“It’s amazing how many unhinged women seem to think that if they claim they’re dating you, you might go along with it,” she said before she could think better of it.
That dark gold gaze of his lit with a gleam she couldn’t name then. And it sparked something deep inside her, making her fight to draw in a breath. Making her feel unsteady in the serviceable low heels that Natalie favored. Making her wish she’d worn something more substantial than a nice jacket over another pencil skirt. Like a suit of armor. Or her very own brick wall.
“There are always unhinged women hanging about,” Achilles said in that quietly devastating way of his. “Trying to convince me that they have relationships with me that they adamantly do not. Why do you imagine that is, Miss Monette?”
She told herself he couldn’t possibly know that she was one of those women, no matter how his gaze seemed to pin her where she stood. No matter the edge in his voice, or the sharp emphasis he’d put on Miss Monette.
Even if he suspected something was different with his assistant, he couldn’t know. Because no one could know. Because Valentina herself hadn’t known Natalie existed until she’d walked into that bathroom. And that meant all sorts of things, such as the fact that everything she’d been told about her childhood and her birth was a lie. Not to mention her mother.
But there was no way Achilles could know any of that.
“Perhaps it’s you,” she murmured in response. She smiled when his brows rose in that expression of sheer arrogance that never failed to make her feel the slightest bit dizzy. “I only mean that you’re a public figure and people imagine you a certain way based on the kind of press coverage you allow. Unless you plan to actively get out there and reclaim your public narrative, I don’t think there’s any likelihood that it will change.”
“I am not a public figure. I have never courted the public in any way.”
Valentina checked a sigh. “You’re a very wealthy man. Whether you like it or not, the public is fascinated by you.”
Achilles studied her until she was forced to order herself not to fidget beneath the weight of that heavy, intense stare.
“I’m intrigued that you think the very existence of public fascination must create an obligation in me to cater to it,” he said quietly. “It does not. In fact, it has the opposite effect. In me. But how interesting that you imagine you owe something to the faceless masses who admire you.”
Valentina’s lips felt numb. “No masses, faceless or otherwise, admire me, Mr. Casilieris. They have no idea I exist. I’m an assistant, nothing more.”
His hard mouth didn’t shift into one of those hard curves, but his dark gold eyes gleamed, and somehow that made the floor beneath her seem to tilt, then roll.
“Of course you are,” he said, his voice a quiet menace that echoed in her like a warning. Like something far more dangerous than a simple warning. “My mistake.”
Later that night, still feeling as off balance as if the floor really wasn’t steady beneath her feet, Valentina found herself alone with Achilles long after everyone else in the office had gone home.
It had been an extraordinarily long couple of days, something Valentina might have thought was business as usual for the Casilieris Company if so many of the other employees hadn’t muttered about how grueling it was. Beneath their breath and when they thought she couldn’t hear them, that was. The deal that Achilles was so determined to push through had turned out to have more tangles and turns than anyone had expected—especially, it seemed, Achilles. What that meant was long hour after long hour well into the tiny hours of the night, hunched over tables and conference rooms, arguing with fleets of attorneys and representatives from the other side over take-out food from fine New York restaurants and stale coffee.
Valentina was deep into one of the contracts Achilles had slid her way, demanding a fresh set of eyes on a clause that annoyed him, when she noticed that they were the only ones there. The Casilieris Company had a significant presence all over the planet, so there were usually people coming and going at all conceivable hours to be available to different workdays in distant places. Something Valentina had witnessed herself after spending so much time in these offices since she’d arrived in New York.
But when she looked up from the dense and confusing contract language for a moment to give her ever-impending headache a break, she could see from the long conference room table where she sat straight through the glass walls that allowed her to see all the way across the office floor. And there was no one there. No bustling secretaries, no ambitious VPs putting in ostentatiously late hours where the boss could see their vigilance and commitment. No overzealous interns making busy work for themselves in the cubicles. No late-night cleaning crews, who did their jobs in the dark so as not to bother the workers by day. There wasn’t a soul. Anywhere.
Something caught in her chest as she realized that it was only the two of them. Just Valentina and the man across the table from her, whom she was trying very hard not to look at too closely.
It was an extraordinarily unimportant thing to notice, she chastised herself, frowning back down at the contract. They were always alone, really. In his car, on his plane, in his penthouse. Valentina had spent more time with this man, she thought, than with any other save her father.
Her gaze rose from the contract of its own accord. Achilles sat across from her in the quiet of the otherwise empty office, his laptop cracked open before him and a pile of contracts next to the sleek machine. He looked the way he always did at the end of these long days. Entirely too good, something in her whispered—though she shoved that aside as best she could. It did no good to concentrate on things like that, she’d decided during her tenure with him. The man’s appearance was a fact, and it was something she needed to come to terms with, but she certainly didn’t have to ogle him.
But she couldn’t seem to look away. She remembered that moment in his penthouse a little too clearly, the first night they’d been in New York. She remembered how close they’d stood in that window, and the things he’d told her, that dark gold gaze of his boring into her. As if he had every intention of looking directly to her soul. More than that, she remembered him reaching out and taking hold of the end of the ponytail she’d worn, that he’d looked at as if he had no idea how it had come to be attached to her.
But she’d dreamed about it almost every time she’d slept, either way.
Tonight Achilles was lounging in a pushed-back chair, his hands on top of his head as if, had he had longer hair, he’d be raking his hands through it. His jaw was dotted with stubble after a long day in the office, and it lent him the look of some kind of pirate.
Valentina told herself—sternly—that there was no need for such fanciful language when he already made her pulse heat inside her simply by being in the same room. She tried to sink down a bit farther behind the piles and piles of documents surrounding her, which she was viewing as the armor she wished she was wearing. The remains of the dinner she’d ordered them many hours before were scattered across the center of the table, and she took perhaps too much pride in the fact she’d completed so simple a task. Normal people, she was certain, ordered from take-out menus all the time, but Valentina never had before she’d taken over Natalie’s life. Valentina was a princess. She’d discussed many a menu and sent requests to any number of kitchens, but she’d never ordered her own meal in her life, much less from stereotypical New Yorkers with accents and attitudes.
She felt as if she was in a movie.
Valentina decided she would take her victories where she found them. Even if they were as small and ultimately pointless as sending out for a takeaway meal.
“It’s late,” Achilles said, reminding her that they were all alone here. And there was something in his voice then. Or the way his gaze slammed into hers when she looked up again.
Or maybe it was in her—that catch.
That little kick of something a little too much like excitement that wound around and around inside her. Making her feel...restless. Undone. Desperate for something she couldn’t even name.
“And here I thought you planned to carry straight through until dawn,” she said, as brightly as possible, hoping against hope he couldn’t see anything on her face. Or hear it in her voice.
Achilles lowered his hand to the arms of his chair. But he didn’t shift that gaze of his from hers. And she kept catching him looking at her like this. Exactly like this. Simmering. Dark and dangerous, and spun through with gold. In the cars they took together. Every morning when he walked out of his bedchamber and found her sitting in the office suite, already starting on the day’s work as best she could. Across boardroom tables just like this one, no matter if they were filled with other people.
It was worse now. Here in the quiet of his empty office. So late at night it felt to Valentina as if the darkness was a part of her.
And Valentina didn’t have any experience with men, but oh, the books she’d read. Love stories and romances and happy-ever-afters, and almost all of them started just like this. With a taut feeling in the belly and fire everywhere else.
Do not be absurd, she snapped at herself.
Because she was Princess Valentina of Murin. She was promised to another and had been since her birth. There wasn’t space in her life for anything but that. Not even here, in this faraway place that had nothing at all to do with her real life. Not even with this man, whom she never should have met, and never would have had she not seized that moment in the London bathroom.
You can take a holiday from your life, apparently, she reminded herself. But you still take you along with you wherever you go.
She might have been playing Natalie Monette, but she was still herself. She was still the same person she’d always been. Dutiful. Mindful of what her seemingly inconsequential behavior might mean to her father, to the kingdom, to her future husband’s kingdom, too. Whatever else she was—and she wasn’t sure she knew anymore, not here in the presence of a man who made her head spin without seeming to try very hard—Valentina was a person who had always, always kept her vows.
Even when it was her father who had made them, not her.
“If you keep staring at me like that,” Achilles said softly, a kind of ferociousness beneath his rough words that made her stomach knot, then seemed to kindle a different, deeper fire lower down, “I am not certain I’ll be able to contain myself.”
Valentina’s mouth was dry. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I think you do.”
Achilles didn’t move, she could see that he wasn’t moving, and yet everything changed at that. He filled every room he entered—she was used to that by now—but this was something different. It was as if lightning flashed. It was if he was some kind of rolling thunder all his own. It was as if he’d called in a storm, then let it loose to fill all of the room. The office.
And Valentina, too.
“No,” she whispered, her voice scratchy against all that light and rumble.
But she could feel the tumult inside her. It was fire and it was light and it threatened to burst free of the paltry cage of her skin. Surely she would burst. Surely no person could survive this. She felt it shake all through her, as if underlining her fear.
“I don’t know what you mean, and I don’t like what you’re implying. I think perhaps we’ve been in this office too long. You seem to have mistaken me for one of your mistresses. Or worse, one of those desperate women who call in, hoping to convince you they ought to be one of them.”
“On the contrary, Miss Monette.”
And there was a starkness to Achilles’s expression then. No curve on his stern mouth. No gleaming thing in the seductive gold of his dark eyes. But somehow, that only made it worse.
“You’re the one who manages my mistresses. And those who pretend to that title. How could I possibly confuse you for them?” He cocked his head slightly to one side, and something yawned open inside her, as if in response. “Or perhaps you’re auditioning for the role?”
“No.” Her voice was no less scratchy this time, but there was more power in it. Or more fear, something inside her whispered. “I am most certainly not auditioning for anything like that. Or anything at all. I already have a job.”
“But you told me you meant to quit.” She had the strangest notion then that he was enjoying himself. “Perhaps you meant you were looking to make a lateral move. From my boardroom to my bed?”
Valentina tried to summon her outrage. She tried to tell herself that she was deeply offended on Natalie’s behalf, because of course this was about her, not Valentina herself... She tried to tell herself a whole lot of things.
But she couldn’t quite get there. Instead, she was awash with unhelpful little visions, red hot and wild. Images of what a “lateral move” might look like. Of what his bed might feel like. Of him.
She imagined that lean, solidly muscled form stretched over hers, the way she’d read in so many books so many times. Something almost too hot to bear melted through her then, pulling deep in her belly, and making her breath go shallow before it shivered everywhere else.
As if it was already happening.
“I know that this might come as a tremendous shock,” Valentina said, trying to make herself sound something like fierce—or unmoved, anyway. Anything other than thrown and yearning. “But I have no interest in your bed. Less than no interest.”
“You are correct.” And something gleamed bright and hot and unholy gold in that dark gaze of his. “I am in shock.”
“The next time an aspiring mistress calls the office,” Valentina continued coolly, and no matter that it cost her, “I’ll be certain to put her through to you for a change. You can discuss lateral moves all day long.”
“What if a random caller does not appeal to me?” he asked lazily, as if this was all a game to him. She told herself it was. She told herself the fact that it was a game made it safe, but she didn’t believe it. Not when all the things that moved around inside her made it hard to breathe, and made her feel anything at all but safe. “What if it is I who wish to alter our working relationship after all these years?”
Valentina told herself that this was clearly a test. If, as this conversation seemed to suggest, Natalie’s relationship with her boss had always been strictly professional, why would he want to change that now? She’d seen how distant he kept his romantic entanglements from his work. His work was his life. His women were afterthoughts. There was no way the driven, focused man she’d come to know a bit after the close proximity of these last days would want to muddy the water in his office, with the assistant who not only knew where all the bodies were buried, but oversaw the funeral rites herself.
This had to be a test.
“I don’t wish to alter a thing,” she told him, very distinctly, as if there was nothing in her head but thorny contract language. And certainly nothing involving that remarkably ridged torso of his. “If you do, I think we should revisit the compensation package on offer for my resignation.”
Achilles smiled as if she delighted him. But in an entirely too wicked and too hot sort of way.
“There is no package, Miss Monette,” he murmured. “And there will be no resignation. When will you understand? You are here to do as I wish. Nothing more and nothing less than that. And perhaps my wishes concerning your role here have changed.”
He wants you to fall apart, Valentina snapped at herself. He wants to see if this will break you. He’s poking at Natalie about her change in performance, not at you. He doesn’t know you exist.
Because there could be no other explanation. And it didn’t matter that the look in his eyes made her shudder, down deep inside.
“Your wishes concerning my role now involve me on my back?” It cost her to
keep her voice that flat. She could feel it.
“You say that as if the very idea disgusts you.” And that crook in the corner of his lethal mouth deepened, even as that look in his eyes went lethal. “Surely not.”
Valentina forced herself to smile. Blandly. As if her heart wasn’t trying to claw its way out of her chest.
“I’m very flattered by your offer, of course,” she said.
A little too sweetly to be mistaken for sincerity.
Achilles laughed then. It was an unsettling sound, too rough and too bold. It told her too much. That he knew—everything. That he knew all the things that were moving inside her, white hot and molten and too much for her to handle or tamp down or control. There was a growing, impossible fire raging in places she hardly understood, rendering her a stranger to herself.
As if he was the one in control of her body, even sitting across the table, lounging in his seat as if none of this was a matter of any concern at all.
While she felt as if she was both losing pieces of herself—and seeing her true colors for the very first time.
“Are you letting me down easy?” Achilles asked.
There was still laughter in his voice, his gaze and, somehow, dancing in the air between them despite all that fire still licking at her. She felt it roll through her, as if those big hands of his were on her skin.
And then she was suddenly incapable of thinking about anything at all but that. His hands all over her body. Touching places only she had ever seen. She had to swallow hard. Then again. And still there was that ringing in her ears.
“Do think it will work?” he asked, laughter still making his words sound a little too much like the rough, male version of honey.
“I imagine it will work beautifully, yes.” She held on to that smile of hers as if her life depended on it. She rather thought it did. It was that or tip over into all that fire, and she had no idea what would become of her if she let that happen. She had no idea what would be left. “Or, of course, I could involve Human Resources in this discussion.”
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