And he was still simply looking at her, still sitting there before her as if sprawling on the floor made him less threatening, less diabolical. Less him.
Worse, as if he expected an answer.
“Adriana,” he began evenly, almost kindly, and she couldn’t take it.
She was horrified when tears filled her eyes, that hopelessness washing over her and leaving her cruelly exposed. She shook her head, lifting her hands and then dropping them back into her lap.
He had destroyed her. He’d taken her apart and she’d let him, and she didn’t have any idea how she would survive this. She didn’t know what to do. If she wasn’t who she’d always thought she was, if she was instead who she’d always feared she might become, then she had nothing.
Nothing to hold on to anymore. Nothing to fight for. Nothing at all.
“What do you want from me?” she asked him, and she didn’t sound like herself, so broken and small. She felt the tears spill over, the heat of them on her cheeks, and she was too far gone to care. Though her eyes blurred, she focused on him, dark and male and still. “Is this it—to make me become everything I hate? Everything I spent my whole life fighting against? Are you happy now?”
He didn’t answer, and she couldn’t see him any longer, anyway, so she stopped pretending and covered her face with her hands, letting the tears flow unchecked into her palms, her humiliation complete.
She didn’t hear him move. But she felt his hands on her, lifting her into the air and then bringing her down on his lap. Holding her, she realized when it finally penetrated. Prince Pato was holding her. She tried to push away, but he only pulled her closer, sliding her across his legs so that her face was nestled into the crook of his neck. There was the lightest of touches, as if he’d pressed a kiss to her hair.
He was warm and strong and deliciously solid, and it was so tempting to pretend that they were different people. That this meant something. That he cared.
That she was the kind of woman someone might care for in the first place.
It was shocking how easy it was to tell herself lies, she thought then, despairing of herself—and so very, very sad about how eager she was to believe them. Even now, when she knew better.
“We don’t always get to play the versions of ourselves we prefer,” Pato said after a long while, when Adriana’s tears had faded away, and yet he still held her.
He smoothed a gentle hand over her hair as he spoke, and Adriana found that she didn’t have the strength to fight it off the way she should. She couldn’t seem to protect herself any longer. Not from him. Not from any of this. She could feel the rumble of his voice in his chest, and had to shut her eyes against the odd flood of emotion that rocked through her.
Too much sensation. Too many wild emotions, too huge and too dangerous. Too much.
“I don’t think you understand,” she whispered.
“The army was the only place I ever felt like a normal person,” he replied. Did she imagine that his arms held her closer, more carefully, as if she really was something precious to him? And when had she started wanting him to think so? “None of the men in my unit cared that I was a prince. They cared if I did my job. They treated me the same way they treated each other. It was a revelation.” He traced the same path over her hair, making her shiver again. “And if I like Pato the Playboy Prince less than I liked Pato the Soldier, well. One doesn’t cancel out the other. They’re both me.”
There was nothing but his arms around her and the solid heat of him warming her from the inside out. Making her feel as if everything was somehow new. Maybe because he was holding her this way, maybe because he’d told her something about him she hadn’t already read in a tabloid. Maybe because she didn’t have the slightest idea what to do with his gentleness. Adriana felt hushed, out of time. As if nothing that happened here could hurt her.
It wasn’t true, she knew. It never was. But she couldn’t seem to keep herself from wanting, much too badly, to believe that just this once, it could be.
“Yes,” she said, finding it easier to talk to that strong neck of his, much easier when she couldn’t see that challenging golden gaze. She could fool herself into believing she was safe. And that he was. “But none of the versions of you—even the most scandalous and attention-seeking—are called a whore with quite the same amount of venom they use when it’s me.” He sighed, and she closed her eyes against the smooth, hot skin of his throat. “You know it’s true.”
She felt him swallow. “What they call you reflects far more on them than on you,” he said gruffly.
“Perhaps it did when I wasn’t exactly what they called me. But I can’t cling to that anymore, can I?”
She pushed herself away from him then, sitting up with her arms braced against his chest so she could search his face, and the way he frowned at her, as if he was truly concerned, made her foolish heart swell.
“You said it yourself,” she continued. “Kitzinian princes and Righetti women. History repeating itself, right here on this plane.” His frown deepened and she felt his body tighten beneath her, but she kept going. “I held my head up no matter what they said because I knew they were wrong. But now...” She shrugged, that emptiness yawning inside her again, black and deep. “Blood will tell, you said, and you were right.”
Pato’s gaze was so intense, meeting hers, that it very nearly hurt.
“What happened between us does not make you a whore.”
“I think you’ll find that it does. By definition.”
His eyes moved over her face, dark and brooding, almost as if she’d insulted him with that simple truth.
“But,” he said, his tone almost careful, “you were happy enough to risk that definition when it was your suggestion, and when you thought it would benefit Lenz.”
There was no reason that should hurt her. She didn’t know why it did. I don’t think you love him, he’d told her in that low, sure voice.
“That was different,” she whispered, shaken. “That was a plan hatched in desperation. This was...”
She couldn’t finish. Pato looked at her for a long moment, and then his eyes warmed again to the gold she knew, his mouth hinted at that wicked curve she’d tasted and felt pressed against her very core, and she didn’t know if it was joy or fear that twisted inside her, coiling tight and making it difficult to breathe.
“Passion, Adriana,” he said with soft intent. “This was passion.”
She told herself she didn’t feel that ring inside her like a bell. That there was no click of recognition, no sudden swell of understanding. She didn’t know what he was talking about, she told herself desperately, but she was quite certain she shouldn’t have anything to do with either passion or princes. There was only one place that would lead her, and on this end of history she very much doubted she’d end up with her portrait in the Royal Gallery. Like her great-aunt Sandrine, she’d be no more than a footnote in a history book, quietly despised.
“Passion is nothing but an excuse weak people use to justify their terrible behavior,” she told him, frowning.
“You sound like a very grim and humorless cleric,” Pato said mildly, his palms smoothing down her back to land at her hips. “Did my mouth feel like a justification to you? Did the way you came apart in my hands feel like an excuse? Or were you more alive in those moments than ever before?”
Adriana pushed at his chest then, desperate to get away from him, and she was all too aware that she was able to climb out of his lap and scramble to her feet at last only because he chose to let her go.
“It doesn’t matter what it felt like.” She wished her voice didn’t still have that telltale rasp. She wished Pato hadn’t made it sound as if this was something more than the usual games he played with every