“My mother was a very fragile woman,” he said after a long moment, surprising Adriana.
She blinked, not following him. “Your mother?”
Queen Matilda had been an icon before her death from cancer some fifteen years ago. She was still an icon all these years later, beloved the world over. Her grave was still piled high with flowers and trinkets, as mourners continued to make pilgrimages to pay their respects. She had been graceful, regal, feminine and lovely. Her smile had once been called “Kitzinian sunshine” by the rhapsodic British press, while at home she’d been known as the kingdom’s greatest weapon.
She had been anything but fragile.
“She was so beautiful,” Pato said, his voice dark, skating over Adriana’s skin and making her wrap her arms around herself. “From the time she was a girl, that was the only thing she knew. How beautiful she was and what that would get her. A king, a throne, adoring subjects. But my father married a pretty face he could add to his collection of lovely things and then ignore, and my mother didn’t know what to do when the constant attention she lived for was taken away from her.”
Pato’s eyes were troubled when they met hers, and Adriana caught her breath. That same celebrated beauty his mother had been so famous for was stamped all over him, though somehow, he made it deeply masculine. He was gilded and perfect, just as she had been before him, and Adriana would never have called him the least bit fragile, either. Until this moment, when he almost looked...
But she couldn’t let herself think it. There was too much at stake and she couldn’t trust herself. She didn’t dare. What he felt wasn’t her concern. It couldn’t be.
He smiled then, but it wasn’t his usual smile. This one felt like nails digging into her, sharp and deep, and she wanted to hold him the way he’d held her, as if she could make him feel safe for a moment, however fleeting.
You’re such a fool.
“You don’t have to tell me this,” she said hurriedly, suddenly afraid of where this was going. What it would do to her if he showed her things she knew he shouldn’t. “It’s your family’s private, personal business.”
She wanted him too much. She’d proved it in unmistakable terms, with her legs flung over his shoulders and her body laid open for his touch. Somewhere inside of her, where she was afraid to look because she didn’t want to admit it, Adriana knew what that meant. She knew.
He gave half the world his body. She would survive that; his women always did. But if he gave her his secrets, she would never recover.
“So she did the only thing she knew how to do,” Pato said, his gaze never leaving Adriana’s, once again that different, harder version of himself, every inch of him powerful. Determined. Bleak, Adriana thought, and ached for him. “She found the attention she needed.”
Adriana stared at him, not wanting to understand what he was saying. Not wanting to make the connection. He nodded, as if he could see the question she didn’t want to ask right there on her face.
“There were always men,” he said, confirming it, and Adriana hugged herself that much tighter. “They kept her happy. They made her smile, laugh, dance in the palace corridors and pick flowers in the gardens. They made her herself. And my father didn’t care how many lovers she took as long as she was discreet. He might not have wanted her the way she thought he should, the way she needed to be wanted, but he wanted her happy.”
Adriana found it hard to swallow. She could only stare at Pato in shock. And hurt for him in ways she didn’t understand. He leaned forward then, keeping his eyes on hers, hard and demanding. She felt that power of his fill the space between them, pressing at her like a command.
“Was my mother a whore, Adriana?” he asked, his voice a quiet lash. “Is that the word you’d use to describe her?”
She felt too hot, then too cold. Paralyzed.
“I can’t— You shouldn’t—”
Pato only watched her, his mouth in that serious line, and she felt the ruthlessness he hid behind his easy smiles and his laughter pressing into her from all sides and sinking deep into her belly. How had she ever imagined this man was careless?
“Of course not,” she said at last, feeling outside herself. Desperate. As if what she said would keep her from shaking apart from the inside out. “She was the queen. But that doesn’t mean—”
“It’s a word people use when they need a weapon,” he said, very distinctly, and that look in his eyes made Adriana feel naked. Intensely vulnerable. As if he could see all the ugliness she hid there, the encroaching darkness. “It’s a means of control. It’s a prison they herd you into because they think you need to be contained.”
She shook her head, unable to speak, unable to handle what was happening inside her. Some kind of earthquake, rolling long and hard and destroying foundations she hadn’t known she’d built in the first place.
“That’s all well and good,” she whispered, hardly aware of what she was saying, seeing only Pato and that look on his face, “but there’s no one here but you and me and what happened between us, the way I just—”
“Don’t do it,” he warned her, cutting her off, his eyes flashing. “Don’t make it ugly simply because it was intense. There was nothing ugly about it. You taste like a dream and your responsiveness is a gift, not a curse.”
What moved in her then was so overwhelming she thought for a long, panicked moment that she might actually be sick, right there on the floor. She was too hot again, then freezing cold, and she might have thought she’d come down with a fever if she hadn’t seen the way he looked at her. If she hadn’t felt it deep inside her, making so many things she’d taken for granted crumble into dust.
But she couldn’t bring herself to look away. She was falling apart—he was making sure she did—and she didn’t want to look away.
“Don’t use their weapons on yourself,” he told her then, very distinctly, the royal command and that brooding darkness making her shiver as his gaze devoured her, changed her, demanded she listen to him. “Don’t lock yourself in their prison. And don’t let me hear you use that word to describe yourself again, Adriana. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a declaration of war.”
But Adriana knew that the war had started the moment she’d been sent to work with this man, and despite what she’d told herself all these weeks, despite what she’d so desperately wanted to believe, she’d already lost.
* * *
Pato couldn’t sleep, and he could always sleep.
This was one more thing that had never happened to him before Adriana had walked into his life and turned it inside out. He’d entertained a number of very detailed ideas about how he’d enjoy making her pay for that as he sprawled there in his decidedly empty bed—none of them particularly conducive to rest.
Damn her.
It was her insistence that she was, in fact, all the things the jackals called her that had him acting so outside his own parameters, he knew. It was maddening. Pato had handled any number of women over the years who had used their supposed fragility as a tool to try to manipulate him. He could have piloted a yacht across the sea of tears that had been cried on or near him, all by women angling for his affection, his protection, his money or his name—whatever they thought they could get.
He’d never been the slightest bit moved.
Adriana, by contrast, wanted nothing from him save his good behavior. She was appalled that he’d touched her, kissed her, made her forget herself. She’d now offered herself to him twice while