her with that golden stare for another ageless moment, so sure of himself. So sure of her. He took the tissue from her hand then, his fingers brushing over hers—leaving nothing behind but heat and confusion, neither of which she could afford. “Small minds prefer the simplest explanations. They’d assume it was you.”
* * *
“You must have done something,” Adriana’s father said peevishly, and not for the first time. “I told you to ingratiate yourself, to be obliging, didn’t I? I told you to be careful!”
“You did,” Adriana agreed. She didn’t look over at her mother, who was preparing breakfast at the stove. She didn’t have to look; she could feel her mother’s sympathy like a cool breeze through the room. She tried to rub away the tension in her temples, the churning confusion inside her. “But I didn’t do anything, I promise. Lenz thinks this is a great opportunity for me.”
There was a tense silence then, and Adriana blinked as she realized her mistake. Her stomach twisted.
“‘Lenz?’” Her father’s brows clapped together. “You’re quite familiar with the crown prince and future king of Kitzinia, are you not? I don’t need to tell you where that leads, Adriana. I don’t need to remind you whose blood runs through your veins. The shame of it.”
He didn’t. He really didn’t, as she was the one who lived it in ways he couldn’t imagine, being male. But he always did, anyway. She could see that same old lecture building in him, making his whole body stiffen.
“Papa,” she said gently, reaching over to cover his hands with hers. “I worked with him for three years. A certain amount of familiarity is to be expected.”
“And yet he insults you like this, throwing you to his dog of a brother like refuse, straight back into the tabloids.” Her father frowned at her, and a small chill tickled the back of her neck. “Perhaps his expectation was for rather more familiarity than you offered, have you thought of that?”
It wasn’t the first time her father had managed to articulate her deepest fears. But this time it seemed to sting more. Adriana pulled her hands away.
“Eat, Emilio,” her mother said then, slipping into her usual seat and raising her brows when Adriana’s father only scowled at the cooked breakfast she set before him. “You hate it when your eggs get cold.”
“It was never like that,” Adriana said, pushed to defend herself—though she wasn’t sure she was addressing her father as much as herself. “Lenz is a good man.”
“He is a man,” her father replied shortly, something she didn’t like in his gaze. “A very powerful man. And you are a very beautiful woman with only a terrible history and a disgraced family name to protect you.”
“Emilio, please,” her mother interjected.
Her father looked at her for an uncomfortable moment, then dropped his gaze to his meal, his silence almost worse. Adriana excused herself, unable to imagine eating even a bite when her stomach was in knots.
She made her way through the ancient villa to her childhood bedroom. It would be easier to leave Kitzinia altogether, she knew. She’d sat up nights as a child, listening to her mother beg her father to emigrate, to live in a place where their surname need never cause any kind of reaction at all. But Emilio Righetti was too proud to abandon the country his ancestor had betrayed, and Adriana understood it, no matter how hard it was to bear sometimes, no matter how she wished she didn’t. Because when it came right down to it, she was the same.
She shut the door to her bedroom behind her and sank down on the edge of her bed. She was so tired, though she didn’t dare let herself sleep. She had to return to the palace. Had to face Pato again.
Adriana let her eyes drift shut, wishing herself far away from the villa she’d grown up in, surrounded by the remains of the once vast Righetti wealth. If she looked out her window, she could see the causeway the kingdom had built in the 1950s, linking the red-roofed, picturesque city that spread along the lakeside to the royal palace that sat proudly on its own island in the middle of the blue water, its towers and spires thrust high against the backdrop of the snowcapped Alps. The villa boasted one of the finest addresses in the old city, a clear indication that the Righettis had once been highly favored by many Kitzinian rulers.
Now the villa was a national landmark. A reminder. The birthplace and home of the man who had murdered his king, betrayed his country, nearly toppling the kingdom with his treachery. Because of him, all the rest of the Righetti family history was seen through a negative lens. There had been other royal mistresses from other noble Kitzinian families—but only the Righettis enjoyed the label of witches. Whores.
There was no escape from who she was, Adriana knew. Not as long as she stayed here. And she didn’t understand what was happening to her now—what was happening in her. What had ignited in her last night at that embassy party under Pato’s arrogant golden stare. What had stalked her dreams all through the long night, erotic and wild, and still thrummed beneath her skin when she woke...
That was a lie, she thought now, cupping a hand over the nape of her neck as if she could ease the tension she felt. Adriana knew exactly what was happening. She didn’t want to understand it, because she didn’t want to admit it. Yet the way her father had looked at her today, as if she was somehow visibly tainted by the family history, made it impossible to keep lying to herself.
She’d heard it all her life. It had been flung at her in school and was whispered behind her back even now. It wasn’t enough that she was assumed to be traitorous by blood, like all her male relatives. She was the only female Righetti of her generation, and more, was the very image of her famous forebears—there were portraits in the Royal Gallery to prove it. They were well-known and well-documented whores, all the way down to Adriana’s great-aunt, who had famously beguiled one of the king’s cousins into walking away from his dukedom, disowned and disgraced.
And Adriana was just like them.
She knew exactly how tainted she really was, how very much she lived down to her family’s legacy. Because it wasn’t Lenz who had dreamed of something more familiar. It was her.
Lenz was good and kind, and he’d believed in her. He’d given her a chance. Adriana was the first Righetti to set foot in the palace since her traitorous ancestor had been executed there a hundred years ago, and Lenz had made that happen. He’d changed everything. He’d given her hope. And in return, Adriana had adored him, happy simply to be near him.
And yet she’d dreamed of Pato in ways she’d never dreamed of his brother. Wild and sensual. Explicit. Maybe it shouldn’t surprise her that she couldn’t get Pato out of her head, she thought now in a wave of misery. Maybe it was programmed into her very flesh, her bones, to want him. To want anything, anyone royal, moving from one prince to the next. To be exactly what she’d always been: a Righetti.
That was what they said in the tabloids, which had pounced on her switch from Lenz’s office to Pato’s with malicious glee, after three years of going a bit easier on her. She’s failed to snare Prince Lenz with her Righetti wiles—will the shameless Pato be easier to trap?
Maybe this had all been inevitable from the start.
Her mobile phone chirped at her from the bedside table, snapping her eyes open. She reached for it and tensed when she saw the name that flashed on the screen. It felt like confirmation that she was cursed. But she picked it up, because Pato was her job. Her responsibility. It didn’t matter what she felt.
It only mattered what she did, and she controlled that. Not him. Not the ghosts of her slutty ancestors. Not her own treacherous blood.
Stop being so melodramatic, she ordered herself, pulling in a deep breath. Nothing is inevitable.
“It’s eight-fifteen in the morning,” she said by way of a greeting, and she didn’t bother to sweeten her tone. “Surely too early for your usual debauchery.”
“Pack your bags,” Pato said, sounding uncharacteristically alert despite the hour.