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.”
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