The Prince's Scandalous Baby Read Online Free PDF Page B

her feel uncomfortable and a little like she was a stranger here, for the first time.
     
    “You’ve never been outside of Italy?” she asked, awkwardly. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean… God, I feel like such an ass…”
     
    He turned to her, and cupped her face in his hand. “No, I didn’t mean to make you feel that way. I mean that you’re brave, and I don’t think you know it. Yes, I’ve never left Italy, but I want to change that. I’ve always dreamed of changing that. I would consider it an honor to be a little more like you.”
     
    All the awkwardness that she had felt a moment before melted away into confusion and disbelief. He wanted to be more like her ? How could a man like Nico ever want to be anything like her? She was a two-bit girl from a two-bit town. There were five stoplights, and that’s counting the one that was constantly going in and out because the council couldn’t decide on what model to replace it with.
     
    He was worldly in a way she could never be, even if he’d never left Italy. He was refined. When he walked into a room, he owned that room. She’d seen it when he came into the square in front of the fountain, and she’d seen other people—the bartender, the cab driver, others wandering around—see it too.
     
    The idea that he should think that any part of him was inferior seemed laughable, but his gaze on her was too intense to allow any laughter to slip past her lips.
     
    She didn’t know what unnerved her more: the fact that he was serious about what he was saying, or the fact that she wanted his lips to stop talking and start kissing her.
     
    He drew closer to her, bringing his lips close to hers, and spurring a sudden wave of panic through her body. She shouldn’t be here. She should be at home. She should be packing. No one knew she was here.
     
    And then she felt the softness of his kiss, and all of her doubts were silenced.

 
    FIVE

Morning broke slowly, and Juliette woke slowly to match it. There was no real moment of realization of where she was and who she was with. It just kind of came to her, bit by bit, as the sky grew lighter.
     
    She wasn’t sure whose bed they had slept in. She wasn’t sure what the consequences would be if she were found here. The only thing she was really sure of was his arms, and how good they felt wrapped around her as they had been all night. Everything else was secondary, and was definitely nothing to be worried about so long as she was with him.
     
    When she was fully conscious, she saw that he wasn’t yet awake. She could tell by the steady rhythm of his breathing, by the solid, steady thumping of his heart, and by the indecipherable words that occasionally fell from his lips. She wasn’t sure why the fact that he talked in his sleep made her so happy; maybe it was something to do with the fact that it made him seem more like a human, and less like a dream.
     
    She didn’t want to wake him before he woke naturally, so instead, she just lay in his arms and stared out the window. She could see the little crests of the waves on the water. She could hear the birds chirping, but the sea was too far, so the waves all felt like some distant silent movie. They only felt real when the breeze carried the faint scent of salt in through the window.
     
    Nothing could have been as perfect as that moment.
     
    And then she heard the sound of footsteps on the stairs.
     
    She scrambled to sit up, scanning the room for her clothes. The steps on the stairs weren’t fast or heavy, but they were growing closer too quickly for her to have any hope of getting fully dressed.
     
    Her only hope of covering herself was the bedsheet, which she threw around herself in haste. She spared a glance at Nico, just to make sure that she wasn’t robbing him of his own cover, but he barely seemed to have noticed that she had moved. He was just mumbling to himself and turning over, trying to block out the sun in the room.
     
    Like a sailor bracing for