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 laughed off every sticky situation he’d ever been in.
But not this one. Not today. He was angry. And she had no idea why.
She watched him warily as he roamed around the foot of the bed, so close to naked, and now that temper she hadn’t known he had spilling out around him like a black cloud. But she couldn’t stop. Not when she’d figured out a way to fix things. And what did he care, anyway? It wasn’t as if his reputation was at stake.
“I don’t understand,” she said after a moment, trying to sound reasonable. Rational. “You’ve gone out of your way to link yourself to every woman with a bad reputation you’ve ever come across. Why not me? My bad reputation goes back centuries!”
“I actually did those things,” he replied, that dark temper rich in his voice, in the narrow gaze he aimed at her. “I didn’t pretend for the cameras. I don’t apologize for who I am, but I also don’t fake it.”
Adriana blinked. “So your issue isn’t the idea itself, then. It’s that you need your debaucheries to be honest and truthful. Real.”
The way he looked at her then made a low, dark pulse begin to drum in her, panic and heat and something else she’d never experienced before and couldn’t name. It took everything she had not to bolt for the door and forget she’d ever started this.
“My reputation is my life’s work,” Pato said, and there was a certain harshness in his voice then, dark and grim and tired, that made something clutch hard in Adriana’s chest. “It’s not a cross I’m forced to bear. It’s deliberate.”
“Fine,” she blurted out. She’d never felt so desperate. She only knew this had to happen, she had to have the opportunity to fix one thing her family name had ruined, just one thing—
“Fine?” he echoed, his golden eyes narrowing, focusing in on her in a way that should have made her fall over in a dead faint. Incinerate on the spot. Run.
Something.
But she met his gaze squarely instead.
“We don’t have to fake it,” Adriana said, very distinctly, so there could be no mistake. “I’ll sleep with you.”
All the air in the room evaporated into a shimmer of heat. Into the intensity of Pato’s gaze, the electricity that arced between them, the tension bright and taut and very nearly painful.
He laughed, low and dark and wicked, and Adriana felt it like a touch, as if his strong, elegant hands were directly on her skin. It made her feel weak. It made her want to drop the wrap and press herself against him, to see if that might ease the heavy ache inside her, the pulse of it, the need.
But who was she kidding? She knew it would. And so did he.
“You have no idea what you’re asking, Adriana,” he scoffed. His mouth curved mockingly, knowingly, and that ache in her only grew sharper, more insistent. She suddenly wasn’t at all sure what she was desperate for. But she couldn’t look away. “You wouldn’t know where to start.”
Adriana couldn’t stop the shivering, way down deep inside her.
Her bones felt like jelly and she didn’t know what scared her more—that she might really follow through and throw herself at him, and God only knew what would become of her then, or that the terrible ache inside her might take her to the ground on its own, and then he’d know exactly how much he tormented her.
Though she suspected he already did.
Pato was coming toward her, that sun-kissed skin on careless display, the faint brush of dark hair across his hard pectoral muscles seeming to emphasize his fascinating, unapologetic maleness. And he watched her so intently as he moved, his golden eyes gleaming as if all the wickedness in the world was in him, dark and rich and his to use against her if he chose. All his.
She shouldn’t find that at all intriguing. She shouldn’t wonder, now that she’d glimpsed a different side of this man, what else he hid behind his disreputable mask.
This is about Lenz, she reminded herself sharply. She refused to think about Pato’s claim that her beloved crown prince had wanted her as his mistress all those years she’d believed they’d been working together in harmony. She couldn’t let that matter. This was about saving the one thing she could save, the one thing her family name had blackened that she could actually wash clean.
She couldn’t save herself, perhaps. But she could save Lenz’s reputation.
“Your brother—” she began.
“Rule number five,” Pato said smoothly, but with that alarming kick of dark fire beneath. “When attempting to negotiate your way into my bed, don’t bring up my brother. Ever.”
Adriana felt her pulse beating too hard inside her neck, her wrists. And lower, where it mixed with that ache in her, gave it bite. She forced herself to stand still as Pato roamed toward her. Forced herself to act as if he didn’t, in fact, intimidate her—even when he stopped so close to her that she had to tilt her head back to look at him.
He crossed his arms over his chest, his eyes unreadable.
“Are we negotiating?” she asked, her voice so much smaller than it should have been. Telling him too much she shouldn’t let him know.
“I don’t take trembling virgins to my bed, Adriana,” Pato said, with all that gold in his gaze and that curve to his lips, but still, that new hardness beneath. It almost made her miss what he’d said. Then it penetrated, and her body seemed to detonate into a long, red flush of humiliation—but he wasn’t finished. “Particularly not trembling, terrified virgins who imagine themselves in love with my brother and view my bed as a sacrificial altar.”
“I—” She’d never stammered in her life. She had to order herself to snap her mouth closed, to calm herself. Or at least to breathe. “I’m not terrified.” His gaze never wavered, and yet she was sure it was consuming her where she stood. “And, of course, I’m certainly not a virgin.”
His dark brows rose. “Convince me.”
“How?” she demanded, bright red and humiliated. And trembling, just as he’d accused. He missed nothing. “Not that it would matter if I was or that it’s any of your business, let me point out.”
“But it is.” He was merciless, his hard gaze hot. “You want in my bed? Then I want to know every last detail of your vast sexual experience. Convince me, Adriana. Consider it a job interview—your résumé. After all, you’ve read all about me in the tabloids. You said so yourself.”
She told herself he couldn’t possibly be asking that. This couldn’t possibly be happening. But then, what part of this day so far was at all possible? She didn’t drink to excess and wake up in men’s beds. She didn’t have extended conversations with