The Prince's Nine-Month Scandal

by Caitlin Crews

  And in the meantime, she still had to live Valentina’s life.

  That meant endless rounds of charity engagements. It meant approximately nine million teas with the ladies of this or that charity and long, sad walks through hospitals filled with ill children. It was being expected to “say a few words” at the drop of a hat, and always in a way that would support the crown while offending no one. It meant dinners with King Geoffrey, night after night, that she gradually realized were his version of preparing Valentina for the role she would be expected to fill once she married and was the next Queen of Tissely. It also meant assisting in the planning of the impending royal wedding, which loomed larger with every day that passed.

  Every call you don’t answer is another questionable decision I’m making for YOUR wedding, she texted Valentina after a particularly long afternoon of menu selecting. I hope you enjoy the taste of tongue and tripe. Both will feature prominently.

  But the princess didn’t respond.

  Which meant Natalie had no choice but to carry on playing Valentina. She supposed she could fly to London and see if she was there, but the constant stream of photographs screeching about her fairy-tale love affair in the papers made her think that turning up at Achilles Casilieris’s property this close to Valentina’s wedding would make everything worse. It would cause too much commotion.

  It would make certain that when they finally did switch, Natalie wouldn’t be able to seamlessly slip back into her old life.

  Meanwhile, everything was as Rodolfo had predicted. The public loved them, and the papers dutifully recycled the same pictures from Rome again and again. Sometimes there were separate shots of them going about their business in their separate countries, and Natalie was more than a little embarrassed by the fact she pored over the pictures of Rodolfo like any obsessed tabloid reader. One day the papers were filled with stories about how daredevil, playboy Rodolfo encouraged Valentina to access her playful side, bringing something real and rare to her stitched-up, dutiful life. The next day the same papers were crowing about the way the proper princess had brought noted love cheat Rodolfo to heel, presumably with the sheer force of her goodness. It didn’t matter what story the papers told; the people ate it up. They loved it.

  Natalie, meanwhile, was miserable. And alone.

  Everything was in ruins all around her—it was just too bad her body didn’t know it.

  Because it wanted him. So badly it kept her up at night. And made her hoard her vivid, searing memories of Rome and play them out again and again in her head. In her daydreams. And all night long, when she couldn’t sleep and when she dreamed.

  She was terribly afraid that it was all she would ever have of him.

  The longer she didn’t hear from Rodolfo or see him outside of the tabloids, the more Natalie was terrified that she’d destroyed Valentina’s marriage. Her future. Her destiny. That come the wedding day, there would be no groom at the altar. Only a princess bride and the wreck Natalie had made of her life.

  Because she was a twin that shouldn’t exist. A twin that couldn’t exist, if Rodolfo had been right in Rome.

  Do you suppose the king happily looked the other way while Queen Frederica swanned off with a stolen baby? he’d asked, and God help her, but she could still see the contempt on his face. It still ricocheted inside of her, scarring wherever it touched.

  And it was still a very good question.

  One afternoon she locked herself in Valentina’s bedroom, pulled out her mobile and punched in her mother’s number from memory.

  Natalie and her mother weren’t close. They never had been, and while Natalie had periodically wondered what it might be like to have the mother/daughter bond so many people seemed to enjoy, she’d secretly believed she was better off without it. Still, she and Erica were civil. Cordial, even. They might not get together for holidays or go off on trips together or talk on the phone every Sunday, but every now and then, when they were in the same city and they were both free, they had dinner. Natalie wasn’t sure if that would make pushing Erica for answers harder or easier.

  “Mother,” she said matter-of-factly after the perfunctory greetings—all with an undercurrent of some surprise because they’d only just seen each other a few months back in Barcelona and Natalie wasn’t calling from her usual telephone number—were done. “I have to ask you a very serious question.”

  “Must you always be so intense, Natalie?” her mother asked with a sigh that only made her sound chillier, despite the fact she’d said she was in the Caribbean. “It’s certainly not your most attractive trait.”

  “I want the truth,” Natalie forged on, not letting her mother’s complaint distract her. Since it was hardly anything new. “Not some vague story about the evils of some or other Prince Charming.” Her mother didn’t say anything to that, which was unusual. So unusual that it made a little trickle of unease trail down Natalie’s back...but what did she have to fear? She already knew the answer. She’d just been pretending, all this time, that she didn’t. “Is your real name Frederica de Burgh, Mother? And were you by chance ever married to King Geoffrey of Murin?”

  She was sitting on the chaise in the princess’s spacious bedroom with the laptop open in front of her, looking at pictures of a wan, very unsmiling woman, pale with copper hair and green eyes, who had once been the Queen of Murin. Relatively few pictures existed of the notorious queen, but it really only took one. The woman Natalie knew as Erica Monette was always tanned. She had dark black hair in a pixie cut, brown eyes and was almost never without her chilly smile. But how hard could it be, for a woman who didn’t want to be found or connected to her old self, to cut and dye her hair, get some sun and pop in color contacts?

  “Why would you ask such a thing?” her mother asked.

  Which was neither an answer nor an immediate refutation of her theory, Natalie noted. Though she thought her mother sounded a little...winded.

  She cleared her throat. “I am sitting in the royal palace in Murin right now.”

  “Well,” Erica said after a moment bled out into several. She cleared her throat, and Natalie thought that was more telling than anything else, given that her mother didn’t usually do emotions. “I suppose there’s no use in telling you not to go turning over rocks like that. It can only lead to more trouble than it’s worth.”

  “Explain this to me,” Natalie whispered, because it was that or shout, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to give in to that urge. She wasn’t sure she’d stop. “Explain my life to me. How could you possibly have taken off and gone on to live a regular life with one of the King’s children?”

  “I told him you died,” her mother said matter-of-factly. So matter-of-factly, it cut Natalie in half. She couldn’t even gasp. She could only hold the phone to her ear and sit there, no longer the same person she’d been before this phone call. Her mother took that as a cue to keep going, once again sounding as unruffled as she always did. “My favorite maid took you and hid you until I could leave Murin. I told your father one of the twins was stillborn and he believed it. Why wouldn’t he? And of course, we’d hid the fact that I was expecting twins from the press, because Geoffrey’s mother was still alive then and she thought it was unseemly. It made sense to hide that there’d been a loss, too. Geoffrey never liked to show a weakness. Even if it was mine.”

  A thousand questions tracked through Natalie’s head then. And with each one, a different emotion, each one buffeting her like its own separate hurricane. But she couldn’t indulge in a storm. Not now. Not when she had a charity event to attend in a few short hours and a speech to give about its importance. Not when she had to play the princess and try her best to keep what was left of Valentina’s life from imploding.

  Instead, she asked the only question she could.

  “Why?”

  Erica sighed. And it occurred to Natalie that it wasn’t just that she wasn’t close to her mother, but that she had no idea who her mother was. And likely never would. “I wanted something tha
t was mine. And you were, for a time, I suppose. But then you grew up.”

  Natalie rubbed a trembling hand over her face.

  “Didn’t it occur to you that I would find out?” she managed to ask.

  “I didn’t see how,” Erica said after a moment. “You were such a bookish, serious child. So intense and studious. It wasn’t as if you paid any attention to distant European celebrities. And of course, it never occurred to me that there was any possibility you’d run into any member of the Murinese royal family.”

  “And yet I did,” Natalie pushed out through the constriction in her throat. “In a bathroom in London. You can imagine my surprise. Or perhaps you can’t.”

  “Oh, Natalie.” And she thought for a moment that her mother would apologize. That she would try, however inadequately, to make up for what she’d done. But this was Erica. “Always so intense.”

  There wasn’t much to say after that. Or there was, of course—but Natalie was too stunned and Erica was too, well, Erica to get into it.

  After the call was over, Natalie sat curled up in that chaise and stared off into space for a long time. She tried to put all the pieces together, but what she kept coming back to was that her mother was never going to change. She was never going to be the person Natalie wanted her to be, whether Natalie was a princess or a secretary. None of that mattered, because it was Erica who had trouble figuring out how to be a mother.

  And in the meantime, Natalie really, truly was a princess, after all. Valentina’s twin with every right to be in this castle. It was finally confirmed.

  And Rodolfo still isn’t yours, a small voice inside her whispered. He never will be, even if he stops hating you tomorrow. Even if he shows up for his wedding, it won’t be to marry you.

  She let out a long, hard breath. And then she sat up.

  It took a swipe of her finger to bring up the string of texts Valentina still hadn’t answered.

  It turns out we really are sisters, she typed. Maybe you already suspected as much, but I was in denial. So I asked our mother directly. I’ll tell you that story if and when I see you again.

  She sent that and paused, lifting a hand to rub at the faint, stubborn headache that wouldn’t go away no matter how much water she drank or how much sleep she got, which never felt at all like enough.

  I don’t know when that will be, because you’ve fallen off the face of the planet and believe me, I know how hard it is to locate Achilles Casilieris when he doesn’t wish to be found. But if you don’t show up soon, I’m going to marry your husband and I didn’t sign up to pretend to be you for the rest of my life. I agreed to six weeks and it’s nearly been that.

  She waited for long moments, willing the other woman to text back. To give her some clue about...anything. To remind her that she wasn’t alone in this madness despite how often and how deeply she felt she was.

  If you’re not careful, you’ll be Natalie Monette forever. Nobody wants that.

  But there was nothing.

  So Natalie did the only thing she could do. She got to her feet, ignored her headache and that dragging exhaustion that had been tugging at her for over a week now, and went out to play Valentina.

  Again.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A FEW SHORT hours before the wedding, Rodolfo strode through the castle looking for his princess bride, because the things he wanted to say to her needed to be said in person.

  He’d followed one servant and bribed another, and that was how he finally found his way to the princess’s private rooms. He nodded briskly to the attendants who gaped at him when he entered, and then he strode deeper into her suite as if he knew where he was headed. He passed an empty media center and an office, a dining area and a cheerful salon, and then pushed his way through yet another door to find himself in her bedroom at last.

  To find Valentina herself sitting on the end of the grand four-poster bed that dominated the space as if she’d been waiting for him.

  She was not dressed in her wedding clothes. In fact, she was wearing the very antithesis of wedding clothes: a pair of very skinny jeans, ballet flats and a slouchy sort of T-shirt. There was an apricot-colored scarf wrapped around her neck several times, her hair was piled haphazardly on the top of her head and she’d anchored the great copper mess of it with a pair of oversize sunglasses. He stopped as the door shut behind him and could do nothing but stare at her.

  This was the sort of outfit a woman wore to wander down to a café for a few hours. It was not, by any possible definition, an appropriate bridal ensemble for a woman who was due to make her way down the aisle of a cathedral to take part in a royal wedding.

  “You appear to be somewhat underdressed for the wedding,” he pointed out, aware he sounded more than a little gruff. Deadly, even. “Excuse me. I mean our wedding.”

  There was something deeply infuriating about the bland way she sat there and did nothing at all but stare back at him. As if she was deliberately slipping back into that old way she’d acted around him. As if he’d managed to push her too far away from him for her to ever come back and this was the only way she could think to show it.

  But Rodolfo was finished feeling sorry for himself. He was finished living down to expectations, including his own. He was no ghost, in his life or anyone else’s. After their conversation in Tissely, Ferdinand had appointed Rodolfo to his cabinet. He’d called it a wedding gift, but Rodolfo knew what it was: a new beginning. If he could manage it with his father after all these years and all the pain they’d doled out to each other, this had to be easier.

  He’d convinced himself that it had to be.

  “I am sorry, princess,” he said, because that was where it needed to start, and it didn’t seem to matter that he couldn’t recall the last time he’d said those words. It was Valentina, so they flowed. Because he meant them with every part of himself. “You must know that above all else.”

  She straightened on the bed, though her gaze flicked away from his as she did. It seemed to take her a long time to look back at him.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I am sorry,” he said again. There was too much in his head, then. Felipe. His father. Even his mother, who had refused to interrupt her solitude for a wedding, and no matter that it was the only wedding a child of hers would ever have. She’d been immovable. He took another step toward Valentina, then stopped, opening up his hands at his sides. “I spent so long angrily not being my brother that I think I forgot how to be me. Until you. You challenged me. You stood up to me. You made me want to be a better man.”

  He heard what he assumed were her wedding attendants in the next room, but Valentina only regarded him, her green eyes almost supernaturally calm. So calm he wondered if perhaps she’d taken something to settle her nerves. But he forgot that when she smiled, serene and easy, and settled back on the bed.

  “Go on,” she murmured, with a regal little nod.

  “In my head, you were perfect,” he told her, drifting another step or so in her direction. “I thought that if I could win you, I could fix my life. I could make my father treat me with respect. I could clean up my reputation. I could make myself the Prince I always wanted to be, but couldn’t, because I wasn’t my brother and never could be.” He shook his head. “And then at the first hint that you weren’t exactly who I wanted you to be, I lost it. If you weren’t perfect, then how could you save me?”

  That was what it was, he understood. It had taken him too long to recognize it. Why else would he have been so furious with her? So deeply, personally wounded? He was an adult man who risked death for amusement. Who was he to judge the games other people played? Normally, he wouldn’t. But then, he’d spent his whole life pretending to be normal. Pretending he wasn’t looking for someone to save him. Fix him. Grant him peace.

  No wonder he’d been destroyed by the idea that the only person who’d ever seemed the least bit capable of doing that had been deliberately deceiving him.

  “I don’t need you to save me,”
he told her now. “I believe you already have. I want you to marry me.”

  Again, the sounds of her staff while again, she only watched him with no apparent reaction. He told herself he’d earned her distrust. He made himself keep going.

  “I want to love you and enjoy you and taste you, everywhere. I do not want a grim march through our contractual responsibilities for the benefit of a fickle press. I want no heir and spare, I want to have babies. I want to find out what our life is like when neither one of us is pretending anything. We can do that, princess, can we not?”

  She only gazed back at him, a faint smile flirting with the edge of her lips. Then she sat up, folding her hands very nicely, very neatly in her lap.

  “I’m moved by all of this, of course,” she said in a voice that made it sound as if she wasn’t the least bit moved. It rubbed at him, making all the raw places inside him...ache. But he told himself to stand up straight and take it like a man. He’d earned it. Which wasn’t to say he wouldn’t fight for her, of course. No matter what she said. Even if she was who he had to fight. “But you think I’m a raving madwoman, do you not?”

  And that was the crux of it. There was what he knew was possible, and there was Valentina. And if this was what Rodolfo had to do to have her, he was willing to do it. Because he didn’t want their marriage to be like his parents’. The fake smiles and churning fury beneath it. The bitterness that had filled the spaces between them. The sharp silences and the barbed comments.

  He didn’t want any of that, so brittle and empty. He wanted to live.

  After all this time being barely alive when he hadn’t felt he deserved to be, when everyone thought he should have died in Felipe’s place and he’d agreed, Rodolfo wanted to live.

  “I do not know how to trust anyone,” he told her now, holding her gaze with his, “but I want to trust you. I want to be the man you see when you look at me. If that means you want me to believe that there are two of you, I will accept that.” His voice was quiet, but he meant every word. “I will try.”