The Billionaire's Secret Princess

by Caitlin Crews

  She exploded. She cried out and she shook, the pleasure so intense she didn’t understand how anyone could live through it, but still she shook some more. She shook until she thought she’d been made new. She shook until she didn’t care either way.

  And when she knew her own name again, Achilles was crawling his way over her. He no longer wore those loose black trousers of his, and there was a look of unmistakably savage male triumph stamped deep on his face.

  “Beautiful,” he murmured. He was on his elbows over her, pressing himself against her. His wall of a chest. That fascinatingly hard part of him below. He studied her flushed face as if he’d never seen her before. “Am I the only man who has ever tasted you?”

  Valentina couldn’t speak. She could only nod, mute and still shaking.

  She wondered if she might shake like this forever, and she couldn’t seem to work herself up into minding if she did.

  “Only mine,” he said with a certain quiet ferocity that only made that shaking inside her worse. Or better. “You are only and ever mine.”

  And that was when she felt him. That broad smooth head of his hardest part, nudging against the place where she was nothing but soft, wet heat and longing.

  She sucked in a breath, and Achilles took her face in his hands.

  “Mine,” he said again, in the same intense way.

  It sounded a great deal like a vow.

  Valentina’s head was spinning.

  “Yours,” she whispered, and he grinned then, too fierce and too elemental.

  He shifted his hips and moved a little farther against her, pressing himself against that entrance again, and Valentina found her hands in fists against his chest.

  “Will it hurt?” she asked before she knew she meant to speak. “Or is that just something they say in books, to make it seem more...”

  But she couldn’t quite finish that sentence. And Achilles’s gaze was too dark and too bright at once, so intense she couldn’t seem to stop shaking or spinning. And she couldn’t bring herself to look away.

  “It might hurt.” He kept his attention on her, fierce and focused. “It might not. But either way, it will be over in a moment.”

  “Oh.” Valentina blinked, and tried to wrap her head around that. “I suppose quick is good.”

  Achilles let out a bark of laughter, and she wasn’t sure if she was startled or something like delighted to hear it. Both, perhaps.

  And it made a knot she hadn’t known was hardening inside her chest ease.

  “I cannot tell if you are good for me or you will kill me,” he told her then. He moved one hand, smoothing her hair back from her temple. “It will only hurt, or feel awkward, for a moment. I promise. As for the rest...”

  And the smile he aimed at her then was, Valentina thought, the best thing she’d ever seen. It poured into her and through her, as bright and thick as honey, changing everything. Even the way she shook for him. Even the way she breathed.

  “The rest will not be quick,” Achilles told her, still braced there above her. “It will not be rushed, it will be thorough. Extremely thorough, as you know I am in all things.”

  She felt her breath stutter. But he was still going.

  “And when I am done, glikia mou, we will do it again. And again. Until we get it right. Because I am nothing if not dedicated to my craft. Do you understand me?”

  “I understand,” Valentina said faintly, because it was hard to keep her voice even when the world was lost somewhere in his commanding gaze. “I guess that’s—”

  But that was when he thrust his way inside her. It was a quick, hard thrust, slick and hot and overwhelming, until he was lodged deep inside her.

  Inside her.

  It was too much. It didn’t hurt, necessarily, but it didn’t feel good, either. It felt...like everything. Too much of everything.

  Too hard. Too long. Too thick and too deep and too—

  “Breathe,” Achilles ordered her.

  But Valentina didn’t see how that was possible. How could she breathe when there was a person inside her? Even if that person was Achilles.

  Especially when that person was Achilles.

  Still, she did as he bade her, because he was inside her and she was beneath him and splayed open and there was nothing else to do. She breathed in.

  She let it out, and then she breathed in again. And then again.

  And with each breath, she felt less overwhelmed and more...

  Something else.

  Achilles didn’t seem particularly worried. He held himself over her, one hand tangled in her hair as the other made its way down the front of her body. Lazily. Easily. He played with her breasts. He set his mouth against the crook of her neck where it met her shoulder, teasing her with his tongue and his teeth.

  And still she breathed the way he’d told her to do. In. Out.

  Over and over, until she couldn’t remember that she’d balked at his smooth, intense entry. That she’d ever had a problem at all with hard and thick and long and deep.

  Until all she could feel was fire.

  Experimentally, she moved her hips, trying to get a better feel for how wide he was. How deep. How far inside her own body. Sensation soared through her every time she moved, so she did it again. And again.

  She took a little more of him in, then rocked around a little bit, playing. Testing. Seeing how much of him she could take and if it would continue to send licks of fire coursing through her every time she shifted position, no matter how minutely.

  It did.

  And when she started to shift against him, restlessly, as if she couldn’t help herself, Achilles lifted his head and grinned down her, something wild and dark and wholly untamed in his eyes.

  It thrilled her.

  “Please...” Valentina whispered.

  And he knew. He always knew. Exactly what she needed, right when she needed it.

  Because that was when he began to move.

  He taught her about pace. He taught her depth and rhythm. She’d thought she was playing with fire, but Achilles taught her that she had no idea what real fire was.

  And he kept his word.

  He was very, very thorough.

  When she began to thrash, he dropped down to get closer. He gathered her in his arms, holding her as he thrust inside her, again and again. He made her his with every deep, possessive stroke. He made her want. He made her need.

  He made her cry out his name, again and again, until it sounded to Valentina like some kind of song.

  This time, when the fire took her, she thought it might have torn her into far too many pieces for her to ever recover. He lost his rhythm then, hammering into her hard and wild, as if he was as wrecked as she was—

  And she held him to her as he tumbled off that edge behind her, and straight on into bliss.

  * * *

  Achilles had made a terrible mistake, and he was not a man who made mistakes. He didn’t believe in them. He believed in opportunities—it was how he’d built this life of his. Something that had always made him proud.

  But this was a mistake. She was a mistake. He couldn’t kid himself. He had never wanted somebody the way that he wanted Valentina. It had made him sloppy. He had concentrated entirely too much on her. Her pleasure. Her innocence, as he relieved her of it.

  He hadn’t thought to guard himself against her.

  He never had to guard himself against anyone. Not since he’d been a child. He’d rather fallen out of the habit—and that notion galled him.

  Achilles rolled to the side of the bed and sat there, running a hand over the top of his head. He could hear Valentina behind him, breathing. And he knew what he’d see if he looked. She slept hard, his princess. After he’d finished with her the last time, he’d thought she might have f
allen asleep before he’d even pulled out of her. He’d held the weight of her, sprawled there on top of him, her breath heavy and her eyes shut tight so he had no choice but to marvel at the length of her eyelashes.

  And it had taken him much longer than it should have to shift her off him, lay her beside him and cover her with the sheets. Carefully.

  It was that unexpected urge to protect her—from himself, he supposed, or perhaps from the uncertain elements of his ruthlessly climate-controlled bedroom—that had made him go cold. Something a little too close to the sort of panic he did not permit himself to feel, ever, had pressed down on him then. And no amount of controlling his breath or ordering himself to stop the madness seemed to help.

  He rubbed a palm over his chest now, because his heart was beating much too fast, the damned traitor.

  He had wanted her too much, and this was the price. This treacherous place he found himself in now, that he hardly recognized. It hadn’t occurred to him to guard himself against a virgin no matter her pedigree, and this was the result.

  He felt things.

  He felt things—and Achilles Casilieris did not feel. He refused to feel. The intensity of sex was physical, nothing more. Never more than that, no matter the woman and no matter the situation and no matter how she might beg or plead—

  Not that Valentina had done anything of the sort.

  He stood from the bed then, because he didn’t want to. He wanted to roll back toward her, pull her close again. He bit off a filthy Greek curse, beneath his breath, then moved restlessly across the floor toward the windows.

  Manhattan mocked him. It lay there before him, glittering and sparkling madly, and the reason he had a penthouse in this most brash and American of cities was because he liked to stand high above the sprawl of it as if he was some kind of king. Every time he came here he was reminded how far he’d come from his painful childhood. And every time he stayed in this very room, he looked out over all the wealth and opportunity and untethered American dreams that made this city what it was and knew that he had succeeded.

  Beyond even the wildest dreams the younger version of Achilles could have conjured up for himself.

  But tonight, all he could think about was a copper-haired innocent who had yet to tell him her real name, who had given him all of herself with that sweet enthusiasm that had nearly killed him, and left him...yearning.

  And Achilles did not yearn.

  He did not yearn and he did not let himself want things he could not have, and he absolutely, positively did not indulge in pointless nostalgia for things he did not miss. But as he stood at his huge windows overlooking Manhattan, the city that seemed to laugh at his predicament tonight instead of welcoming him the way it usually did, he found himself tossed back to the part of his past he only ever used as a weapon.

  Against himself.

  He hardly remembered his mother. Or perhaps he had beaten that sentimentality out of himself years ago. Either way, he knew that he had been seven or so when she had died, but it wasn’t as if her presence earlier had done anything to save her children from the brute of a man whom she had married. Demetrius had been a thick, coarse sort of man, who had worked with his hands down on the docks and had thought that gave him the right to use those hands however he wished. Achilles didn’t think there was anything the man had not beaten. His drinking buddies. His wife. The family dog. Achilles and his three young stepsiblings, over and over again. The fact that Achilles had not been Demetrius’s own son, but the son of his mother’s previous husband who had gone off to war and never returned, had perhaps made the beatings Demetrius doled out harsher—but it wasn’t as if he spared his own flesh and blood from his fists.

  After Achilles’s mother had died under suspicious circumstances no one had ever bothered to investigate in a part of town where nothing good ever happened anyway, things went from bad to worse. Demetrius’s temper worsened. He’d taken it out on the little ones, alternately kicking them around and then leaving them for seven-year-old Achilles to raise.

  This had always been destined to end in failure, if not outright despair. Achilles understood that now, as an adult looking back. He understood it analytically and theoretically and, if asked, would have said exactly that. He’d been a child himself, etcetera. But where it counted, deep in those terrible feelings he’d turned off when he had still been a boy, Achilles would never understand. He carried the weight of those lives with him, wherever he went. No matter what he built, no matter what he owned, no matter how many times he won this or that corporate battle—none of that paid the ransom he owed on three lives he could never bring back.

  They had been his responsibility, and he had failed. That beat in him like a tattoo. It marked him. It was the truth of him.

  When it was all over—after Achilles had failed to notice a gas leak and had woken up only when Demetrius had returned from one of his drinking binges three days later to find the little ones dead and Achilles listless and nearly unresponsive himself—everything had changed. That was the cut-and-dried version of events, and it was accurate enough. What it didn’t cover was the guilt, the shame that had eaten Achilles alive. Or what it had been like to watch his siblings’ tiny bodies carried out by police, or how it had felt to stand at their graves and know that he could have prevented this if he’d been stronger. Bigger. Better.

  Achilles had been sent to live with a distant aunt who had never bothered to pretend that she planned to give him anything but a roof over his head, and nothing more. In retrospect, that, too, had been a gift. He hadn’t had to bother with any healing. He hadn’t had to examine what had happened and try to come to terms with it. No one had cared about him or his grief at all.

  And so Achilles had waited. He had plotted. He had taken everything that resembled a feeling, shoved it down as deep inside him as it would go, and made it over into hate. It had taken him ten years to get strong enough. To hunt Demetrius down in a sketchy bar in the same bad neighborhood where he’d brutalized Achilles’s mother, beaten his own children and left Achilles responsible for what had happened to them.

  And that whole long decade, Achilles had told himself that it was an extermination. That he could walk up to this man who had loomed so large over the whole of his childhood and simply rid the world of his unsavory presence. Demetrius did not deserve to live. There was no doubt about that, no shred of uncertainty anywhere in Achilles’s soul. Not while Achilles’s mother and his stepsiblings were dead.

  He’d staked out his stepfather’s favorite dive bar, and this one in the sense that it was repellant, not attractive to rich hipsters from affluent neighborhoods. He’d watched a ramshackle, much grayer and more frail version of the stepfather roaring in his head stumble out into the street. And he’d been ready.

  He’d gone up to Demetrius out in the dark, cold night, there in a part of the city where no one would ever dream of interfering in a scuffle on the street lest they find themselves shanked. He’d let the rage wash over him, let the sweet taint of revenge ignite in his veins. He’d expected to feel triumph and satisfaction after all these years and all he’d done to make himself strong enough to take this man down—but what he hadn’t reckoned with was that the drunken old man wouldn’t recognize him.

  Demetrius hadn’t known who he was.

  And that meant that Achilles had been out there in the street, ready to beat down a defenseless old drunk who smelled of watered-down whiskey and a wasted life.

  He hadn’t done it. It wasn’t worth it. He might have happily taken down the violent, abusive behemoth who’d terrorized him at seven, but he’d been too big himself at seventeen to find any honor in felling someone so vastly inferior to him in every way.

  Especially since Demetrius hadn’t the slightest idea who he’d been.

  And Achilles had vowed to himself then and there that the night he stood in the street in his old neighborho
od, afraid of nothing save the darkness inside him, would be the absolutely last time he let feelings rule him.

  Because he had wasted years. Years that could have been spent far more wisely than planning out the extermination of an old, broken man who didn’t deserve to have Achilles as an enemy. He’d walked away from Demetrius and his own squalid past and he’d never gone back.

  His philosophy had served him well since. It had led him across the years, always cold and forever calculating his next, best move. Achilles was never swayed by emotion any longer, for good or ill. He never allowed it any power over him whatsoever. It had made him great, he’d often thought. It had made him who he was.

  And yet Princess Valentina had somehow reached deep inside him, deep into a place that should have been black and cold and nothing but ice, and lit him on fire all over again.

  “Are you brooding?” a soft voice asked from behind him, scratchy with sleep. Or with not enough sleep. “I knew I would do something wrong.”

  But she didn’t sound insecure. Not in the least. She sounded warm, well sated. She sounded like his. She sounded like exactly who she was: the only daughter of one of Europe’s last remaining powerhouse kings and the only woman Achilles had ever met who could turn him inside out.

  And maybe that was what did it. The suddenly unbearable fact that she was still lying to him. He had this burning thing eating him alive from the inside out, he was cracking apart at the foundations, and she was still lying to him.

  She was in his bed, teasing him in that way of hers that no one else would ever dare, and yet she lied to him. Every moment was a lie, even and especially this one. Every single moment she didn’t tell him the truth about who she was and what she was doing here was more than a lie. More than a simple deception.

  He was beginning to feel it as a betrayal.

  “I do not brood,” he said, and he could hear the gruffness in his own voice.

  He heard her shift on the bed, and then he heard the sound of her feet against his floor. And he should have turned before she reached him, he knew that. He should have faced her and kept her away from him, especially when it was so dark outside and there was still so much left of the night—and he had clearly let it get to him.