The Prince's Nine-Month Scandal. CAITLIN CREWS
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her to feel slapped down by his response. He wasn’t going to marry her. She certainly didn’t need to feel wounded by the way he planned to run his relationship. Critical, certainly. But not wounded.
“As will I,” she said mildly.
Rodolfo studied her for a long moment, and Natalie forced herself to hold that seething dark glare while he did it. She even smiled and settled back against the delicate little couch, as if she was utterly relaxed. When she was nothing even remotely like it.
“No,” he said after a long, long time, his voice dark and lazy and something else she felt more than heard. “I think not.”
Natalie held back the little shiver that threatened her then, because she knew, somehow, that he would see it and leap to the worst possible conclusion.
“You mistake me,” she said coolly. “I wasn’t asking your permission. I was stating a fact.”
“I would suggest that you think very carefully about acting on this little scheme of yours, princess,” Rodolfo said in that same dark, stirring tone. “You will not care for my response, I am certain.”
Natalie crossed her legs and forced herself to relax even more against the back of her little couch. Well. To look it, anyway. As if she had never been more at her ease, despite the drumming of her pulse.
She waved a hand the way Valentina had done in London, so nonchalantly. “Respond however you wish. You have my blessing.”
He laughed, then. The sound was rougher than Natalie would have imagined a royal prince’s laugh ought to have been, and silkier than she wanted to admit as it wrapped itself around her. And all of that was a far second to the way amusement danced over his sculpted, elegant face, making him look not only big and surprisingly powerful, but very nearly approachable. Magnetic, even.
Something a whole lot more than magnetic. It lodged itself inside of her, then glowed.
Good lord, Natalie thought in another sort of daze as she gazed back at him. This is the most dangerous man I’ve ever met.
“I take it this is an academic discussion,” Rodolfo said when he was finished laughing like that and using up all the light in the world, so cavalierly. “I had no idea you felt so strongly about what I did or didn’t do, much less with whom. I had no idea you cared what I did at all. In fact, princess, I wasn’t certain you heard a single word I’ve uttered in your presence in all these months.”
He moved from the grand fireplace then, and watching him in motion was not exactly an improvement. Or it was a significant improvement, depending on how she looked at it. He was sleek for such a big man, and moved far too smoothly toward the slightly more substantial chair at a diagonal to where Natalie sat. He tossed himself into the stunningly wrought antique with a carelessness that should have snapped it into kindling, but didn’t.
It occurred to her that he was far more aware of himself and his power than he appeared. That he was something of an iceberg, showing only the slightest bit of himself and containing multitudes beneath the surface. She didn’t want to believe it. She wanted him to be a vapid, repellant playboy who she could slap into place during her time as a make-believe princess. But there was that assessing gleam in his dark gaze that told her that whatever else this prince was, he wasn’t the least bit vapid.
And was rather too genuinely charming for her peace of mind, come to that.
He settled in his chair and stretched out his long, muscled legs so that they almost brushed hers, then smiled.
Natalie kept her own legs where they were, because shifting away from him would show a weakness she refused to let him see. She refused, as if her life depended on that refusal, and she didn’t much care for the hysterical notion that it really, truly did.
“I don’t care at all what you do or don’t do,” she assured him. “But it certainly appears that you can’t say the same, for some reason.”
“I am not the one who started making proclamations about my sexual intentions. I think you’ll find that was you. Here. Today.” That curve of his mouth deepened. “Entirely unprovoked.”
“My mistake. Because a man who has grown up manipulating the press in no way sends a distinct message when he spends the bulk of his very public engagement ‘escorting’ other women to various events.”
His gaze grew warmer, and that sculpted mouth curved. “I am a popular man.”
“What I am suggesting to you is that you are not the only popular person in this arrangement. I’m baffled at your Neanderthal-like response to a simple statement of fact, when you have otherwise been at such pains to present yourself as the very image of modernity in royal affairs.”
“We are sitting in an ancient castle on an island with a history that rivals Athens itself, discussing our upcoming marriage, which is the cold-blooded intermingling of two revered family lines for wealth and power, exactly as it might have been were we conducting this conversation in the Parthenon.” His dark brows rose. “What part of this did you find particularly modern?”
“The two of us, I thought, before I walked in this room.” She smiled brightly and let her foot dangle a bit too close to his leg. As if she didn’t care at all that he was encroaching into her personal space. As if the idea of even so innocuous a touch did nothing at all to her central nervous system. As if he were not the sort of man she’d hated all her life, on principle. And as if he were not promised to another, she snapped at herself in disgust, but still, she didn’t retreat the way she should have. In case she was wondering what kind of person she was. “Now I suspect the Social Media Prince is significantly more caveman-like than he wants his millions of adoring followers to realize.”
“I am the very soul of a Renaissance man, I assure you. I am merely aware of what the public will and will not support and I hate to break it you, princess, but the tabloids are not as forgiving of royal indiscretions as you appear to be.”
“You surprise me again, Your Highness. I felt certain that a man in your position could not possibly care what the tabloid hacks did or did not forgive, given how much material you give them to work with. Daily.”
“The two of us can sit in this room and bask in our progressive values, I am sure,” Rodolfo murmured, and the look in his dark eyes did not strike Natalie as particularly progressive. “But public sentiment, I think you will find, is distressingly traditional. People may enjoy any number of their own extramarital affairs. It doesn’t make them tolerant when a supposed fairy-tale princess strays from her charmed life. If anything, it makes the stones they cast heavier and more pointed.”
“So, to unpack that, you personally wish to carry on as if we are single and free, but are prevented from following your heart’s desire because you suddenly fear public perception?” She eyed him balefully and made no attempt to hide it. “That’s a bit hard to believe, coming from the man who told me not twenty minutes ago that he refused to be declawed.”
“You are not this naive, princess.” And the look he gave her then seemed to prickle along her skin, lighting fires Natalie was terribly afraid would never go out. “You know perfectly well that I can do as I like with only minimal repercussions. It is you who cannot. You have built an entire life on your spotless character. What would happen were you to be revealed as nothing more or less than a creature as human as the rest of us?”
RODOLFO HAD LONG ceased recognizing himself. And yet he kept talking.
“It will be difficult to maintain the fiction that you are a saint if your lovers are paraded through the tabloids of Europe every week,” he pointed out, as if he didn’t care one way or the other.
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