Шантель Шоу – One Night With The Prince: A Royal Without Rules (страница 9)

“Ah,” he said in the low voice he could see made her shiver, and then he smiled as if she was prey and he was already on her. In her. “I see.” And he was closer than he should have been. He was much too close and he didn’t care at all, because her eyes widened and were that intoxicating shade of the finest Swiss chocolate. “You’re under the impression that you can shame me.”

They stared at each other, while laughter and conversation and the music kicked around them. Her lovely face flushed red. He saw the flash of that same panic he’d seen before, as if she wasn’t at all as controlled as she pretended, but she didn’t look away. Brave, he thought. Or foolish.

Pato lost himself in her dark gaze then, electric and alive and focused on him as if nothing else existed. As if he was already buried deep inside her, and she was waiting for him to move.

That image didn’t help matters at all. He blew out a breath.

“Come,” he said shortly, annoyed with himself. He turned on his heel and started across the great ballroom, knowing she had no choice but to follow, to keep him on that absurd leash of hers. And she did.

“Where are you going?” she asked as she fell into step with him. He didn’t think that hint of breathlessness in her voice was from walking, and it carved out something like a smile inside him.

“It’s like we’re chained together, Adriana.” He couldn’t seem to find his footing, and that was a catastrophe waiting to happen. And still, he didn’t care about that the way he knew he should. “Think of the possibilities.”

“No, thank you,” she replied, predictably, and he indulged himself and wrapped his hand around her upper arm, feigning solicitousness as he moved her through the door that led out toward the gardens. She jumped when he touched her, electric shock and that darker kick beneath it. He knew because he felt it, too. Her skin was softer than satin, warm and smooth beneath his palm, she smelled faintly of jasmine, and he shouldn’t have done it. Because now he knew.

Her eyes flew to his, and it punched through him hard, making him want to push her back against the nearest wall, lift her against him, lose himself completely in the burn of it. In her.

“Are you sure?” he asked, as they moved from the bright light of the ballroom into the soft, cool dark outside. He led her across the wide patio, skirting the small clumps of people who stood clustered around the bar tables that dotted it here and there. “Five minutes ago my sexual escapades were foremost on your mind. Don’t tell me you’ve lost interest so quickly.”

He looked down at her, and made no effort to contain the heat in him. The fire. He felt a tremor run through her, and God help him, he wanted her more than he’d wanted anything in years.

“I didn’t realize you were so sensitive about your scandalous past, Your Royal Highness,” she said, in a rendition of her usual cool he might have believed, had he not been looking into the wild heat in her gaze. “I’ll take care not to mention it again.”

“Somehow,” he murmured, his grip on her arm tightening just enough to make her suck in a breath, just enough to torture himself, “I very much doubt that.”

At some point, he was going to have to figure out why this woman got to him like this. But not tonight. Not now.

She pulled her arm from his grip as he steered her between two tables, as if concerned they couldn’t make it through the narrow channel side by side. But she rubbed at the place he’d touched her as if he’d left behind a mark, and Pato smiled.

In the deepest, farthest shadows of the patio, he found an empty table, the candle in the center, which should have been glowing, unlit. But he didn’t need candlelight to see her as she deliberately put the table between them, keeping as far out of his reach as she could. His eyes adjusted to the dark and he studied the flush on her cheeks, the hectic sparkle in her gaze.

And then he waited, leaning his elbows on the table and watching her. Her pretty eyes widened. She shifted from one foot to the other. He made her nervous, and he couldn’t pretend he didn’t like it.

“I wasn’t trying to shame you,” she said after long moments passed, just the two of them in a far, dark corner, all the nerves he could see on her face rich in her voice. And there was something else, he thought as he studied her. Something he couldn’t quite identify.

“Of course you were.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“You did.”

She looked stricken for a moment, then dropped her gaze to the tabletop, and he watched as she crossed her arms as if she thought she needed to hold herself together. Or protect herself.

“What are you ashamed of, Adriana?” he asked softly.

She flinched as if he’d slapped her, telling him a great deal more than he imagined she meant to do, but her expression was clear when she lifted her head. That mask again. She let out a breath and then she opened her mouth—

“Don’t lie to me,” he heard himself say, and worse, he could feel how important it was to him that she heed him. How absurdly, dangerously important. “Don’t clean it up. Just tell me.”

“I’m a Righetti, Your Royal Highness,” she said after a moment, her dark eyes glittering in the shadows. “Shame runs like blood in our veins. It’s who we are.”

Pato didn’t know how long they stood like that, held in that taut, near-painful moment. He didn’t know how long he gazed at her, at the proud tilt of her chin and the faintest tremor in her lips, with that darkness in her eyes. He didn’t know how she’d punched into him so completely that her hand might as well have ripped through his chest. That was what it felt like, and he didn’t want that. He didn’t want this. He couldn’t.

“Adriana,” he said finally, but his voice was no more than a rasp. And then he saw figures approaching from the corner of his eye, and he stopped, almost grateful for the intrusion into a moment that shouldn’t have happened in the first place.

She dropped her gaze again, and hunched her shoulders slightly as she stood there, as if warding off whoever had come to stand at the table a small distance behind her. Pato didn’t spare them a glance. He didn’t look away from Adriana for even a moment, and the fact that was more dangerous than anything that had come before didn’t escape him.

He wanted to touch her. He wanted to pull her against him, hold her, soothe her somehow, and he felt hollow inside because of it. Hollow and twisted, and stuck where he’d put himself, on the other side of an incidental table and an impossible divide, useless and corrupt and dismissable.

A fine bed he’d made, indeed.

And then she stiffened again, as if she’d been struck, and Pato frowned as he recognized the voices coming from behind her.

“Was that wise, do you think?” The cold, precise tones of Princess Lissette, her faint accent making the words seem even icier. She sounded as blonde and Nordic as she looked, Pato thought uncharitably. And as frigid.

“I’m not sure what wisdom has to do with it.”

There was no mistaking his brother’s voice, and the ruthlessly careful way he spoke while in public. The dutiful Crown Prince Lenz and his arranged-since-the-cradle bride stood at the next table, a candle bright between them, the warm glow doing nothing to ease their stiff, wary postures.

There were worse beds to lie in than his, Pato knew, eyeing his brother. Poor bastard.

“One must strive to be compassionate, of course,” Lissette continued in the same measured way. “But even I know of her family’s notoriety. Do you worry that it reflects badly on your judgment, your discernment, that you selected her to be your assistant when she is widely regarded as something of a pariah?”

Pato went still. Adriana seemed turned to stone, a statue, her eyes lowered as she bent slightly forward over her crossed arms.

“Look at me,” he ordered her in an undertone, but she ignored him.

Behind her, an uncomfortable silence swelled. Pato saw his brother begin to frown, then remember himself and fight it back. His ice princess fiancée only gazed back at him calmly. Pato wanted to order them to stop talking, to point out that Adriana was right here—but he didn’t trust that the princess would stop. Or that she wasn’t already aware that Adriana stood at the next table. And he didn’t want Adriana to be any more of a target. A dim alarm sounded in him then, questioning that unusual protective urge, but he shoved it aside.

“This will all go much smoother, I think,” Lenz said finally, an edge to his voice, “if you do not speak of things you don’t understand, Princess.”

“I believe I understand perfectly,” she replied with cool hauteur. “You took a traitor’s daughter as your mistress and flaunted her in the face of Kitzinian society, for years. What is there to misunderstand?”

“Adriana Righetti was never my mistress,” Lenz snapped, his tone scathing. Even derisive. “Credit me with slightly more intelligence than that, Lissette.”

There were other voices then, calling out for the happy royal couple from some distance across the patio, and Pato watched in a quiet fury as his brother pasted on his usual public smile, offered his arm to his fiancée—who smiled back in the same way as she took it—before they glided away. He had the wholly uncharacteristic urge to smack their heads together.