or—”
“You can’t possibly be this naive.”
Something Adriana had never seen before moved over Pato’s face. His hand tightened briefly, and then he released her and sat up in a smooth roll.
He shoved his hair back and pinned her with a glare when she scrambled away from him and to her knees on the far side of the bed, pulling the sheet back over her as she went. She had never seen him look like that. Brooding, dark. No hint of his famous laughter, his notorious smile.
“I’m being rational, not naive,” she countered, unable to tear her eyes away from him when he looked like this, as if he was someone else. Someone ruthless and hard. Not like easy, careless Pato at all. “Your brother was the first person to believe in me, but it was wrong of me to take advantage of that.”
Pato shook his head, rubbing at his jaw with one hand as if he was keeping words back manually.
“I abused his kindness,” she continued, her unease growing. “His—”
“For God’s sake, Adriana,” Pato spat out. “He wasn’t being kind. He was grooming you to be his mistress.”
FOR A LONG, breathless moment, Adriana could only stare at him, another piece of her world crumbling into dust in this bed, shattering in that relentless golden gaze.
“That’s absurd.” She felt turned inside out. “He would never do something like that.”
“You know all about his previous assistants, I’m sure,” Pato said, in that same blunt way, a hard gleam in his gaze and no hint of a curve on that mouth of his. “Did you never question why he cycled so many of them through that position? And why they all had such different sets of credentials? One an art historian, another a socialite? Lenz prefers his mistresses be accessible.”
Adriana felt as if she’d slipped sideways into some alternate reality, where nothing made sense any longer. Lenz had wanted her, all this time, as she’d so often daydreamed he might—but not as his mistress. She’d never wanted that. And now she sat too close to naked in the morning sun with Pato, of all people, who looked like some harsher version of himself, and she was terrified that he might be right. Hadn’t her father said the same thing only yesterday?
“He’s a good man,” she whispered, shaken.
“Yes,” Pato said impatiently. “And yet he’s still flesh and blood like all the rest of us.”
She shook her head, and looked down at the bed. She’d done this. She understood that, if nothing else. This was the Righetti curse. This was her fault. Her head felt heavy again, and it pounded, but she knew it wasn’t a leftover from last night. It was the generations of Righettis running wild in her blood, and her silly notion she could be any different.
“Do people really think that I’m his mistress?” she asked, sounding like a stranger to her own ears. She was afraid to look at Pato then, but she made herself do it anyway. His eyes seemed darker than usual, and they glittered.
“Of course.” There was an edge to his low voice then, a darker sheen to that intent way he looked at her. “You are a Righetti, he is a Kitzinian prince, and one thing we know about history, Adriana, is that it repeats itself until it kills us all.”
Suddenly, the fact that she was practically naked with this man seemed obscene, disgusting. As if her flesh itself were evil, as if it had made her do this—her body ignoring her brain and acting of its own accord. She slid out of the bed and looked around wildly, her eyes falling on the nearest chair. She walked over and grabbed the oversize wrap that she’d worn against the cool London weather, dropped the sheet that made everything seem too sexual, and covered herself.
It didn’t make her feel any better.
Adriana couldn’t understand how she’d been so blind, so stupid. How she hadn’t known that of course people would think the worst of her, no matter if the tabloids had eased off—out of respect for Lenz, she understood now in a miserable rush of insight. No one had cared that she was good at her job, that she’d never so much as touched the future king. Why had she imagined any of that would matter? Because you wanted to pretend. Because you wanted to believe you could be someone else.
But she was a Righetti. There was never any mistaking that. She should have known it would poison everyone and everything she came into contact with. Even Lenz.
She turned then, and Pato still watched her, sitting there on his bed, a vision of indolent male beauty. Every inch of him royal, gorgeous and as utterly, deliberately corrupt as it was assumed she was. He’d chosen it. He was the Playboy Prince, scandalous and dissolute. But he was still a prince.
Adriana blinked. “So are you,” she said slowly, as an idea took root inside her, and began to grow. “A Kitzinian prince, I mean.”
Pato’s mouth crooked. “To my father’s everlasting dismay, yes.”
It was so simple, Adriana thought then, staring at him as if she’d never seen him before. It could fix everything.
“Then we should make them all think that I’m your mistress,” she said in a rush. She clutched the wrap tighter around her, drifting closer to the bed as she spoke. “The tabloids are halfway there already.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“No one would be at all surprised to discover that you were sleeping with a Righetti,” she continued excitedly, ignoring the odd, arrested look on his face. “Your brother is much too responsible to make that kind of mistake. But you live for mistakes. You’re famous for them!”
“I’m not following you,” he said, and she noticed then that his voice had gone low and hot, and not with the kind of heat she’d heard before.
“It wouldn’t even take that much effort.” She was warming to the topic as her mind raced ahead, picturing it. “One paparazzi picture and the whole world would be happy to believe that history was indeed repeating itself, but with a far more likely candidate than your brother.”
Pato only looked at her for a long moment, and Adriana found herself remembering, suddenly, that he was second in line to the throne. One tragedy and he would be king. All of a sudden he looked as commanding, as regal, as a man in such a position should. Powerful beyond measure. Dangerous.
It was as if she hadn’t seen him before. As if he’d been hiding, right there in plain sight, beneath the dissipated exterior. But how was that possible?
“It wouldn’t be real, of course,” she said quickly, confusion making her feel edgy. Or maybe that was him. “All we’d need was a few pictures and some good PR spin.”
He laughed then, but it was a low, almost aggressive sound, and it made her whole body stiffen in reaction.
“You can’t possibly be suggesting that we pretend you’re sleeping with me to preserve my brother’s reputation,” he said softly, and Adriana didn’t miss the fact that the tone he used was deadly. It made her stomach twist. “You are not actually standing here in my bedroom, wearing almost nothing, and proposing such a thing.”
She searched his face, but he was a stranger, dark and hard.
“That’s exactly what I’m proposing.”
His jaw worked. His golden eyes flashed. “No.”
She scowled at him. “Why not?”
“Do you really require a reason?” he demanded, and then he got to his feet, making everything that much more tense. “You’d be much better served making certain we both forget this absurd conversation ever happened.”
That was when Adriana realized, in a kind of shock, that he was angry. Pato, who famously never got angry. Who was supposed to be carefree and easy in all things. Who had