“I suggest you do your job.” It came out harsher than he’d intended, and he saw her blink, as if it hurt. He tried to force his usual laughter into his voice, that devil-may-care attitude he’d perfected, but he couldn’t quite do it. “If you can. I can’t promise I’ll cooperate, but then, you knew that going in.”
“I don’t want—”
“I am Prince Patricio of Kitzinia and you are a Kitzinian subject,” he said, more himself in that moment than he’d allowed himself to be in years, and that, too, was trouble. Big trouble. It was too soon to be anything but Pato the Playboy, even here—and still, he couldn’t stop. “You serve at my pleasure, Adriana. Yours is irrelevant.”
For a breath, she seemed to freeze there before him. Then she averted her eyes in appropriate deference to his rank, and there was no particular triumph in winning that little skirmish, Pato found. Not when it made him feel empty. Adriana shot to her feet then and started for the door, her spine straight and every inch of her obviously, silently, furious. It hummed in the air between them. He knew it should offend his royal dignity, had he been possessed of any, but it only made him want to taste her again. Taste her temper. Let it take them both on a ride.
“Thank you, Your Royal Highness, for reminding me of my duty. And my place. I won’t forget it again.”
She spoke as she moved, her words perfectly polite if not quite as respectful as they should have been. There was that edge beneath it, that slap, that was all Adriana. It made him hunger for her all over again.
He reached out and snagged her elbow as she passed, pulling her against him, her back to his front, cursing himself as he did it but completely unable to stop.
“I won’t forget this,” he said, directly into her ear, all of her soft skin smooth and warm and delicious against his chest, his aching sex. “As you march around to my brother’s tune and make your doomed attempts to keep me in line, I’ll remember all of this.” He let his gaze drift down over her body, satisfaction moving hard in him when her nipples hardened, when another flush worked over her sensitive skin, when her eyes eased closed and her breath went shallow. “I’ll remember those freckles between your breasts, for example, three in a line. I’ll wonder how they taste. I’ll be thinking about the way you look right now, kissed and wild and desperate, when you’re ordering me around in your conservative little business suits. It will always be there, hanging in the air between us like a fog.”
She shook her head in confusion, and he could feel the fine, delicate tremors that shook in her, the staccato beat of her pulse, all that need and fire and loss. It raged just as brightly in him.
“Then why...?”
Pato leaned closer, spurred on by demons he didn’t recognize, needs he didn’t understand at all. But their teeth were in him. Deep. And he wanted them in her, too.
“My pleasure, Adriana,” he told her fiercely, as if it was some kind of promise. A dark threat. He couldn’t tell the difference any longer. “Not yours.”
ADRIANA EYED PATO across the aisle of his royal jet as it winged its way into the night from the glittering shores of Monaco back to Kitzinia, cutting inward across the top of Italy toward Switzerland, Liechtenstein and home.
He was still wearing the formal black tie he’d worn to debonair effect earlier this evening, causing the usual deafening screams when he’d walked the red carpet into the star-studded charity event. Now he murmured into his mobile phone while he lounged on the leather sofa that stretched along one side of the luxury aircraft’s lounge area. It had been a long night for him, she thought without a shred of sympathy, as he’d not only had to say a few words at the banquet dinner, but had fended off, at last count, three Hollywood actresses, the lusty wife of a French politician, a determined countess, two socialites and one extremely overconfident caterer.
Left to his own devices, Adriana was well aware, Pato would have stayed in Monaco through the night as he had in years past, partying much too hard with all the celebrities who had flocked to the grand charity event there, and running the risk of either appearing drunk at his engagement with the Kitzinian Red Cross the following morning, or missing it entirely.
She’d insisted they leave tonight. He’d eventually acquiesced.
But Adriana didn’t kid herself. She didn’t know why he’d pretended to listen to her more often than not in the weeks since that humiliating morning in his London flat. She only knew she found it suspicious.
And that certainly wasn’t to suggest he’d behaved.
“Your schedule is full this week,” she’d told him one morning not long after they’d returned from London, standing stiffly in his office in the palace. Wearing nothing but a pair of battered jeans, he’d been kicked back in the huge, red leather chair behind his massive desk, with his feet propped up on the glossy surface, looking more like a male model than a royal prince.
“I’m bored to tears already,” he’d said, his hands stacked behind his head and his golden gaze trained on her in a way that made her want to squirm. She’d somehow managed to refrain. “I think I’d prefer to spend the week in the Maldives.”
“Because you require a holiday, no doubt, after all of your hard work doing...what, exactly?”
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