but she was shaky, unbalanced, and for some reason felt as if she might burst into tears. She couldn’t seem to form the words she needed, and his eyes darkened because, of course, he knew that, too. He’d done this to her deliberately.
“You can’t handle me, Adriana,” Pato growled. “Look at you. I’ve barely touched you and you’re coming apart.”
That dark thing inside of her roared through her, making her bold. Making her stark, raving mad. But she couldn’t hold it in check. She couldn’t stop.
She didn’t want to stop, and she didn’t want to think about why.
“It looks like you’re the one who’s coming apart, Your Royal Highness,” she hissed. Taunting him. Poking at him, and she knew it. She wanted it—she wanted him—and the obvious truth of that was like another explosion, bathing her in a white-hot heat. Adriana had no choice then but to keep talking despite the way he looked at her. “Maybe your reputation is all lies and misdirection. Maybe the truth is you can’t handle me.”
When he laughed then, it was darker than what was inside her, darker and far wilder, and it connected to that ache in her, hard. So hard she stopped breathing.
And then he moved.
His arms came around her and his hands slid over her bottom with an easy command, as if he’d touched her a thousand times before and just as carnally, slipping directly into her panties and pausing to test her curves, her flesh, against the heat of his palms. She made a wild sort of sound, but as she did he hauled her to him and lifted her against him, pulling her legs around his waist even as her back hit the wall behind her.
The room seemed to spin around, but that was only Pato, pressing her to the wall of his chest and the wall at her back, molding his hips to hers, the hardest part of him flush against her. Skin. Heat. Fires within fires, and she was afraid she was already burned to a crisp. Everything hurt—but was eased by the heat of him, only to hurt again. And again.
She expected an explosion. A detonation. Something to match that searing blaze in his gaze, the drum of anticipation beneath her skin, that hunger between her legs that he was only making worse. Her eyes were glazed and wide, and she could feel him everywhere. That perfect, lean body pressed against her, into her, so powerful and male, holding her steady so far from the ground.
His hands moved over her skin, leaving trails of fire in his wake. He traced the curve of her breasts, teased the hard tips with his thumbs until she moaned. He moved his hips, rocking against her, making her breath come in desperate pants even as her core ignited into a glorious, molten ache that she never wanted to end, that she wasn’t sure she’d survive.
Adriana couldn’t think. She could only hold on to his broad, hard shoulders and surrender to the dark exultation that roared in her, that made her try to get closer to him, that made her think she might die if she couldn’t taste him. That made her want things she’d only read about before. That made her want everything.
He leaned in close, so close that when his wicked mouth curved again, she felt it against her own lips, and it made her shake against him, the small moan escaping her before she could stop it.
“Let me see if I can handle this,” he mocked her.
“I don’t think you can,” she heard herself say. “Or you already would have.”
As if she was as wanton as he was, and as unashamed. As if she knew what she was demanding.
That smile of his deepened, torturing her. Delighting her.
And then, slowly and deliberately, with one hand on her bottom to move her against him in a sinuous rhythm that made her feel weak, the other at her jaw to hold her where he wanted her, Pato took his own sweet time and licked his way into her mouth.
Ruining her, Adriana thought while the world disappeared, forever.
* * *
He never should have tasted her.
That it was a terrible mistake was a certainty, but Adriana clung to him like honey, melting and hot, tasting like sugar and fire with her lithe body wrapped all around him. Pato couldn’t stop himself. For a heady moment—his mouth angled over hers, tasting her again and again and again—he even forgot why he should.
This was supposed to be a lesson to her. A way to decidedly call her bluff, nothing more.
And yet he wanted to take her where they stood, pressed up against the wall, thrusting into the heat of her he could feel scalding him through the thin layers that barely separated them. She was so soft. So responsive.
Perfect.
But she didn’t want him, no matter what her body shouted at him. No matter what he felt in his arms, what he tasted.
She met him even as he grew bolder, hotter, more demanding. She kissed him as if she’d forgotten who it was she truly wanted. She bloomed beneath his hands, incandescent and addicting. She twined her arms around his neck and writhed against him as if she was as desperate as he was, as if she wanted nothing more than Pato deep inside of her.
But she wanted Lenz. She was in love with Lenz. Pato had seen it.
It was that unpalatable fact that he couldn’t make himself ignore, no matter how hard he was and no matter what he would have given, in that moment, to simply drive into her and ride them both into an oblivion where Lenz did not exist. Could never exist.
Where there was only this heat. This need. This delicious electricity, intense and greedy, that made him want to taste every part of her, make her scream out in pleasure while he did, and then take her until she sobbed his name.
His name, not his brother’s.
But he couldn’t stop. He didn’t want to stop. What was this woman doing to him? He’d never acted with so little thought before. He’d never forgot to hide himself. He’d certainly never opened his mouth and let some part of the truth come out. It was as if he’d lost the control that had defined him since he was eighteen....
That couldn’t happen. He couldn’t let it.
He spun around, walking them back to the bed with Adriana still wrapped around him, and then he tortured himself by bringing them down on the mattress—catching himself on one arm so he didn’t crush her, but letting himself revel in the feel of her beneath him the way he wanted her, even for a moment.
Pato had never put much stock in the kingdom’s insistence that Righetti women were akin to witches, temptresses and jezebels without equal, but pulling himself away from Adriana, from all that soft, hot fire, was the hardest thing he could remember doing.
He didn’t understand this. He didn’t understand himself.
“I can handle it, Adriana,” he told her. “I can handle you. But I won’t.”
He stood over her, telling himself it didn’t matter that she sprawled there before him, her lips swollen from his, her breasts spilling from her bra and crying out for his hands, her silken limbs spread out before him like a dessert he hungered for as if he was a starving man. It didn’t matter because it couldn’t.
He smirked, knowing it would hit her like a slap. “But I appreciate the offer.”
Her
