life inside him and beat at his chest in primitive masculine triumph. That was all bad enough.
But it went much deeper than that, and Pato knew it.
He’d known it while they were still in the air. He’d known it when he’d started telling her things he never spoke about, ever. He’d known it when the plane had finally landed and he’d sent her off in a separate car and had found himself standing on the tarmac, staring at her disappearing taillights and wanting things he couldn’t have.
He’d known for some time, if he was honest, but tonight it had all come into sharp and unmistakable focus.
Pato didn’t simply want her in his bed.
He liked her. She made him laugh, she challenged him and she wasn’t the least bit in awe of him. From the very start, she’d treated him as if she expected him to be the educated, intelligent, capable man he was supposed to be rather than the airy dilettante he played so well. He wanted to teach her every last sensual trick he’d ever learned, and bathe them both in that scalding heat of hers. He wanted to prove to her that the passion that flared between them was rare and good. He wanted to take away the pressure of all that family history she wore about her neck like an albatross.
Worst of all, most damning and most dangerous, he wanted to be that better man she deserved.
“It isn’t even my dirt, but I’m covered in it,” she’d said tonight, breaking the heart he didn’t have all over again, and he’d wanted nothing more than to be the one who showed her that she had never been anything but beautiful and clean, all the way through. Pato never should have let himself get lost in the fantasy that he might be that man. He wasn’t. There was no possibility that he could be anything to her, and couldn’t allow himself to forget that again.
Not until the game he and Lenz had played for all these years reached its conclusion. He couldn’t break the faith his brother had placed in him all those years ago. He couldn’t break the vow he’d made. He wouldn’t.
And he’d never been even remotely tempted to do so before.
Pato found himself on one of his balconies that looked out over the water to the mainland beyond and the city nestled there on the lakeshore. His eyes drifted toward the sparkling lights of the old city, the ancient quarter that had sprawled over the highest hill since the first thatched cottages were built there in medieval times. It was filled with museums and grand old houses, narrow little lanes dating back centuries and so many of Kitzinia’s blue-blooded nobles in their luxurious, historic villas. And he knew precisely where the Righetti villa stood on the finest street in the quarter, one of the kingdom’s most famous and most visited landmarks.
But tonight he didn’t think about his murdered ancestor or Almado Righetti’s plot to turn the kingdom over to foreign enemies, all in service to long-ago wars. It was only the house where she lived, where he imagined her as wide-awake as he was, as haunted by him as he was by her. He didn’t care what her surname was. He didn’t care if this was history repeating itself. He certainly didn’t care about the malicious gossip of others.
The ways he wanted her almost scared him. Almost.
And of all the things he couldn’t have while this game played on, he understood that she was going to hurt the worst. She already did.
Pato slammed his fist against the thick stone balustrade. Hard. As if that might wake him up, restore him to himself. It did nothing but make his knuckles ache, and it didn’t make him any less alone.
He hated this game, but he couldn’t lose his focus. There was one week left until the wedding, and she’d served her purpose. He had to let her go.
ADRIANA WALKED INTO the palace the following morning on shaky legs, trying with all her might to feel completely unaffected by what had happened the night before. And if she couldn’t quite feel it, to appear as if she did. Cool. Calm. Professional. Not riddled with anxiety, her body still humming with leftover desire.
“I wanted to know how you tasted,” she could hear him say, as if he whispered it into her ear. Her skin prickled at the memory.
Nothing had changed, she assured herself, save her understanding of her own weakness and her ability to tell herself lies. And nothing would change, because this was Pato. Careless, promiscuous, thoughtless, undependable for the whole of his adult life, and proud of it besides. No depth, she reminded herself. No conscience and no shame. Those hints she’d seen of another man—that ruthless power, that dark focus, that devastating gentleness—weren’t him.
They couldn’t be him.
And the things he’d said, which she could still feel running through her like something electric...well. She’d lost herself in a sensual storm. She’d never experienced anything like it before and she’d decided it was entirely possible she’d made it all seem much more intense than it had been. Pato had made her sob and writhe and fall to pieces. He’d made her body sing for him as if she were no more than an instrument—and well he should. Passion, he’d called it, and he would know. Sex was his occupation, his art. He was a master.
He’d mastered her without even trying very hard.
It was no wonder she’d concocted some fantasy around that, she told herself as she made her way down the gleaming marble hall that led to Pato’s office. He did things like this—like her—all the time. The number of women who fantasized about him was no doubt astronomical, and none of them hung about the palace, clinging to his ankles. Nor would she.
She would be perfectly serene, she chanted to herself as she let herself into his office. Efficient and competent. And she wouldn’t verbally spar with him anymore, as he obviously viewed it as a form of flirtation, and she found it far too easy to slip into, putting herself at risk. Last night was a mistake, never to be repeated. No conversation was necessary, no embarrassing postmortem. It was done. She marched around the quietly opulent office, turning on lights and arranging the papers he wouldn’t read on his desk. The two of them would simply...move forward.
Or so Adriana told herself, over and over, as she waited for him to appear.
He didn’t come. She waited, she lectured herself more sternly, and still he failed to saunter in, disheveled and lazy and wearing something that violated every possible palace protocol, the way he usually did. When Adriana realized he was going to miss his engagement with the Kitzinian Red Cross—after what she’d gone through to get him back into the country, specifically to meet with them—she braced herself, smoothed her hands over the very conservative suit she’d chosen this morning, which was in no way protective armor, and set off through the palace to find him.
Pato’s bed, she was relieved to find when she made it to his bedroom, was empty.
It was only then, while she stared at the rumpled sheets and the indentation in the pillows where his head must have been at some point last night, that Adriana admitted to herself that maybe she was a little too relieved. That maybe it had hurt to imagine that he could have carried on with his usual depravity after she’d left him last night.
You are nothing but another instrument, she reminded herself harshly, amazed at her capacity for self-delusion. And he happens to be a remarkably talented musician—no doubt because he practices so very, very often.
If only she could make that sink in. If only she could make that traitorous part of her, the part that insisted on wild fantasies and childish hope no matter how many times it was crushed out of her, believe it.
“You look disappointed,” Pato drawled from the doorway behind her. Adriana whirled around to face him, her heart leaping out of her chest. “Shall I ring a few bored socialites and have them fill up the bed? Just think of all the sanctimonious lectures you could deliver.”
He sounded the way he looked this morning: dangerous. Edgy. Dark and something like grim. Adriana’s breath tangled in her throat.
Pato