That smile of his deepened, torturing her. Delighting her.
And then, slowly and deliberately, with one hand on her bottom to move her against him in a sinuous rhythm that made her feel weak, the other at her jaw to hold her where he wanted her, Pato took his own sweet time and licked his way into her mouth.
Ruining her, Adriana thought while the world disappeared, forever.
* * *
He never should have tasted her.
That it was a terrible mistake was a certainty, but Adriana clung to him like honey, melting and hot, tasting like sugar and fire with her lithe body wrapped all around him. Pato couldn’t stop himself. For a heady moment—his mouth angled over hers, tasting her again and again and again—he even forgot why he should.
This was supposed to be a lesson to her. A way to decidedly call her bluff, nothing more.
And yet he wanted to take her where they stood, pressed up against the wall, thrusting into the heat of her he could feel scalding him through the thin layers that barely separated them. She was so soft. So responsive.
Perfect.
But she didn’t want him, no matter what her body shouted at him. No matter what he felt in his arms, what he tasted.
She met him even as he grew bolder, hotter, more demanding. She kissed him as if she’d forgotten who it was she truly wanted. She bloomed beneath his hands, incandescent and addicting. She twined her arms around his neck and writhed against him as if she was as desperate as he was, as if she wanted nothing more than Pato deep inside of her.
But she wanted Lenz. She was in love with Lenz. Pato had seen it.
It was that unpalatable fact that he couldn’t make himself ignore, no matter how hard he was and no matter what he would have given, in that moment, to simply drive into her and ride them both into an oblivion where Lenz did not exist. Could never exist.
Where there was only this heat. This need. This delicious electricity, intense and greedy, that made him want to taste every part of her, make her scream out in pleasure while he did, and then take her until she sobbed his name.
His name, not his brother’s.
But he couldn’t stop. He didn’t want to stop. What was this woman doing to him? He’d never acted with so little thought before. He’d never forgot to hide himself. He’d certainly never opened his mouth and let some part of the truth come out. It was as if he’d lost the control that had defined him since he was eighteen....
That couldn’t happen. He couldn’t let it.
He spun around, walking them back to the bed with Adriana still wrapped around him, and then he tortured himself by bringing them down on the mattress—catching himself on one arm so he didn’t crush her, but letting himself revel in the feel of her beneath him the way he wanted her, even for a moment.
Pato had never put much stock in the kingdom’s insistence that Righetti women were akin to witches, temptresses and jezebels without equal, but pulling himself away from Adriana, from all that soft, hot fire, was the hardest thing he could remember doing.
He didn’t understand this. He didn’t understand himself.
“I can handle it, Adriana,” he told her. “I can handle you. But I won’t.”
He stood over her, telling himself it didn’t matter that she sprawled there before him, her lips swollen from his, her breasts spilling from her bra and crying out for his hands, her silken limbs spread out before him like a dessert he hungered for as if he was a starving man. It didn’t matter because it couldn’t.
He smirked, knowing it would hit her like a slap. “But I appreciate the offer.”
Her face blazed red as he’d thought it would, and she looked tense and unhappy as she pushed herself up to a sitting position. Her lovely blond hair fell in a sexy tangle around her pretty face, making her look as if he’d already had her. He wished he had, with an edge of desperation that should have alarmed him. But she sat before him, with all that lust and wild need still stamped on her face, and the only thing he felt was that pounding desire.
She inclined her head at the clear evidence that he wanted her, badly and unmistakably, then looked up to hold his gaze with hers, her chocolate eyes dark and still too hot.
“I can see how much you appreciate it, Your Royal Highness,” she said softly, but with that kick beneath that he couldn’t help but enjoy. He didn’t understand why he liked her edginess. Why he liked how unafraid she was of him, even now.
He could still taste her. He was so hard for her it hurt, and he wasn’t used to denying himself anything. Much less women. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d tried. Pato had slept with any number of women who had assumed he’d be a conduit to his brother, who had cold-bloodedly used him for that purpose. It had never bothered Pato before.
He didn’t know why it bothered him now—why that look on her face in the shadows last night kept flashing in his head. He only knew he wouldn’t—couldn’t—be this woman’s path to his brother, no matter her reasons, no matter how convoluted it all was. He wanted her head to be full of him, and nothing else.
“We can’t always have what we want,” he said quietly. He meant it more than she knew.
“You can. You do.” She frowned at him. “You’ve made a career out of it.”
Pato shook his head. “You’re not going to win this argument with me. No matter how sweetly you pout, or how naked you get. Not that I don’t enjoy both.”
She made a small sound of frustration, mixed, he could tell from the color in her cheeks, with that embarrassment that he found himself entirely too obsessed with. When was the last time he’d met a woman who still blushed?
“Is there any woman alive you haven’t slept with?” she demanded. “Or is it only me?”
“It’s only you,” Pato assured her, not knowing why he was doing this. Not understanding what there was to gain from it. Surely it would be better simply to have her. That was the time-honored approach to situations like this. Chemistry never lasted. Sex was white-hot for only a small while, and then it burned itself out. The only thing denial ever did—or so he’d heard—was make the wanting worse.
But he had never wanted someone like this. And having tasted her, he very much doubted that sex would be a cure. More like his doom.
He didn’t know where that thought came from, and yet it clawed into him.
“You didn’t even know the word no until today!” she snapped at him.
“If I were you,” he said in a low voice that he could see got to her when she shivered again, as if he’d run his fingers down the line of her elegant neck, “I’d quit now, before tempers are lost and consequences become far greater. I’d put on some clothes and remember myself. My place. Just a suggestion.”
She pulled in a breath, and her hands balled into fists, and then she shook her head slightly as if she really was remembering herself.
“I told you I’d resign,” she said after a moment. Her mouth firmed. “And I will. Today, in fact.”
“No, you will not.”
She should resign. He should see to it she was sacked, barred from the palace, kept away for her own good. She should take her melting brown eyes and that impossibly tempting body of hers, her irritating martyr’s love for the undeserving Lenz, and leave Kitzinia far behind. She should protect herself from her family’s history, from the endless, vicious rumor mill that comprised the highest levels of Kitzinian society, and was even nastier than usual when it came to her.
He wished he could protect her himself.
He was, Pato realized then, in terrible trouble. But this was a game, he reminded himself, and Adriana was a part of it.