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. “We’re flying to London this afternoon. There’s some charity thing I had no intention of attending, and now, apparently, must. My brother commands it.”
Adriana blinked, and sorted through the possibilities in her head.
“Presumably you mean the Children’s Foundation, of which you and your brother are major benefactors,” she said crisply. “And their annual ball.”
“Presumably,” he agreed, that alertness blending into his more typical laziness, and prickling over her skin no matter how badly she didn’t want to be affected. “I don’t really care, I only follow orders. And Adriana?”
“Yes?” But she knew. She could hear it in his voice. She could imagine that smile in the corner of his mouth, that gleam in his eyes. She didn’t have to see any of it—she felt it. Her eyes drifted shut again, and she hated herself anew.
“It’s never too early for debauchery,” he said in that low, stirring way that was only his. “I’d be delighted to prove that to you. You can make it back to the palace in what? Twenty minutes?”
“You need to stop,” she retorted, not realizing she meant to speak, and then it sat there between them. Pato didn’t reply, but she could feel him. That disconcerting power of his, that predatory beauty. She dropped her forehead into one hand, kept her eyes shut. “I’m not your toy. I don’t expect you to make my job easy for me, but this is unacceptable.” He still didn’t speak, but she could feel the thrum of him inside her, the electricity. “Not every woman you meet wants to sleep with you.”
He laughed, and she felt it slide through her like light, illuminating too many truths she’d prefer to hide away forever. Exposing her. Making that curl of heat glow again, low and hot, proving what a liar she was.
“Rule number four,” he began.
“Would
