had he been someone else. Her stomach had twisted into a hard knot. “I’m a terrible disappointment. Sometimes even to myself.”
Adriana hadn’t understood the tension that had flared between them then, the odd edginess that had filled the interior of the car, fragile and heavy at once. She hadn’t wanted to understand it. But she’d been afraid she did. That Pandora’s box might have been opened, and there wasn’t a thing she could do to change it after the fact. But that didn’t mean that she needed to rummage around inside it, picking up things best left where they were.
“Your brother was the first man who was ever kind to me,” she’d said, her voice sounding oddly soft in the confines of the car. “It changed everything. It made me believe—” But she hadn’t been able to say it, not to Pato, who couldn’t possibly have understood what it had meant to her to feel safe, at last. Who would mock her, she’d been sure. “I would have been perfectly happy to keep on believing that. You didn’t have to tell me otherwise.”
“Adriana.” He’d said her name like a caress, a note she’d never heard before in his voice, and she’d held up a hand to stop him from saying anything further. There had been tears pricking at the back of her eyes and it had already been far too painful.
He would take everything. She knew he would. She’d always known, and it was that, she’d acknowledged then, that scared her most of all.
“You did it deliberately,” she’d said quietly, and she’d forced herself to look at him. “Because you could. Because you thought it was funny.”
“Did you imagine he would love you back?” Pato had asked, an oddly gruff note in his voice then, his gleaming eyes unreadable, and it had hurt her almost more than she could bear. “Walk away from his betrothal, risk the throne he’s prepared for all his life? Just as the Duke of Reinsmark did for your great-aunt Sandrine?”
“It wasn’t about what Lenz would or wouldn’t do,” she’d whispered fiercely, fighting back the wild tilt and spin of her emotions, while Pato’s words had dripped into her like poison, bitter and painful. “People protect those they care about. If you cared about anything in the world besides pleasuring yourself, you’d know that, and you wouldn’t careen through your life destroy—”
He had reached over and silenced her with his finger on her lips, and she hadn’t had time to analyze the way her heart slammed into her ribs, the way her whole body seemed to twist into a dark, sheer ripple of joy at even so small and furious a touch from him.
“Don’t.”
It had been a command, a low whisper, his voice a rough velvet, and that had hurt, too. The car had come to a stop, but Pato hadn’t moved. He hadn’t looked away from her, pinning her to her seat with too much darkness in his gaze and an expression she’d never seen before on his face, making him a different man all over again.
“You don’t know what I care about,” he’d told her in that low rasp. “And I never thought any of that was funny.”
She’d felt that touch on her mouth for days.
“Ci vediamo,” Pato said into his mobile with a laugh now, ending his call.
Adriana snapped back into the present to find him looking at her from where he lounged there across the plane’s small aisle. She felt as deeply disconcerted as if the scene in the car had only just happened, as if it hadn’t been days ago, and she was afraid he could take one look at her and know exactly what she was thinking. He’d done it before.
If he could, tonight he chose to keep that to himself.
“Good book?” he asked mildly, as if he cared.
“It’s enthralling,” she replied at once. “I can’t bear to put it down for even a second.”
“You haven’t looked at it in at least five minutes.”
“I doubt you were paying that much attention,” she said coolly. “Certainly not while making juvenile plans to wreak havoc across Italy with your highly questionable race car driving friends who, last I checked the gossip columns, think the modeling industry exists purely to supply them with arm candy.”
He laughed as if she delighted him, and she felt it everywhere, like the touch of the sun. He moved in her like light, she thought in despair, even when he wasn’t touching her. She was lost. If she was honest, she’d been lost from the start, when he’d stood there before her with such unapologetic arrogance, naked beneath a bedsheet, and laughed at the idea that she could make him behave.
She should have listened to him. She certainly shouldn’t have listened to Lenz, whose motivations for sending her to Pato in the first place, she’d realized at some point while standing in that hallway after seeing him again, couldn’t possibly be what she’d imagined them to be when she’d raced off to do his bidding. And she couldn’t listen to the tumult inside her, the fire and the need, the chaos that Pato stirred in her without even seeming to try, because that way lay nothing but madness. She was sure of it.
Adriana didn’t know what she was going to do.
“Keep looking at me like that,” Pato said then, making her realize that she’d been staring at him for far too long—and that he was staring back, his eyes gleaming with a dark fire she recognized, “and I won’t be responsible for what happens next.”
* * *
Pato expected her to throw that back in his face. He expected that cutting tongue of hers, the sweet slap of that smile she used like a razor and sharpened so often and so comprehensively on his skin. He liked both far more than he should.
But her eyes only darkened as they clung to his, and a hectic flush spread over those elegant cheekbones he wanted to taste. He was uncomfortably hard within the next breath, the wild, encompassing need he’d been trying to tell himself he’d imagined, or embellished, slamming into him again, sinking its claws deep, making him burn hot, and want.
How could he want her this much?
It had been weeks since London, and his fascination with her should have ebbed by now, as his little fascinations usually did in much less time. And most of those women had not fancied themselves tragically in love with his brother. But Adriana was always with him, always right there within his reach, prickly and unimpressed and severe. He spent his days studying her lovely face and its many masks, reading her every gesture, poking at her himself when he grew tired of the distance she tried to put between them.
This woman was his doom. He understood that on a primal level, and yet couldn’t do the very thing he needed to do to avert it. He couldn’t let her walk away. That was part of the game—but he found he couldn’t bear the thought of it.
And he didn’t like to think about the implications of that.
“Careful, Adriana,” he said quietly. Her chest rose and fell too fast and her hands clenched almost fitfully at the thick paperback she held. If he asked, she would claim she didn’t want him and never had—but he could see the truth written all over her. He recognized what burned in her, no matter what she claimed. It made him harder, wilder. Closer to desperate than he’d been in years. “I’m in a dangerous mood tonight.”
She blinked then, looking down into her lap and smoothing her hands over the abused book, and he had rendered himself so ridiculous when it came to this woman that he felt it like loss.
“I don’t know how you can tell the difference between that and any of your other moods,” she said in her usual sharp way, which Pato told himself was better than that lost, hungry stare that could only lead to complications he knew he should avoid. “They’re all dangerous, sooner or later, aren’t they? And we both know who’ll have to clean up the mess.”
“I expected applause when we boarded the plane,” he told her, smiling when her gaze came back to his, her brows arched over those warm, wary eyes that made him forget about the hollow places inside him. “A grateful speech or two, perhaps even a few thankful tears.”
“You