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He blinked, then scowled at her. “What?”
“I love you,” she said, so softly he almost thought he’d imagined it. But she was gazing at him, those melting brown eyes warm and glowing, and he knew she’d said it. That she meant it. “And that has nothing to do with what happens here, or after we leave. You don’t owe me anything.” She held up a hand when he started to talk. “I don’t expect or need you to say it back.”
Pato stared at her until she grew visibly uncomfortable under the weight of it. Until her sweet expression started to creep back toward a frown.
“The only thing less attractive than watching you attempt to martyr yourself for my brother in my bed,” he growled, his temper kicking in as he spoke, like a black band tight around his chest, his gut, “is watching you martyr yourself for me so soon after I’ve been inside you, listening to you scream out my name.” She sucked in an appalled breath, but he didn’t stop, couldn’t stop, and he stalked toward her until he stood within arm’s reach. “I have no desire whatsoever to be quietly and distantly loved by some selfless, bloodless saint locked away in her self-imposed nunnery, prostrating herself daily to whatever it is she thinks she can’t have or doesn’t deserve. No hairshirt, no mortification of the flesh. No, thank you.”
That telltale tide of red swept over her, but this time, he thought, it wasn’t so simple as embarrassment. Her eyes narrowed and she drew herself up, pulling the throw tighter around her as if it could protect her from him.
“What an ugly thing to say,” she breathed, and he had the impression she was afraid to truly voice the words—as if she thought she might start yelling if she did. He wished she would. “Even for you.”
He crossed his arms over his chest and glared at her.
“You want to love me, Adriana?” he demanded, his voice rough and hot and impatient, welling up from that place inside he’d thought he’d excised long ago, that heart it seemed only she could reach. He’d be damned if he’d let her hide. Not if he couldn’t. He angled himself closer. “Then love me. Make it hurt. Make it jealous and possessive and painful. Make demands. Make it real or don’t bother.”
CHAPTER NINE
THERE WERE STAINS of red high on Adriana’s cheeks, a dazed look on her pretty face, and Pato gave in to his driving need to be closer to her. Closer, always closer, no matter how irritated he might be with her and her proclamation of so-called love, as tepid as whatever she’d imagined she felt for Lenz.
Pato reached over and sat her down on the sofa, then gripped the back of it, pinning her there with an arm on either side of her. Caging her. Putting his face too close to hers. He couldn’t read the way she looked at him then, didn’t understand the darkness in her gaze, that sheen that suggested emotions she’d prefer to conceal from him.
“I know all about hiding, Adriana,” he said quietly, though he could still hear that edge in his voice. He could feel it inside him. “I can see it when it’s right in front of me.”
“I don’t know why you want to tell me anything.” There was a raggedness in her voice, and he could see it in her face. “I don’t know why you hunted me down at the villa, why you brought me here. It would have been easier to simply let me go this morning. Isn’t that why you did it?”
“You know why.” He wanted to touch her. Taste that lovely mouth. Take her again and again until neither of them could speak. But he didn’t. He couldn’t. “I can’t have you, Adriana, but it’s not because I don’t want you.”
She didn’t say a word, but she was breathing high and hard, as if climbing a steep hill. He could see that same darkness in her eyes, deeper now. Her confusion. He pushed away from the sofa but continued to stand over her, looking down at this woman who might, in fact, be the death of him. She’d already ruined him; that much was certain.
“My mother left behind some personal papers,” he said then. It was time to finish this, before he forgot why he wanted that, too. “She left them to my father, which seemed an odd choice, given his profound disinterest in her personal affairs while she was alive. But eventually, he read them. And discovered that Lenz was not, in fact, his biological son.”
It was Pato’s greatest secret, it wasn’t only his secret, and she could use it to topple his brother’s kingdom if she chose. And there it lay, huge and ugly between them, taking up all the air in the cottage.
Adriana made a small, shocked noise, and covered her mouth with her hands. Pato let her simply stare at him, let all the implications sink in. For long moments she seemed frozen. But eventually, she blinked.
