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CHAPTER SIX
THECHARITYGALAtook place in a refurbished ancient villa, blazing with light and understated wealth and dripping with all manner of international celebrities like another layer of decoration. Icons from the epic films of Bollywood mingled with lauded stars of the stages of the West End and rubbed shoulders with a wide selection of Europe’s magnificently blooded aristocrats, all doing what they did best. They graced the red carpet as if they found nothing more delightful, smiling into cameras and posing for photographs while giving lip service to the serious charity cause du jour.
Rodolfo escorted his mouthy, surprising princess down the gauntlet of the baying paparazzi, smiling broadly as the press went mad at the sight of them, just as he’d suspected they would.
“I told you,” he murmured, leaning down to put his mouth near her ear. As much to sell the story of their great romance as to take pleasure in the way she shivered, then stiffened as if she was trying to hide it from him. Who could have imagined that his distant betrothed was so exquisitely sensitive? He couldn’t wait to find out where else she was this tender. This sweet. “They want nothing more than to imagine us wildly and madly in love.”
“A pity my imagination is not quite so vivid,” she replied testily, though she did it through a smile that perhaps only he could tell was not entirely serene.
But the grin on Rodolfo’s face as they made their way slowly through the wall of flashing cameras and shouting reporters wasn’t feigned in the least.
“You didn’t mention which charity this gala benefits,” the princess said crisply as they followed the well-heeled crowd inside the villa, past dramatic tapestries billowing in the slight breeze and a grand pageant of colored lights in the many fountains along the way.
“Something critically important, I am sure,” he replied, and his grin only deepened when she slid a reproving look at him. “Surely they are all important, princess. In the long run, does it matter which one this is?”
“Not to you, clearly,” she murmured, nodding regally at yet another photographer. “I am sure your carelessness—excuse me, I mean thoughtfulness—is much appreciated by all the charities around who benefit from your random approach.”
Rodolfo resolved to take her out in public every night, to every charity event he could find in Europe, whether he’d heard of its cause or not. Not only because she was stunning and he liked looking at her, though that helped. The blazing lights caught the red in her hair and made it shimmer. The gray dress she wore hugged her figure before falling in soft waves to the floor. She was a vision, and better than all of that, out here in the glare of too many spotlights she could not keep chairs between them to ward him off. He liked the heat of her arm through his. He liked her body beside his, lithe and slender as if she’d been crafted to fit him. He liked the faint scent of her, a touch of something French and something sweet besides, and below it, the simplicity of that soap she used.
There wasn’t much he didn’t like about this woman, if he was honest, not even her intriguing puritan streak. Or her habit of poking at him the way no one else had ever dared, not even his disapproving father, who preferred to express his endless disappointment with far less sharpness and mockery. No one else ever threw Felipe in his face and if they’d ever tried to do such a remarkably stupid thing, it certainly wouldn’t have been to psychoanalyze him. Much less find him wanting.
He took care of that all on his own, no doubt. And the fact that his own father found his second son so much more lacking than his first was common knowledge and obvious to all. No need to underscore it.
Rodolfo supposed it was telling that as little as he cared to have that conversation, he hadn’t minded that Valentina had tried. Or he didn’t mind too much. He didn’t know where his deferential, disappearing princess had gone, the one who had hidden in plain sight when there’d been no one in the room but the two of them, but he liked this one much better.
The hardest part of his body agreed. Enthusiastically. And it didn’t much care that they were out in public.
But there was another gauntlet to run inside the villa. One Rodolfo should perhaps have anticipated.
“I take it that you did not make proclamations about your sudden onset of fidelity to your many admirers,” Valentina said dryly after they were stopped for the fifth time in as many steps by yet another woman who barely glanced at the princess and then all but melted all over Rodolfo. Right there in front of her.
For the first time in his entire adult life, Rodolfo found he was faintly embarrassed by his own prowess with the fairer sex.
“It is not the sort of thing one typically announces,” he pointed out, while attempting to cling to his dignity, despite the number of slinky women circling him with that same avid look in their eyes. “It has the whiff of desperation about it, does it not?
“Of course, generally speaking, becoming engagedisthe announcement.” What was wrong with him, that he found her tartness so appealing? Especially when not a bit of it showed on her lovely, serene face? How had he spent all these months failing to notice how appealing she was? He’d puzzled it over for days and still couldn’t understand it. “I can see the confusion in your case, given your exploits these last months.”
“Yet here I am,” he pointed out, slanting a look down at her, amused despite himself. “At your side. Exuding fidelity.”
“That is not precisely what you exude,” she said under her breath, because naturally she couldn’t let any opportunity pass to dig at him, and then they were swept into the receiving line.
It felt like a great many hours later when they finally made it into the actual gala itself. A band played on a raised dais while glittering people outshone the blazing chandeliers above them. Europe’s finest and fanciest stood in these rooms, and he’d estimate that almost all of them had their eyes fixed on the spectacle of Prince Rodolfo and Princess Valentina actually out and about together for once—without a single one of their royal relatives in sight as the obvious puppeteers of what had been hailed everywhere as an entirely cold-blooded marriage of royal convenience.
But their presence here had already done exactly what Rodolfo had hoped it would. He could see it in the faces of the people around them. He’d felt it on the red carpet outside, surrounded by paparazzi nearly incandescent with joy over the pictures they’d be able to sell of the two of them. He could already read the accompanying headlines.
Do the Daredevil Prince and the Dutiful Princess ActuallyLikeEach Other After All?
He could feel the entire grand ballroom of the villa seem to swell with the force of all that speculation and avid interest.
And Rodolfo made a command decision. They could do another round of the social niceties that would cement the story he wanted to sell even further, assuming he wasn’t deluged by more of the sort of women who were happy to ignore his fiancée as she stood beside him. Or he could do what he really wanted to do, which was get his hands on Valentina right here in public, where she would have no choice but to allow it.
This was what he was reduced to. On some level, he felt the requisite shame. Or some small shadow of it, if he was honest.
Because it still wasn’t much of a contest.
“Let’s dance, shall we?” he asked, but he was already moving toward the dance floor in the vast, sparkling ballroom that seemed to swirl around him as he spoke. His proper, perfect princess would have to yank her arm out of his grip with some force, creating a scene, if she wanted to stop him.
He was sure he could see steam come off her as she realized that for herself, then didn’t do it. Mutinously, if that defiant angle of her pointed chin was any clue.
