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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 face blazed red as he’d thought it would, and she looked tense and unhappy as she pushed herself up to a sitting position. Her lovely blond hair fell in a sexy tangle around her pretty face, making her look as if he’d already had her. He wished he had, with an edge of desperation that should have alarmed him. But she sat before him, with all that lust and wild need still stamped on her face, and the only thing he felt was that pounding desire.
