She chided herself for that instantly. It felt defeating. Despairing. She was anonymous and free and unremarkable, standing on a city street. Nobody in the entire world knew where she was. Nobody would know where to look and nobody was likely to find her if they tried. Valentina couldn’t decide if that notion made her feel small and fragile, or vast and powerful. Maybe both at the same time.
She didn’t know how long she stood there. She ignored the first few calls that buzzed at her from Natalie’s mobile tucked in her pocket, but then realized that standing about speaking on her phone gave her far more of a reason to be out there in the street. Instead of simply standing there doing nothing, looking like she was doing exactly what she was doing, which was looming around as she waited for somebody to turn up.
So she did her job, out there on the street. Or Natalie’s job, anyway. She fielded the usual phone calls from the office and, if she was honest, liked the fact that she had somewhere to put all her nervous energy. She was half-afraid that Achilles would call and demand that she return to his side immediately, but she suspected that she was less afraid of that happening than she was hoping that it would, so she didn’t have to follow this through.
Because even now, there was a part of her that simply wanted to retreat back into what she already knew. What she’d spent her life believing.
Afternoon was bleeding into evening, and Valentina was beginning to think that she’d completely outstayed her welcome. That Erica was in one of the other places she sometimes stayed, like the one in the Caribbean Natalie had mentioned in a text. That at any moment now it was likely that one of the doormen in the surrounding buildings would call the police to make her move along at last. That they hadn’t so far she regarded as some kind of miracle. She finished up the last of the calls she’d been fielding, and told herself that it had been foolish to imagine that she could simply turn up one afternoon, stand around and solve the mysteries of her childhood so easily.
But that was when she saw her.
And Valentina didn’t know exactly what it was that had caught her eye. The hair was wrong, not long and coppery like her daughters’ but short. Dark. And it wasn’t as if Valentina had any memories of this woman, but still. There was something in the way she moved. The way she came down the block, walking quickly, a plastic bag hanging from one wrist and the other hand holding a phone to her ear.
But Valentina knew her. She knew that walk. She knew the gait and the way the woman cocked her head toward the hand holding her phone. She knew the way this woman carried herself.
She recognized her, in other words, when she shouldn’t have. When, she realized, despite the fact she’d spent a whole summer afternoon waiting for this moment—she really didn’t want to recognize her.
And she’d been nursing fantasies this whole time, little as she wanted to admit that, even to herself. She’d told herself all the things that she would do if this woman appeared. She’d worked out scenarios in her head.
Do you know who I am? she would ask, or demand, and this woman she had always thought of as Federica, but who went by a completely different name—the better to hide, Valentina assumed—would... Cry? Flail about? Offer excuses? She hadn’t been able to decide which version she would prefer no matter how many times she’d played it out in her head.
And as this woman who was almost certainly her mother walked toward her, not looking closely enough to see that there was anyone standing down the block a ways in front of her, much less someone who she should have assumed was the daughter she knew as Natalie, Valentina realized what she should have known already. Or maybe, deep down, she had known it—she just hadn’t really wanted to admit it.
There was nothing this woman could do to fix anything or change anything or even make it better. She couldn’t go back in time. She couldn’t change the past. She couldn’t choose Valentina instead of Natalie, if that had been the choice she’d made. Valentina wasn’t even certain that was something she’d want, if she could go back in time herself, but the fact of the matter was that there was nothing to be done about it now.
And her heart beat at her and beat at her, until she thought it might beat its way straight out through her ribs, and even as it did, Valentina couldn’t pretend that she didn’t know that what she was feeling was grief.
Grief, thick and choking. Dark and muddy and deep.
For the childhood she’d never had, and hadn’t known she’d missed until now. For the life she might have known had this woman been different. Had Valentina been different. Had her father, perhaps, not been King Geoffrey of Murin. It was all speculation, of course. It was that tearing thing in her belly and that weight on her chest, and that thick, deep mud she worried she might never find her way out of again.
And when Erica drew close to her building’s green awning, coming closer to Valentina than she’d been in twenty-seven years, Valentina...said nothing. She let her hair fall forward to cover her face where she leaned against the brick wall. She pretended she was on a serious phone call while the woman who was definitely her mother—of course she was her mother; how had Valentina been tricking herself into pretending she could be anything but that?—turned into the building that Valentina had been staking out all afternoon, and was swallowed up into her own lobby.
For long moments, Valentina couldn’t breathe. She wasn’t sure she could think.
It was as if she didn’t know who she was.
She found herself walking. She lost herself in the tumult of this sprawling mess of a bright and brash city, the noise of car horns in the street, and the blasts of conversation and laughter from the groups of strangers she passed. She made her way back to the park and wandered there as the summer afternoon took on that glassy blue that meant the hour was growing late.
She didn’t cry. She hardly saw in front of her. She simply walked.
And dusk was beginning to steal in at last, making the long blocks cold in the long shadows, when she finally made it back to Achilles’s building.
One of the doormen brought her up in the elevator, smiling at her as she stepped off. It made her think that perhaps she had smiled in return, though she couldn’t tell. It was as if her body was not her own and her face was no longer under her control. She walked into Achilles’s grand living room, and stood there. It was as if she still didn’t know where she was. As if she still couldn’t see. And the huge windows that let Manhattan in all around her only seemed to make her sense of dislocation worse.
“Where the hell have you been?”
That low growl came from above her. Valentina didn’t have to turn and look to know that it was Achilles from on high, standing at the top of the stairs that led to his sprawling master suite.
She looked up anyway. Because somehow, the most dangerous man she’d ever met felt like an anchor.
He looked as if he’d just showered. He wore a T-shirt she could tell was soft from down two flights, stretched over his remarkable chest as if it was as enamored of him as she feared she was. Loose black trousers were slung low on his hips, and she had the giddy sense that if he did something like stretch, or breathe too heavily, she would be able to see a swathe of olive skin between the waistband and the hem of his T-shirt.
And suddenly, she wanted nothing more than to see exactly that. More than she could remember wanting anything else. Ever.
“Careful, glikia mou, or I will take you up on that invitation written all over your face,” Achilles growled as if he was irritated...but she knew better.
Because he knew. He always knew. He could read her when no one else ever had. The masks she wore like they were second nature and the things she pretended for the whole of the rest of the world fooled everybody, but never him.
Never, ever him.
As if there was a real Valentina buried beneath the exterior she’d thought for years was the totality of who she was, and Achilles w
as the only one who had ever met her. Ever seen her. Ever suspected she existed and then found her, again and again, no matter how hard Valentina worked to keep her hidden away.
Her throat was dry. Her tongue felt as if it no longer fit in her own mouth.
But she couldn’t bring herself to look away from him.
She thought about her mother and she thought about her childhood. She thought about the pride she’d taken in that virtue of hers that she’d clung to so fiercely all these years. Or perhaps not so fiercely, as it had been so untested. Was that virtue at all, she wondered?
Or was this virtue?
She had spent all of this time trying to differentiate herself from a woman she thought she knew, but who it turned out she didn’t know at all. And for what? She was already trapped in the same life that her mother had abandoned.
Valentina was the one who hadn’t left her father. She was the one who had prided herself on being perfect. She was the one who was decidedly not mentally ill, never too overwrought to do the job required of her by her blood and her father’s expectations, nothing but a credit to her father in all ways. And she’d reveled in it.
More than reveled in it. It had become the cornerstone of her own self-definition.
And all of it was built on lies. The ones she told herself, and more than that, the lies that had been told to her for her entire life. By everyone.
All Valentina could think as she gazed up the stairs to the man she was only pretending was her employer was that she was done with lies. She wanted something honest. Even—especially—if it was raw.
And she didn’t much care if there were consequences to that.
“You say that is if it is a threat,” she said quietly. Distinctly. “Perhaps you should rethink your own version of an invitation before it gets you in trouble.” She raised her brows in challenge, and knew it. Reveled in it, too. “Sir.”
And when Achilles smiled then, it was with sheer masculine triumph, and everything changed.
* * *
He had thought she’d left him.
When Achilles had come out of the hard, brutal workout he’d subjected himself to that had done absolutely nothing to make his vicious need for her settle, Achilles had found her gone.
And he’d assumed that was it. The princess had finally had enough. She’d finished playing this down-market game of hers and gone back to her palaces and her ball gowns and her resplendent little prince who waited for her across the seas.
He’d told himself it was for the best.
He was a man who took things for a living and made an empire out of his conquests, and he had no business whatsoever putting his commoner’s hands all over a woman of her pedigree. No business doing it, and worse, he shouldn’t want to.
And maybe that was why he found himself on his treadmill again while he was still sucking air from his first workout, running as if every demon he’d vanquished in his time was chasing him all over again, and gaining. Maybe that was why he’d run until he’d thought his lungs might burst, his head might explode or his knees might give out beneath him.
Then he’d run more. And even when he’d exhausted himself all over again, even when he was standing in his own shower with his head bent toward the wall as if she’d bested him personally, it hadn’t helped.
The fact of the matter was that he had a taste of Valentina, and nothing else would do.
And what enraged him the most, he’d found—aside from the fact he hadn’t had her the way he’d wanted her—was that he’d let her think she’d tricked him all this time. That she would go back behind her fancy gates and her moats and whatever the hell else she had in that palace of hers that he’d looked up online and thought looked exactly like the sort of fairy tale he disdained, and she would believe that she’d played him for a fool.
Achilles thought that might actually eat him alive.
And now here she stood when he thought he’d lost her. At the bottom of his stairs, looking up at him, her eyes dark with some emotion he couldn’t begin to define.
But he didn’t want to define it. He didn’t want to talk about her feelings, and he’d die before he admitted his own, and what did any of that matter anyway? She was here and he was here, and a summer night was creeping in outside.
And the only thing he wanted to think about was sating himself on her at last.
At last and for as long as he could.
Achilles was hardly aware of moving down the stairs even as he did it.
One moment he was at the top, staring down at Valentina’s upturned face with her direct challenge ringing in him like a bell, and the next he was upon her. And she was so beautiful. So exquisitely, ruinously beautiful. He couldn’t seem to get past that. It was as if it wound around him and through him, changing him, making him new each time he beheld her.
He told himself he hated it, but he didn’t look away.
“There is no going back,” he told her sternly. “There will be no pretending this didn’t happen.”
Her smile was entirely too graceful and the look in her green eyes too merry by far. “Do you get that often?”
Achilles felt like a savage. An animal. Too much like that monster he kept down deep inside. And yet he didn’t have it in him to mind. He reached out and indulged himself at last while his blood hammered through his veins, running his fingers over that elegant cheekbone of hers, and that single freckle that marred the perfection of her face—and somehow made her all the more beautiful.
“So many jokes,” he murmured, not sure how much of the gruffness in his voice was need and how much was that thing like temper that held him fast and fierce. “Everything is so hilarious, suddenly. How much longer do you think you will be laughing, glikia mou?”
“I think that is up to you,” Valentina replied smoothly, and she was still smiling at him in that same way, graceful and knowing. “Is that why you require so much legal documentation before you take a woman to bed? Do you make them all laugh so much that you fear your reputation as a grumpy icon would take a hit if it got out?”
It was a mark of how far gone he was that he found that amusing. If anyone else had dreamed of saying such a thing to him, he would have lost his sense of humor completely.
He felt his mouth curve. “There is only one way to find out.”
And Achilles had no idea what she might do next. He wondered if that was what it was about her, if that was why this thirst for her never seemed to ebb. She was so very different from all the women he’d known before. She was completely unpredictable. He hardly knew, from one moment to the next, what she might do next.
It should have irritated him, he thought. But instead it only made him want her more.
Everything, it seemed, made him want her more. He hadn’t realized until now how pale and insubstantial his desires had been before. How little he’d wanted anything.
“There is something I must tell you.” She pulled her bottom lip between her teeth after she said that, a little breathlessly, and everything in him stilled.
This was it, he thought. And Achilles didn’t know if he was proud of her or sad, somehow, that this great charade was at an end. For surely that was what she planned to tell him. Surely she planned to come clean about who she really was.
And while there was a part of him that wanted to deny that what swirled between them was anything more than sex, simple and elemental, there was a far greater part of him that roared its approval that she should think it was right to identify herself before they went any further.
“You can tell me anything,” he told her, perhaps more fiercely than he should. “But I don’t know why you imagine I don’t already know.”
He was fascinated when her cheeks bloomed with that crisp, bright red that he liked a little too much. More each time he saw it, because he liked his princess a little fl
ustered. A little off balance.
But something in him turned over, some foreboding perhaps. Because he couldn’t quite imagine why it was that she should be embarrassed by the deception she’d practiced on him. He could think of many things he’d like her to feel for attempting to pull something like that over on him, and he had quite a few ideas about how she should pay for that, but embarrassment wasn’t quite it.
“I thought you might know,” she whispered. “I hope it doesn’t matter.”
“Everything matters or nothing does, glikia mou.”
He shifted so he was closer to her. He wanted to care about whatever it was she was about to tell him, but he found the demands of his body were far too loud and too imperative to ignore. He put his hands on her, curling his fingers over her delicate shoulders and then losing himself in their suppleness. And in the delicate line of her arms. And in the sweet feel of her bare skin beneath his palms as he ran them down from her shoulders to her wrists, then back again.
And he found he didn’t really care what she planned to confess to him. How could it matter when he was touching her like this?
“I do not require your confession,” he told her roughly. “I am not your priest.”
If anything, her cheeks flared brighter.
“I’m a virgin,” she blurted out, as if she had to force herself to say it.
For a moment, it was as if she’d struck him. As if she’d picked up one of the sculptures his interior designer had littered about his living room and clobbered him with it.
“I beg your pardon?”
But she was steadier then. “You heard me. I’m a virgin. I thought you knew.” She swallowed, visibly, but she didn’t look away from him. “Especially when I didn’t know how to kiss you.”
Achilles didn’t know what to do with that.
Or rather, he knew exactly what to do with it, but was afraid that if he tossed his head back and let himself go the way he wanted to—roaring out his primitive take on her completely unexpected confession to the rafters—it might terrify her.
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