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 royal Kitzinian princes in her underwear. And had she really told this man she would sleep with him?
So she took a deep breath and she told him what she thought he wanted to hear.
“I couldn’t possibly count them all,” she said primly, lifting her chin. “I stopped keeping track when I passed into triple digits.”
He only shook his head at her.
“For all I know you and I have already slept together, in fact,” she continued wildly. “Didn’t you once tell an interviewer that you blacked out the better part of the last decade? Well, you’re not alone. Who knows where I’ve been? You were probably there, too, making a spectacle of yourself.”
“And somehow,” Pato said mildly, “I remain unconvinced.”
“Everybody knows I’m a whore,” Adriana forced herself to say, not wanting to admit how limited her sexual experience really was. She wasn’t a virgin, true—but that was more or less a technicality, and deeply embarrassing to boot. “They’ve been calling me that since I was a child, before I even knew what the word meant. Why shouldn’t I embrace it? You do.”
“That doesn’t answer the question, does it?” His gaze bored into her, not relenting at all. Not even the smallest bit. “You have not had sexual partners numbering in the triple digits, Adriana. I’d be very much surprised if you’ve had three in the whole of your life.”
And then he simply stood there, staring down at her, somehow knowing these things that he shouldn’t. It made her feel almost itchy, as if her skin had stopped fitting her properly. As if she was seconds away from exploding, humiliated and laid unacceptably bare.
“One.” She bit out the admission, hating him, hating herself. And yet still as determined to go through with this as she was filled with that terrible, gnawing ache that she worried might consume her alive. Do it for Lenz, she ordered herself. “There was only one and it—”
He waited, his eyes intent and demanding on hers, and she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t tell this sleek, sensual, unapologetically carnal creature about that fumble in the dark, the shock of searing pain and then the unpleasant fullness that followed. That vulnerable, exposed feeling. She’d been seventeen. It had taken all of three unremarkable minutes in a bedroom at a party she shouldn’t have gone to in the first place, and then he’d bragged to the whole school that the Righetti girl was as much of a whore as suspected.
“And?” Pato prompted her.
“It was mercifully brief.”
“I feel seduced already,” he said drily. “What a tempting picture you paint. How can I possibly resist the sacrificial near-virgin who wishes to prostrate herself in my bed for my brother’s benefit? I’ve never been so aroused.”
Each dry, sardonic word, delivered in that deliberately stinging way of his, made Adriana’s fists tighten where she held the wrap around her. She felt that flush of heat that told her she was getting redder, broadcasting the fact he was getting to her. She felt that twist in her gut and still, that ache below. This was a disaster.
But you have to do it. You’ll never be able to live with yourself if you don’t. This might be the only opportunity you ever have to do something good with all this notoriety...
“Then teach me,” she exclaimed, cutting him off before he could continue ripping her to shreds one sardonic word at a time.
For a moment, Pato only looked at her.
And then he closed the distance between them, reaching out to spear his hands into the wild tangle of her hair, making her go up slightly on her toes and brace her hands against the hot, hard planes of his chest or fall completely against him. Her wrap floated to the floor between them, and she forgot it as he held her face still, keeping her captive, a mere breath away from his beautiful mouth.
She heard a sharp, high sound, some kind of gasp, and realized only belatedly that she’d made it. The echo of it made her tremble, or perhaps that was the wildfire in his eyes.
“Teach me everything,” she whispered, spurred on by some dark thing inside her she hardly recognized. But she saw the way his eyes flared, and the ache inside her bloomed in immediate response.
His mouth was so close to hers, his face dark and dangerous, that lethal fire in his gaze. And yet he only held her there, taut and breathless, while sensation after sensation shook through her. Towering flames in her throat, her breasts, her belly. That shocking brightness between her legs.
Her lips parted slightly, and she recognized it as the invitation it was. His gaze dropped to her mouth, hungry and hard, and she felt her nipples pull tight. Nothing existed but that pulse of heat that drummed in her, louder and wilder—
And then he dragged his gaze back to hers
