that aside. That was something to worry about when she was a princess again. That was a problem she could take up when she was back in Murin Castle.
Here, now, she was a secretary. An executive assistant, no more and no less.
“I beg your pardon, Mr. Casilieris.” She let her smile deepen and ignored the little hum of...something deep inside her when his gaze seemed to catch fire. “Are you trying to tell me that you need a bathroom? Should I ask the driver to stop the car right here in the middle of the George Washington Bridge?”
She expected him to get angry again. Surely that was what had been going on before, back in London before the plane had taken off. She’d seen temper all over that fierce, hard face of his and gleaming hot in his gaze. More than that, she’d felt it inside her. As if the things he felt echoed within her, winding her into knots. She felt something a whole lot like a chill inch its way down her spine at that notion.
But Achilles only smiled. And that was far more dangerous than merely devastating.
“Miss Monette,” he said and shook his head, as if she amused him, when she could see that the thing that moved over that ruthless face of his was far too intense to be simple amusement. “I had no idea that beneath your officious exterior you’ve been hiding a comedienne all this time. For five years you’ve worked at my side and never let so much as a hint of this whimsical side of your personality out into the open. Whatever could have changed?”
He knows. The little voice inside her was certain—and terrified.
But it was impossible. Valentina knew it was impossible, so she made herself smile and relax against the leather seat as if she’d never in her life been so at her ease. Very much as if she was not within scant inches of a very large, very powerful, very intense male who was eyeing her the way gigantic lions and tigers and jaguars eyed their food. When they were playing with it.
She’d watched enough documentaries and made enough state visits to African countries to know firsthand.
“Perhaps I’ve always been this amusing,” she suggested, managing to tamp down her hysteria about oversize felines, none of which was particularly helpful at the moment. “Perhaps you’ve only recently allowed yourself to truly listen to me.”
“I greatly enjoy listening to you,” Achilles replied. There was a laziness in the way he sat there, sprawled out in the backseat of his car, that dark gold gaze on hers. A certain laziness, yes—but Valentina didn’t believe it for a second. “I particularly enjoy listening to you when you are doing your job perfectly. Because you know how much I admire perfection. I insist on it, in fact. Which is why I cannot understand why you failed to provide it today.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
But she knew what he meant. She’d been on the plane and she’d been the one to fail repeatedly to do what was clearly her job. She’d hung up on one conference call and failed entirely to connect another. She’d expected him to explode—if she was honest, there was a part of her that wanted him to explode, in the way that anyone might want to poke and poke and poke at some kind of blister to see if it would pop. But he hadn’t popped. He hadn’t lost his temper at all, despite the fact that it had been very clear to Valentina very quickly that she was a complete and utter disaster at doing whatever it was that Natalie did.
When Achilles had stared at her in amazement, however, she hadn’t made any excuses. She’d only gazed right back, serenely, as if she’d meant to do whatever utterly incorrect thing it was. As if it was all some kind of strategy.
She could admit that she hadn’t really thought the job part through. She been so busy fantasizing herself into some kind of normal life that it had never occurred to her that, normal or not, a life was still a whole life. She had no idea how to live any way but the way she’d been living for almost thirty years. How remarkably condescending, she’d thought up there on Achilles Casilieris’s jet, that she’d imagined she could simply step into a job—especially one as demanding as this appeared to be—and do it merely because she’d decided it was her chance at something “normal.”
Valentina had found the entire experience humbling, if she was honest, and it had been only a few hours since she’d switched places with Natalie in London. Who knew what else awaited her?
But Achilles was still sprawled there beside her, that unnerving look of his making her skin feel too small for her bones.
“Natalie, Natalie,” he murmured, and Valentina told herself it was a good thing he’d used that name. It wasn’t her name, and she needed the reminder. This wasn’t about her. It wasn’t her job to advocate for Natalie when the other woman might not wish for her to do anything like that. She was on a fast track to losing Natalie her job, and then what? Valentina didn’t have to worry about her employment prospects, but she had no idea what the market was like for billionaire’s assistants.
But maybe there was a part of her that already knew that there was no way Natalie Monette was a stranger to her. Certainly not on the genetic level. And that had implications she wasn’t prepared to examine just yet, but she did know that the woman who was in all likelihood her long-lost identical twin did not have to work for Achilles Casilieris unless she wanted to.
How arrogant of you, a voice inside her said quietly. Her Royal Highness, making unilateral decisions for others’ lives without their input.
The voice sounded a little too much like her father’s.
“That is my name,” Valentina said to Achilles, in case there had been any doubt. Perhaps with a little too much force.
But she had the strangest notion that he was...tasting the name as he said it. As if he’d never said it before. Did he call Natalie by her first name? Valentina rather thought not, given that he’d called her Miss Monette when she’d met him—but that was neither here nor there, she told herself. And no matter that she was a woman who happened to know the power of titles. She had many of her own. And her life was marked by those who used the different versions of her titles, not to mention the few who actually called her by her first name.
“I cannot tolerate this behavior,” he said, but it wasn’t in that same infuriated tone he’d used earlier. If anything, he sounded almost...indulgent. But surely that was impossible. “It borders on open rebellion, and I cannot have that. This is not a democracy, I’m afraid. This is a dictatorship. If I want your opinion, I’ll tell you what it is.”
There was no reason her heart should have been kicking at her like that, her pulse so loud in her ears she was sure he must be able to hear it himself.
“What an interesting way to foster employee loyalty,” she murmured. “Really more of a scorch-the-earth approach. Do you find it gets you the results you want?”
“I do not need to breed employee loyalty,” Achilles told her, sounding even lazier than before, those dark eyes of his on hers. “People are loyal to me or they are fired. You seem to have forgotten reality today, Natalie. Allow me to remind you that I pay you so much money that I own your loyalty, just as I own everything else.”
“Perhaps,” and her voice was a little too rough then. A little too shaky, when what could this possibly have to do with her? She was a visitor. Natalie’s loyalty was no concern of hers. “I have no wish to be owned. Does anyone? I think you’ll find that they do not.”
Achilles shrugged. “Whether you wish it or do not, that is how it is.”
“That is why I
