by Kendrick, Sharon; Lawrence, Kim; Crews, Caitlin; Milburne, Melanie
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 fallen 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 heali
ng. 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 neighborhood, 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.
But he didn’t.
And in a moment she was at his back, and then she was sliding her arms around his waist with a familiarity that suggested she’d done it a thousand times before and knew how perfectly she would fit there. Then she pressed her face against the hollow of his spine.
And for a long moment she simply stood there like that, and Achilles felt his heart careen and clatter at his ribs. He was surprised that she couldn’t hear it—hell, he was surprised that the whole of Manhattan wasn’t alerted.
But all she did was stand there with her mouth pressed against his skin, as if she was holding him up, and through him the whole of the world.
Achilles knew that there was any number of ways to deal with this situation immediately. Effectively. No matter what name she called herself. He could call her out. He could ignore it altogether and simply send her away. He could let the darkness in him edge over into cruelty, so she would be the one to walk away.
But the simple truth was that he didn’t want to do any of them.
“I have some land,” he told her instead, and he couldn’t tell if he was appalled at himself or simply surprised. “Out in the West, where there’s nothing to see for acres and acres in all directions except the sky.”
“That sounds beautiful,” she murmured.
And every syllable was an exquisite pain, because he could feel her shape her words. He could feel her mouth as she spoke, right there against the flesh of his back. And he could have understood if it was a sexual thing. If that was what raged in him then. If it took him over and made him want to do nothing more than throw her down and claim her all over again. Sex, he understood. Sex, he could handle.
But it was much worse than that.
Because it didn’t feel like fire, it felt…sweet. The kind of sweetness that wrapped around him, crawling into every nook and cranny inside him he’d long ago thought he’d turned to ice. And then stayed there, blooming into something like heat, as if she could melt him that easily.
He was more than a little worried that she could.
That she already had.
“Sometimes a man wants to be able to walk for miles in any direction and see no one,” he heard himself say out loud, as if his mouth was no longer connected to the rest of him. “Not even himself.”
“Or perhaps especially not himself,” she said softly, her mouth against his skin having the same result as before.
Then he could feel her breathe, there behind him. There was a surprising amount of strength in the arms she still wrapped tight around his midsection. Her scent seemed to fill his head, a hint of lavender and something far softer that he knew was hers alone.
And the truth was that he wasn’t done. He had never been a casual man in the modern sense, preferring mistresses who understood his needs and could cater to them over longer periods of time to one-night stands and such flashes in the pan that brought him nothing but momentary satisfaction.
He had never been casual, but this… This was nothing but trouble.
He needed to send her away. He had to fire Natalie, make sure that Valentina left, and leave no possible opening for either one of them to ever come back. This needed to be over before it really started. Before he forgot that he was who he was for a very good reason.
Demetrius had been a drunk. He�
�d cried and apologized when he was sober, however rarely that occurred. But Achilles was the monster. He’d gone to that bar to kill his stepfather, and he’d planned the whole thing out in every detail, coldly and dispassionately. He still didn’t regret what he’d intended to do that night—but he knew perfectly well what that made him. And it was not a good man.
And that was all well and good as long as he kept the monster in him on ice, where it belonged. As long as he locked himself away, set apart.
It had never been an issue before.
He needed to get Valentina away from him, before he forgot himself completely.
“Pack your things,” he told her shortly.
He shifted so he could look down at her again, drawing her around to his front and taking in the kick of those wide green eyes and that mouth he had sampled again and again and again.
And he couldn’t do it.
He wanted her to know him, and even though that was the most treacherous thing of all, once it was in his head he couldn’t seem to let it go. He wanted her to know him, and that meant he needed her to trust him enough to tell who she was. And that would never happen if he sent her away right now the way he should have.
And he was so used to thinking of himself as a monster. Some part of him—a large part of him—took a kind of pride in that, if he was honest. He’d worked so hard on making that monster into an impenetrable wall of wealth and judgment, taste and power.
But it turned out that all it took was a deceitful princess to make him into a man.
“I’m taking you to Montana,” he told her gruffly, because he couldn’t seem to stop himself.
And doomed them both.
CHAPTER EIGHT
ONE WEEK PASSED, and then another, and the six weeks Valentina had agreed to take stretched out into seven, out on Achilles’s Montana ranch where the only thing on the horizon was the hint of the nearest mountain range.
His ranch was like a daydream, Valentina thought. Achilles was a rancher only in a distant sense, having hired qualified people to take care of the daily running of the place and turn its profit. Those things took place far away on some or other of his thousands of acres tucked up at the feet of the Rocky Mountains. They stayed in the sprawling ranch house, a sprawling nod toward log cabins and rustic ski lodges, the better to overlook the unspoiled land in all directions.
