today suggested that meant.

She couldn’t cry. She could hardly move. It simply hurt too much.

Late that night, Adriana found herself in the parlor with the other harlots. She curled up in the chair below their portraits and stared at them until her eyes went blurry.

This was inevitable from the start, she told herself. You walked right into it anyway, talking about love and imagining you were better than your past.

Adriana had no one to blame for this but herself.

CHAPTER TEN

ADRIANA WOKE WITH a start, her heart pounding.

For a moment she didn’t know where she was, but even as she uncurled herself from the chair she found herself in, she remembered, and a glance at the wall before her, and the three portraits hanging there, confirmed it.

Adriana stretched out the kink in her neck, the events of the previous day flooding back to her, one after the next, as she stood. Her father’s face. Her mother’s harsh words. The newspapers, the paparazzi. Pato’s obvious betrayal. She shut her eyes against it, as if that might make it all vanish.