The Prince's Nine-Month Scandal
“Achilles Casilieris is one of the wealthiest men alive. 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 whispered, but there was no heat in it.
Because maybe she was the one who couldn’t believe it. And maybe, if she was entirely honest, there was a part of her that wanted this. The princess life and everything that went with it. The kind of ease she’d never known—and a castle besides. And only for a little while. Six short weeks. Scarcely more than a daydream.
Surely even Natalie deserved a daydream. Just this once.
Valentina’s smile widened as if she could scent capitulation in the air. She tugged off the enormous, eye-gouging ring on her left hand and placed it down on the counter between them. It made an audible clink against the marble surface.
“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 inclined her head in that regal way of hers. “If it doesn’t fit we’ll never speak of switching places again.”
And Natalie felt possessed by a force she didn’t understand. She knew better. Of course she did. This was a ridiculous game and it could only make this bizarre situation worse, and she was certainly no Cinderella. She knew that much for sure.
But she slipped the ring onto her finger anyway, and it fit perfectly, gleaming on her finger like every dream she’d ever had as a little girl. Not that she could live a magical life, filled with talismans that shone the way this ring did, because that was the sort of impracticality her mother had abhorred. But that she could have a home the way everyone else did. That she could belong to a man, to a country, to the sweep of a long history, the way this ring hugged her finger. As if it was meant to be.
The ring had nothing to do with her. She knew that. But it felt like a promise, even so.
And it all seemed to snowball from there. They each kicked off their shoes and stood barefoot on the surprisingly plush carpet. Then Valentina shimmied out of her sleek, deceptively simple sheath dress with the unselfconsciousness of a woman used to being dressed by attendants. She lifted her brows with all the imperiousness of her station, and Natalie found herself retreating into the stall with the dress—since she was not, in fact, used to being tended to by packs of fawning courtiers and therefore all but naked with an audience. She climbed out of her own clothes, handing her pencil skirt, blouse and wrap sweater out to Valentina through the crack she left open in the door. Then she tugged the princess’s dress on, expecting it to snag or pull against her obviously peasant body.
But like the ring, the dress fit as if it had been tailored to her body. As if it was hers.
She walked out slowly, blinking when she saw...herself waiting for her. The very same view she’d seen in the mirror this morning when she’d dressed in the room Mr. Casilieris kept for her in the basement of his London town house because her own small flat was too far away to be to-ing and fro-ing at odd hours, according to him, and it was easier to acquiesce than fight. Not that it had kept him from firing away at her. But she shoved that aside because Valentina was laughing at the sight of Natalie in obvious astonishment, as if she was having the same literal out-of-body experience.
Natalie walked back to the counter and climbed into the princess’s absurd shoes, very carefully. Her knees protested beneath her as she tried to stand tall in them and she had to reach out to grip the marble counter.
“Put your weight on your heels,” Valentina advised. She was already wearing Natalie’s wedges, because apparently even their feet were the same, and of course she had no trouble standing in them as if she’d picked them out herself. “Everyone always wants to lean forward and tiptoe in heels like that, and nothing looks worse. Lean back and you own the shoe, not the other way around.” She eyed Natalie. “Will your glasses give me a headache, do you suppose?”
Natalie 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 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 tugged her hair tie from her ponytail and shook out her hair, then handed the elastic to Valentina. The princess swept her hair back and into the same ponytail Natalie had been sporting only seconds before.
And it was like magic.
Ordinary Natalie Monette, renowned for her fierce work ethic, attention to detail and her total lack of anything resembling a personal life—which was how she’d become the executive assistant to one of the world’s most ferocious and feared billionaires straight out of college and now had absolutely no life to call her own—became Her Royal Highness, Princess Valentina of Murin in an instant. And vice versa. Just like that.
“This is crazy,” Natalie whispered.
The real Princess Valentina only smiled, looking every inch the smooth, super competent right hand of a man as feared as he was respected. Looking the way Natalie had always hoped she looked, if she was honest. Serenely capable. Did this mean...she always had?
More than that, they looked like twins. They had to be twins. There was no possibility that they could be anything but.
Natalie didn’t want to think about the number of lies her mother had to have told her if that was true. She didn’t want to think about all the implications. She couldn’t.
“We have to switch places now,” Valentina said softly, though there was a catch in her voice. It was the catch that made Natalie focus on her rather than the mystery that was her mother. “I’ve always wanted to be...someone else. Someone normal. Just for a little while.”
Their gazes caught at that, both the exact same shade of green, just as their hair was that unusual shade of copper many tried to replicate in the salon, yet couldn’t. The only difference was that Valentina’s was highlighted with streaks of blond that Natalia suspected came from long, lazy days on the decks of yachts or taking in the sunshine from the comfort of her very own island kingdom.
If you’re really twins—if you’re sisters—it’s your island, too, a little voice inside whispered. But Natalie couldn’t handle that. Not here. Not now. Not while she was all dressed up in princess clothes.
“Is that what princesses dream of?” Natalie asked. She wanted to smile, but the moment felt too precarious. Ripe and swollen with emotions she couldn’t have named, though she understood them as they moved through her. “Because I think most other little girls imagine they’re you.”
Not her, of course. Never her.
Something shone a little too brightly in Valentina’s gaze then, and it made Natalie’s chest ache.
But she would never know what her mirror image might have said next, because her name was called in a familiar growl from directly outside the door to the women’s room. Natalie didn’t think. She was dressed as someone else and she couldn’t let anyone see that—so she threw herself back into the stall where she’d changed her clothes as the door was slapped open.
“Exactly what are you doing in here?” growled a voice that Natalie knew better than her own. She’d worked for Achilles Casilieris for five years. She knew him much, much better than she knew herself. She knew, for example, that the particular tone he was using right now meant his usual grouchy mood was being rapidly taken over by his typical impatience. He’d likely had to actually take a moment and look for her, rather than her magically being at his side before he finished his thought. He hated that. And he wasn’t shy at all about expressing his feelings. “Can we leave for New York now, do you think, or do you need to fix your makeup for another hour?”
Natalie stood straighter out of habit, only to realize that her boss’s typical scowl wasn’t directed at her. She was hidden behind the cracked open door of the bathroom stall. Her boss was aiming that famous glare straight at Valentina, and he didn’t appear to notice that she wasn’t Natalie. That if she was Natalie, that would mean she’d lightened her hair in the past fifteen minutes. But she could tell that all her boss saw was his assistant. Nothing more, nothing less.
“I apologize,” Valentina murmured.
“I don’t need you to be sorry, I need you on the plane,” Achilles retorted, then turned back around to head out.
Natalie’s head spun. She had worked for this man, night and day, for half a decade. He was Achilles Casilieris, renowned for his keen insight and killer instincts in all things, and Natalie had absolutely no doubt that he had no idea that he hadn’t been speaking to her.
Maybe that was why, when Valentina reached over and took Natalie’s handbag instead of her own, Natalie didn’t push back out of the stall to stop her. She said nothing. She stood where she was. She did absolutely nothing to keep the switch from happening.
“I’ll call you,” Valentina mouthed into the mirror as she hurried to the door, and the last Natalie saw of Her Royal Highness Valentina of Murin was the suppressed excitement in her bright green eyes as she followed Achilles Casilieris out the door.
Natalie stepped out of the stall again in the sudden silence. She looked at herself in the mirror, smoothed her hair down with palms that shook only the slightest little bit, blinked at the wild sparkle of the absurd ring on her finger as she did it.
And just like that, became a fairy princess—and stepped right into a daydream.
CHAPTER TWO
CROWN PRINCE RODOLFO of the ancient and deeply, deliberately reserved principality of Tissely, tucked away in the Pyrenees between France and Spain and gifted with wealth, peace and dramatic natural borders that had kept things that way for centuries untold, was bored.
This was not his preferred state of existence, though it was not exactly surprising here on the palace grounds of Murin Castle, where he was expected to entertain the royal bride his father had finally succeeded in forcing upon him.
Not that “entertainment” was ever really on offer with the undeniably pretty, yet almost aggressively placid and unexciting Princess Valentina. His future wife. The future mother of his children. His future queen, even. Assuming he didn’t lapse into a coma before their upcoming nuptials, that was.
Rodolfo sighed and stretched out his long legs, aware he was far too big to be sitting so casually on a relic of a settee in this stuffily proper reception room that had been set aside for his use on one of his set monthly visits with his fiancée. He still felt a twinge in one thigh from the ill-advised diving trip he’d taken some months back with a group of his friends and rather too many sharks. Rodolfo rubbed at the scarred spot absently, grateful that while his father had inevitably caught wind of the feminine talent who’d graced the private yacht off the coast of Belize, the fact an overenthusiastic shark had grazed the Crown Prince of Tissely en route to a friend’s recently caught fish had escaped both the King’s spies’ and the rabid tabloids’ breathless reports.
It was these little moments of unexpected grace, he often thought with varying degrees of irony, that made his otherwise royally pointless life worth living.
“You embarrass yourself more with each passing year,” his father had told him, stiff with fury, when Rodolfo had succumbed to the usual demands for a command appearance upon his return to Europe at the end of last summer, the salacious pictures of his “Belize Booze Cruise” still fresh in every tabloid reader’s mind. And more to the point, in his father’s.
“You possess the power to render me unembarrassing forevermore,” Rodolfo had replied easily enough. He’d almost convinced himself his father no longer got beneath his skin. Almost. “Give me something to do, Father. You have an entire kingdom at your disposal. Surely you can find a single task for your only son.”
But that was the crux of the matter they never spoke of directly, of course. Rodolfo was not the son his father had wanted as heir. He was not the son his father would have chosen to succeed him, not the son his father had planned for. He was his father’s only remaining son, and not his father’s choice.
He was not Felipe. He could never be Felipe. It was a toss-up as to which one of them hated him more for that.
“There is no place in my kingdom for a sybaritic fool whose life is little more than an extended advertisement for one of those appalling survival programs, complete with the sensationalism of the nearest gutter press,” his father had boomed from across his vast, appropriately majestic office in the palace, because it was so much easier to attack Rodolfo than address what simmered beneath it all. Not that Rodolfo helped matters with his increasingly dangerous antics, he was aware. “You stain the principality with every astonishingly bad decision you make.”
“It was a boat ride, sir.” Rodolfo had kept his voice even because he knew it irritated his father to get no reaction to his litanies and insults. “Not precisely a scandal likely to topple the whole of the kingdom’s government, as I think you are aware.”
“What I am aware of, as ever, is how precious little you know about governing anything,” his father had seethed, in all his state and consequence.
“You could change that with a wave of your hand,” Rodolfo had reminded him, as gently as possible. Which was perhaps not all that gently. “Yet you refuse.”
And around and around they went.
Rodolfo’s father, the taciturn and disapproving sovereign of Tissely, Ferdinand IV, held all the duties of the monarchy in his tight fists and showed no signs of easing his grip anytime soon. Despite the promise he’d made his only remaining son and heir that he’d give him a more than merely ceremonial place in the principality’s government following Rodolfo’s graduate work at the London School of Economics. That had been ten years back, his father had only grown more bitter and possessive of his throne, and Rodolfo had...adapted.
Life in the principality was sedate, as befitted a nation that had avoided all the wars of the last few centuries by simple dint of being too far removed to take part in them in any real way. Rodolfo’s life, by contrast, was...stimulating. Provocative by design. He liked his sport extreme and his sex excessive, and he didn’t much care if the slavering hounds of the European press corps printed every moment of each, which they’d been more than happy to do for the past decade. If his father wished him to be more circumspect, to preserve and protect the life of the hereditary heir to Tissely’s throne the way he should—the way he’d raced about trying to wrap Felipe in cotton wool, restricting him from everything only to lose him to something as ignoble and silly as an unremarkable cut in his finger and what they’d thought was the flu—he needed only to offer Rodolfo something else with which to fill his time. Such as, perhaps, something to do besides continue to exist, thus preserving the bloodline by dint of not dying.
In fairness, of course, Rodolfo had committed himself to pushing the boundaries of his continued existence as much as possible, with his group of similarly devil-may-care friends, to the dismay of most of their families.
“Congratulations,” Ferdinand had clipped out one late September morning last fall in yet another part of his vast offices in the Tisselian palace complex. “You will be married next summer.”
“I beg your pardon?”
In truth, Rodolfo had not been paying much attention to the usual lecture until that moment. He was no fan of being summoned from whatever corner of the world he happened to be inhabiting and having to race back to present himself before Ferdinand, because his lord and father preferred not to communicate with his only heir by any other means but face-to-face. But of course, Ferdinand had not solicited his opinion. Ferdinand never did.
When he’d focused on his father, sitting there behind the acres and acres of his desk, the old man had actually looked...smug.
That did not bode well.
“You’ve asked me for a role in the kingdom and here it is. The Crown Prince of Tissely has been unofficially betrothed to the Murin princess since her birth. It is high time you did your duty and ensured the line. This should not come as any great surprise. You are not exactly getting any younger, Rodolfo, as your increasingly more desperate public displays amply illustrate.”
Rodolfo had let that deliberate slap roll off his back, because there was no point reacting. It was what his father wanted.
“I met the Murin princess exactly once when I was ten and she was in diapers.” Felipe had been fourteen and a man of the world, to Rodolfo’s recollection, and the then Crown Prince of Tissely had seemed about as unenthused about his destiny as Rodolfo felt now. “That seems a rather tenuous connection upon which to base a marriage, given I’ve never seen her since.”
“Princess Valentina is renowned the world over for her commitment to her many responsibilities and her role as her father’s emissary,” his father had replied coolly. “I doubt your paths would have crossed in all these years, as she is not known to frequent the dens of iniquity you prefer.”
“Yet you believe this paragon will wish to marry me.”
“I am certain she will wish no such thing, but the princess is a dutiful creature who knows what she owes to her country. You claim that you are as well, and that your dearest wish is to serve the crown. Now is your chance to prove it.”
And that was how Rodolfo had found himself both hoist by his own petard and more worrying, tied to his very proper, very dutiful, very, very boring bride-to-be with no hope of escape. Ever.
“Princess Valentina, Your Highness,” the butler intoned from the doorway, and Rodolfo dutifully climbed to his feet, because his life might have been slipping out of his control by the second, but hell, he still had the manners that had been beaten into him since he was small.
The truth was, he’d imagined that he would do things differently than his father when he’d realized he would have to take Felipe’s place as the heir to his kingdom. He’d been certain he would not marry a woman he hardly knew, foisted upon him by duty and immaculate bloodlines, with whom he could hardly carry on a single meaningful conversation. His own mother—no more enamored of King Ferdinand than Rodolfo was—had long since repaired to her preferred residence, her ancestral home in the manicured wilds of Bavaria, and had steadfastly maintained an enduring if vague health crisis that necessitated she remain in seclusion for the past twenty years.
Rodolfo had been so sure, as an angry young man still reeling from his brother’s death, that he would do things better when he had his chance.
And instead he was standing attendance on a strange woman who, in the months of their engagement, had appeared to be made entirely of impenetrable glass. She was about that approachable.
But this time, when Valentina walked into the reception room the way she’d done many times before, so they could engage in a perfectly tedious hour of perfectly polite conversation on perfectly pointless topics as if it was the stifling sixteenth century, all to allow the waiting press corps to gush about their visits later as they caught Rodolfo leaving, everything...changed.
Rodolfo couldn’t have said how. Much less why.
But he felt her entrance. He felt it when she paused in the doorway and looked around as if she’d never laid eyes on him or the paneled ceiling or any part of the run-of-the-mill room before. His body tightened. He felt a rush of heat pool in his—
Impossible.
What the hell was happening to him?
Rodolfo felt his gaze narrow as he studied his fiancée. She looked the way she always did, and yet she didn’t. She wore one of her efficiently sophisticated and chicly demure ensembles, a deceptively simple sheath dress that showed nothing and yet obliquely drew attention to the sheer feminine perfection of her form. A form he’d seen many times before, always clothed beautifully, and yet had never found himself waxing rhapsodic about before. Yet today he couldn’t look away. There was something about the way she stood, as if she was unsteady on those cheeky heels she wore, though that seemed unlikely. Her hair flowed around her shoulders and looked somehow wilder than it usually did, as if the copper of it was redder. Or perhaps brighter.
Or maybe he needed to get his head examined. Maybe he really had gotten a concussion when he’d gone on an impromptu skydiving trip last week, tumbling a little too much on his way down into the remotest peaks of the Swiss Alps.
The princess moistened her lips and then met his gaze, and Rodolfo felt it like her sultry little mouth all over the hardest part of him.
What the hell?
“Hello,” she said, and even her voice was...different, somehow. He couldn’t put his finger on it. “It’s lovely to see you.”
“Lovely to see me?” he echoed, astonished. And something far more earthy, if he was entirely honest with himself. “Are you certain? I was under the impression you would prefer a rousing spot of dental surgery to another one of these meetings. I feel certain you almost admitted as much at our last one.”
He didn’t know what had come over him. He’d managed to maintain his civility throughout all these months despite his creeping boredom—what had changed today? He braced himself, expecting the perfect princess to collapse into an offended heap on the polished floor, which he’d have a hell of a time explaining to her father, the humorless King Geoffrey of Murin.
But Valentina only smiled and a gleam he’d never seen before kindled in her eyes, which he supposed must always have been that remarkable shade of green. How had he never noticed them before?
“Well, it really depends on the kind of dental surgery, don’t you think?” she asked.
Rodolfo couldn’t have been more surprised if the quietly officious creature had tossed off her clothes and started dancing on the table—well, there was no need to exaggerate. He’d have summoned the palace doctors if the princess had done anything of the kind. After appreciating the show for a moment or two, of course, because he was a man, not a statue. But the fact she appeared to be teasing him was astounding, nonetheless.
“A root canal, at the very least,” he offered.
“With or without anesthesia?”
“If it was with anesthesia you’d sleep right through it,” Rodolfo pointed out. “Hardly any suffering at all.”
“Everyone knows there’s no point doing one’s duty unless one can brag forever about the amount of suffering required to survive the task,” the princess said, moving farther into the room. She stopped and rested her hand on the high, brocaded back of a chair that had likely cradled the posteriors of kings dating back to the ninth century, and all Rodolfo could think was that he wanted her to keep going. To keep walking toward him. To put herself within reach so he could—
Calm down, he ordered himself. Now. So sternly he sounded like his father in his own head.
“You are describing martyrdom,” he pointed out.
Valentina shot him a smile. “Is there a difference?”
Rodolfo stood still because he didn’t quite know what he might do if he moved. He watched this woman he’d written off months ago as if he’d never seen her before. There was something in the way she walked this afternoon that tugged at him. There was a new roll to her hips, perhaps. Something he’d almost call a swagger, assuming a princess of her spotless background and perfect genes was capable of anything so basic and enticing. Still, he couldn’t look away as she rounded the settee he’d abandoned and settled herself in its center with a certain delicacy that was at odds with the way she’d moved through the old, spectacularly royal room. Almost as if she was more uncertain than she looked...but that made as little sense as the rest.