Achilles laughed again, and this time it was rougher. Darker and somehow hotter at the same time. Valentina felt it slide all over her, making her breasts feel heavy and her hips restless. While deep between her legs, a slick ache bloomed.
“I admire the feigned naïveté,” Achilles said, and he looked like a pirate again, all dark jaw and that gleam in his gaze. It lit her up. Everywhere. “I have obviously failed to appreciate your acting talent sufficiently. I think we both know what Human Resources will tell you. To suck it up or find another position.”
“That does not sound at all like something Human Resources would say,” Valentina replied crisply, rather than spending even a split second thinking about sucking. “It sounds as if you’re laboring under the delusion that this is a cult of personality, not a business.”
If she expected him to look at all abashed, his grin disabused her of it. “Do you doubt it?”
“I’m not sure that is something I would brag about, Mr. Casilieris.”
His gaze was hot, and she didn’t think he was talking about her job or his company any longer. Had he ever been?
“Is it bragging if it’s true?” he asked.
Valentina stood then, because it was the last thing she wanted to do. She could have sat there all night. She could have rung in a new dawn, fencing words with this man and dancing closer and closer to that precipice she could feel looming between them, even if she couldn’t quite see it.
She could have pretended she didn’t feel every moment of this deep inside her, in places she shouldn’t. And then pretend further she didn’t know what it meant just because she’d never experienced any of it before outside the pages of a book.
But she did know. And this wasn’t her life to ruin. And so she stood, smoothing her hands down her skirt and wishing she hadn’t been quite so impetuous in that London bathroom.
If you hadn’t been, you wouldn’t be here, something in her replied. Is that what you want?
And she knew that she didn’t. Valentina had a whole life left to live with a man she would call husband who would never know her, not really. She had duty to look forward to, and a lifetime of charity and good works, all of which would be vetted by committees and commented on by the press. She had public adulation and a marriage that would involve the mechanical creation of babies before petering off into a nice friendship, if she was lucky.
Maybe the making of the babies would be fun with her prince. What did she know? All she knew so far was that he didn’t do...this. He didn’t affect her the way Achilles did, lounging there like hard-packed danger across a conference table, his gaze too dark and the gold in it making her pulse kick at her.
She’d never felt anything like this before. She doubted she’d ever feel it again.
Valentina couldn’t quite bring herself to regret it.
But she couldn’t stay here tonight and blow up the rest of Natalie’s life, either. That would be treating this little gift that she’d been given with nothing but contempt.
“Have I given you leave to go?” Achilles asked, with what she knew was entirely feigned astonishment. “I am clearly confused in some way. I keep thinking you work for me.”
She didn’t know how he could do that. How he could seem to loom over her when she was the one standing up and looking down at him.
“And because I’d like to continue working for you,” Valentina forced herself to say in as measured a tone as she could manage, “I’m going to leave now. We can pick this up in the morning.” She tapped the table with one finger. “Pick this up, I mean. These contracts and the deal. Not this descent into madness, which I think we can chalk up to exhaustion.”
Achilles only watched her for a moment. Those hands that she could picture too easily against her own flesh curled over the armrests of his chair, and her curse was that she imagined she was that chair. His legs were thrust out before him, long and lean. His usual suit was slightly rumpled, his tie having been tugged off and tossed aside hours earlier, so she could see the olive skin at his neck and a hint of crisp, black hair. He looked simultaneously sleepy and breathlessly, impossibly lethal—with an intensity that made that hot ache between her legs seem to swallow her whole.
And the look in his eyes made everything inside her draw tight, then pulse harder.
“Do you have a problem with that?” she asked, and she meant to sound impatient. Challenging. But she thought both of them were entirely too aware that what came out instead was rather more plaintive than planned.
As if she was really asking him if he was okay with everything that had happened here tonight. She was clearly too dazed to function.
She needed to get away from him while she still had access to what little of her brain remained in all this smoke and flame.
“Do you require my permission?” Achilles lifted his chin, and his dark eyes glittered. Valentina held her breath. “So far tonight it seems you are laboring under the impression that you give the permission, not me. You make the rules, not me. It is as if I am here for no other purpose than to serve you.”
And there was no reason at all that his words, spoken in that soft, if dangerous way, should make her skin prickle. But they did. As if a man like Achilles did not have to issue threats, he was the threat. Why pile a threat on top of the threat? When the look on his face would do.
“I will see you in the morning,” Valentina said, resolutely. “When I’ll be happy to accept your apology.”
Achilles lounged farther down in his chair, and she had the strangest notion that he was holding himself back. Keeping himself in place. Goose bumps shivered to life over her shoulders and down her arms.
His gaze never left hers.
“Go,” he said, and there was no pretending it wasn’t an order. “But I would not lie awake tonight anticipating the contours of my apology. It will never come.”
She wanted to reply to that, but her mouth was too dry and she couldn’t seem to move. Not so much as a muscle.
And as if he knew it, Achilles kept going in that same intensely quiet way.
“Tonight when you can’t sleep, when you toss and turn and stare up at yet another ceiling I own, I want you to think of all the other reasons you could be wide awake in the small hours of the night. All the things that I could do to you. Or have you do to me. All the thousands of ways I will be imagining us together, just like that, under the same roof.”
“That is completely inappropriate, Mr. Casilieris, and I think you know it.”
But she knew full well she didn’t sound nearly as outraged as she should. And only partially because her voice was a mere whisper.
“Have you never wondered how we would fit? Have you not tortured herself with images of my possession?” Achilles’s hard mouth curved then, a wicked crook in one corner that she knew, somehow, would haunt her. She could feel it deep inside her like its own bright fire. “Tonight, I think, you will.”
And Valentina stopped pretending there was any way out of this conversation besides the precise images he’d just mentioned, acted out all over this office. She walked stiffly around the table and gave him a wide, wide berth as she passed.
When she made it to the door of the conference room, she didn’t look behind her to see if he was watching. She knew he was. She could feel it.
Fire and lightning, thunder and need.
She ran.
And heard his laughter follow behind her like the leading edge of a storm she had no hope of outwitting, no matter how fast she moved.
CHAPTER FIVE
ACHILLES ORDINARILY ENJOYED his victory parties. Reveled in them, in fact. Not for him any nod toward false humility or any pretense that he didn’t deeply enjoy these games of high finance with international stakes. But tonight he couldn’t seem to get his head into it, and no matter that he’d been fighting to buy out t
his particular iconic Manhattan hotel—which he planned to make over in his own image, the blend of European elegance and Greek timelessness that was his calling card in the few hotels scattered across the globe that he’d deemed worthy of the Casilieris name—for nearly eighteen months.
He should have been jubilant. It irritated him—deeply—that he couldn’t quite get there.
His group had taken over a New York steak house renowned for its high-end clientele and specialty drinks to match to celebrate the deal he’d finally put through today after all this irritating wrangling. Ordinarily he would allow himself a few drinks to blur out his edges for a change. He would even smile and pretend he was a normal man, like all the rest, made of flesh and blood instead of dollar signs and naked ambition—an improvement by far over the monster he kept locked up tight beneath. Nights like this were his opportunity to pretend to be like anyone else, and Achilles usually indulged that impulse.
He might not have been a normal man—he’d never been a normal man—but it amused him to pretend otherwise every now and again. He was renowned for his surliness as much as his high expectations, but if that was all there was to it—to him—he never would have gotten anywhere in business. It took a little charm to truly manipulate his enemies and his opponents and even his acolytes the way he liked to do. It required that he be as easy telling a joke as he was taking over a company or using his fiercest attorneys to hammer out a deal that served him, and only him, best.
But tonight he was charmless all the way through.
He stood at the bar, nursing a drink he would have much preferred to toss back and follow with a few more of the same, his attention entirely consumed by his princess as she worked the room. As ordered.
“Make yourself useful, please,” he’d told her when they’d arrived. “Try to charm these men. If you can.”
He’d been deliberately insulting. He’d wanted her to imagine he had some doubt that she could pull such a thing off. He’d wanted her to feel the way he did—grouchy and irritable and outside his own skin.
She made him feel like an adolescent.
But Valentina had not seemed the least bit cowed. Much less insulted—which had only made him feel that much more raw.
“As you wish,” she’d murmured in that overly obsequious voice she used when, he thought, she most wanted to get her claws into him. She’d even flashed that bland smile of hers at him, which had its usual effect—making his blood seem too hot for his own veins. “Your slightest desire is my command, of course.”
And the truth was, Achilles should have known better. The kind of men he liked to manipulate best, especially when it came to high-stakes deals like the one he’d closed tonight, were not the sort of men he wanted anywhere near his princess. If the real Natalie had been here, she would have disappeared. She would have dispensed her usual round of cool greetings and even cooler congratulations, none of which encouraged anyone to cozy up to her. Then she would have sat in this corner or that, her expression blank and her attention focused entirely on one of her devices. She would have done that remarkable thing she did, that he had never thought to admire as much as perhaps he should have, which was her ability to be both in the room and invisible at the same time.
Princess Valentina, by contrast, couldn’t have stayed invisible if her life depended on it. She was the furthest thing from invisible that Achilles had ever seen. It was as if the world was cast into darkness and she was its only light, that bright and that impossibly silvery and smooth, like her own brand of moonlight.
She moved from one group to the next, all gracious smiles. And not that bland sort of smile she used entirely too pointedly and too well, which invariably worked his last nerve, but one he’d seen in too many photographs he’d looked at much too late at night. Hunched over his laptop like some kind of obsessed troll while she slept beneath the same roof, unaware, which only made him that much more infuriated.
With her, certainly. But with himself even more.
Tonight she was the consummate hostess, as if this was her victory celebration instead of his. He could hear her airy laugh from across the room, far more potent than another woman’s touch. And worse, he could see her. Slender and graceful, inhabiting a pencil skirt and well-cut jacket as if they’d been crafted specifically for her. When he knew perfectly well that those were his assistant’s clothes, and they certainly weren’t bespoke.
But that was Valentina’s power. She made everything in her orbit seem to be only hers. Crafted specifically and especially for her.
Including him, Achilles thought—and he hated it. He was not a man a woman could put on a leash. He’d never given a woman any kind of power over him in his life, and he didn’t understand how this creature who was engaged in a full-scale deception—who was running a con on him even now—somehow seemed to have the upper hand in a battle he was terribly afraid only he knew they were fighting.
It was unconscionable. It made him want to tear down this building—hell, the whole city—with his bare hands.
Or better yet, put them on her.
All the men around her lapped it up, of course. They stood too close. They put their hands on her elbow, or her shoulder, to emphasize a point that Achilles did not have to hear to know did not require emphasis. And certainly did not require touch.
She was moonlight over this grim, focused life of his, and he had no idea how he was going to make it through a world cast in darkness without her.
If he was appalled by that sentiment—and he was, deeply and wholly—it didn’t seem to matter. He couldn’t seem to turn it off.
It was far easier to critique her behavior instead.
So Achilles watched. And seethed. He catalogued every single touch, every single laugh, every single time she tilted back her pretty face and let her sleek copper hair fall behind her, catching all the light in the room. He brooded over the men who surrounded her, knowing full well that each and every one of them was imagining her naked. Hell, so was he.
But he was the only person in this room who knew what he was looking at. They thought she was Natalie Monette, his dependable assistant. He was the only one who knew who she really was.
By the time Valentina finished a full circuit of the room, Achilles was in a high, foul temper.
“Are you finished?” he asked when she came to stand by his side again, his tone a dark slap he did nothing at all to temper. “Or will you actually whore yourself out in lieu of dessert?”
He meant that to hurt. He didn’t care if he was an ass. He wanted to knock her back a few steps.
But of course Valentina only shot him an arch, amused look, as if she was biting back laughter.
“That isn’t very nice,” she said simply.
That was all.
And yet Achilles felt that bloom of unfortunate heat inside him all over again, and this time he knew exactly what it was. He didn’t like it any better than he had before, and yet there it sat, eating at him from the inside out.
It didn’t matter if he told himself he didn’t wish to feel shame. All Valentina had to do was look at him as if he was a misbehaving child, tell him he wasn’t being nice when he’d built an entire life out of being the very opposite of nice and hailing that as the source of his vast power and influence—and there it was. Heavy in him, like a length of hard, cold chain.
How had he given this woman so much power over him? How had he failed to see that was what was happening while he’d imagined he was giving her the rope with which to hang herself?
This could not go on. He could not allow this to go on.
The truth was, Achilles couldn’t seem to get a handle on this situation the way he’d planned to when he’d realized who she was on the plane. He’d imagined it would be an amusing sort of game to humble a high and mighty spoiled-rotten princess who had never worked a day in her life and imagined she co
uld deceive the Achilles Casilieris so boldly. He’d imagined it would be entertaining—and over swiftly. He supposed he’d imagined he’d be shipping her back to her palace and her princessy life and her proper royal fiancé by the end of the first day.
But Valentina wasn’t at all who he’d thought she’d be. If she was spoiled—and she had to be spoiled, by definition, he was certain of it—she hid it. No matter what he threw at her, no matter what he demanded, she simply did it. Not always well, but she did it. She didn’t complain. She didn’t try to weasel out of any tasks she didn’t like. She didn’t even make faces or let out those long-suffering sighs that so many of his support staff did when they thought he couldn’t hear them.
In fact, Valentina was significantly more cheerful than any other assistant he’d ever had—including Natalie.
She was nothing like perfect, but that made it worse. If she was perfect, maybe he could have dismissed her or ignored her, despite the game she was playing. But he couldn’t seem to get her out of his head.
It was that part he couldn’t accept. Achilles lived a highly compartmentalized life by design, and he liked it that way. He kept his women in the smallest, most easily controlled and thus ignored space. It had been many, many years since he’d allowed sex to control his thoughts, much less his life. It was only sex, after all. And what was sex to a man who could buy the world if he so chose? It was a release, yes. Enjoyable, even.
But Achilles couldn’t remember the last time he’d woken in the night, his heart pounding, the hardest part of him awake and aware. With nothing in his head but her. Yet it was a nightly occurrence since Valentina had walked onto his plane.
It was bordering on obsession.
And Achilles did not get obsessed. He did not want. He did not need. He took what interested him and then he forgot about it when the next thing came along.
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