“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.
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