by Kendrick, Sharon; Lawrence, Kim; Crews, Caitlin; Milburne, Melanie
Valentina found herself glaring at his back as he led her into a lavish office suite on the first level of his expansive penthouse. When she stood in the center of the room, awaiting further instructions, he only crooked a brow. He leaned back against the large desk that stretched across one wall and regarded her with that hot sort of focus that made everything inside her seem to shift hard to the left.
She froze. And then she could have stood there for hours, for all she knew, as surely as if he’d caught her and held her fast in his fists.
“When you are ready, Miss Monette, feel free to take your seat.” His voice was razor sharp, cut through with that same rough darkness that she found crept through her limbs. Lighting her up and making her feel something like sluggish. She didn’t understand it. “Though I do love being kept waiting.”
More chastened than she wanted to admit, Valentina moved to one of the seats set around a table to the right of the desk, at the foot of towering bookshelves stuffed full of serious-looking books, and settled herself in it. When he continued to stare at her as if she was deliberately keeping him waiting, she reached into the bag—Natalie’s bag, which she’d liberated from the bathroom when she’d left the airport with Achilles—until she found a tablet.
A few texts with her double had given her the passwords she needed and some advice.
Just write down everything he says. He likes to forget he said certain things, and it’s always good to have a record. One of my jobs is to function as his memory.
Valentina had wanted to text back her thoughts on that, but had refrained. Natalie might have wanted to quit this job, but that was up to her, not the woman taking her place for a few weeks.
“Anything else?” Achilles’s voice had a dark edge. “Would you like to have a snack? Perhaps a brief nap? Tell me, is there any way that I can make you more comfortable, Miss Monette, such that you might actually take it upon yourself to do a little work today?”
And Valentina didn’t know what came over her. Because she wanted to argue. She, who had made a virtue out of remaining quiet and cordial under any circumstances, wanted to fight. She didn’t understand it. She knew it was Achilles. That there was something in him that made her want to do or say anything to get some kind of reaction. It didn’t matter that it was madness. It was something about that look in his eyes. Something about that hard, amused mouth of his.
It was something about him.
But Valentina reminded herself that this was not her life.
This was not her life and this was not her job, and none of this was hers to ruin. She was the steward of Natalie’s life for a little while, nothing more. She imagined that Natalie would be doing the same for her. Maybe breathing a little bit of new life into the tired old royal nonsense she’d find waiting for her at Murin Castle, but that was all. Neither one of them was out to wreck what they found.
And she’d never had any trouble whatsoever keeping to the party line. Doing her father’s bidding, behaving appropriately, being exactly the princess whom everyone imagined she was. She felt that responsibility—to her people, to her bloodline, to her family’s history—deeply. She’d never acted out the way so many of her friends had. She’d never fought against her own responsibilities. It wasn’t that she was afraid to do any of those things, but simply that it had never occurred to her to try. Valentina had always known exactly who she was and what her life would hold, from her earliest days.
So she didn’t recognize this thing in her that wanted nothing more than to cause a commotion. To stand up and throw the tablet she held at Achilles’s remarkably attractive head. To kick over the chair she was sitting in and, while she was at it, that desk of his, too, all brash steel and uncompromising masculinity, just like its owner.
She wanted to do something. Anything. She could feel it humming through her veins, bubbling in her blood. As if something about this normal life she’d tried on for size had infected her. Changed her. When it had only been a few hours.
He’s a ruthless man, something reckless inside her whispered. He can take it.
But this wasn’t her life. She had to protect it, not destroy it, no matter what was moving in her, poking at her, tempting her to act out for the first time in her life.
So Valentina smiled up at Achilles, forced herself to remain serene the way she always did, and got to work.
* * *
It was late into the New York night when Achilles finally stopped torturing his deceitful princess.
He made her go over byzantine contracts that rendered his attorneys babbling idiots. He questioned her on clauses he only vaguely understood himself, and certainly couldn’t expect her to be conversant on. He demanded she prepare memos he had no intention of sending. He questioned her about events he knew she could not possibly know anything about, and the truth was that he enjoyed himself more than he could remember enjoying anything else for quite some time.
When Demetria had bustled in with food, Achilles had waved Valentina’s away.
“My assistant does not like to eat while she works,” he told his housekeeper, but he’d kept his gaze on Valentina while he’d said it.
“I don’t,” she’d agreed merrily enough. “I consider it a weakness.” She’d smiled at him. “But you go right ahead.”
Point to the princess, he’d thought.
The most amazing thing was that Princess Valentina never backed down. Her ability to brazen her way through the things she didn’t know, in fact, was nothing short of astounding. Impressive in the extreme. Achilles might have admired it if he hadn’t been the one she was trying to fool.
“It is late,” he said finally, when he thought her eyes might glaze over at last. Though he would cast himself out his own window to the Manhattan streets below before he’d admit his might, too. “And while there is always more to do, I think it is perhaps wise if we take this as a natural stopping place.”
Valentina smiled at him, tucked up in that chair of hers that she had long since claimed as her own in a way he couldn’t remember the real Natalie had ever done, her green eyes sparkling.
“I understand if you need a rest,” she said sweetly. Too sweetly. “Sir.”
Achilles had been standing at the windows, his back to the mad gleam of Manhattan. But at that, he let himself lean back, his body shifting into something…looser. More dangerous.
And much, much hotter than contracts.
“I worry my hearing has failed me. Because it sounded very much as if you were impugning my manhood.”
“Only if your manhood is so fragile that you can’t imagine it requires a rest,” she said, and aimed a sunny smile at him as if that would take away the sting of her words. “But you are Achilles Casilieris. You have made yourself a monument to manhood, clearly. No fragility allowed.”
“It is almost as if you think debating me like this is some kind of strategy,” he said softly, making no attempt to ratchet back the ruthlessness in his voice. Much less do something about the fire he could feel storming through him everywhere else. “Let me warn you, again, it is only a strategy if your goal is to find yourself without a job and without a recommendation. To say nothing of the black mark I will happily put beside your name.”
Valentina waved a hand in the air, airily, dismissing him. And her possible firing, black marks—all of it. Something else he very likely would have found impressive if he’d been watching her do it to someone else.
“So many threats.” She shook her head. “I understand that this is how you run your business and you’re very successful, but really. It’s exhausting. Imagine how many more bees you could get with honey.”
He didn’t want to think about honey. Not when there were only the two of them here, in this office cushioned by the night outside and the rest of the penthouse. No shared walls on these floors he owned. This late, none of the staff would be u
p. It was only Achilles and this princess pretending to be his assistant, and the buttery light of the few lamps they’d switched on, making the night feel thick and textured everywhere the light failed to reach.
Like inside him.
“Come here.”
Valentina blinked, but her green gaze was unreadable then. She only looked at him for a moment, as if she’d forgotten that she was playing this game. And that in it, she was his subordinate.
“Come here,” he said again. “Do not make me repeat myself, I beg you. You will not like my response.”
She stood the way she did everything else, with an easy grace. With that offhanded elegance that did things to him he preferred not to examine. And he knew she had no desire to come any closer to him. He could feel it. Her wariness hung between them like some kind of smoke, and it ignited that need inside him. And for a moment he thought she might disobey him. That she might balk—and it was in that moment he thought she’d stay where she was, across the room, that he had understood how very much he wanted her.
In a thousand ways he shouldn’t, because Achilles was a man who did not want. He took. Wanting was a weakness that led only to darkness—though it didn’t feel like a weakness tonight. It felt like the opposite.
But he’d underestimated his princess. Her shoulders straightened almost imperceptibly. And then she glided toward him, head high like some kind of prima ballerina, her face set in the sort of pleasant expression he now knew she could summon and dispatch at will. He admired that, too.
And he’d thrown out that summons because he could. Because he wanted to. And he was experimenting with this new wanting, no matter how little he liked it.
Still, there was no denying the way his body responded as he watched her walk toward him. There was no denying the rich, layered tension that seemed to fill the room. And him, making his pulse a living thing as his blood seemed to heat in his veins.
Something gleamed in that green gaze of hers, but she kept coming. She didn’t stop until she was directly beside him, so close that if she breathed too heavily he thought her shoulder might brush his. He shifted so that he stood slightly behind her, and jutted his chin toward the city laid out before them.
“What do you see when you look out the window?”
He felt more than saw the glance she darted at him. But then she kept her eyes on the window before them. On the ropes of light stretching out in all hectic directions possible below.
“Is that a trick question? I see Manhattan.”
“I grew up in squalor.” His voice was harsher than he’d intended, but Achilles did nothing to temper it. “It is common, I realize, for successful men to tell stories of their humble beginnings. Americans in particular find these stories inspiring. It allows them to fantasize that they, too, might better themselves against any odds. But the truth is more of a gray area, is it not? Beginnings are never quite so humble as they sound when rich men claim them. But me?” He felt her gaze on him then, instead of the mess of lights outside. “When I use the word squalor, that’s an upgrade.”
Her swallow was audible. Or perhaps he was paying her too close attention. Either way, he didn’t back away.
“I don’t know why you’re telling me this.”
“When you look through this window you see a city. A place filled with people going about their lives, traffic and isolation.” He shifted so he could look down at her. “I see hope. I see vindication. I see all the despair and all the pain and all the loss that went into creating the man you see before you tonight. Creating this.” And he moved his chin to indicate the penthouse. And the Casilieris Company while he was at it. “And there is nothing that I wouldn’t do to protect it.”
And he didn’t know what had happened to him while he was speaking. He’d been playing a game, and then suddenly it seemed as if the game had started to play him—and it wasn’t finished. Something clutched at him, as if he was caught in the grip of some massive fist.
It was almost as if he wanted this princess, this woman who believed she was tricking him—deceiving him—to understand him.
This, too, was unbearable.
But he couldn’t seem to stop.
“Do you think people become driven by accident, Miss Monette?” he asked, and he couldn’t have said why that thing gripping him seemed to clench harder. Making him sound far more intense than he thought he should have felt. Risking the truth about himself he carried inside and shared with no one. But he still didn’t stop. “Ambition, desire, focus and drive—do you think these things grow on trees? But then, perhaps I’m asking the wrong person. Have you not told me a thousand times that you are not personally ambitious?”
It was one of the reasons he’d kept Natalie with him for so long, when other assistants to men like him used positions like hers as springboards into their own glorious careers. But this woman was not Natalie. If he hadn’t known it before, he’d have known it now, when it was a full-scale struggle to keep his damned hands to himself.
“Ambition, it seems to me, is for those who have the freedom to pursue it. And for those who do not—” and Valentina’s eyes seemed to gleam at that, making Achilles wonder exactly what her ambitions were “—it is nothing more than dissatisfaction. Which is far less worthy and infinitely more destructive, I think we can agree.”
He didn’t know when he’d turned to face her fully. He didn’t know when he’d stopped looking at the city and was looking only at her instead. But he was, and he compounded that error by reaching out his hand and tugging on the very end of her silky, coppery ponytail where it kissed her shoulder every time she moved her head.
Her lips parted, as if on a soundless breath, and Achilles felt that as if she’d caressed him. As if her hands were on his body the way he wished they were, instead of at her sides.
“Are you dissatisfied?” It was amazing how difficult it was not to use her real name then. How challenging it was to stay in this game he suddenly didn’t particularly want to play. “Is that what this is?”
Her green eyes, which had been so unreadable, suddenly looked slick. Dark and glassy with some or other emotion. He couldn’t tell what it was, and still, he could feel it in him like smoke, stealing through his chest and making it harder than it should have been to breathe.
“There’s nothing wrong with dissatisfaction in and of itself,” she told him after a moment, then another, that seemed too large for him to contain. Too dark and much too edgy to survive intact, and yet here they both were. “You see it as disloyalty, but it’s not.”
“How can it be anything else?”
“It is possible to be both loyal and open to the possibility that there is a life outside the one you’ve committed yourself to.” Her green eyes searched his. “Surely there must be.”
“I think you will find that there is no such possibility.” His voice was harsh. He could feel it inside him, like a stain. Like need. “We must all decide who we are, every moment of every day. You either keep a vow or you do not. There is no between.”
She stiffened at that, then tried to force her shoulders back down to an easier, less telling angle. Achilles watched her do it. He watched something like distress cross her lovely face, but she hid that, too. It was only the darkness in her gaze that told him he’d scored a direct hit, and he was a man who took great pride in the strikes he leveled against anyone who tried to move against him. Yet what he felt when he looked at Valentina was not pride. Not pride at all.
“Some vows are not your own,” she said fiercely, her gaze locked to his. “Some are inherited. It’s easy to say that you’ll keep them because that’s what’s expected of you, but it’s a great deal harder to actually do it.”
He knew the vows she’d made. That pointless prince. Her upcoming royal wedding. He assumed that was the least of the vows she’d inherited from her father. And he still thought it wa
s so much smoke and mirrors to hide the fact that she, like so many of her peers, was a spoiled and pampered creature who didn’t like to be told what to do. Wasn’t that the reason poor little rich girl was a saying in the first place?
He had no sympathy for the travails of a rich, pampered princess. But he couldn’t seem to unwind that little silken bit of copper from around his finger, either. Much less step back and put the space between them that he should have left there from the start.
Achilles shook his head. “There is no gray area. Surely you know this. You are either who you say you are or you are not.”
There was something like misery in those eyes of hers then. And this was what he’d wanted. This was why he’d been goading her. And yet now that he seemed to have succeeded, he felt the strangest thing deep in his gut. It was an unpleasant and unfamiliar sensation, and at first Achilles couldn’t identify it. It was a low heat, trickling through him, making him restless. Making him as close to uncertain as he’d ever been.
In someone else, he imagined, it might be shame. But shame was not something Achilles allowed in himself. Ever.
This was a night full of things he did not allow, apparently. Because he wanted her. He wanted to punctuate this oddly emotional discussion with his mouth. His hands. The whole of his too-tight, too-interested body pressed deep into hers. He wanted to taste those sweetly lush lips of hers. He wanted to take her elegant face in his hands, tip her head back and sate himself at last. It seemed to him an age or two since he’d boarded his plane and realized his assistant was not who she was supposed to be. An agony of waiting and all that want, and he was not a man who agonized. Or waited. Or wanted anything, it seemed, but this princess who thought she could fool him.
What was the matter with him that some part of him wanted to let her?
He did none of the things he longed to do.
Achilles made himself do the hard thing, no matter how complicated it was. Or how complicated it felt, anyway. When really it was so simple. He let her go. He let her silky hair fall from between his fingers, and he stepped back, putting inches between them.