by Kendrick, Sharon; Lawrence, Kim; Crews, Caitlin; Milburne, Melanie
Why was he allowing himself to think of such things? His youth was off-limits, even in his own head. What the hell was happening?
Achilles didn’t like that Natalie affected him. But what made him suspicious was that she’d never affected him before. He’d approved when she started to wear those glasses and put her hair up, to make herself less of a target for the less scrupulous men he dealt with who thought they could get to him through expressing their interest in her. But he hadn’t needed her to downplay her looks because he was entranced by her. He hadn’t been.
So what had changed today?
What had emboldened her and, worse, allowed her to get under his skin?
He kept circling back to that bathroom in the airport and the fact she’d walked out of it a different person from the one who’d walked in.
Of course, she wasn’t a different person. Did he imagine the real Natalie had suffered a body snatching? Did he imagine there was some elaborate hoax afoot?
The idea was absurd. But he couldn’t seem to get past it. The plane hit its cruising altitude, and he moved from his chair to the leather couch that took pride of place in the center of the cabin that was set up like one of his high-end hotel rooms. He sat back with his laptop and pretended to be looking through his email when he was watching Natalie instead. Looking for clues.
She wasn’t moving around the plane with her usual focus and energy. He thought she seemed tentative. Uncertain—and this despite the fact she seemed to walk taller than before. As if she’d changed her very posture in that bathroom. But who did something like that?
A different person would have different posture.
It was crazy. He knew that. And Achilles knew further that he always went a little too intense when he was closing a deal, so it shouldn’t have surprised him that he was willing to consider the insane option today. Part of being the sort of unexpected, out-of-the-box thinker he’d always been was allowing his mad little flights of fancy. He never knew where they might lead.
He indulged himself as Natalie sat and started to look through her own bag as if she’d never seen it before. He pulled up the picture of her he kept in his files for security purposes and did an image search on it, because why not.
Achilles was prepared to discover a few photos of random celebrities she resembled, maybe. And then he’d have to face the fact that his favorite assistant might have gone off the deep end. She was right that replacing her would be hard—but it wouldn’t be impossible. He hadn’t overestimated his appeal—and that of his wildly successful company—to pretty much anyone and everyone. He was swamped with applicants daily, and he didn’t even have an open position.
But then none of that mattered because his image search hit gold.
There were pages and pages of pictures. All of his assistant—except it wasn’t her. He knew it from the exquisitely bespoke gowns she wore. He knew it from the jewels that flowed around her neck and covered her hands, drawing attention to things like the perfect manicure she had today—when the Natalie he knew almost never had time to care for her nails like that. And every picture he clicked on identified the woman in them not as Natalie Monette, assistant to Achilles Casilieris, but Her Royal Highness, Princess Valentina of Murin.
Achilles didn’t have much use for royals, or really anyone with inherited wealth, when he’d had to go to so much trouble to amass his own. He’d never been to the tiny Mediterranean kingdom of Murin, mostly because he didn’t have a yacht to dock there during a sparkling summer of endless lounging and, further, didn’t need to take advantage of the country’s famously friendly approach to taxes. But he recognized King Geoffrey of Murin on sight, and he certainly recognized the Murinese royal family’s coat of arms.
It had been splashed all over the private jet he’d seen on the same tarmac as his back in London.
There was madness, Achilles thought then, and then there was a con job that no one would ever suspect—because who could imagine that the person standing in front of them, looking like someone they already knew, was actually someone else?
If he wasn’t mistaken—and he knew he wasn’t, because there were too many things about his assistant today that didn’t make sense, and Achilles was no great believer in coincidence—Princess Valentina of Murin was trying to run a con.
On him.
Which meant a great many things. First, that his actual assistant was very likely pretending to be the princess somewhere, leaving him and her job in the hands of someone she had to know would fail to live up to Achilles’s high standards. That suggested that second, she really wasn’t all that happy in her position, as this princess had dared to throw in his face in a way he doubted Natalie ever would have. But it also suggested that third, Natalie had effectively given her notice.
Achilles didn’t like any of that. At all. But the fourth thing that occurred to him was that clearly, neither this princess nor his missing assistant expected their little switch to be noticed. Natalie, who should have known better, must honestly have believed that he wouldn’t notice an imposter in her place. Or she hadn’t cared much if he did.
That was enraging, on some level. Insulting.
But Achilles smiled as Valentina settled herself across the coffee table from him, with a certain inbred grace that whispered of palaces and comportment classes and a lifetime of genteel manners.
Because she thought she was tricking him.
Which meant he could trick her instead. A prospect his body responded to with great enthusiasm as he studied her, this woman who looked like an underling whom a man in his position could never have touched out of ethical considerations—but wasn’t.
She wasn’t his employee. He didn’t pay her salary, and she wasn’t bound to obey him in anything if she didn’t feel like it.
But she had no idea that he knew that.
Achilles almost felt sorry for her. Almost.
“Let’s get started,” he murmured, as if they’d exchanged no harsh words. He watched confusion move over her face in a blink, then disappear, because she was a royal princess and she was used to concealing her reactions. He planned to have fun with that. The possibilities were endless, and seemed to roll through him like heat. “We have so much work to do, Miss Monette. I hardly know where to begin.”
CHAPTER TWO
BY THE TIME they landed in New York, Princess Valentina of Murin was second-guessing her spontaneous, impulsive decision to switch places with the perfect stranger she’d found wearing her face in the airport lounge.
Achilles Casilieris could make anyone second-guess anything, she suspected.
“You do not appear to be paying attention,” he said silkily from beside her, as if he knew exactly what she was thinking. And who she was. And every dream she’d ever had since she was a girl—that was how disconcerting this man was, even lounging there beside her in the back of a luxury car doing nothing more alarming than sitting.
“I am hanging on your every word,” she assured him as calmly as she could, and then she repeated his last three sentences back to him.
But she had no idea what he was talking about. Repeating conversations she wasn’t really listening to was a skill she’d learned in the palace a long, long time ago. It came in handy at many a royal gathering. And in many longwinded lectures from her father and his staff.
You have thrown yourself into deep, deep water, she told herself now, as if that wasn’t entirely too apparent already. As if it hadn’t already occurred to her that she’d better learn how to swim, and fast.
Achilles Casilieris was a problem.
Valentina knew powerful men. Men who ruled countries. Men who came from centuries upon centuries of power and consequence and wielded it with the offhanded superiority of those who had never imagined not ruling all they surveyed.
But Achilles was in an entirely different league.
He took over the whole of the backseat of the car that had waited for them on the tarmac in the bright and sunny afternoon, looking roomy and spacious from the outside. He’d insisted she sit next to him on the plush backseat that should have been more than able to fit two people with room to spare. And yet Valentina felt crowded, as if he was pressing up against her when he wasn’t. Achilles wasn’t touching her, but still, she was entirely too aware of him.
He took up all the air. He’d done it on his plane, too.
She had the hectic notion, connected to that knot beneath her breastbone that was preventing her from taking anything like a deep breath, that it wasn’t the enclosed space that was the issue. That he would have this same effect anywhere. All that brooding ruthlessness he didn’t bother to contain—or maybe he couldn’t contain even if he’d wanted to—seemed to hum around him like a kind of force field that both repelled and compelled at once.
If she was honest, the little glimpse she’d had of him in the airport had been the same—she’d just ignored it.
Valentina had been too busy racing into the lounge so she could have a few precious seconds alone. No staff. No guards. No cameras. Just her perched on the top of a closed toilet seat, shut away from the world, breathing. Letting her face do what it liked. Thinking of absolutely nothing. Not her duty. Not her father’s expectations.
Certainly not her bloodless engagement to Prince Rodolfo of Tissely, a man she’d tuned out within moments of their first meeting. Or their impending wedding in two months’ time, which she could feel bearing down on her like a thick hand around her throat every time she let herself think about it. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to do her duty and marry the Crown Prince of Tissely. She’d been promised in marriage to her father’s allies since the day she was born. It was that she’d never given a great deal of thought to what it was she wanted, because want had never been an option available to her.
And it had suddenly occurred to her at her latest wedding dress fitting there in London that she was running out of time.
Soon she would be married to a man in what was really more of a corporate merger of two great European brands, the houses of Tissely and Murin. She’d be expected to produce the necessary heirs to continue the line. She would take her place in the great sweep of her family’s storied history, unite two ancient kingdoms, and in so doing fulfill her purpose in life. The end.
The end, she’d thought in that bathroom stall, high-end and luxurious but still, a bathroom stall. My life fulfilled at twenty-seven.
Valentina was a woman who’d been given everything, including a healthy understanding of how lucky she was. She didn’t often indulge herself with thoughts of what was and wasn’t fair when there was no doubt she was among the most fortunate people alive.
But the thing was, it still didn’t seem fair. No matter how hard she tried not to think about it that way.
She would do what she had to do, of course. She always had and always would, but for that single moment, locked away in a bathroom stall where no one could see her and no one would ever know, she basked in the sheer, dizzying unfairness of it all.
Then she’d pulled herself together, stepped out and had been prepared to march onto her plane and head back to the life that had been plotted out for her since the day she arrived on the planet.
Only to find her twin standing at the sinks.
Her identical twin—though that was, of course, impossible.
“What is this?” the other woman had asked when they’d faced each other, looking something close to scared. Or unnerved, anyway. “How…?”
Valentina had been fascinated. She’d been unable to keep herself from studying this woman who appeared to be wearing her body as well as her face. She was dressed in a sleek pencil skirt and low heels, which showed legs that Valentina recognized all too well, having last seen them in her own mirror. “I’m Valentina.”
“Natalie.”
She’d repeated that name in her head like it was a magic spell. She didn’t know why she felt as if it was.
But then, running into her double in a London bathroom seemed something close enough to magic to count. Right then when she’d been indulging her self-pity about the unchangeable course of her own life, the universe had presented her with a glimpse of what else could be. If she was someone else.
An identical someone else.
They had the same face. The same legs, as she’d already noted. The same coppery hair that her double wore up in a serviceable ponytail and the same nose Valentina could trace directly to her maternal grandmother. What were the chances, she’d wondered then, that they weren’t related?
And didn’t that raise all kinds of interesting questions?
“You’re that princess,” Natalie had said, a bit haltingly.
But if Valentina was a princess, and if they were related as they surely had to be…
“I suspect you might be, too,” she’d said gently.
“We can’t possibly be related. I’m a glorified secretary who never really had a home. You’re a royal princess. Presumably your lineage dates back to the Roman Conquest.”
“Give or take a few centuries.” Valentina tried to imagine having a job like that. Or any job. A secretary, glorified or otherwise, who reported to work for someone else and actually did things with her time that weren’t directly related to being a symbol. She couldn’t really wrap her head around it, or being effectively without a home, either, having been a part of Murin since her birth. As much Murin as its beaches and hills, its monuments and its palace. She might as well have been a park. “Depending which branch of the family you mean, of course.”
“I was under the impression that people with lineages that could lead to thrones and crown jewels tended to keep better track of their members,” Natalie had said, her tone just dry enough to make Valentina decide that given the right circumstances—meaning anywhere that wasn’t a toilet—she’d rather like her doppelganger.
And she knew what the other woman had been asking.
“Conspiracy theorists claim my mother was killed and her death hushed up. Senior palace officials have assured me my whole life that no, she merely left to preserve her mental health, and is rumored to be in residence in a hospital devoted to such things somewhere. All I know is that I haven’t seen her since shortly after I was born. According to my father, she preferred anonymity to the joys of motherhood.”
And she waited for Natalie to give her an explanation in turn. To laugh, perhaps, and then tell her that she’d been raised by two perfectly normal parents in a happily normal somewhere else, filled with golden retrievers and school buses and pumpkin-spiced coffee drinks and whatever else normal people took for granted that Valentina only read about.
But instead, this woman wearing Valentina’s face had looked stricken. “I’ve never met my father,” she’d whispered. “My mother’s always told me she has no idea who he was. And she bounces from one affair to the next pretty quickly, so I came to terms with the fact it was possible she really, truly didn’t know.”
And Valentina had laughed, because what else could she do? She’d spent her whole life wishing she’d had more of a family than her chilly father. Oh, she loved him, she did, but he was so excruciatingly proper. So worried about appearances. His version of a hug was a well-meaning critique on her latest public appearance. Love to her father was maintaining and bolstering the family’s reputation across the ages. She’d always wanted a sister to share in the bolstering. A brother. A mother. Someone.
But she hadn’t had anyone. And now she had a stranger who looked just like her.
“My father is many things,” she’d told Natalie. It was too soon to say our father. And who knew? Maybe they were cousins. Or maybe this was a fluke. No matter that little jolt of recognition inside her, as if she’d been meant to know this woman. As
if this was a reunion. “Including His Royal Majesty, King Geoffrey of Murin. What he is not now, nor has ever been, I imagine, is forgettable.”
Natalie had shaken her head. “You underestimate my mother’s commitment to amnesia. She’s made it a life choice instead of a malady. On some level I admire it.”
“My mother was the noblewoman Frederica de Burgh, from a very old Murinese family.” Valentina watched Natalie closely as she spoke, looking for any hint of…anything, really, in her gaze. “Promised to my father at birth, raised by nuns and kept deliberately sheltered, and then widely held to be unequal to the task of becoming queen. Mentally. But that’s the story they would tell, isn’t it, to explain why she disappeared? What’s your mother’s name?”
Natalie sighed and swung her shoulder bag onto the counter. Valentina had the impression that she’d really, truly wanted not to answer. But she had. “She calls herself Erica.”
And there it was. Valentina supposed it could be a coincidence that Erica was a shortened form of Frederica. But how many coincidences were likely when they resulted in two women who’d never met—who never should have met—who happened to be mirror images?
If there was something in her that turned over at the notion that her mother had, in fact, had a maternal impulse after all—just not for Valentina—well, this wasn’t the time to think about that. It might never be the time to think about that. She’d spent twenty-seven years trying her best not to think about that.
She changed the subject before she lost her composure completely and started asking questions she knew she shouldn’t.