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The real Princess Valentina only smiled, looking every inch the smooth, super competent right hand of a man as feared as he was respected. Looking the way Natalie had alwayshopedshe looked, if she was honest. Serenely capable. Did this mean...she always had?
More than that, they looked like twins. They had to be twins. There was no possibility that they could be anything but.
Natalie didn’t want to think about the number of lies her mother had to have told her if that was true. She didn’t want to think about all the implications. She couldn’t.
“We have to switch places now,” Valentina said softly, though there was a catch in her voice. It was the catch that made Natalie focus on her rather than the mystery that was her mother. “I’ve always wanted to be...someone else. Someone normal. Just for a little while.”
Their gazes caught at that, both the exact same shade of green, just as their hair was that unusual shade of copper many tried to replicate in the salon, yet couldn’t. The only difference was that Valentina’s was highlighted with streaks of blond that Natalia suspected came from long, lazy days on the decks of yachts or taking in the sunshine from the comfort of her very own island kingdom.
If you’re really twins—if you’re sisters—it’s your island, too,a little voice inside whispered. But Natalie couldn’t handle that. Not here. Not now. Not while she was all dressed up in princess clothes.
“Is that what princesses dream of?” Natalie asked. She wanted to smile, but the moment felt too precarious. Ripe and swollen with emotions she couldn’t have named, though she understood them as they moved through her. “Because I think most other little girls imagine they’re you.”
Not her, of course. Never her.
Something shone a little too brightly in Valentina’s gaze then, and it made Natalie’s chest ache.
But she would never know what her mirror image might have said next, because her name was called in a familiar growl from directly outside the door to the women’s room. Natalie didn’t think. She was dressed as someone else and she couldn’t let anyone see that—so she threw herself back into the stall where she’d changed her clothes as the door was slapped open.
“Exactly what are you doing in here?” growled a voice that Natalie knew better than her own. She’d worked for Achilles Casilieris for five years. She knew him much, much better than she knew herself. She knew, for example, that the particular tone he was using right now meant his usual grouchy mood was being rapidly taken over by his typical impatience. He’d likely had to actually take a moment and look for her, rather than her magically being at his side before he finished his thought. He hated that. And he wasn’t shy at all about expressing his feelings. “Can we leave for New York now, do you think, or do you need to fix your makeup for another hour?”
Natalie stood straighter out of habit, only to realize that her boss’s typical scowl wasn’t directed at her. She was hidden behind the cracked open door of the bathroom stall. Her boss was aiming that famous glare straight at Valentina, and he didn’t appear to notice that she wasn’t Natalie. That if she was Natalie, that would mean she’d lightened her hair in the past fifteen minutes. But she could tell that all her boss saw was his assistant. Nothing more, nothing less.
“I apologize,” Valentina murmured.
“I don’t need you to be sorry, I need you on the plane,” Achilles retorted, then turned back around to head out.
Natalie’s head spun. She had worked for this man, night and day, forhalf a decade.He was Achilles Casilieris, renowned for his keen insight and killer instincts in all things, and Natalie had absolutely no doubt that he had no idea that he hadn’t been speaking to her.
Maybe that was why, when Valentina reached over and took Natalie’s handbag instead of her own, Natalie didn’t push back out of the stall to stop her. She said nothing. She stood where she was. She did absolutely nothing to keep the switch from happening.
“I’ll call you,” Valentina mouthed into the mirror as she hurried to the door, and the last Natalie saw of Her Royal Highness Valentina of Murin was the suppressed excitement in her bright green eyes as she followed Achilles Casilieris out the door.
Natalie stepped out of the stall again in the sudden silence. She looked at herself in the mirror, smoothed her hair down with palms that shook only the slightest little bit, blinked at the wild sparkle of the absurd ring on her finger as she did it.
And just like that, became a fairy princess—and stepped right into a daydream.
