by Kendrick, Sharon; Lawrence, Kim; Crews, Caitlin; Milburne, Melanie
“Achilles,” she said again, and there was something in her gaze then. Something darker than need.
But this was no time for sweetness. Or anything deeper. This was a claiming.
“Later,” he told her, and then he took her mouth with his, tasting the words he was certain, abruptly, he didn’t want to hear.
He might be nothing to her but a walk on the wild side she would look back on while she rotted away in some palatial prison, but he would make sure that she remembered him.
He had every intention of leaving his mark.
Achilles tore off his trousers, freeing himself. Then he reached down and found the gusset of her panties, ripping them off and shoving the scraps aside to fit himself to her at last.
And then he stopped thinking about marks and memories, because she was molten hot and wet. She was his. He sank into her, groaning as she encased his length like a hot, tight glove.
It was so good. It was too good.
She always was.
He moved then, and she did, too, that slick, deep slide. And they knew each other so well now. Their bodies were too attuned to each other, too hot and too certain of where this was going, and it was never, ever enough.
He reached between them and pressed his fingers in the place where she needed him most, and felt her explode into a frenzy beneath him. She raised her hips to meet each thrust. She dug her fingers into his shoulders as if she was already shaking apart.
He felt it build in her, and in him, too. Wild and mad, the way it always was.
As if they could tear apart the world this way. As if they already had.
“No one will ever make you feel the way that I do,” he told her then, a dark muttering near her ear as she panted and writhed. “No one.”
And he didn’t know if that was some kind of endearment, or a dire warning.
But it didn’t matter, because she was clenching around him then. She gasped out his name, while her body gripped him, then shook.
And he pumped himself into her, wanting nothing more than to roar her damned name. To claim her in every possible way. To show her—
But he did none of that.
And when it was over, when the storm had passed, he pulled himself away from her and climbed to his feet again. And he felt something sharp and heavy move through him as he looked down at her, still lying there half on and half off the antique settee they’d moved a few feet across the floor, because he had done exactly as he set out to do.
He’d messed her up. She looked disheveled and shaky and absolutely, delightfully ravished.
But all he could think was that he still didn’t have her. That she was still going to leave him when she was done here. That she’d never had any intention of staying in the first place. It ripped at him. It made him feel something like crazy.
The last time he’d ever felt anything like it, he’d been an angry seventeen-year-old in a foul-smelling street with an old drunk who didn’t know who he was. It was a kind of anguish.
It was a grief, and he refused to indulge it. He refused to admit it was ravaging him, even as he pulled his clothes back where they belonged.
And then she made it even worse. She smiled.
She sat up slowly, pushing her skirt back into place and tucking the torn shreds of her panties into one pocket. Then she gazed up at him.
Achilles was caught by that look in her soft green eyes, as surely as if she’d reached out and wrapped her delicate hands around his throat. On some level, he felt as if she had.
“I love you,” she said.
They were such small words, he thought through that thing that pounded in him like fear. Like a gong. Such small, silly words that could tear a man down without any warning at all.
And there were too many things he wanted to say then. For example, how could she tell him that she loved him when she wouldn’t even tell him her name?
But he shoved that aside.
“That was sex, glikia mou,” he grated at her. “Love is something different from a whole lot of thrashing around, half-clothed.”
He expected her to flinch at that, but he should have known better. This was his princess. If she was cowed at all, she didn’t show it.
Instead, she only smiled wider.
“You’re the expert on love as in all things, of course,” she murmured, because even here, even now, she was the only person alive who had ever dared to tease him. “My mistake.”
She was still smiling when she stood up, then walked around him. As if she didn’t notice that he was frozen there in some kind of astonishment. Or as if she was happy enough to leave him to it as she headed toward the foyer and, presumably, the work he’d always adored that seemed to loom over him these days, demanding more time than he wanted to give.
He’d never had a life that interested him more than his empire, until Valentina.
And he didn’t have Valentina.
She’d left Achilles standing there with her declaration heavy in his ears. She’d left him half fire and a heart that long ago should have turned to ice. He’d been so certain it had when he was seven and had lost everything, including his sense of himself as anything like good.
He should have known then.
But it wasn’t until much later that day—after he’d quizzed his security detail and household staff to discover she’d walked out with nothing but her shoulder bag and disappeared into the gray of the London afternoon—that he’d realized that had been the way his deceitful princess said goodbye.
CHAPTER NINE
VALENTINA COULDN’T KEEP her mind on her duties now that she was back in Murin. She couldn’t keep her mind focused at all, come to that. Not on her duties, not on the goings-on of the palace, not on any of the many changes that had occurred since she’d come back home.
She should have been jubilant. Or some facsimile thereof, surely. She had walked back into her well-known, well-worn trap, expecting the same old cage, only to find that the trap wasn’t at all what she had imagined it was—and the cage door had been tossed wide open.
When she’d left London that day, her body had still been shivering from Achilles’s touch. She hadn’t wanted to go. Not with her heart too full and a little bit broken at her own temerity in telling him how she felt when she’d known she had to leave. But it was time for her to go home, and there had been no getting around that. Her wedding to Prince Rodolfo was imminent. As in, the glittering heads of Europe’s ancient houses were assembling to cheer on one of their own, and she needed to be there.
The phone calls and texts that she’d been ignoring that whole time, leaving Natalie to deal with it all on her own, had grown frantic. And she couldn’t blame her sister, because the wedding was a mere day away. Your twin sister, she’d thought, those terms still feeling too unwieldy. She’d made her way to Heathrow Airport and bought herself a ticket on a commercial plane—the first time she’d ever done anything of the sort. One more normal thing to tuck away and remember later.
“Later” meaning after tomorrow, when she would be wed to a man she hardly knew.
It had taken Valentina a bit too long to do the right thing. To do the only possible thing and tear herself away from Achilles the way she should have done a long time ago. She should never have gone with him to Montana. She should certainly never have allowed them to stay there all that time, living out a daydream that could end only one way.
She’d known that going in, and she’d done it anyway. What did that make her, exactly?
Now I am awake, she thought as she boarded the plane. Now I am awake and that will have to be as good as alive, because it’s all I have left.
She hadn’t known what to expect from a regular flight into the commercial airport on the island of Murin. Some part of her imagined that she would be recognized. Her face was on th
e cover of the Murin Air magazines in every seat back, after all. She’d had a bit of a start when she’d sat down in the remarkably uncomfortable seat, pressed up against a snoring matron on one side and a very gray-faced businessman on the other.
But no one had noticed her shocking resemblance to the princess in the picture. No one had really looked at her at all. She flashed Natalie’s passport, walked on the plane without any issues and walked off again in Murin without anyone looking at her twice—even though she was quite literally the spitting image of the princess so many were flocking to Murin to see marry her Prince Charming at last.
Once at the palace, she didn’t bother trying to sneak in because she knew she’d be discovered instantly—and that would hardly allow Natalie to switch back and escape, would it? So instead she’d walked up to the guard station around the back at the private family entrance, gazed politely at the guard who waited there and waited.
“But the…the princess is within,” the guard had stammered. Maybe he was thrown by the fact Valentina was dressed like any other woman her age on the street. Maybe he was taken back because he’d never spoken to her directly before.
Or maybe it was because, if she was standing here in front of him, she wasn’t where the royal guard thought she was. Which he’d likely assumed meant she’d sneaked out, undetected.
All things considered, she was happy to let that mystery stand.
Valentina had aimed a conspiratorial smile at the guard. “The princess can’t possibly be within, given that I’m standing right here. But it can be our little secret that there was some confusion, if you like.”
And then, feeling heavier than she ever had before and scarred somehow by what she’d gone through with Achilles, she’d walked back in the life she’d left so spontaneously and much too quickly in that London airport.
She’d expected to find Natalie as desperate to leave as she supposed, in retrospect, she had been. Or why else would she have suggested this switch in the first place?
But instead, she’d found a woman very much in love. With Crown Prince Rodolfo of Tissely. The man whom Valentina was supposed to marry the following day.
More than that, Natalie was pregnant.
“I don’t know how it happened,” Natalie had said, after Valentina had slipped into her bedroom and woken her up—by sitting on the end of the bed and pulling at Natalie’s foot until she’d opened her eyes and found her double sitting there.
“Don’t you?” Valentina had asked. “I was a virgin, but I had the distinct impression that you had not saved yourself for marriage all these years. Because why would you?”
Natalie had flushed a bit, but then her eyes had narrowed. “Was a virgin? Is that the past tense?” She’d blinked. “Not Mr. Casilieris.”
But it wasn’t the time then for sisterly confessions. Mostly because Valentina hadn’t the slightest idea what she could say about Achilles that wasn’t…too much. Too much and too unformed and unbearable, somehow, now that it was over. Now that none of it mattered, and never could.
“I don’t think that you have a job with him anymore,” Valentina had said instead, keeping her voice even. “Because I don’t think you want a job with him anymore. You said you were late, didn’t you? You’re having a prince’s baby.”
And when Natalie had demurred, claiming that she didn’t know one way or the other and it was likely just the stress of inhabiting someone else’s life, Valentina had sprung into action.
She’d made it her business to find out, one way or another. She’d assured Natalie that it was simply to put her mind at ease. But the truth was a little more complicated, she admitted to herself as she made her way through the palace.
The fact was, she was relieved. That was what had washed through her when Natalie had confessed not only her love for Rodolfo, but her suspicions that she might be carrying his child. She’d pushed it off as she’d convinced one of her most loyal maids to run out into the city and buy her a few pregnancy tests, just to be certain. She’d shoved it to the side as she’d smuggled the tests back into her rooms, and then had handed them over to Natalie so she could find out for certain.
But there was no denying it. When Natalie had emerged from the bathroom with a dazed look on her face and a positive test in one hand, Valentina finally admitted the sheer relief that coursed through her veins. It was like champagne. Fizzy and a little bit sharp, washing through her and making her feel almost silly in response.
Because if Natalie was having Rodolfo’s baby, there was no possible way that Valentina could marry him. The choice—though it had always been more of an expected duty than a choice—was taken out of her hands.
“You will marry him,” Valentina had said quietly. “It is what must happen.”
Natalie had looked pale. “But you… And I’m not… And you don’t understand, he…”
“All of that will work out,” Valentina had said with a deep certainty she very badly wanted to feel. Because it had to work out. “The important thing is that you will marry him in the morning. You will have his baby and you will be his queen when he ascends the throne. Everything else is spin and scandal, and none of that matters. Not really.”
And so it was.
Once King Geoffrey had been brought into the loop and had been faced with the irrefutable evidence that his daughter had been stolen from him all those years ago—that Erica had taken Natalie and, not only that, had told Geoffrey that Valentina’s twin had died at birth—he was more than on board with switching the brides at the wedding.
He’d announced to the gathered crowd that a most blessed miracle had occurred some months before. A daughter long thought dead had returned to him to take her rightful place in the kingdom, and they’d all kept it a secret to preserve everyone’s privacy as they’d gotten to know each other.
Including Rodolfo, who had always been meant to be part of the family, the king had reminded the assembled crowd and the whole of the world, no matter how. And feelings had developed between Natalie and Rodolfo, where there had only ever been duty and honor between Valentina and her intended.
Valentina had seen this and stepped aside of her own volition, King Geoffrey had told the world. There had been no scandal, no sneaking around, no betrayals. Only one sister looking out for another.
The crowds ate it up. The world followed suit. It was just scandalous enough to be both believable and newsworthy. Valentina was branded as something of a Miss Lonely Hearts, it was true, but that was neither here nor there. The idea that she would sacrifice her fairy-tale wedding—and her very own Prince Charming—for her long-lost sister captured the public’s imagination. She was more popular than ever, especially at home in Murin.
And this was a good thing, because now that her father had two heirs, he could marry one of his daughters off to fulfill his promises to the kingdom of Tissely, and he could prepare the other to take over Murin and keep its throne in the family.
And just like that, Valentina went from a lifetime preparing to be a princess who would marry well and support the king of a different country, to a new world in which she was meant to rule as queen in her own right.
If it was another trap, another cage, it was a far more spacious and comfortable one than any she had known before.
She knew that. There was no reason at all she should have been so unhappy.
“Your attention continues to drift, daughter,” King Geoffrey said then.
Valentina snapped herself out of those thoughts in her head that did her no good and into the car where she sat with her father, en route to some or other glittering gala down at the water palace on the harbor. She couldn’t even remember which charity it was this week. There was always another.
The motorcade wound down from the castle, winding its way along the hills of the beautiful capital city toward the gleaming Mediterranean Sea. Valentina nor
mally enjoyed the view. It was pretty, first and foremost. It was home. It reminded her of so many things, of her honor and her duty and her love of her country. It renewed her commitment to her kingdom, and made her think about all the good she hoped she could do as its sovereign.
And yet these days, she wasn’t thinking about Murin. All she could seem to think about was Achilles.
“I am preparing myself for the evening ahead,” Valentina replied calmly enough. She aimed a perfectly composed smile at her father. “I live in fear of greeting a diplomat with the wrong name and causing an international incident.”
Her father’s gaze warmed, something that happened more often lately than it ever had before. Valentina chalked that up to the rediscovery of Natalie and, with it, some sense of family that had been missing before. Or too caught up in the past, perhaps.
“I have never seen you forget a name in all your life,” Geoffrey said. “It’s one among many reasons I expect you will make a far better queen than I have been a king. And I am aware I gave you no other choice, but I cannot regret that your education and talents will be Murin’s gain, not Tissely’s.”
“I will confess,” Valentina said then, “that stepping aside so that Natalie could marry Rodolfo is not quite the sacrifice some have made it out to be.”
Her father’s gaze then was so canny that it reminded her that whatever else he was, King Geoffrey of Marin was a force to be reckoned with.
“I suspected not,” he said quietly. “But there is no reason not to let them think so. It only makes you more sympathetic.”
His attention was caught by something on his phone then. And as he frowned down at it, Valentina looked away. Back out the window to watch the sun drip down over the red-tipped rooftops that sloped all the way to the crystal blue waters below.
She let her hand move, slowly so that her father wouldn’t notice, and held it over that faint roundness low in her belly she’d started to notice only a few weeks ago.