A Royal Without Rules

Pato’s mouth had curved, and he’d stretched back even farther in his chair, making his magnificent chest move in ways that only called attention to all those lean, fine muscles packed beneath his sun-kissed skin.

Adriana had kept her eyes trained on his face. Barely.

“Oh, I work hard,” he’d told her in that soft, suggestive way that she’d wished she found disgusting. But since London, she’d been unable to dampen the fires he’d lit inside her, and she’d felt the burn of it then. Bright and hot.

“Perhaps if you dressed appropriately,” she’d said briskly, forcing a calm smile she didn’t feel, and telling herself there was no fire, nothing to burn but her shameful folly, “you might find you had more appropriate feelings about your actual duties, as well.”

He’d grinned. “Are my clothes what make me, then?” he’d asked silkily. “Because I feel confident I’m never more myself than when I’m wearing nothing at all. Don’t you think?”

Adriana hadn’t wanted to touch that, and so she’d listed off his week’s worth of engagements while his eyes laughed at her. Charities and foundations. Various events to support and promote Kitzinian commerce and businesses. Tours of war memorials on the anniversary of one of the kingdom’s most famous battles from the Great War. A visit to a city in the southern part of the country that had been devastated by a recent fire. Balls, dinners, speeches. The usual.

“Not one of those things sounds like any fun at all,” Pato had said, still lounging there lazily, as if he’d already mentally excused himself to the Maldives.

Adriana didn’t understand what had happened to her—what she’d done. She shouldn’t have responded to him like that in London. She shouldn’t have lost her head, surrendered herself to him so easily. So completely. If he hadn’t stopped, she knew with a deep sense of shame, she wouldn’t have.

And every day she had to stand there before him, both of them perfectly aware of that fact.

It made her hate him all the more. Almost as much as she hated herself. She’d worked closely with Lenz for three years. They’d traveled all over the world together. She’d adored him, admired him. And not once had she so much as brushed his hand inappropriately. Never had she worried that she couldn’t control herself.

But Pato had touched her and it had been like cracking open a Pandora’s box. Need, dark and wild. Lust and want and that fire she’d never felt before in all her life. Proof, at last, that she was a Righetti in more than simply name.

It had to be that tainted blood in her that had made her act so out of character she’d assured herself every day since London. It had to be that infamous Righetti nature taking hold of her, just as the entire kingdom had predicted since her birth, and just as the tabloids claimed daily, speculating madly about her relationship with Pato.

Because it couldn’t be him. It couldn’t be.

“Yours is a life of great sacrifice and terrible, terrible burdens, Your Royal Highness,” she’d said then, without bothering to hide her sarcastic tone. Forgetting herself the way she did too often around him. “However do you cope?”

For a moment their eyes had locked across the wide expanse of his desk, and the look in his—a quiet, supremely male satisfaction she didn’t understand at all, though it made something in her shiver—caused her heart to pound. Erratic and hard.

“Does your lingerie match today, Adriana?” he’d asked softly. Deliberately. Taunting her with the memory of that London morning. “I liked it. Next time, I’ll taste it before I take it off you.”

Adriana had flinched, then felt herself flush hot and red. She’d remembered—she’d felt—his hands on her, slipping into her panties to mold the curves of her backside to his palms, caressing her breasts through her bra. The heat of her embarrassment had flamed into a different kind of warmth altogether, pooling everywhere he’d touched her in London, and then starting to ache anew. And she’d been certain that she’d turned the very same cranberry color as the lingerie she’d worn then as she’d stood there before him in that office.

Pato, of course, had smiled.

She’d opened her mouth to say something, anything. To blister him with the force of all the anger and humiliation and dark despair that swirled in her. To save herself from the truths she didn’t want to face, truths that moved in her like blood, like need, like all the rest of the things she didn’t want to accept.

“I told you how I feel about challenges,” he’d said before she could speak, dropping his hands from behind his head and shifting in his chair, his gaze intense. “Disrespect me all you like, I don’t mind. But you should bear in mind that, first, it will reflect on you should you be foolish enough to do it in public, not on me. And second, you won’t like the way I retaliate. Do you understand me?”