Шантель Шоу – One Night With The Prince: A Royal Without Rules (страница 10)

Then he glanced back at Adriana, who still hadn’t moved a muscle.

“Look at me,” he said again, with an odd urgency he didn’t understand.

She lifted her head then and the pain on her face stunned him into silence. He could see it in her dark eyes, slicked not with embarrassment but with a kind of grief.

For a moment he was lost. This wasn’t the tough, impervious Adriana he’d grown accustomed to over the past days—unflappable, he’d assumed, thanks to growing up a beautiful Righetti girl in the sharp teeth of Kitzinian society. But then, suddenly, he understood.

And didn’t care at all for how it made him feel.

“My God,” he said flatly. “You’re in love with him.”

* * *

Adriana woke up in a rush and had no idea where she was.

She was on her stomach on an unfamiliar bed in a sunlit room she’d never seen before. She blinked, frowned, and realized as she did both that her head ached and that she’d neglected to remove her eye makeup the night before. What—

There was a slight movement behind her, a small shift against the mattress.

She was not alone in the bed.

Adriana froze. Then, very slowly, her heart pounding, she turned to look, somehow knowing what she would see even as she prayed she was mistaken.

Please not him. Please not him. Please—

Prince Pato lay sprawled out on his back, the sheets kicked off, naked save for a pair of tight navy blue briefs that clung to his narrow hips. The light from the skylights bathed him in shades of gold, and she couldn’t quite take in that perfect, hard-packed flesh of his, so close beside her she could almost feel the heat he generated, and could see the rough shadow of his beard on his jaw. She couldn’t make sense of all his fine masculine beauty, much less the picture of sheer abandon he made, sun-kissed and golden and stretched out so carelessly against the crisp white sheets.

She was in bed with Pato.

Her mouth was too dry; her eyes felt scraped and hollow. She felt fragile and broken, and had no idea how to pull herself together enough to handle this. Adriana was afraid she might be sick.

In a panic, she whipped her head around, yanked back the sheet and looked down at herself, not sure whether to be horrified or relieved to discover that while she wasn’t naked, she wore only the matching cranberry hip-slung panties and bra she’d had on beneath her gown at the charity ball.

The ball. Adriana fought to keep breathing as images from the night before began to flood her head. Those strange, intense moments with Pato. His hand on her arm. The way he’d looked at her, as if he could see straight into her. Then Lenz’s voice, so disgusted, so appalled.

She couldn’t think about Lenz. She couldn’t.

Had she really done this? Had she decided to become what she’d always been so proud she wasn’t? With the one person in all the world best suited to debauch her—or anyone, come to that—completely? He did it by rote, no doubt. He could do it in his sleep. No wonder she couldn’t recall it.

Adriana turned to look at him again, as if she might see her own actions tattooed on his smooth skin, and she jolted in shock.

Pato was awake. And watching her.

“Oh, my God,” she whispered. She pulled the sheets up to her neck, fought the urge to burst into tears, and stared at him in horror.

Pato’s golden eyes were sleepy, his hair a thick, careless mess, and still he fairly oozed the same sensual menace he had the night before, when he’d been dressed so elegantly. He studied her for a long moment, and the great, wide bed felt like a tiny little cot, suddenly. Like a trap. Adriana’s pulse beat at her, and she forgot about her headache.

“I hope you appreciate the sacrifice I made to your modesty,” Pato said in that drawling way of his, as if he was too lazy to bother enunciating properly. He waved at the form-fitting briefs he wore. At that flat abdomen of his, the crisp dark hair that disappeared beneath the fabric. She jerked her eyes away, and his mouth curved. “I think you know very well I prefer to sleep naked.”

Adriana felt dizzy, and part of her welcomed it. Encouraged it. It would be such a relief to simply faint dead away. To escape whatever morning-after this was. She lifted a hand to her head, only belatedly realizing that her hair had tumbled down from its chignon, and was hanging around her face in a wild mess that rivaled Pato’s.

Somehow, that made it worse. It made her feel like the wanton slut she must have become last night. Was it possible to share a bed with Prince Pato and not be a wanton slut? Her chest felt tight.

He watched her as she pushed the mass of blond waves behind her shoulders, his golden gaze like a flame as it touched her. More images from the previous night flashed through her head then, as if the heat of his gaze triggered her memory, and she frowned at him.

“You got me drunk,” she accused him.

Blaming him felt good. Clean. Far better to concentrate on that and not the images flickering in her head. Some dark-paneled pub, or possibly the kind of rich man’s club a prince might frequent, thick with reds and woods and the shots of strong spirits Pato slid in front of her, one after the next, his golden gaze never leaving her face. His elegant hands brushing hers. That wicked mouth of his much too close.

“You got you drunk,” he corrected, shifting over to his side and propping his head up on one hand as he continued to regard her with that lazy intent that made her belly fold in on itself. “Who was I to stand in your way?”

A dark street, laughter. Her laughter, and the wicked current of his voice beneath it. Her arm around Pato’s waist and his lean, hard arm around her shoulders. Then being held high against his chest as he moved through some kind of lobby...

This was awful, Adriana thought then, her chest aching with the sobs, the screams, she refused to let out. This was beyond awful.

“My God.” She said it again, despite the decided lack of any divine intervention this morning. She squeezed her eyes shut, bracing herself for the blow. Preparing herself, because she had to know. “Did you—? Did we—?”

There was nothing but silence. Adriana dared to open her eyes again, to find that Pato was staring at her in outrage.

She shuddered. “Does that mean we did?” she asked in a tiny voice.

“First of all,” he said, in that low voice of his that curled around her like a caress, and she couldn’t seem to shake it off, “I am not in the habit of taking advantage of drunk women who pretend to detest me when they are sober, no matter how much they beg.”

His gaze was hard on hers, and Adriana felt caught in the heat, the command, that surely a wastrel like Pato shouldn’t have at his disposal. Eventually, his mouth moved into a small, sexy grin that shouldn’t have tugged at her like that, all fire and need in the core of her, then a shiver everywhere else. She couldn’t seem to think, to move. To breathe. She could only stare back at him, her heart going wild, as if he was holding her captive in the palm of his hand.

“And second,” he said silkily, “if we had, you wouldn’t have to ask. You’d know.”

“Oh,” Adriana said faintly, not sure she was breathing. “Well. If you’re sure...?”

Pato shook his head. “I’m sure.”

She believed him. He was only looking at her now, all that gleaming attention of his focused on her. He wasn’t even touching her, and she felt branded. Scalded. Changed. She had a perfect memory of his hand on her arm, the heat of it, the punch of it, the way everything inside her had wound deliciously tight. She believed him, and yet there was something inside her that almost wished—

Stop, she snapped at herself, off balance and scared and much too close to falling apart.

Adriana realized belatedly that far too much time had passed and she’d done nothing but stare at him, while he watched her and no doubt read every last thought that crossed her mind. He was lethal; she understood that now, in a way she hadn’t before. He was lethal and she was in bed with him and somehow by the grace of God she hadn’t succumbed to his darker nature or, worse, hers...

Adriana frowned. “Did you say I begged?”

Pato smiled.

“For what?” she asked in an appalled whisper. “Exactly?”

He smiled wider.

“This can’t be happening.” She was barely audible, even to her own ears, but she felt each word like a stone slamming through her. “Did I—” But even as she asked, she shut herself off. “No. I don’t want to know.”

“You begged very prettily,” he told her then, that wild gleam in his eyes, which made her feel much too hot, too constricted, as if she might burst wide-open. “If it helps.”

It helped confirm that she hated herself, Adriana thought, that old black wave of self-loathing rising in her and then drenching her, drowning her, in all the ways she’d let herself down. Blood really will tell, she thought bitterly. You’ve been fooling yourself all these years, but in the end, you’re no better than any of them. Righetti whores.

She managed to take a breath, then another one.

And then, through her confusion, one thing became perfectly clear: it was time to accept who she was, once and for all. And that meant it was time to change her life.