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CHAPTER SEVEN
MAYBEITWASthe music. Maybe it was the whirl of so many gleaming, glorious people.
Natalie had the suspicion that really, it was Rodolfo.
But no matter what it was, no matter why—she forgot.
That she wasn’t really a princess, or if she was, she was the discarded kind. The lost and never-meant-to-be-found sort that had only been located by accident in a bathroom outside London.
She forgot that the dress wasn’t hers, the ball inside the pretty old building wasn’t a magical spectacle put on just for her and, most of all, that the man at her side—gripping her hand as he led her into temptation—wasn’t ever going to be hers, no matter what.
He’d danced with her. It was as simple and as complicated as that.
Natalie had never thought of herself as beautiful before she’d seen herself in that mirror tonight, but it was more than that. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone had treated her like awoman.Much less a desirable one. Not a pawn in whatever game the man in question might have been playing with her employer, which had only ever led to her wearing her hair in severe ponytails and then donning those clear glasses to keep the attention off her. Not an assistant. Not the person responsible for every little detail of every little thing and therefore the first one to be upbraided when something went wrong.
Rodolfo looked at her as if she was no more and no less than a beautiful woman. He didn’t see a list of all the things she coulddowhen he gazed at her. He saw only her. A princessed-out, formally made-up version of her, sure. And she couldn’t really gloss over the fact he called her by the wrong name because he had every reason to believe she was someone else. Even so, she was the woman he couldn’t seem to stop touching, who made his eyes light up with all that too-bright need and hunger.
And it was that, Natalie found, she couldn’t resist.
She’d never done a spontaneous thing in her life before she’d switched places with Valentina in that bathroom. Left to her own devices, she thought it was likely she’d never have given her notice at all, no matter how worked up she’d been. And now it seemed she couldn’t stop with the spontaneity. Yet somehow Rodolfo’s grip on her hand, so strong and sure, made her not mind very much at all. She let this prince, who was far more charming than she wanted to admit to herself, tug her along with him, deeper into the shadows, until they were more in the dark than the light.
He turned to face her then, and he looked something like stern in the darkness. He set the two glasses of sparkling wine down on the nearby balustrade, then straightened again. Slowly. Deliberately, even. Natalie’s heart thudded hard against her ribs, but it wasn’t from fear. He pulled her hand that he’d been holding high against his chest and held it there, and Natalie couldn’t have said why she felt as caught. As gripped tight. Only that she was—and more concerning, had no desire to try to escape it.
If anything, she leaned closer into him, into the shelter of his big body.
“Where did you come from?” he asked, his voice a mere scrape against the night. “What the hell are you doing to me?”
Natalie opened her mouth to answer him. But whatever that dark, driving force had been inside her, urging her to poke back at him and do her best to slap down the only real Prince Charming she’d ever met in the flesh, it was gone. Had she imagined herself some kind of avenging angel here? Flying into another woman’s royal fairy tale of a life to do what needed doing, the way she did with everything else? Fighting her mother’s battles all these years later and with a completely different man than the one Erica had never explicitly named?
It didn’t matter, because that had been before he’d taken her in his arms and guided her around a dance floor, making her feel as if she could dance forever when she’d never danced a waltz before in her life. She had a vague idea of what it entailed, but only because she’d had to locate the best ballroom dancing instructor in London when Achilles Casilieris had abruptly decided he needed a little more polish one year. She’d watched enough of those classes—before Mr. Casilieris had reduced the poor man to tears—to understand the basic principle of a waltz.
But Rodolfo had made her feel as if they were flying.
He looked down at her now, out here in the seductive dark, and it made her tremble deep inside. It made her forget who she was and what she was doing. Her head cleared of everything save him. Rodolfo. The daredevil prince who made her feel as if she was the one catapulting herself out of airplanes every time his dark, hungry gaze caught hers. And held.
He took her bare shoulders in his hands, drawing her closer to him. Making her shiver, deep and long. On some distant level she thought she should push away from him. Remind them both of her boundaries, maybe. But she couldn’t seem to remember what those were. Instead she tilted her head back while she drifted closer to his big, rangy body. And then she made everything worse by sliding her hands over the steel wall of his chest, carefully packaged in that gorgeous suit that made him look almost edible. To push him away, she told herself piously.
But she didn’t push at him. She didn’t even try.
His dark eyes gleamed with a gold she could feel low in her belly, like a fiery caress. “The way you look at me is dangerous, princess.”
“I thought you courted danger,” she heard herself whisper.
“I do,” he murmured. “Believe me, I do.”
And then he bent his head and kissed her.
This time, the first brush of his mouth against hers was light. Easy. Electricity sparked and sizzled, and then he did it again, and it wasn’t enough. Natalie pressed herself toward him, trying to get more of him. Trying to crawl inside him and throw herself into the storm that roared through her. She went up on her toes to close the remaining distance between them, and her reward was the way he smiled, that dangerous curve of his mouth against hers.
It seemed to wash over her like heat then pool in a blaze of fire, high between her legs. Natalie couldn’t keep herself from letting out a moan, needy and insistent.
And obvious. So terribly, blatantly obvious it might as well have been a scream in the dark. She felt Rodolfo turn to stone beneath her palms.
Then he angled his head, took the kiss deeper and wilder and everything went mad.
Rodolfo simply...took her over. He kissed her like he was already a great king and she but one more subject to his rule. His inimitable will. He kissed her as if there had never been any doubt that she was his, in every possible way. His mouth was demanding and hot, intense and carnal, and her whole body thrilled to it. Her hands were fists, gripping his jacket as if she couldn’t bear to let go of him, and he only took the kiss deeper, wilder.
She arched against him as he plundered her mouth, taking and taking and taking even more as he bent her over his arm, as if he could never get enough—
