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Then he stopped, abruptly, muttering a curse against her lips. It seemed to pain him to release her, but he did it, stepping back and maneuvering so he stood between Natalie and what it took her far too long to realize was another group of guests making use of the wide terrace some distance away.
But she couldn’t bring herself to care about them. She raised a hand to her lips, aware that her fingers trembled. And far more aware that he was watching her too closely as she did it.
“Why do you look at me as if it is two hundred years ago and I have just stolen your virtue?” he asked softly, his dark eyes searching hers. “Or led you to your ruin with a mere kiss?”
Natalie didn’t know what look she wore on her face, but she felt...altered. There was no pretending otherwise. Rodolfo was looking at her the way any man might gaze at the woman he was marrying in less than two months, after kissing her very nearly senseless on the terrace of a romantic Roman villa.
But that was the trouble. No matter what fairy tale she’d been spinning out in her head, Natalie wasn’t that woman.
She was ruined, all right. All the way through.
“I’m not looking at you like that.” Her voice hardly sounded like hers. She took a step away from him, coming up against the stone railing. She glanced down at the two glasses of sparkling wine that sat there and considered tossing them back, one after the next, because that might dull the sharp thing that felt a little too much like pain, poking inside of her. Only the fact that it might dull her a littletoomuch kept her from it. Things were already bad enough. “I’m not looking at you like anything, I’m sure.”
Rodolfo watched her, his eyes too dark to read. “You are looking at me as if you have never been kissed before. Much as that might pander to my ego, which I believe we’ve agreed is egregiously large already, we both know that isn’t true.” His mouth curved. “And tell the truth, Valentina. It was not so bad, was it?”
That name slammed into her like a sucker punch. Natalie could hardly breathe through it. She had to grit her teeth to keep from falling over where she stood. How did she keep forgetting?
Because you want to forget,a caustic voice inside her supplied at once.
“I’m not who you think I am,” she blurted out then, and surely she wasn’t the only one who could hear how ragged she sounded. How distraught.
But Rodolfo only laughed. “You are exactly who I think you are.”
“I assure you, I am not. At all.”
“It is an odd moment for a philosophical turn, princess,” he drawled, and there was something harder about him then. Something more dangerous. Natalie could feel it dance over her skin. “Are any of us who others think we are? Take me, for example. I am certain that every single person at this gala tonight would line up to tell you exactly who I am, and they would be wrong. I am not the tabloid stories they craft about me, pimped out to the highest bidder. My wildest dream is not surviving an adventure or planning a new one, it’s taking my rightful place in my father’s kingdom. That’s all.” His admission, stark and raw, hung between them like smoke. She had the strangest notion that he hadn’t meant to say anything like that. But in the next instant he looked fierce. Almost forbidding. “We are none of us the roles we play, I am sure.”
“Are you claiming you have a secret inner life devoted to your sense of duty? That you are merely misunderstood?” she asked, incredulous.
“Do you take everything at face value, princess?” She told herself she was imagining that almost hurt look on his face. And it was gone when he angled his head toward her. “You cannot really believe you are the only one with an internal life.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
But, of course, she couldn’t tell him what she meant. She couldn’t explain that she hadn’t been feeling the least bit philosophical. Or that she wasn’t actually Princess Valentina at all. She certainly couldn’t tell this man that she was Natalie Monette—a completely different person.
Though it occurred to her for the first time that even if she came clean right here and now, the likelihood was that he wouldn’t believe her. Because who could believe something so fantastical? Would she have believed it herself if it wasn’t happening to her right now—if she wasn’t standing in the middle of another woman’s life?
And messing it up beyond recognition,that same interior voice sniped at her.Believe that, if nothing else.
“Do you plan to tell me what, then, you meant?” Rodolfo asked, dark and low and maybe with a hint of asperity. Maybe with more than just a hint. “Or would you prefer it if I guessed?”
The truth hit Natalie then, with enough force that she felt it shake all the way through her. There was only one reason that she wanted to tell him the truth, and it wasn’t because she’d suddenly come over all honest and upstanding. She’d switched places with another person—lying about who she was came with the territory. It allowed her to sit there at those excruciatingly proper dinners and try to read into King Geoffrey’s facial expressions and his every word without him knowing it, still trying to figure out if she really thought he was her father. And what it would mean to her if he was. Something that would never happen if she’d identified herself. If he’d been on the defensive when he met her.
She didn’t want to tell Rodolfo the truth because she had a burning desire for him to know who she was. Or she did want that, of course, but it wasn’t first and foremost.
It made her stomach twist to admit it, but it was true: what she wanted was him. This. She wanted what was happening between them to be real and then, when it was, she wanted to keep him.
He is another woman’s fiancé,she threw at herself in some kind of despair.
Natalie thought she’d never hated herself more than she did at that moment, because she simply couldn’t seem to govern herself accordingly.
“I need to leave,” she told him, and she didn’t care if she sounded rude. Harsh and abrupt. She needed to remove herself from him—from all that temptation he wore entirely too easily, like another bespoke suit—before she made this all worse. Much, much worse. In ways she could imagine all too vividly. “Now.”
“Princess, please. Do not run off into the night. I will only have to chase you.” He moved toward her and Natalie didn’t have the will to step away. To ward him off. To do what she should. And she compounded it by doing absolutely nothing when he fit his hand to her cheek and held it there. His dark eyes gleamed. “Tell me.”
He was so big it made her heart hurt. The dark Roman night did nothing to obscure how beautiful he was, and she could taste him now. A kind of rich, addicting honey on her tongue. She thought that alone might make her shatter into pieces. This breath, or the next. She thought it might be the end of her.
“I need to go,” she whispered, aware that her hands were in useless, desperate fists at her sides.
