A Royal Without Rules

He was sleeping when you saw that, another voice countered. He is probably not sleeping now.

God, she hated him. She hated that this was her life. Adriana steeled herself and pushed through the door.

The music was loud, electronic and hypnotic, filling the dimly lit room. Adriana saw the woman first. She was completely naked save for a tiny black thong, plus long dark hair spilling down to the small of her back, and she was dancing.

If that was the word for it. It was carnal. Seductive. She moved to the music as if it was part of her, sensual and dark, writhing and spinning in the space between the two low couches that took up most of the floor space of the cozy room.

Performing, Adriana realized after a stunned moment. She was performing.

Pato lounged on the far couch, his long legs thrust out in front of him and crossed at the ankle, his elegant suit jacket open over his magnificent chest, and his lean arms stretched out along the back of the seat. He was fully clothed, which both surprised and oddly disappointed Adriana, but he looked no less the perfect picture of sexual indolence even though his skin wasn’t showing.

Her throat went dry. The woman bent over backward, her hips circling in open, lustful invitation, her arms in the air before her. The music was like a dark throb, moving inside Adriana like a demand, a caress.

She swallowed hard, and that was when she realized Pato was looking straight at her.

Her heart stopped. Then kicked, exploding into her ribs, making her stomach drop. But Adriana didn’t—couldn’t—move.

The moment stretched out between them, electric and fierce. There was only that arrogant golden stare of his, as if the woman before him didn’t exist. As if the music was for Adriana alone—for him. She had the panicked thought that he’d wanted her to find him like this, that this was some kind of trap. That he knew, somehow, the riot inside of her, the confusion. The heat.

Adriana didn’t know how long she stood there, frozen on the outside and that catastrophic fire within. But eventually—seconds later? years?—Pato lifted one hand, pointed a remote toward the entertainment center on the far wall and silenced the music. All without looking away from Adriana for an instant.

The sudden silence made her flinch. Pato’s mouth curved in one corner, wicked and knowing.

“It’s time to go, Your Royal Highness,” Adriana said stiffly into the quiet. She was aware, on some level, that the other woman was speaking, scowling at her. But Adriana couldn’t seem to hear a word she said. Couldn’t seem to see anything but Pato.

“You could come sit down, Adriana.” His dark brows rose in challenge as he patted the sofa cushion beside him, and she was certain he knew the very moment her nipples pulled taut in a reaction she didn’t understand. He smiled. “Watch. Enjoy. Who knows what might happen?”

“Not a single thing you’re imagining right now, I assure you,” Adriana said, struggling to control her voice.

She forced her shoulders back, stood straighter. She would not let this man best her. She couldn’t let herself feel these things, whatever they were. She had too much to prove—and too much too lose. Adriana jerked her gaze away from him, ignoring his low chuckle, and frowned at the woman, who still stood there wearing nothing but a black thong and an attitude.

“Aren’t you the ambassador’s daughter?” she asked sharply. “Should we call downstairs and ask your father what he thinks about your innovative approach to foreign policy?”

The woman made an extremely rude and anatomically challenging suggestion.

“No, thank you,” Adriana replied coolly, unable, on some level, to process the fact that she was having this conversation while gazing at this woman’s bared breasts. Not the first set of naked breasts she’d seen in Pato’s company. She could only pray it was the last. “But I’m sure that if you walked into the ballroom dressed like this you’d have a few takers. No doubt that would delight your father even further.”

Pato laughed then, rising from the couch with that sinuous masculine grace he didn’t deserve, and straightened his suit jacket with a practiced tug. He did not look at all ashamed, or even caught out. He looked the way he always did: deeply amused. Lazy and disreputable. Unfairly sexy. His darker-than-blond hair was long enough to hint at a curl, and he wore it so carelessly, as if fingers had just or were about to run through it. That wicked mouth of his made him look like a satyr, not a prince. And those golden eyes gleamed as he held her gaze, connecting with a punch to all that confused heat inside her. Making it bloom into an open flame.

“There is no need for threats, Adriana,” he said, sardonic and low, and she felt it everywhere. “Nothing would please me more than to do your bidding.”

The ambassador’s daughter moved then, plastering herself to his long, lean body, rubbing her naked breasts against his chest as she flung her arms around his neck, hooked one leg over his hip and pressed her mouth to his. He didn’t kiss her the way Adriana had once seen him kiss one of his paramours in an almost-hidden alcove in the palace—carnal and demanding and an obvious, smoking-hot prelude to what came next. This was not that, thank goodness. But he didn’t exactly fight her off, either.

“Then by all means, let’s have you do my bidding, Your Royal Highness,” Adriana said icily, everything inside her seeming to fold in on itself, like a fist. “Whenever you can tear yourself away, of course.”

Pato set the other woman aside with a practiced ease that reminded Adriana of the same dexterity he’d showed in his bed that other morning. It made that fist curl tighter. Harder. He murmured something Adriana couldn’t hear, that made the ambassador’s thonged daughter smile at him as if he’d licked her. And then he smoothed down his tie, buttoned his jacket and sauntered toward the doorway as if there wasn’t a nearly naked woman panting behind him and a formal reception he was supposed to be attending below.

Adriana stepped back to let him move into the hallway, and took more pleasure than she should have in snapping the door shut behind him. Perhaps with slightly more force than necessary.

“Temper, temper,” Pato murmured, eyeing her with laughter in that golden gaze. “And here I thought you’d be so proud of me.”

“I doubt you thought anything of the kind.” She’d never wanted to hit another human being so much in all her life. “I doubt you think. And why on earth would I be proud of this embarrassing display?”

He propped one shoulder against the closed door and waved a languid hand down the length of him, inviting her to take a long look. She declined. Mostly.

“Am I not clothed?” he asked, taunting her. Again. “‘Keep your clothes on, Your Royal Highness,’ you said in that prissy way of yours in the car on the way over tonight. I am delighted, as ever, to obey.”

“You wouldn’t know how to obey if it was your job,” she snapped at him. “Not that I imagine you know what one of those is, either.”

“You make a good point,” he said, and that was when it occurred to Adriana that they hadn’t moved at all—that they were standing entirely too close in that doorway. His face shifted from pretty to predatory, and her head spun. “I’m better at giving the orders, it’s true. Rule number three, Adriana. The faster you obey me, the harder and the longer you’ll come. Consider it my personal guarantee.”

She couldn’t believe he’d said that. Her entire body seemed to ignite, then liquefy.

“Enough,” she muttered, but she didn’t fool him with her horrified tone, if that flash of amused satisfaction in his gaze meant anything. Desperation made her lash out. “You shouldn’t share these sad rules of yours, Your Royal Highness. It only makes you that much more pathetic—the dissipated, aging bachelor, growing more pitiable by the moment, on a fast track to complete irrelevance.”

“Yes,” he agreed. He leaned closer, surrounding her, mesmerizing her. “That’s exactly why you’re breathing so fast, why your cheeks are so flushed. You pity me.”

Adriana ducked around him and started down the hall, telling herself none of that had happened. None of it. No dancing girl, no strange awareness. No rules that made her belly feel tight and needy. And certainly not the look she’d just seen in his eyes, stamped hard on his face. But her heart clattered in her chest, it was as hard to breathe as he’d suggested, and she knew she was lying.

Worse, he was right beside her.

“You’re welcome,” Pato said after a moment, sounding smug and irritatingly male. It made her pulse race, but she refused to look at him. She couldn’t seem to stop herself from imagining what kind of orders he’d give…and she hated herself for wondering.

“I beg your pardon?” she asked icily, furious with herself.

“Someone needs to provide fodder for your fantasies, Adriana. I live to serve.”

She stopped walking, her hand on the door that led out of the residence. When she looked at him, she ignored the impact of that hot golden gaze of his and smiled instead. Poisonously.

“My fantasies involve killing you,” she told him. “I spend hours imagining burying you in the palace gardens beneath the thorniest rose bushes, so I’d never have to deal with you again.” She paused, then added with exaggerated politeness, “Your Royal Highness.”

Pato grinned widely, and leaned down close. Too close. Adriana was aware, suddenly and wildly, of all the skin she was showing, all of it right there, within his reach. All that bare flesh, so close to that satyr’s mouth of his. That wicked mouth with a slight smear of crimson on it, a sordid little memento that did nothing to detract from his devastating appeal. Or from her insane response to him.

“I knew you fantasized about me,” he murmured, his voice insinuating, delicious. Seductive. “I can see it on your face when you think it’s not showing.”

He ran his fingertip down the sparkling blue strap that rose from the bodice of her gown and fastened at the nape of her neck. That was all. That was enough. He touched nothing but the fabric, up and down and back again, lazy and slow and so very nearly innocuous.

And Adriana burned. And shivered. And hated herself.

“Someday,” he whispered, his eyes ablaze, “I’ll tell you what you do in my fantasies. They’re often…complicated.”

Adriana focused on that smear of lipstick on his perfect lips. She didn’t understand any of this. She should be horrified, disgusted. She should find him categorically repulsive. Why didn’t she? What was wrong with her?

But she was terrified that she already knew.

“That’s certainly something to look forward to,” she said, the deliberate insincerity in her voice like a slap, just as she’d intended, but he only grinned again. “In the meantime, you have lipstick all over your mouth.” She kept her expression smooth as she stepped back, away from him. She snapped open her clutch, reached inside with a hand that was not shaking, and produced a tissue. “I know you like to trumpet your conquests to all and sundry but not, I beg you, tonight. Not the ambassador’s daughter.”

“They wouldn’t think it was the ambassador’s daughter who put her mouth all over me, Adriana.” He held 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.”