It was one of the reasons he’d kept Natalie with him for so long, when other assistants to men like him used positions like hers as springboards into their own glorious careers. But this woman was not Natalie. If he hadn’t known it before, he’d have known it now, when it was a full-scale struggle to keep his damned hands to himself.
“Ambition, it seems to me, is for those who have the freedom to pursue it. And for those who do not—” and Valentina’s eyes seemed to gleam at that, making Achilles wonder exactly what her ambitions were “—it is nothing more than dissatisfaction. Which is far less worthy and infinitely more destructive, I think we can agree.”
He didn’t know when he’d turned to face her fully. He didn’t know when he’d stopped looking at the city and was looking only at her instead. But he was, and he compounded that error by reaching out his hand and tugging on the very end of her silky, coppery ponytail where it kissed her shoulder every time she moved her head.
Her lips parted, as if on a soundless breath, and Achilles felt that as if she’d caressed him. As if her hands were on his body the way he wished they were, instead of at her sides.
“Are you dissatisfied?” It was amazing how difficult it was not to use her real name then. How challenging it was to stay in this game he suddenly didn’t particularly want to play. “Is that what this is?”
Her green eyes, which had been so unreadable, suddenly looked slick. Dark and glassy with some or other emotion. He couldn’t tell what it was, and still, he could feel it in him like smoke, stealing through his chest and making it harder than it should have been to breathe.
“There’s nothing wrong with dissatisfaction in and of itself,” she told him after a moment, then another, that seemed too large for him to contain. Too dark and much too edgy to survive intact, and yet here they both were. “You see it as disloyalty, but it’s not.”
“How can it be anything else?”
“It is possible to be both loyal and open to the possibility that there is a life outside the one you’ve committed yourself to.” Her green eyes searched his. “Surely there must be.”
“I think you will find that there is no such possibility.” His voice was harsh. He could feel it inside him, like a stain. Like need. “We must all decide who we are, every moment of every day. You either keep a vow or you do not. There is no between.”
She stiffened at that, then tried to force her shoulders back down to an easier, less telling angle. Achilles watched her do it. He watched something like distress cross her lovely face, but she hid that, too. It was only the darkness in her gaze that told him he’d scored a direct hit, and he was a man who took great pride in the strikes he leveled against anyone who tried to move against him. Yet what he felt when he looked at Valentina was not pride. Not pride at all.
“Some vows are not your own,” she said fiercely, her gaze locked to his. “Some are inherited. It’s easy to say that you’ll keep them because that’s what’s expected of you, but it’s a great deal harder to actually do it.”
He knew the vows she’d made. That pointless prince. Her upcoming royal wedding. He assumed that was the least of the vows she’d inherited from her father. And he still thought it was so much smoke and mirrors to hide the fact that she, like so many of her peers, was a spoiled and pampered creature who didn’t like to be told what to do. Wasn’t that the reason poor little rich girl was a saying in the first place?
He had no sympathy for the travails of a rich, pampered princess. But he couldn’t seem to unwind that little silken bit of copper from around his finger, either. Much less step back and put the space between them that he should have left there from the start.
Achilles shook his head. “There is no gray area. Surely you know this. You are either who you say you are or you are not.”
There was something like misery in those eyes of hers then. And this was what he’d wanted. This was why he’d been goading her. And yet now that he seemed to have succeeded, he felt the strangest thing deep in his gut. It was an unpleasant and unfamiliar sensation, and at first Achilles couldn’t identify it. It was a low heat, trickling through him, making him restless. Making him as close to uncertain as he’d ever been.
In someone else, he imagined, it might be shame. But shame was not something Achilles allowed in himself. Ever.
This was a night full of things he did not allow, apparently. Because he wanted her. He wanted to punctuate this oddly emotional discussion with his mouth. His hands. The whole of his too-tight, too-interested body pressed deep into hers. He wanted to taste those sweetly lush lips of hers. He wanted to take her elegant face in his hands, tip her head back and sate himself at last. It seemed to him an age or two since he’d boarded his plane and realized his assistant was not who she was supposed to be. An agony of waiting and all that want, and he was not a man who agonized. Or waited. Or wanted anything, it seemed, but this princess who thought she could fool him.
What was the matter with him that some part of him wanted to let her?
He did none of the things he longed to do.
Achilles made himself do the hard thing, no matter how complicated it was. Or how complicated it felt, anyway. When really it was so simple. He let her go. He let her silky hair fall from between his fingers, and he stepped back, putting inches between them.
But that did nothing to ease the temptation.
“I think what you need is a good night’s sleep,” he told her, like some kind of absurd nurturer. Something he had certainly never tried to be for anyone else in the whole of his life. He would have doubted it was possible—and he refused to analyze that. “Perhaps it will clear your head and remind you of who you are. Jet lag can make that so very confusing, I know.”
He thought she might have scuttled from the room at that, filled with her own shame if there was any decency in the world, but he was learning that this princess was not at all who he expected her to be. She swallowed, hard. And he could still see that darkness in her eyes. But she didn’t look away from him. And she certainly didn’t scuttle anywhere.
“I know exactly who I am, Mr. Casilieris,” she said, very directly, and the lenses in her glasses made her eyes seem that much greener. “As I’m certain you do, too. Jet lag makes a person tired. It doesn’t make them someone else entirely.”
And when she turned to walk from the room then, it was with her head held high, graceful and self-contained, with no apparent second thoughts. Or anything the least bit like shame. All he could read on her as she went was that same distracting elegance that was already too far under his skin.
Achilles couldn’t seem to do a thing but watch her go.
And when the sound of her footsteps had faded away, deep into the far reaches of the penthouse, he turned back to the wild gleam of Manhattan on the other side of his windows. Frenetic and frenzied. Light in all directions, as if there was nothing more to the world tonight than this utterly mad tangle of life and traffic and people and energy and it hardly mattered what he felt so high above it. It hardly mattered at all that he’d betrayed himself. That this woman who should have been nothing to him made him act like someone he barely recognized.
And her words stayed with him. I know exactly who I am. They echoed around and around in his head until it sounded a whole lot more like an accusation.
As if she was the one playing this game, and winning it, after all.
CHAPTER FOUR
AS THE DAYS PASSED, Valentina thought that she was getting the hang of this assistant thing—especially if she endeavored to keep a minimum distance between herself and Achilles when the night got a little too dark and close. And at all other times, for that matter.
She’d chalked up those odd, breathless moments in his office that first night to the strangeness of inhabiting someone else’s life. Because it couldn’t be anything else. Since then, she hadn’t felt the need t
o say too much. She hadn’t defended herself—or her version of Natalie. She’d simply tried to do the job that Natalie, apparently, did so well she was seen by other employees of the Casilieris Company as superhuman.
With every day she became more accustomed to the demands of the job. She felt less as if she really ought to have taken Achilles up on his offer of a parachute and more as if this was something she could handle. Maybe not well or like superhuman Natalie, but she could handle it all the same in her own somewhat rudimentary fashion.
What she didn’t understand was why Achilles hadn’t fired her already. Because it was perfectly clear to Valentina that her version of handling things in no way lived up to Achilles’s standards.
And if she’d been any doubt about that, he was the first to tell her otherwise.
His corporate offices in Manhattan took up several floors at one of Midtown’s most esteemed addresses. There was an office suite set aside for him, naturally enough, that sprawled across the top floor and looked out over Manhattan as if to underscore the notion that Achilles Casilieris was in every way on top of the world. Valentina was settled in the immediate outer office, guarded by two separate lines of receptionist and secretarial defense should anyone make it through security. It wasn’t to protect Achilles, but to further illuminate his importance. And Natalie’s, Valentina realized quickly.
Because Natalie controlled access to Achilles. She controlled his schedule. She answered his phone and his email, and was generally held to have that all-important insight into his moods.
“What kind of day is it?” the senior vice presidents would ask her as they came in for their meetings, and the fact they smiled as they said it didn’t make them any less anxious to hear her answer.
Valentina quickly discovered that Natalie controlled a whole lot more than simple access. There was a steady line of people at her desk, coming to her to ask how best to approach Achilles with any number of issues, or plot how to avoid approaching him with the things they knew he’d hate. Over the course of her first week in New York City, Valentina found that almost everyone who worked for Achilles tried to run things past her first, or used her to gauge his reactions. Natalie was less the man’s personal assistant, she realized, and more the hub around which his businesses revolved. More than that, she thought he knew it.
“Take that up with Natalie,” he would say in the middle of a meeting, without even bothering to look over at her. Usually while cutting someone off, because even he appeared not to want to hear certain things until Natalie had assessed them first.
“Come up with those numbers and run them past Natalie,” he would tell his managers, and sometimes he’d even sound irritated while he said such things.
“Why are you acting as if you have never worked a day in my company?” he’d demanded of one of his brand managers once. “I am not the audience for your uncertain first drafts, George. How can you not know this?”
Valentina had smiled at the man in the meeting, and then had been forced to sit through a brainstorming/therapy session with him afterward, all the while hoping that the noncommittal things she’d murmured were, at the very least, not the opposite of the sort of things Natalie might have said.
Not that she texted Natalie to find out. Because that might have led to a conversation Valentina didn’t really want to have with her double about strange, tense moments in the darkness with her employer.
She didn’t know what she was more afraid of. That Natalie had never had any kind of tension with Achilles and Valentina was messing up her entire life...or that she did. That tension was just what Achilles did.
Valentina concentrated on her first attempt at a normal life, complete with a normal job, instead. And whether Achilles was aware of it or not, Natalie had her fingers in everything.
Including his romantic life.
The first time Valentina had answered his phone to find an emotional woman on the other end, she’d been appalled.
“There’s a crying woman on the phone,” she’d told Achilles. It had taken her a day or so to realize that she wasn’t only allowed to walk in and out of his office when necessary, but encouraged to do so. That particular afternoon Achilles had been sitting on the sofa in his office, his feet up on his coffee table as he’d scowled down at his laptop. He shifted that scowl to her instead, in a way that made Valentina imagine that whatever he was looking at had something to do with her—
But that was ridiculous. There was no her in this scenario. There was only Natalie, and Valentina very much doubted Achilles spent his time looking up his assistant on the internet.
“Why are you telling me this?” he’d asked her shortly. “If I wanted to know who called me, I would answer my phones myself.”
“She’s crying about you,” Valentina had said. “I assume she’s calling to share her emotions with you, the person who caused them.”
“And I repeat—why are you telling me this.” This time it wasn’t a question, and his scowl deepened. “You are my assistant. You are responsible for fielding these calls. I’m shocked you’re even mentioning another crying female. I thought you stopped bringing them to my attention years ago.”
Valentina had blinked at that. “Aren’t you at all interested in why this woman is upset?”
“No.”
“Not at all. Not the slightest bit interested.” She studied his fierce face as if he was an alien. In moments like this, she thought he must have been. “You don’t even know which woman I’m referring to, do you?”
“Miss Monette.” He bit out that name as if the taste of it irritated him, and Valentina couldn’t have said why it put her back up when it wasn’t even her name. “I have a number of mistresses, none of whom call that line to manufacture emotional upsets. You are already aware of this.” And he’d set his laptop aside, as if he needed to concentrate fully on Valentina before him. It had made her spine prickle, from her neck to her bottom and back up again. “Please let me know exactly what agenda it is we are pursuing today, that you expect to interrupt me in order to have a discussion about nuisance calls. When I assure you, the subject does not interest me at all. Just as it did not interest me five years ago, when you vowed to stop bothering me about them.”
There was a warning in that. Valentina had heard it, plain as day. But she hadn’t been able to heed it. Much less stop herself.
“To be clear, what you’re telling me is that tears do not interest you,” she’d said instead of beating a retreat to her desk the way she should have. She’d kept her tone even and easy, but she doubted that had fooled either one of them.
“Tears interest me least of all.” She’d been sure that there was a curve in that hard mouth of his then, however small.
And what was the matter with her that she’d clung to that as if it was some kind of lifeline? As if she needed such a thing?
As if what she really wanted was his approval, when she hadn’t switched places with Natalie for him. He’d had nothing to do with it. Why couldn’t she seem to remember that?
“If this is a common occurrence for you, perhaps you need to have a think about your behavior,” she’d pointed out. “And your aversion to tears.”
There had definitely been a curve in his mouth then, and yet somehow that hadn’t made Valentina any easier.
“This conversation is over,” he’d said quietly. Though not gently. “Something I suggest you tell the enterprising actress on the phone.”
She’d thought him hideously cold, of course. Heartless, even. But the calls kept coming. And Valentina had quickly realized what she should perhaps have known from the start—that it would be impossible for Achilles to actually be out there causing harm to so many anonymous women when he never left the office. She knew this because she spent almost every hour of every day in his company. The man literally had no time to go out there smashing hearts left and right,
the way she’d be tempted to believe he did if she paid attention only to the phone calls she received, laden with accusations.
“Tell him I’m falling apart,” yet another woman on the phone said on this latest morning, her voice ragged.
“Sorry, but what’s your name again?” Valentina asked, as brightly as possible. “It’s only that he’s been working rather hard, you see. As he tends to do. Which would, of course, make it extremely difficult for him to be tearing anyone apart in any real sense.”
The woman had sputtered. But Valentina had dutifully taken her name into Achilles when he next asked for his messages.
“I somewhat doubted the veracity of her claim,” Valentina murmured. “Given that you were working until well after two last night.”
Something she knew very well since that had meant she’d been working even longer than that.
Achilles laughed. He was at his desk today, which meant he was framed by the vertical thrust of Manhattan behind him. And still, that look in his dark gold gaze made the city disappear. “As well you should. I have no idea who this woman is. Or any of them.” He shrugged. “My attorneys are knee-deep in paternity suits, and I win every one of them.”
Valentino was astonished by that. Perhaps that was naive. She’d certainly had her share of admirers in her day, strange men who claimed an acquaintance or who sent rather disturbing letters to the palace—some from distant prisons in foreign countries. But she certainly never had men call up and try to pretend they had relationships with her to her.
Then again, would anyone have told her if they had? That sat on her a bit uneasily, though she couldn’t have said why. She only knew that his gaze was like a touch, and that, too, seemed to settle on her like a weight.
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