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That should have disgusted her. It alarmed her that it didn’t.
“I think we’re a bit past worrying about professionalism,” he said, his voice mild, though his eyes were intent on hers, and his mouth looked dangerous in a new way with his jaw unshaved and his thick hair so unruly.
And all of him so close.
“I need to leave,” she replied evenly. “The palace, the royal family—I should have done it a long time ago.” She started to pull away from him, but he only shifted position and smoothed his hand down to the indentation of her waist. He rested it there, almost idly, and she froze as if he was pressing her to the bed with brute force.
It would have been easier if he had been, she recognized on some level. It would have been unambiguous. But instead he was only touching her, barely touching her, and she couldn’t seem to form the words to demand he let her go. She only trembled. Inside and out.
And he knew. His eyes gleamed, and he knew.
“At least let me get back under the sheet,” she said desperately.
“Why?” He shrugged again, so lazy. So at ease. “You’re showing less skin than you would if you were wearing a bikini.”
“You’ve never seen me in a bikini,” she managed to say. “It would be inappropriate.”
His fingers traced the faintest pattern along the curve of her body, and she could no more help the shiver of goose bumps that rose on her skin than she could turn back time and avoid this scenario in the first place. He looked at the telltale prickle of flesh, his hand tightened at her waist and she let out a tiny, involuntary sound that made his golden gaze darken and focus on her, hot and hungry.
But when he spoke again, his voice was light.
“I hate to be indelicate, Adriana, but I’ve already seen all of this. You’re about eight hours too late for modesty.”
“It’s time for me to leave,” she said, desperate and determined in equal measure. “You never wanted an assistant in the first place, and I think it’s high time I rethink my career prospects.”
Pato only raised a dark brow.
“I have no business being at the palace,” she said urgently. “The princess was right. If I’d had any idea that working for your brother would harm his reputation, I never would have taken the job in the first place. I would never want people to think less of him because of me. I would never want to compromise his reputation, or—”
“You can’t possibly be this naive.”
Something Adriana had never seen before moved over Pato’s face. His hand tightened briefly, and then he released her and sat up in a smooth roll.
He shoved his hair back and pinned her with a glare when she scrambled away from him and to her knees on the far side of the bed, pulling the sheet back over her as she went. She had never seen him look like that. Brooding, dark. No hint of his famous laughter, his notorious smile.
“I’m being rational, not naive,” she countered, unable to tear her eyes away from him when he looked like this, as if he was someone else. Someone ruthless and hard. Not like easy, careless Pato at all. “Your brother was the first person to believe in me, but it was wrong of me to take advantage of that.”
Pato shook his head, rubbing at his jaw with one hand as if he was keeping words back manually.
“I abused his kindness,” she continued, her unease growing. “His—”
“For God’s sake, Adriana,” Pato spat out. “He wasn’t being kind. He was grooming you to be his mistress.”
CHAPTER FOUR
FOR A LONG, breathless moment, Adriana could only stare at him, another piece of her world crumbling into dust in this bed, shattering in that relentless golden gaze.
“That’s absurd.” She felt turned inside out. “He would never do something like that.”
“You know all about his previous assistants, I’m sure,” Pato said, in that same blunt way, a hard gleam in his gaze and no hint of a curve on that mouth of his. “Did you never question why he cycled so many of them through that position? And why they all had such different sets of credentials? One an art historian, another a socialite? Lenz prefers his mistresses be accessible.”
Adriana felt as if she’d slipped sideways into some alternate reality, where nothing made sense any longer. Lenz had wanted her, all this time, as she’d so often daydreamed he might—but not as his mistress. She’d never wanted that. And now she sat too close to naked in the morning sun with Pato, of all people, who looked like some harsher version of himself, and she was terrified that he might be right. Hadn’t her father said the same thing only yesterday?
