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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.
“I saw Achilles Casilieris, out there in the lounge,” she’d said instead. The notorious billionaire had been there on her way in, brooding in a corner of the lounge and scowling at the paper he’d been reading. “He looks even more fearsome in person. You can almost see all that brash command and dizzying wealth ooze from his pores, can’t you?”
“He’s my boss,” Natalie had said, sounding amused—if rather darkly. “If he was really oozing anything, anywhere, it would be my job to provide first aid until actual medical personnel could come handle it. At which point he would bite my head off for wasting his precious time by not curing him instantly.”
Valentina had been flooded with a rash of follow-up questions. Was the biting off of heads normal? Was it fun to work for a man who sounded half-feral? Most important, did Natalie like her life or merely suffer through it?
But then her mobile started buzzing in her clutch. She’d forgotten about ferocious billionaires and thought about things she knew too much about, like the daredevil prince she was bound to marry soon, instead, because their fathers had agreed regardless of whether either one of them liked it. She’d checked the mobile’s display to be sure, but wasn’t surprised to find she’d guessed correctly. Lucky her, she’d had another meeting with her husband-to-be in Murin that very afternoon. She’d expected it to go the way all their meetings so far had gone. Prince Rodolfo, beloved the world over for his good looks and devil-may-care attitude, would talk. She would listen without really listening. She’d long since concluded that foretold a very happy royal marriage.
“My fiancé,” she’d explained, meeting Natalie’s gaze again. “Or his chief of staff, to be more precise.”
“Congratulations,” Natalie murmured.
“Thank you, I’m very lucky.” Valentina’s mouth curved, though her tone was far more dry than Natalie’s had been. “Everyone says so. Prince Rodolfo is objectively attractive. Not all princes can make that claim, but the tabloids have exulted over his abs since he was a teenager. Just as they have salivated over his impressive dating history, which has involved a selection of models and actresses from at least four continents and did not cease in any noticeable way upon our engagement last fall.”
“Your Prince Charming sounds...charming,” Natalie had said.
Valentina raised one shoulder, then dropped it. “His theory is that he remains free until our marriage, and then will be free once again following the necessary birth of his heir. More discreetly, I can only hope. Meanwhile, I am beside myself with joy that I must take my place at his side in two short months. Of course.”
Natalie had laughed, and the sound had made Valentina’s stomach flip. Because it sounded like her. It sounded exactly like her.
“It’s going to be a terrific couple of months all around, then,” her mirror image was saying. “Mr. Casilieris is in rare form. He’s putting together a particularly dramatic deal and it’s not going his way and he...isn’t used to that. So that’s me working twenty-two-hour days instead of my usual twenty for the foreseeable future, which is even more fun when he’s cranky and snarling.”
“It can’t possibly be worse than having to smile politely while your future husband lectures you about the absurd expectation of fidelity in what is essentially an arranged marriage for hours on end. The absurdity is that he might be expected to curb his impulses for a year or so, in case you wondered. The expectations for me apparently involve quietly and chastely finding fulfillment in philanthropic works, like his sainted absentee mother, who everyone knows manufactured a supposed health crisis so she could live out her days in peaceful seclusion. It’s easy to be philanthropically fulfilled while living in isolation in Bavaria.”
Natalie had smiled. “Try biting your tongue while your famously short-tempered boss rages at you for no reason, for the hundredth time in an hour, because he pays you to stand there and take it without wilting or crying or selling whingeing stories about him to the press.”
Valentina had returned that smile. “Or the hours and hours of grim palace-vetted prewedding press interviews in the company of a pack of advisers who will censor everything I say and inevitably make me sound like a bit of animated treacle, as out of touch with reality as the average overly sweet dessert.”
“Speaking of treats, I also have to deal with the board of directors Mr. Casilieris treats like irritating schoolchildren, his packs of furious ex-lovers each with her own vendetta, all his terrified employees who need to be coached through meetings with him and treated for PTSD after, and every last member of his staff in every one of his households, who like me to be the one to ask him the questions they know will set him off on one of his scorch-the-earth rages.” Natalie had moved closer then, and lowered her voice. “I was thinking of quitting, to be honest. Today.”
“I can’t quit, I’m afraid,” Valentina had said. Regretfully.
But she’d wished she could. She’d wished she could just...walk away and not have to live up to anyone’s expectations. And not have to marry a man whom she barely knew. And not have to resign herself to a version of the same life so many of her ancestors had lived. Maybe that was where the idea had come from. Blood was blood, after all. And this woman clearly shared her blood. What if...?
“I have a better idea,” she’d said, and then she’d tossed it out there before she could think better of it. “Let’s switch places. For a month, say. Six weeks at the most. Just for a little break.”
“That’s crazy,” Natalie said at once, and she was right. Of course she was right.
“Insane,” Valentina had agreed. “But you might find royal protocol exciting! And I’ve always wanted to do the things everyone else in the world does. Like go to a real job.”
“People can’t switch places.” Natalie had frowned. “And certainly not with a princess.”
“You could think about whether or not you really want to quit,” Valentina pointed out, trying to sweeten the deal. “It would be a lovely holiday for you. Where will Achilles Casilieris be in six weeks’ time?”
“He’s never gone from London for too long,” Natalie had said, as if she was considering it.
Valentina had smiled. “Then in six weeks we’ll meet in London. We’ll text in the meantime with all the necessary details about our lives, and on the appointed day we’ll just meet up and switch back and no one will ever be the wiser. Doesn’t that sound like fun?”
“It would never work,” Natalie had replied. Which wasn’t exactly a no. “No one will ever believe I’m you.”
Valentina waved a hand, encompassing the pair of them. “How would anyone know the difference? I can barely tell myself.”
“People will take one look at me and know I’m not you. You look like a princess.”
“You, too, can look like a princess,” Valentina assured her. Then smiled. “This princess, anyway. You already do.”
“You’re elegant. Poised. You’ve had years of training, presumably. How to be a diplomat. How to be polite in every possible situation. Which fork to use at dinner, for God’s sake.”
“Achilles Casilieris is one of the wealthiest men alive,” Valentina had pointed out. “He dines with as many kings as I do. I suspect that as his personal assistant, Natalie, you have, too. And have likely learned how to navigate the cutlery.”
“No one will believe it,” Natalie had insisted. But she’d sounded a bit as if she was wavering.
Valentina tugged off the ring on her left hand and placed it down on the counter between them. It made an audible clink against the marble surface, as well it should, given it was one of the crown jewels of the kingdom of Tissely.
“Try it on. I dare you. It’s an heirloom from Prince Rodolfo’s extensive treasury of such items, dating back to the dawn of time, more or less.” She smiled. “If it doesn’t fit we’ll never speak of switching places again.”
But the ring had fit her double as if it had been made especially for her.
And after that, switching clothes was easy. Valentina found herself in front of the bathroom mirror, dressed like a billionaire’s assistant, when Natalie walked out of the stall behind her in her own shift dress and the heels her favorite shoe designer had made just for her. It was like looking in a mirror, but one that walked and looked unsteady on her feet and was wearing her hair differently.
Valentina couldn’t tell if she was disconcerted or excited. Both, maybe.
She’d eyed Natalie. “Will your glasses give me a headache, do you suppose?”
But Natalie had pulled them from her face and handed them over. “They’re clear glass. I was getting a little too much attention from some of the men Mr. Casilieris works with, and it annoyed him. I didn’t want to lose my job, so I started wearing my hair up and these glasses. It worked like a charm.”
“I refuse to believe men are so idiotic.”
Natalie had grinned as Valentina took the glasses and slid them onto her nose. “The men we’re talking about weren’t exactly paying me attention because they found me enthralling. It was a diversionary tactic during negotiations, and yes, you’d be surprised how many men fail to see a woman who looks smart.”
She’d freed her hair from its utilitarian ponytail and shook it out, then handed the stretchy elastic to Valentina. It took Valentina a moment to re-create the ponytail on her own head, and then it was done.
And it really was like magic.
“This is crazy,” Natalie had whispered.
“We have to switch places now,” Valentina said softly, hearing the rough patch in her own voice. “I’ve always wanted to be...someone else. Someone normal. Just for a little while.”
And she’d gotten exactly what she’d wanted, hadn’t she?
“I am distressed, Miss Monette, that I cannot manage to secure your attention for more than a moment or two,” Achilles said then, slamming Valentina back into this car he dominated so easily when all he was doing was sitting there.
Sitting there, filling up the world without even trying.
He was devastating. There was no other possible word that could describe him. His black hair was close-cropped to his head, which only served to highlight his strong, intensely masculine features. She’d had hours on the plane to study him as she’d repeatedly failed to do the things he’d expected of her, and she still couldn’t really get her head around why it was that he was so...affecting. He shouldn’t have been. Dark hair. Dark eyes that tended toward gold when his temper washed over him, which he’d so far made no attempt to hide. A strong nose that reminded her of ancient statues she’d seen in famous museums. That lean, hard body of his that wasn’t made of marble or bronze but seemed to suggest both as he used it so effortlessly. A predator packed into a dark suit that seemed molded to him, whispering suggestions of a lethal warrior when all he was doing was taking phone calls with a five-hundred-thousand-dollar watch on one wrist that he didn’t flash about, because he was Achilles Casilieris. He didn’t need flash.
Achilles was something else.
It was the power that seemed to emanate from him, even when he was doing nothing but sitting quietly. It was the fierce hit of his intelligence, that brooding, unmistakable cleverness that seemed to wrap around him like a cloud. It was something in the way he looked at her, as if he saw too much and too deeply and no matter that Valentina’s unreadable game face was the envy of Europe. Besides all that, there was something untamed about him. Fierce.
Something about him left her breathless. Entirely too close to reeling.
“Do you require a gold star every time you make a statement?” she asked, careful not to look at him. It was too hard to look away. She’d discovered that on the plane ride from London—and he was a lot closer now. So close she was sure she could feel the heat of his body from where she sat. “I’ll be certain to make a note to celebrate you more often. Sir.”
Valentina didn’t know what she was doing. In Natalie’s job, certainly, but also with this man in general. She’d learned one thing about powerful people—particularly men—and it was that they did not enjoy being challenged. Under any circumstances. What made her think Achilles would go against type and magically handle this well?
But she couldn’t seem to stop herself.
And the fact that she had never been one to challenge much of anything before hardly signified. Or maybe that was why she felt so unfettered, she thought. Because this wasn’t her life. This wasn’t her remote father and his endless expectations for the behavior of his only child. This was a strange little bit of role-playing that allowed her to be someone other than Princess Valentina for a moment. A few weeks, that was all. Why not challenge Achilles while she was at it? Especially if no one else ever did?
She could feel his gaze on the side of her face, that brooding dark gold, and she braced herself. Then made sure her expression was nothing but serene as she turned to face him.
It didn’t matter. There was no minimizing this man. She could feel the hit of him—like a fist—deep in her belly. And then lower.
“Are you certain you were not hit in the head?” Achilles asked, his dark voice faintly rough with the hint of his native Greek. “Perhaps in the bathroom at the airport? I fear that such places can often suffer from slippery floors. Deadly traps for the unwary.”
“It was only a bathroom,” she replied airily. “It wasn’t slippery or otherwise notable in any way.”
“Are you sure?” And something in his voice and his hard gaze prickled into her then. Making her chest feel tighter.
