by Kendrick, Sharon; Lawrence, Kim; Crews, Caitlin; Milburne, Melanie
It was far away from everything and felt even farther than that. It was an hour drive to the nearest town, stout and quintessentially Western, as matter-of-fact as it was practical. They’d come at the height of Montana’s short summer, hot during the day and cool at night, with endless blue skies stretching on up toward forever and nothing to do but soak in the quiet. The stunning silence, broken only by the wind. The sun. The exuberant moon and all those improbable, impossible stars, so many they cluttered up the sky and made it feel as if, were she to take a big enough step, Valentina could toss herself straight off the planet and into eternity.
And Valentina knew she was running out of time. Her wedding was the following week, she wasn’t who she was pretending she was, and these stolen days in this faraway place of blue and gold were her last with this man. This stolen life had only ever been hers on loan.
But she would have to face that soon enough.
In Montana, as in New York, her days were filled with Achilles. He was too precise and demanding to abandon his businesses entirely, but there was something about the ranch that rendered him less overbearing. He and Valentina would put out what fires there might be in the mornings, but then, barring catastrophe, he let his employees earn their salaries the rest of the day.
While he and Valentina explored what this dreamy ranch life, so far removed from everything, had to offer. He had a huge library that she imagined would be particularly inviting in winter—not, she was forced to remind herself, that she would ever see it in a different season. A guest could sink into one of the deep leather chairs in front of the huge fireplace and read away a snowy evening or two up here in the mountains. He had an indoor pool that let the sky in through its glass ceiling, perfect for swimming in all kinds of weather. There was the hot tub, propped up on its own terrace with a sweeping view, which cried out for those cool evenings. It was a short drive or a long, pretty walk to the lake a little ways up into the mountains, so crisp and clear and cold it almost hurt.
But it was the kind of hurt that made her want more and more, no matter how it made her gasp and think she might lose herself forever in the cut of it.
Achilles was the same. Only worse.
Valentina had always thought of sex—or her virginity, anyway—as a single, solitary thing. Someday she would have sex, she’d always told herself. Someday she would get rid of her virginity. She had never really imagined that it wasn’t a single, finite event.
She’d thought virginity, and therefore sex, was the actual breaching of what she still sometimes thought of as her maidenhead, as if she was an eighteenth-century heroine—and nothing more. She’d never really imagined much beyond that.
Achilles taught her otherwise.
Sex with him was threaded into life, a rich undercurrent that became as much a part of it as walking, breathing, eating. It wasn’t a specific act. It was everything.
It was the touch of his hand across the dinner table, when he simply threaded their fingers together, the memory of what they’d already done together and the promise of more braided there between them. It was a sudden hot, dark look in the middle of a conversation about something innocuous or work-related, reminding her that she knew him now in so many different dimensions. It was the way his laughter seemed to rearrange her, pouring through her and making her new, every time she heard it.
It was when she stopped counting each new time he wrenched her to pieces as a separate, astonishing event. When she began to accept that he would always do that. Time passed and days rolled on, and all of these things that swirled between them only deepened. He became only more able to wreck her more easily the better he got to know her. And the better she got to know him.
As if their bodies were like the stars above them, infinite and adaptable, a great mess of joy and wonder that time only intensified.
But she knew it was running out.
And the more Achilles called her Natalie—which she thought he did more here, or perhaps she was far more sensitive to it now that she shared his bed—the more her terrible deception seemed to form into a heavy ball in the pit of her stomach, like some kind of cancerous thing that she very much thought might consume her whole.
Some part of her wished it would.
Meanwhile, the real Natalie kept calling her. Again and again, or leaving texts, but Valentina couldn’t bring herself to respond to them. What would she say? How could she possibly explain what she’d done?
Much less the fact that she was still doing it and, worse, that she didn’t want it to end no matter how quickly her royal wedding was approaching.
Even if she imagined that Natalie was off in Murin doing exactly the same thing with Rodolfo that Valentina was doing here, with all this wild and impossible hunger, what did that matter? They could still switch back, none the wiser. Nothing would change for Valentina. She would go on to marry the prince as she had always been meant to do, and it was highly likely that even Rodolfo himself wouldn’t notice the change.
But Natalie had not been sleeping with Achilles before she’d switched places with Valentina. That meant there was no possible way that she could easily step back into the life that Valentina had gone ahead and ruined.
And was still ruining, day by day.
Still, no matter how self-righteously she railed at herself for that, she knew it wasn’t what was really bothering her. It wasn’t what would happen to Natalie that ate her up inside.
It was what would happen to her. And what could happen with Achilles. She found that she was markedly less sanguine about Achilles failing to notice the difference between Valentina and Natalie when they switched back again. In fact, the very notion made her feel sick.
But how could she tell him the truth? If she couldn’t tell Natalie what she’d done, how could she possibly tell the man whom she’d been lying to directly all this time? He thought he was having an affair with his assistant. A woman he had vetted and worked closely with for half a decade.
What was she supposed to say, Oh, by the way, I’m actually a princess?
The truth was that she was still a coward. Because she didn’t know if what was really holding her back was that she couldn’t imagine what she would say—or if she could imagine all too well what Achilles would do. And she knew that made her the worst sort of person. Because when she worried about what he would do, she was worried about herself. Not about how she might hurt him. Not about what it would do to him to learn that she had lied to him all this time. But the fact that it was entirely likely that she would tell him, and that would be the last she’d see of him. Ever.
And Valentina couldn’t quite bear for this to be over.
This was her vacation. Her holiday. Her escape—and how had it never occurred to her that if that was true, it meant she had to go back? She’d known that in a general sense, of course, but she hadn’t really thought it through. She certainly hadn’t thought about what it would feel like to leave Achilles and then walk back to the stifling life she’d called her own for all these years.
It was one thing to be trapped. Particularly when it was all she’d ever known. But it was something else again to see exactly how trapped she was, to leave it behind for a while, and then knowingly walk straight back into that trap, closing the cage door behind her.
Forever.
Sometimes when she lay awake at night listening to Achilles breathe in the great bed next to her, his arms thrown over her as if they were slowly becoming one person, she couldn’t imagine how she was ever going to make herself do it.
But time didn’t care if she felt trapped. Or torn. It marched on whether she wanted it to or not.
“Are you brooding?” a low male voice asked from behind her, jolting her out of her unpleasant thoughts. “I thought that was my job, not yours.”
Valentina turned from the rail of the balcony that ambled along the side of the mas
ter suite, where she was taking in the view and wondering how she could ever fold herself up tight and slot herself back into the life she’d left behind in Murin.
But the view behind her was even better. Achilles lounged against the open sliding glass door, naked save for a towel wrapped around his hips. He had taken her in a fury earlier, pounding into her from behind until she screamed out his name into the pillows, and he’d roared his own pleasure into the crook of her neck. Then he’d left her there on the bed, limp and still humming with all that passion, while he’d gone out for one of his long, brutal runs he always claimed cleared his head.
It had been weeks now, and he still took her breath. Now that she knew every inch of him, she found herself more in awe of him. All that sculpted perfection of his chest, the dark hair that narrowed at his lean hips, dipping down below the towel where she knew the boldest part of him waited.
She’d tasted him there, too. She’d knelt before the fireplace in that gorgeous library, her hands on his thighs as he’d sat back in one of those great leather chairs. He’d played with her hair, sifting strands of it through his fingers as she’d reached into the battered jeans he wore here on the ranch and had pulled him free.
He’d tasted of salt and man, and he’d let her play with him as she liked. He let her lick him everywhere until she learned his shape. He let her suck him in, then figure out how to make him as wild as he did when he tasted her in this same way. And she’d taken it as a personal triumph when he’d started to grip the chair. And when he’d lost himself inside her mouth, he’d groaned out that name he called her. Glikia mou.
Even thinking about it now made that same sweet, hot restlessness move through her all over again.
But time was her enemy. She knew that. And looking at him as he stood there in the doorway and watched her with that dark gold gaze that she could feel in every part of her, still convinced that he could see into parts of her she didn’t know how to name, Valentina still didn’t know what to do.
If she told him who she was, she would lose what few days with him she had left. This was Achilles Casilieris. He would never forgive her deception. Never. Her other option was never to tell him at all. She would go back to London with him in a few days as planned, slip away the way she’d always intended to do if a week or so later than agreed, and let the real Natalie pick up the pieces.
And that way, she could remember this the way she wanted to do. She could remember loving him, not losing him.
Because that was what she’d done. She understood that in the same way she finally comprehended intimacy. She’d gone and fallen in love with this man who didn’t know her real name. This man she could never, ever keep.
Was it so wrong that if she couldn’t keep him, she wanted to keep these sun-soaked memories intact?
“You certainly look like you’re brooding.” There was that lazy note to his voice that never failed to make her blood heat. It was no different now. It was that quick. It was that inevitable. “How can that be? There’s nothing here but silence and sunshine. No call to brood about anything. Unless of course, it is your soul that is heavy.” And she could have sworn there was something in his gaze then that dared her to come clean. Right then and there. As if, as ever, he knew what she was thinking. “Tell me, Natalie, what is it that haunts you?”
And it was moments like these that haunted her, but she couldn’t tell him that. Moments like this, when she was certain that he knew. That he must know. That he was asking her to tell him the truth at last.
That he was calling her the wrong name deliberately, to see if that would goad her into coming clean.
But the mountains were too quiet and there was too much summer in the air. The Montana sky was a blue she’d never seen before, and that was what she felt in her soul. And if there was a heaviness, or a darkness, she had no doubt it would haunt her later.
Valentina wanted to live here. Now. With him. She wanted to live.
She had so little time left to truly live.
So once again, she didn’t tell him. She smiled instead, wide enough to hide the fissures in her heart, and she went to him.
Because there was so little time left that she could do that. So few days left to reach out and touch him the way she did now, sliding her palms against the mouthwatering planes of his chest as if she was memorizing the heat of his skin.
As if she was memorizing everything.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she told him quietly, her attention on his skin beneath her hands. “I never do.”
“I am not the mystery here,” he replied, and though his voice was still so lazy, so very lazy, she didn’t quite believe it. “There are enough mysteries to go around, I think.”
“Solve this one, then,” she dared him, going up on her toes to press her mouth to his.
Because she might not have truth and she might not have time, but she had this.
For a little while longer, she had this.
* * *
Montana was another mistake, because apparently, that was all he did now.
They spent weeks on his ranch, and Achilles made it all worse by the day. Every day he touched her, every day lost himself in her, every day he failed to get her to come clean with him. Every single day was another nail in his coffin.
And then, worse by far to his mind, it was time to leave.
Weeks in Montana, secluded from the rest of the world, and he’d gained nothing but a far deeper and more disastrous appreciation of Valentina’s appeal. He hadn’t exactly forced her to the light. He hadn’t done anything but lose his own footing.
In all those weeks and all that sweet summer sunshine out in the American West, it had never occurred to him that she simply wouldn’t tell him. He’d been so sure that he would get to her somehow. That if he had all these feelings churning around inside him, whatever was happening inside her must be far more extreme.
It had never occurred to him that he could lose that bet.
That Princess Valentina had him beat when it came to keeping herself locked up tight, no matter what.
They landed in London in a bleak drizzle that matched his mood precisely.
“You’re expected at the bank in an hour,” Valentina told him when they reached his Belgravia town house, standing there in his foyer looking as guileless and innocent as she ever had. Even now, when he had tasted every inch of her. Even now, when she was tearing him apart with that serene, untouchable look on her face. “And the board of directors is adamant—”
“I don’t care about the bank,” he muttered. “Or old men who think they can tell me what to do.”
And just like that, he’d had enough.
He couldn’t outright demand that Valentina tell him who she really was, because that wouldn’t be her telling him of her own volition. It wouldn’t be her trusting him.
It’s almost as if she knows who you really are, that old familiar voice inside hissed at him. It had been years since he’d heard it, inside him or otherwise. But even though Demetrius had not been able to identify him on the streets when he’d had the chance, Achilles always knew the old man when he spoke. Maybe she knows exactly what kind of monster you are.
And a harsh truth slammed into him then, making him feel very nearly unsteady on his feet. He didn’t know why it hadn’t occurred to him before. Or maybe it had, but he’d shoved it aside out there in all that Montana sky and sunshine. Because he was Achilles Casilieris. He was one of the most sought-after bachelors in all the world. Legions of women chased after him daily, trying anything from trickery to bribery to outright lies about paternity claims to make him notice them. He was at the top of everyone’s most wanted list.
But to Princess Valentina of Marin, he was nothing but a bit of rough.
She was slumming.
That was why she hadn’t bothered
to identify herself. She didn’t see the point. He might as well have been the pool boy.
And he couldn’t take it. He couldn’t process it. There was nothing in him but fire and that raw, unquenchable need, and she was so cool. Too cool.
He needed to mess her up. He needed to do something to make all this…wildfire and feeling dissipate before it ate him alive and left nothing behind. Nothing at all.
“What are you doing?” she asked, and he took a little too much satisfaction in that appropriately uncertain note in her voice.
It was only when he saw her move that he realized he was stalking toward her, backing her up out of the gleaming foyer and into one of the town house’s elegant sitting rooms. Not that the beauty of a room could do anything but fade next to Valentina.
The world did the same damned thing.
She didn’t ask him a silly question like that again. And perhaps she didn’t need to. He backed her up to the nearest settee, and took entirely too much pleasure in the pulse that beat out the truth of her need right there in her neck.
“Achilles…” she said hoarsely, but he wanted no more words. No more lies of omission.
No more slumming.
“Quiet,” he ordered her.
He sank his hands into her gleaming copper hair, then dragged her mouth to his. Then he toppled her down to antique settee and followed her. She was slender and lithe and wild beneath him, rising to meet him with too much need, too much longing.
As if, in the end, this was the only place they were honest with each other.
And Achilles was furious. Furious, or something like it—something close enough that it burned in him as brightly. As lethally. He shoved her skirt up over her hips and she wrapped her legs around his waist, and she was panting already. She was gasping against his mouth. Or maybe he was breathing just as hard.