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Tonight, however, it felt like a rebuke.
Her body didn’t want silk, it wanted Rodolfo.
She would have given anything she had to go back in time and keep herself from making that confession. To accept that of course he would call her by the wrong name and find a way to make her peace with it. Her mind spun out into one searing fantasy after another about how the night would have gone if only she’d kept her mouth shut.
But that was the trouble, wasn’t it? She’d waited too long to tell him the truth, if she was going to. And she never should have allowed him to touch her while he thought she was Valentina. Not back in the palace. Certainly not tonight. She should have kept her distance from him entirely.
Because no matter what her traitorous heart insisted, even now, he wasn’t hers. He could never be hers. The ring on her finger belonged to another woman and so did he. It didn’t matter that Valentina had given her blessing, whatever that meant in the form of a breezy text. Natalie had never wanted to be the sort of woman who took another woman’s man, no matter the circumstances. She’d spent her whole childhood watching her mother flit from one lover to the next, knowing full well that many of the men Erica juggled had been married already. Natalie always vowed that she was not going to be one of those women who pretended they didn’t know when a man was already committed elsewhere. In this case, she’d known going in and she’d still ended up here.
How many more ways was she going to betray herself?
How many more lives was she going to ruin besides her own?
Natalie looked around the achingly gorgeous room, aware of every last detail that made it the perfect room for a princess, from the soaring canopy over her high, proud bed to the deep Persian rugs at her feet. The epic sweep of the drapery at each window and the stunning view of Rome on the other side of the glass. The artistry in every carved leg of each of the chairs placedjust soat different points around the chamber.She looked down at her own body, still warm and pink from her bath and barely covered in a flowy, bright blue silk that cascaded lazily from two spaghetti straps at her shoulders. Her manicure and pedicure were perfect. Her skin was as soft as a baby’s after access to Valentina’s moisturizing routine with products crafted especially for her. Her hair had never looked so shiny or healthy, even braided over one shoulder. And she was wearing nothing but silk and a ring fit for a queen. Literally.
But she didn’t belong here with these things that would never belong to her. She might fit into this borrowed life in the most physical sense, but none of it suited her.None of it was hers.
“I am Natalie Monette,” she told herself fiercely, her own voice sounding loud and brash in the quiet of the room. Not cool and cultured, like a princess. “My fingernails are never painted red. My toes are usually a disaster. I live on pots of coffee and fistfuls of ibuprofen, not two squares of decadent chocolate a day and healthy little salads.”
She moved over to the high bed, where Valentina’s laptop and mobile phone waited for her on a polished bedside table, plugged in and charged up, because not even that was her responsibility here.
It was time to go home. It was time to wake up from this dream and take back what was hers—her career—before she lost that, too.
It was time to get back to the shadows, where she belonged.
She picked up the mobile and punched in her own number, telling herself this would all fade away fast when she was back in her own clothes and her own life. When she had too much to do for Mr. Casilieris to waste her time brooding over a prince she’d never see again. Soon this little stretch of time would be like every other fairy tale she’d ever been told as a girl, a faded old story she might recall every now and then, but no part of anything that really mattered to her.
And so what if her heart seemed to twist at that, making her whole chest ache?
It was still time—past time—to go back where she belonged.
“I am Natalie Monette,” she whispered to herself as the phone on the other end rang and rang. “I am not a princess. I was never a princess and I never will be.”
But it didn’t matter what she told herself, because Valentina didn’t answer.
Not that night.
And not for weeks.
