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It was times like this that Natalie wished she had the sort of relationship with her mother that other people seemed to have with theirs. She’d like nothing more than to call Erica up and ask for some advice, or maybe just so she could feel soothed, somehow, by the fact of her mother’s existence. But that had never been the way her mother operated. Erica had liked Natalie best when she was a prop. The pretty little girl she could trot out when it suited her, to tug on a heartstring or to prove that she was maternal when, of course, she wasn’t. Not really. Not beyond the telling of the odd fairy tale with a grim ending, which Natalie had learned pretty early on was less for her than for her mother.
No wonder Natalie had lost herself in school. It didn’t matter where they moved. It didn’t matter what was going on in whatever place Erica was calling home that month. Natalie could always count on her studies. Whether she was behind the class or ahead of it when she showed up as the new kid, who cared? School always gave her a project of one sort or another. She’d viewed getting into college—on a full academic scholarship, of course, because Erica had laughed when Natalie had asked if there would be any parental contributions to her education and then launched into another long story about the evils of rich, selfish men—as her escape. College had been four years of an actual place to call home, at last. Plus classes. Basically nirvana, as far as Natalie had been concerned.
But that kind of overachieving behavior, while perfect for her eventual career as the type A assistant to the most picky and overbearing man alive, had not exactly helped Natalie make any friends. She’d always been the new kid in whatever school she’d ended up in. Then, while she wasn’t the new kid at college, she was so used to her usual routine of studying constantly that she hadn’t known how to stop it. She and her freshman-year roommate had gotten along well enough and they’d even had lunch a few times over the next few years, all very pleasant, but it hadn’t ever bloomed into the sort of friendships Natalie knew other women had. She’d had a boyfriend her junior year, which had been more exciting in theory than in fact. And then she’d started working for Mr. Casilieris after graduation and there hadn’t been time for anything but him, ever again.
All of this had been perfectly fine with her yesterday. She’d been proud of her achievements and the fact no one had helped her in equal measure. Well. She’d wanted to quit her job, but surely that was a reasonable response to five years of Achilles Casilieris. And today, sitting on the cushioned bench at the foot of a princess’s bed with a medieval castle looming all around her like an accusation, it was clear to Natalie that really, she could have used someone to call.
Anyone except the person she knew she had to call, that was.
But Natalie hadn’t dealt with a terrifying man like Achilles Casilieris for years by being a coward, no matter how tempting it was to become one now. She blew out a breath, then dialed her own mobile number. She knew that the flight she should have been on right now, en route to New York City, hadn’t landed yet. She even knew that all the calls she’d set up would likely have ended—but she wasn’t surprised when Valentina didn’t answer. Mr. Casilieris was likely tearing strips out of the princess’s hide, because no matter how she’d handled the situation, it wouldn’t have been to his satisfaction. She was a bit surprised that Valentina hadn’t confessed all and that the Casilieris plane wasn’t landing in Murin right now to discharge her—and so Achilles Casilieris could fire Natalie in person for deceiving him.
Really, it hadn’t been nice of Natalie to let Valentina take her place. She’d known what the other woman was walking into. God help the poor princess if she failed to provide Mr. Casilieris with what he wanted three seconds before he knew he wanted it. When she’d started, Achilles Casilieris had been famous for cycling through assistants in a matter of hours, sometimes, depending on the foulness of his mood. Everyone was an idiot, as he was all too happy to make clear, especially the people he paid to assist him. Everyone fell short of his impossibly high standards. If he thought Natalie had lost her ability to do her job the way he liked it done, he’d fire her without a second thought. She’d never been in any doubt about that.
Which meant that really, she should have been a little more concerned about the job Valentina was almost certainly botching up right this very minute, somewhere high above the Atlantic Ocean.
But she found she couldn’t work up the usual worry over that eventuality. If he fired her, he fired her. It saved her having to quit, didn’t it? And when she tried to stress out about losing the position she’d worked so hard to keep all these years, all she could think of instead was the fact he hadn’t known Valentina wasn’t her in that bathroom. That despite spending more time with Natalie than with his last ten mistresses combined, he’d failed to recognize her. And meanwhile, Rodolfo had looked ather.As if he wanted to climb inside of her. As if he could never, ever get enough. And that mouth of his was sculpted and wicked, knowing and hot...
She heard her own voice asking for a message and a phone number on the other end of the line, but she didn’t leave a voice mail at the beep. What would she say? Where would she start? Would she jump right into the kissing and claims that she’d sleep her way around Europe in payback for any extramarital adventures Prince Rodolfo might have? She could hardly believe she’d done either of those things, much less think of how best to tell someone else that she had. Particularly when the someone else was the woman who was expected to marry the man in question.
The fact was, she had no idea what Valentina expected from her arranged marriage. A dry tone in a bathroom to a stranger when discussing her fiancé wasn’t exactly a peek into the woman’s thoughts on what happily-ever-after looked like for her. Maybe she’d been fine with the expected cheating, like half of Europe seemed to be. Maybe she hadn’t cared either way. Natalie had no way to tell.
But it didn’t matter what Valentina’s position on any of this was. It didn’t make Natalie any happier with herself that she was hoping, somewhere in there, that Valentina might give her blessing. Or her forgiveness, anyway. And it wasn’t as if she could blame the Prince, either. Prince Rodolfo thought shewasValentina. His behavior was completely acceptable. He’d had every reason to believe he was with his betrothed.
Natalie was the one who’d let another woman’s fiancé kiss her. So thoroughly her breasts still ached and her lips felt vulnerable and she felt a fist of pure need clench tight between her legs at the memory. Natalie was the one who’d kissed him back.
There was no prettying that up.Thatwas who she was.
Natalie put the phone aside, then jumped when it beeped at her. She snatched it back up, hoping it was Valentina so she could at least unburden her conscience—another indication that she was not really the good person she’d always imagined herself to be, she was well aware—but it was a reminder from the princess’s calendar, telling her she had a dinner with the king in a few hours.
She wanted to curl back up on that chaise and cry for a while. Perhaps a week or so. She wanted to look around for the computer she was sure the princess must have secreted away somewhere and see if she could track her actual life as it occurred across the planet. She wanted to rewind to London and her decision to do this insane thing in the first place and then think better of pulling such a stunt.
But she swallowed hard as she looked down at that reminder on the mobile screen.The king.
All those things she didn’t want to think about flooded her then.
If Erica had shortened her name... If all that moving around had been lesswanderer’s soul and moreon the run...If there was really, truly only one reasonable explanation as to how a royal princess and a glorified secretary could pass for each other and it had nothing to do with that tired old saying thateveryone had a twin somewhere...
If all of those things were true, then the King of Murin—with whom she was about to have a meal—wasn’t simply the monarch of this tiny little island kingdom, well-known for his vast personal wealth, many rumors of secret affairs with the world’s most glamorous women and the glittering, celebrity-studded life he lived as the head of a tiny, wealthy country renowned for its yacht-friendly harbors and friendly taxes.
He was also very likely her father.
And that was the lure, it turned out, that Natalie couldn’t resist.
