you require warnings now?” Lenz sounded amused. “Has the Playboy Prince lost his magic touch?”
“I’m merely considering how best to proceed,” Pato said, that raw thing in him seeming to tie itself into a knot, because he knew how he’d like to proceed. It was hot and raw inside him. Emphatic. “Yet all I find myself thinking about are those Righetti royal mistresses. She looks just like them. Tell me, brother, what other gifts has she inherited? Please tell me they’re kinky.”
“Stop!” Lenz bit out the sharp command, something Pato very rarely heard directed at him. “Have some respect. Adriana isn’t like that. She never...”
But he didn’t finish. And Pato blinked, everything in him going still. Too still. As if this mattered.
“Does that mean what I think that means?” he asked. It couldn’t. He shouldn’t care—but there was that raw thing in him, and he had to know. “Is it possible? Was Adriana Righetti, in fact, no more than your personal assistant?”
Lenz muttered a curse. “Is that so difficult to believe?”
“It defies all reason,” Pato retorted. But he smiled, a deep satisfaction moving through him, and he thought of the way Adriana had looked at him, determination and awareness in her dark eyes. He felt it kick in him. Hard. “You kept her for three whole years. What exactly were you doing?”
“Working,” Lenz said drily. “She happens to be a great deal more than a pretty face.” He cleared his throat. “Speaking of which, the papers are having a grand time attempting to uncover the identity of your mystery woman.”
“Which one?” Pato asked, still smiling.
Lenz sighed. “And still the public adores you. I can’t think why.”
“We all have our roles to play.” He heard the restlessness in his voice then, the darkness. It was harder and harder to keep it at bay.
His older brother let out another sigh, this one tinged with bitterness, and Pato felt his own rise to the surface. Not that it was ever far away. Especially not now.
“I thought it would feel different at this point,” Lenz said quietly. “I thought I would feel triumphant. Victorious. Something. Instead, I am nothing but an imposter.”
Pato pulled on a pair of trousers and a shirt and roamed out of his dressing room, then around the great bedchamber, hardly seeing any of it. There was too much history, too much water under the bridge, and only some of it theirs. Chess pieces put in place and manipulated across the years. Choices and vows made and then kept. They were in the final stages of a very long game, with far too much at stake. Far too much to lose.
“Don’t lose faith now,” he said, his voice gruff. “It’s almost done.”
Lenz’s laugh was harsh. “What does faith have to do with it? It’s all lies and misdirection. Callous manipulation.”
“If you don’t have faith in this course of ours, Lenz,” Pato said fiercely, the rawness in his brother’s voice scraping inside him, “then all of this has been in vain. All of it, for all these years. And then what will we do?”
There was a muffled noise that suggested one of Lenz’s aides had poked a head in.
“I must go,” his brother said after another low conversation. “And this is about sacrifice, Pato, though never mine. Don’t think it doesn’t keep me awake, wondering at my own vanity. If I was a good man, a good brother...”
He didn’t finish. What would be the point? Pato rubbed a hand over his eyes.
“It’s done,” he said. “The choice is made. We are who are and there’s no going back.”
There was a long pause, and Pato knew exactly which demons danced there between them, taunting his brother, dark and vicious. They were his, too.
“Be as kind to Adriana as you can,” Lenz said abruptly. “I like her.”
“We are all of us pawns, brother,” Pato reminded him softly.
“Be nice to her anyway.”
“Is that a command?” The raw thing in him was growing, hot and hungry. And Lenz had never touched her.
“If it has to be.” Lenz snorted. “Will it work?”
Pato laughed, though it was a darker sound than it should have been. He thought of all the moving parts of this game, all they’d done and all there was left to do before it was over. And then he thought of Adriana Righetti’s sharp smile on her courtesan’s mouth, then the dazed expression on her face when he’d told her to kneel. And the heat in him seemed to simmer, then become intent.
“It’s never worked before,” he told his brother. “But hope springs eternal, does it not?”
His certainly did.
He found Adriana waiting for him as promised in the relatively small reception room off the grandiose main foyer of his lavish palace apartment. It was filled with fussy antiques, commanding works of art and the gilt-edged glamor that was meant to proclaim his exalted status to all who entered. Pato much preferred the flat he kept in London, where he wasn’t required to impart a history lesson every time a guest glanced at a chair.
She was every bit as beautiful as her famously promiscuous ancestors, Pato thought, standing in the doorway and studying her. More so. She stood at the windows that looked out over the cold, blue waters of the alpine lake surrounding the palace, impatient hands on her hips and her stiff back to the door, and there was nothing in the least bit beige about her. Or even henlike, come to that. She’d refastened her jacket, and he appreciated the line of it almost as much as he’d enjoyed ruining that line when he’d unbuttoned it earlier. It skimmed over the elegant shape of her body before flaring slightly at her hips, over the narrow sheath of the skirt she wore and the high heels that made her legs look long and lean and as if they’d fit nicely wrapped around his back.
And she had in her genetic arsenal the most celebrated temptresses in the history of the kingdom. How could he possibly resist?
Anticipation moved in him, hard and bright. He needed her with him to play out this part of the game—but he hadn’t expected he’d enjoy himself. And now, he thought, he would. Oh, how he would.
There were so many ways to be nice, after all, and Pato knew every last one of them.
TEN DAYS LATER, Adriana stood in the middle of a glittering embassy ballroom, a serene smile pasted to her face, while inside, she itched to kill Pato. Preferably with her very own hands.
It was a feeling she was growing accustomed to the more time she spent in his presence—and the more he pulled his little stunts. Like tonight’s disappearing act in the middle of a reception where he was supposed to be calmly discharging his royal duties.
Please, she scoffed inside her head, her gaze moving around the room for the fifth time, holding out hope that she’d somehow missed him before, that he’d somehow blended into a crowd for the first time in his life. As if he has the slightest idea what the word duty means!
“The prince stepped out to take an important phone call,” she lied to the ambassador beside her, when she accepted, finally, what she already knew. Pato had vanished, which could only bode ill. She kept her smile in place. “Why don’t I see if I can help expedite things?”
“If you would be so kind,” the ambassador murmured in reply, but without the sly, knowing look that usually accompanied any discussion of Pato or his suspicious absences in polite company. Nor did he look around to see if any women were also missing. Adriana viewed that as a point in her favor.
She had kept the paparazzi’s favorite prince scandal-free for ten whole days. That was something of a record, if she did