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CHAPTER EIGHT
RODOLFOCAUGHTUPto her quickly with his long, easily athletic stride, and then refused to leave her side. He stayed too close and put his hand at the small of her back, guiding her through the splendid, sparkling crowd whether she wanted his aid or not. Natalie told herself she most emphatically did not, but just as she hadn’t pulled away from him out on the terrace despite her threats that she might scream, she didn’t yank herself out of his grasp now, either. She assured herself she was only thinking about what would be best for the real princess, that she was only avoiding the barest hint of scandal—but the truth was like a brand sunk deep in her belly.
She wanted him to touch her. She liked it when he did.
You are a terrible person,she told herself severely.
Natalie wanted to hate him for that, too. She told herself that of course she did, but that slick heat between her legs and the flush that she couldn’t quite seem to cool let her know exactly how much of a liar she was. With every step and each shifting bit of pressure his hand exerted against her back.
He summoned their driver with a quick call, and then walked with her all the way back down the red carpet, smiling with his usual careless charm at all the paparazzi who shrieked out his name. Very much as if he enjoyed all those flashing lights and impertinent questions.
It was Natalie who wanted to curl up into a ball and hide somewhere. Natalie who wasn’t used to this kind of attention—not directed at her, anyway. She’d fended off the press for Mr. Casilieris as part of her job, but she’d never been its focus before, and she discovered she really, truly didn’t like it. It felt like salt on her skin. Stinging and gritty. But she didn’t have the luxury of fading off into the background to catch her breath in the shadows, because she wasn’t Natalie right now. She was Princess Valentina, who’d grown up with this sort of noisy spectacle everywhere she went. Who’d danced on her doting father’s shoes when she was small and had cut her teeth on spotlights of all shapes and sizes and hell, for all she knew, enjoyed every moment of it the way Rodolfo seemed to.
She was Princess Valentina tonight, and a princess should have managed to smile more easily. Natalie tried her best, but by the time Rodolfo handed her into the gleaming black SUV that waited for them at the end of the press gauntlet, she thought her teeth might crack from the effort of holding her perhaps not so serene smile in place.
“I don’t need your help,” she told him, but it was too late. His hand was on her arm again as she clambered inside and then he was climbing in after her, forcing her to throw herself across the passenger seat or risk having him...all over her.
She hated that she had to remind herself—sternly—why that would be a bad idea.
“Would you prefer it if I had drop-kicked you into the vehicle?” he asked, still smiling as he settled himself beside her.
There was a gleam in his dark gaze that let her know he was fully aware of the way she was clinging to the far door as if it might save her. From him. As ever, he appeared not to notice the confines or restrictions of whatever he happened to be sitting on. In this case, he sprawled out in the backseat of the SUV, taking up more than his fair share of the available room and pretty much all of the oxygen. Daring her to actually come out and comment on it, Natalie was fairly sure, rather than simply twitching her skirts away from his legs in what she hoped was obvious outrage.
“I think you are well aware that neither I nor anyone else would prefer to be drop-kicked. And also that there exists yet another option, if one without any attendant theatrics. You could let me get in the car as I have managed to do all on my own for twenty-seven years and keep your hands to yourself while I did it.”
He turned slightly in his seat and studied her for a moment, as the lights of Rome gleamed behind him, streaking by in the sweet, easy dark as they drove.
“Spoken like someone who has not spent the better part of her life being helped in and out of motorcades to the roars of a besotted crowd,” Rodolfo said, his dark brows high as his dark eyes took her measure. “Except you have.”
Natalie could have kicked herself for making such a silly mistake, and all because she’d hoped to score a few points in their endless little battle of words. She thought she really would have given herself a pinch, at the very least, if he hadn’t been watching her so closely. She sniffed instead, to cover her reaction.
“You’ve gone over all literal, haven’t you? Back on the terrace it was all metaphor and now you’re parsing what I say for any hint of exaggeration? What’s next? Will you declare war on parts of speech? Set loose the Royal Tisselian Army on any grammar you dislike?”
“I am looking for hints, Valentina, but it is not figurative language that I find mysterious. It is a woman who has already changed before my eyes, more than once, into someone else.”
Natalie turned her head so she could hold that stern, probing gaze of his. Steady and long. As if she really was Valentina and had nothing at all to hide.
“No one has changed before your eyes, Your Highness. I think you might have to face the fact that you are not very observant. Unless and until someone pricks at your vanity. I might as well have been a piece of furniture to you, until I mentioned I planned to let others sit on me.” She let out a merry little laugh that was meant to be a slap, and hit its mark. She saw the flare of it in his gaze. “You certainly couldn’t havethat.”
“Think for a moment, please.” Rodolfo’s voice was too dark to be truly impatient. Too rich to sound entirely frustrated. And still, Natalie braced herself. “What is the headline if I am found to be cavorting outside the bounds of holy matrimony?”
“A long, weary sigh of boredom from all sides, I’d imagine.” She aimed a cool smile his way. “With a great many exclamation points.”
“I am expected to fail. I have long since come to accept it is my one true legacy.” Yet that dark undercurrent in his low voice and the way he lounged there, all that ruthless power simmering beneath his seeming unconcern, told Natalie that Rodolfo wasn’t resigned to any such thing. “You, on the other hand? It wouldn’t bemyfeelings of betrayal you would have to worry about, however unearned you might think they were. It would be the entire world that thought less of you, forever after. Is that really what you want? After you have gone to such lengths to create your spotless reputation?”
Natalie laughed again, but there was nothing funny. There was only a kind of heaviness pressing in upon her, making her feel as if she might break apart if she didn’t get away from this man before something really terrible happened. Something she couldn’t explain away as a latent Cinderella fantasy, lurking around inside of her without her knowledge or permission, that had put a ball and a prince together and then thrown her headfirst into an unfortunate kiss.
“What does it matter?” she asked him, aware that her voice was ragged, giving too much away—but she couldn’t seem to stop herself. “There’s no way out of this, so we might as well do as we like no matter what the headlines say or do not. It will make no difference. We will marry. You will have your heirs. Our kingdoms will be linked forever. Who cares about the details when that’s the only part that truly matters in the long run?”
“An argument I might have made myself a month ago,” Rodolfo murmured. “But we are not the people we were a month ago, princess. You must know that.”
From a distance he would likely have looked relaxed. At his ease, with his legs thrust out and his collar loosened. But Natalie was closer, and she could see that glittering, dangerous thing in his gaze. She could feel it inside her, like a lethal touch of his too-talented hands, stoking fires she should have put out a long time ago.
“What I know,” she managed to say over her rocketing pulse and that quickening, clenching in her core, “is that it is not I who am apparently unwell.”
But Rodolfo only smiled.
Which didn’t help at all.
