AllFreeNovel
Share Us
For a moment there was nothing in the room but the sound of his own pounding heart.
“You’re a good man, Pato,” Adriana said then. There was a scratchy undertone to her voice that made him think she was holding back tears. For him. And he thought it might undo him. “And a very good brother.”
Pato looked at her, then away, before he forgot what he could and couldn’t have. Before he forgot he’d chosen to be a hollow man, with an empty life. Before he was tempted to believe her.
“My father is also unwell,” he said instead, bitterly. “It is, ironically enough, his heart.”
* * *
Adriana was worried about her own.
She hardly knew where to look, what to think. Nothing he was telling her could possibly be true—and yet it all made a horrible sense. It explained the chilliness she’d always sensed between Lenz and the king. It explained Lenz’s extraordinary patience with Pato’s messy escapades. More, it explained how Pato could do all the scandalous things he’d done and yet also be the man who’d held her on the plane, then quietly rid her of a lifetime of shame. It explained everything.
He stood there at the window so calmly, half-naked as ever, all sun-kissed skin and masculine grace, talking with such seeming nonchalance about things that would overthrow their government. He had given up a throne. He loved his brother more than he wanted what was his by birthright. He had deliberately crafted his own mythology to serve his own ends and to force his father, the king, into doing what he wanted him to do. He’d even hinted at this once before, in London, when he’d said his reputation was his life’s work.
He was truly remarkable, she thought then. And he was hers.
It didn’t matter for how long. It didn’t matter if he couldn’t have her, as he’d said. It didn’t matter if all she ever had of him was the distance and the unrequited love that he’d mocked. He’d given her his secrets. He’d stepped out of hiding and shown her who he really was, because he believed she deserved to know. Because he hadn’t wanted to let her leave him the way she had this morning, thinking the worst of him.
He would rather have her know the dangerous truth than have her think he didn’t care.
That he cared, that he must or he would never have shared any of this with her, that he really must trust her, dawned inside her like the sun.
He was hers.
“His health is deteriorating, he is not a candidate for surgery and he is an unacceptable risk to the kingdom,” Pato was saying. “He should have stepped down already. He will have no choice when Lenz marries Lissette, as she was betrothed at birth to the heir to the Kitzinian throne.” Pato shrugged at Adriana’s quizzical look. “If Lenz marries her, it is an assertion that he is, in fact, that heir. There can be no going back unless my father wants an international incident that could well become a war. He will have no choice but to face the inevitable.” Pato’s mouth moved into a curve that was far darker than usual. “He has grown more desperate by the day for another option.”
“You,” Adriana said.
“Me,” Pato agreed, “even though I’ve gone to great lengths to keep myself out of the running.” He sighed, and then leveled a look at her that made something twist in her stomach, made a sense of foreboding trickle down her back. “He had convinced himself that the kingdom would excuse me as a young man sowing his oats, who could in time settle down, as men do. But now he believes I am skulking about with one of Lenz’s cast-off mistresses, which he finds truly distasteful. Worse, he is superstitious enough to believe that Righetti women possess some kind of witchcraft, and that I am weak enough to be under your spell.”
Adriana couldn’t breathe, as if he’d slammed that straight into her gut. But she couldn’t look away from him, either.
“Bewitched by a woman descended from traitors and temptresses,” Pato said softly, his golden eyes darker, more intense. “Crafted by the ages to be my downfall.”
“You want him to think that,” she managed to say, despite feeling as if the room were drawing tight on all sides. “That’s why you decided to behave these last weeks. You wanted him to think I was influencing you.”
“Yes.”
His gaze was dark. Demanding. Without apology, and Adriana felt so brittle, suddenly. So close to breaking, and that wave of misery she’d thought she was rid of waited there for her, she knew. In the next breath. Or the one following. And it would crash over her and take her to her knees if she let it.
But she still couldn’t look away from him.
“Was it all a game?” she whispered, that familiar emptiness opening again inside her, reminding her how easy it was to be sucked back in. “Was any of it real?”
