And he couldn’t think of a single good reason why he shouldn’t do the same with her.
“Do you have something you wish to say to me?” Valentina asked, her soft, smooth voice snapping him back to this party that bored him. This victory that should have excited him, but that he only found boring now.
“I believe I said it.”
“You misunderstand me,” she replied, smiling. From a distance it would look as if they were discussing something as light and airy as that curve to her mouth, he thought. Achilles would have been impressed had he not been close enough to see that cool gleam in her green gaze. “I meant your apology. Are you ready to give it?”
He felt his own mouth curve then, in nothing so airy. Or light.
“Do I strike you as a man who apologizes, Miss Monette?” he asked her, making no attempt to ease the steel in his voice. “Have I ever done so in all the time you’ve known me?”
“A man who cannot apologize is not quite a man, is he, Mr. Casilieris?” This time he thought her smile was meant to take away the sting of her words. To hide the insult a little. Yet it only seemed to make it worse. “I speak philosophically, of course. But surely the only people who can’t bring themselves to apologize are those who fear that any admission of guilt or wrongdoing diminishes them. I think we can both agree that’s the very opposite of strength.”
“You must tell me if I appear diminished, then,” he growled at her, and he had the satisfaction of watching that pulse in her neck go wild. “Or weak in some way.”
He wasn’t surprised when she excused herself and went back to working the crowd. But he was surprised he let her.
Not here, he cautioned that wild thing inside him that he’d never had to contend with before, not over a woman. And never so raw and bold. Not now.
Later that night, they sat in his car as it slid through the streets of Manhattan in the midst of a summer thunderstorm, and Achilles cautioned himself not to act rashly.
Again.
But Valentina sat there beside him, staring out the window with a faint smile on her face. She’d settled beside him on the wide, plush seat without a word, as if it hardly mattered to her if he spoke or not. If he berated her, if he ignored her. As if she was all alone in this car or, worse, as if her mind was far away on more interesting topics.
And he couldn’t tolerate it.
Achilles could think of nothing but her, she was eating him alive like some kind of impossible acid, yet her mind was miles away. She didn’t seem to notice or care what she did to him when he was the one who was allowing her grand deception to continue—instead of outing her the way he should have the moment he’d understood who she was.
His hands moved before he knew what he meant to do, as if they had a mind of their own.
He didn’t ask. He didn’t push or prod at her or fence more words, forcing some sort of temper or explosion that would lead them where he wanted her to go. He didn’t stack that deck.
He simply reached across the backseat, wrapped his hand around the back of her neck and hauled her closer to him.
She came easily, as if she really was made of nothing but light. He pulled her until she was sprawled across his lap, one hand braced on his thigh and another at his side. Her body was as lithe and sweetly rounded as he’d imagined it would be, but better. Much, much better. She smelled like a dream, something soft and something sweet, and all of it warm and female and her. Valentina.
But all he cared about was the fact that that maddening mouth of hers was close to his.
Finally.
“What are you doing?” she breathed.
“I should think that was obvious,” he growled. “And overdue.”
And then, at last, he kissed her.
He wasn’t gentle. He wasn’t anything like tentative. He was neither soft nor kind, because it was too late for that.
He claimed her. Took her. He reminded her who he was with every slick, intense slide of his tongue. Or maybe he was reminding himself.
And he couldn’t stop himself once the taste of her exploded inside him, making him reel. He wanted more. He wanted everything.
But she was still fighting him, that stubbornness of hers that made his whole body tight and needy. Not with her body, which was wrapped around him, supple and sweet, in a way that made him feel drunk. Not with her arms, which she’d sneaked around his shoulders as if she needed to hold on to him to keep herself upright.
It was that mouth of hers that had been driving him wild since the start.
He pulled his lips from hers. Then he slid his hands up to take her elegant cheekbones between his palms. He tilted her face where he wanted it, making the angle that much slicker. That much sweeter.
“Kiss me back,” he demanded, pulling back farther to scowl at her, all this unaccustomed need making him impatient. And testy.
She looked stunned. And entirely too beautiful. Her green eyes were wide and dazed behind those clear glasses she wore. Her lips were parted, distractingly soft and faintly swollen already.
Achilles was hard and he was greedy and he wanted nothing more than to bury himself inside her here and now, and finally get rid of this obsession that was eating him alive.
Or indulge in it awhile.
“In case you are confused,” he told her, his voice still a growl, “that was an order.”
She angled herself back, just slightly. As if she was trying to sit up straighter against him. He didn’t allow it. He liked her like this. Off balance and under his control, and he didn’t much care if that made him a savage. He’d only ever pretended to be anything else, and only occasionally, at that.
“I am kissing you back,” she said, and there was a certain haughtiness in her voice that delighted him. It made him grin, imagining all the many ways he could make her pay for that high-born, inbred superiority that he wanted to lap up like cream.
“Not well enough,” he told her.
Her cheeks looked crisp and red, but she didn’t shrink away from him. She didn’t so much as blink.
“Maybe we don’t have any chemistry,” she theorized in that same voice, making it sound as if that was a foregone conclusion. “Not every woman in the world finds you attractive, Mr. Casilieris. Did you ever think of that?”
Achilles pulled her even more off balance, holding her over his lap and in his arms, right where he wanted her.
“No,” he said starkly, and he didn’t care if his greed and longing was all over his face, revealing more to her than he had ever shared with anyone. Ever. “I don’t think either of those things is a problem.”
Then he set his mouth to hers, and proved it.
* * *
Valentina thought she’d died and gone to a heaven she’d never dreamed of before. Wicked and wild and better. So very much better than anything she could have come up with in her most brilliant and dark-edged fantasies.
She had never been truly kissed before—if that was even the word to describe something so dominant and so powerful and so deeply, erotically thrilling—but she had no intention of sharing her level of inexperience with Achilles. Not when he seemed so close to some kind of edge and so hell-bent on taking her with him, toppling over the side into all of this sensation and need.
So she simply mimicked him. When he tilted his head, she did the same. She balled up her hands in his exquisitely soft shirt, up there against the hard planes of his chest tucked beneath his dark suit coat. She was aware of his hard hands on her face. She exulted in his arms like steel, holding her and caging her against him. She lost herself in that desperately cruel mouth as it moved over hers, the touch of his rough jaw, the impossible heat.
God help her, the heat.
And she was aware of that hard ridge beneath her, suddenly. She couldn’t seem to keep from wriggling against it. Once, darin
gly. Then again when she heard that deep, wild and somehow savagely beautiful male noise he made in response.
And Valentina forgot about her vows, old and forthcoming. She forgot about faraway kingdoms and palaces and the life she’d lived there. She forgot about the promises she’d made and the ones that had been made in her name, because all of that seemed insubstantial next to the sheer, overwhelming wonder of Achilles Casilieris kissing her like a man possessed in the back of his town car.
This was her holiday. Her little escape. This was nothing but a dream, and he was, too. A fantasy of the life she might have lived had she been anyone else. Had she ever been anything like normal.
She forgot where they were. She forgot the role she was supposed to be playing. There was nothing in all the world but Achilles and the wildness he summoned up with every drag of his mouth against hers.
The car moved beneath them, but all Valentina could focus on was him. That hot possession of his mouth. The fire inside her.
And the lightning that she knew was his, the thunder storming through her, teaching her that she knew less about her body than he did. Much, much less. When he shifted so he could rub his chest against hers, she understood that he knew her nipples had pebbled into hard little points. When he laughed slightly as he rearranged her arms around his shoulders, she understood that he knew all her limbs were weighted down with the force of that greedy longing coursing through her veins.
The more he kissed her, over and over again as if time had no meaning and he could do this forever, she understood that he knew everything.
When he pulled his mouth from hers again, Valentina heard a soft, whimpering sound of protest. It took her one shuddering beat of her heart, then another, to realize she’d made it.
She couldn’t process that. It was so abandoned, so thoughtless and wild—how could that be her?
“If we do not get out of this car right now,” Achilles told her, his gaze a dark and breathtaking gold that slammed into her and lit her insides on fire, “we will not get out of it for some time. Not until I’ve had my fill of you. Is that how you want our first time to go, glikia mou? In the backseat of a car?”
For a moment Valentina didn’t know what he meant.
One hastily sucked-in breath later, she realized the car had come to a stop outside Achilles’s building. Her cheeks flushed with a bright heat, but worse, she knew that he could see it. He saw everything—hadn’t she just realized the truth of that? He watched her as she flushed, and he liked it. That deeply male curve in the corner of his mouth made that plain.
Valentina struggled to free herself from his hold then, to climb off his lap and sit back on the seat herself, and she was all too aware that he let her.
She didn’t focus on that. She couldn’t. That offhanded show of his innate strength made her feel...slippery, inside and outside and high between her legs. She tossed herself off his lap, her gaze tangling with his in a way that made the whole world seem to spin a little, and then she threw herself out the door. She summoned a smile from somewhere and aimed it at the doormen.
Breathe, she ordered herself. Just breathe.
Because she couldn’t do this. This wasn’t who she was. She hadn’t held on to her virginity all this time to toss it aside at the very first temptation...had she?
This couldn’t be who she was. It couldn’t.
She’d spent her whole life practicing how to appear unruffled and serene under any and all circumstances, though she couldn’t recall ever putting it to this kind of test before. She made herself breathe. She made herself smile. She sank into the familiarity of her public persona, wielding it like that armor she’d wanted, because it occurred to her it was the toughest and most resilient armor she had.
Achilles followed her into that bright and shiny elevator in the back of the gleaming lobby, using his key to close the doors behind them. He did not appear to notice or care that she was newly armored, especially while he seemed perfectly content to look so...disreputable.
His suit jacket hung open, and she was sure it had to be obvious to even the most casual observer that she’d had her hands all over his chest and his shirt. And she found it was difficult to think of that hard mouth of his as cruel now that she knew how it tasted. More, how it felt on hers, demanding and intense and—
Stop, she ordered herself. Now.
He leaned back against the wall as the elevator started to move, his dark gold eyes hooded and intent when they met hers. He didn’t say a word. Maybe he didn’t have to. Her heart was pounding so loud that Valentina was certain it would have drowned him out if he’d shouted.
But Achilles did not shout.
On the contrary, when the elevator doors shut behind them, securing them in his penthouse, he only continued to watch her in that same intense way. She moved into the great living room, aware that he followed her, silent and faintly lazy.
It made her nervous. That was what she told herself that fluttery feeling was, lodged there beneath her ribs. And lower, if she was honest. Much lower.
“I’m going to bed,” she said. And then instantly wished she’d phrased that differently when she heard it echo there between them, seeming to fill up the cavernous space, beating as madly within her as her own frenzied heart. “Alone.”
Achilles gave the impression of smiling without actually doing so. He thrust his hands into the pockets of his dark suit and regarded her solemnly, save for that glittering thing in his dark gaze.
“If that is what you wish, glikia mou.”
And that was the thing. It wasn’t what she wished. It wasn’t what she wanted, and especially not when he called her that Greek name that she thought meant my sweet. It made her want to taste that word on that mouth of his. It made her want to find out exactly how sweet he thought she was.
It made her want to really, truly be someone else so she could do all the things that trampled through her head, making her chest feel tight while the rest of her...yearned.
Her whole life had been an exercise in virtue and duty, and she’d thought that meant something. She’d thought that said something about who she was. Valentina had been convinced that she’d held on to her chastity all this time, long after everyone she’d known had rid themselves of theirs, as a gift to her future.
But the night all around her told her something different. It had stripped away all the lies she’d told herself—or Achilles had. All the places she’d run and hid across all these years. Because the truth was that she’d never been tested. Was it truly virtue if she’d never been the least bit tempted to give it away? Or was it only coincidence that she’d never encountered anything that had felt the least bit compelling in that regard? Was it really holding on to something if she’d never felt the least bit like getting rid of it?
Because everything tonight was different. Valentina was different—or, worse, she thought as she stared at Achilles across the little bit of space that separated them, she had never been who she’d imagined she was. She had never understood that it was possible that a body could drown out what the mind knew to be prudent.
Until now.
She had judged passion all her life and told herself it was a story that weak people told themselves and others to make their sins seem more interesting. More complicated and unavoidable. But the truth was, Valentina had never experienced passion in her life.
Not until Achilles.
“I am your assistant,” she told him. Or perhaps she was telling herself. “This must never happen again. If it does, I can’t work for you.”
“I have already told you that I am more than happy to accommodate—”
“There will be no lateral moves,” she threw at him, appalled to hear her voice shaking. “You might lie awake at night imagining what that means and what it would look like, but I don’t. I won’t.”
“Liar.”
Then again, chimed in a small voice deep inside, you never used to lie, did you? Not to others and not to yourself.
“I have no doubt that you enjoy doing as you please,” she spat at him, horrified that any of this was happening and, worse, that she’d let it—when Valentina knew who she was and what she’d be going back to in a few short weeks. “No matter the consequences. But not everyone is as reckless as you.”
Achilles didn’t quite smirk. “And that is why one of us is a billionaire and the other is his assistant.”
“And if we were having a discussion about how to make money,” Valentina said from between her teeth, no sign of her trademark serenity, “I would take your advice—but this is my life.”
Guilt swamped her as she said that. Because, of course, it wasn’t her life. It was Natalie’s. And she had the sick feeling that she had already complicated it beyond the point of return. It didn’t matter that Natalie had texted her to say that she’d kissed Prince Rodolfo, far away in Murin and neck-deep in Valentina’s real life, however little Valentina had thought about it since she’d left it behind. Valentina was going to marry Rodolfo. That her double had kissed him, the way Valentina probably should have, wasn’t completely out of line.
But this... This thing she was doing... It was unacceptable on every level. She knew that.
Maybe Natalie has this same kind of chemistry with Rodolfo, something in her suggested. Maybe he was engaged to the wrong twin.
Which meant, she knew—because she was that self-serving—that maybe the wrong twin had been working for Achilles all this time and all of this was inevitable.
She wasn’t sure she believed that. But she couldn’t seem to stop herself. Or worse, convince herself that she should.
Achilles was still watching her too closely. Once again, she had the strangest notion that he knew too much. That he could see too far inside her.
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