The Prince's Nine-Month Scandal

And it all seemed to snowball from there. They each kicked off their shoes and stood barefoot on the surprisingly plush carpet. Then Valentina shimmied out of her sleek, deceptively simple sheath dress with the unselfconsciousness of a woman used to being dressed by attendants. She lifted her brows with all the imperiousness of her station, and Natalie found herself retreating into the stall with the dress—since she was not, in fact, used to being tended to by packs of fawning courtiers and therefore all but naked with an audience. She climbed out of her own clothes, handing her pencil skirt, blouse and wrap sweater out to Valentina through the crack she left open in the door. Then she tugged the princess’s dress on, expecting it to snag or pull against her obviously peasant body.

But like the ring, the dress fit as if it had been tailored to her body. As if it was hers.

She walked out slowly, blinking when she saw...herself waiting for her. The very same view she’d seen in the mirror this morning when she’d dressed in the room Mr. Casilieris kept for her in the basement of his London town house because her own small flat was too far away to be to-ing and fro-ing at odd hours, according to him, and it was easier to acquiesce than fight. Not that it had kept him from firing away at her. But she shoved that aside because Valentina was laughing at the sight of Natalie in obvious astonishment, as if she was having the same literal out-of-body experience.

Natalie walked back to the counter and climbed into the princess’s absurd shoes, very carefully. Her knees protested beneath her as she tried to stand tall in them and she had to reach out to grip the marble counter.

“Put your weight on your heels,” Valentina advised. She was already wearing Natalie’s wedges, because apparently even their feet were the same, and of course she had no trouble standing in them as if she’d picked them out herself. “Everyone always wants to lean forward and tiptoe in heels like that, and nothing looks worse. Lean back and you own the shoe, not the other way around.” She eyed Natalie. “Will your glasses give me a headache, do you suppose?”

Natalie pulled them from her face and handed them over. “They’re clear glass. I was getting a little too much attention from some of the men Mr. Casilieris works with, and it annoyed him. I didn’t want to lose my job, so I started wearing my hair up and these glasses. It worked like a charm.”

“I refuse to believe men are so idiotic.”

Natalie grinned as Valentina took the glasses and slid them onto her nose. “The men we’re talking about weren’t exactly paying me attention because they found me enthralling. It was a diversionary tactic during negotiations and yes, you’d be surprised how many men fail to see a woman who looks smart.”

She tugged her hair tie from her ponytail and shook out her hair, then handed the elastic to Valentina. The princess swept her hair back and into the same ponytail Natalie had been sporting only seconds before.

And it was like magic.

Ordinary Natalie Monette, renowned for her fierce work ethic, attention to detail and her total lack of anything resembling a personal life—which was how she’d become the executive assistant to one of the world’s most ferocious and feared billionaires straight out of college and now had absolutely no life to call her own—became Her Royal Highness, Princess Valentina of Murin in an instant. And vice versa. Just like that.

“This is crazy,” Natalie whispered.

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 always hoped she 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, for half 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.

CHAPTER TWO (#u827fdee0-d59c-5b72-a135-f64b795acaa0)

CROWN PRINCE RODOLFO of the ancient and deeply, deliberately reserved principality of Tissely, tucked away in the Pyrenees between France and Spain and gifted with wealth, peace and dramatic natural borders that had kept things that way for centuries untold, was bored.

This was not his preferred state of existence, though it was not exactly surprising here on the palace grounds of Murin Castle, where he was expected to entertain the royal bride his father had finally succeeded in forcing upon him.

Not that “entertainment” was ever really on offer with the undeniably pretty, yet almost aggressively placid and unexciting Princess Valentina. His future wife. The future mother of his children. His future queen, even. Assuming he didn’t lapse into a coma before their upcoming nuptials, that was.

Rodolfo sighed and stretched out his long legs, aware he was far too big to be sitting so casually on a relic of a settee in this stuffily proper reception room that had been set aside for his use on one of his set monthly visits with his fiancée. He still felt a twinge in one thigh from the ill-advised diving trip he’d taken some months back with a group of his friends and rather too many sharks. Rodolfo rubbed at the scarred spot absently, grateful that while his father had inevitably caught wind of the feminine talent who’d graced the private yacht off the coast of Belize, the fact an overenthusiastic shark had grazed the Crown Prince of Tissely en route to a friend’s recently caught fish had escaped both the King’s spies’ and the rabid tabloids’ breathless reports.

It was these little moments of unexpected grace, he often thought with varying degrees of irony, that made his otherwise royally pointless life worth living.

“You embarrass yourself more with each passing year,” his father had told him, stiff with fury, when Rodolfo had succumbed to the usual demands for a command appearance upon his return to Europe at the end of last summer, the salacious pictures of his “Belize Booze Cruise” still fresh in every tabloid reader’s mind. And more to the point, in his father’s.

“You possess the power to render me unembarrassing forevermore,” Rodolfo had replied easily enough. He’d almost convinced himself his father no longer got beneath his skin. Almost. “Give me something to do, Father. You have an entire kingdom at your disposal. Surely you can find a single task for your only son.”

But that was the crux of the matter they never spoke of directly, of course. Rodolfo was not the son his father had wanted as heir. He was not the son his father would have chosen to succeed him, not the son his father had planned for. He was his father’s only remaining son, and not his father’s choice.

He was not Felipe. He could never be Felipe. It was a toss-up as to which one of them hated him more for that.

“There is no place in my kingdom for a sybaritic fool whose life is little more than an extended advertisement for one of those appalling survival programs, complete with the sensationalism of the nearest gutter press,” his father had boomed from across his vast, appropriately majestic office in the palace, because it was so much easier to attack Rodolfo than address what simmered beneath it all. Not that Rodolfo helped matters with his increasingly dangerous antics, he was aware. “You stain the principality with every astonishingly bad decision you make.”

“It was a boat ride, sir.” Rodolfo had kept his voice even because he knew it irritated his father to get no reaction to his litanies and insults. “Not precisely a scandal likely to topple the whole of the kingdom’s government, as I think you are aware.”

“What I am aware of, as ever, is how precious little you know about governing anything,” his father had seethed, in all his state and consequence.

“You could change that with a wave of your hand,” Rodolfo had reminded him, as gently as possible. Which was perhaps not all that gently. “Yet you refuse.”

And around and around they went.

Rodolfo’s father, the taciturn and disapproving sovereign of Tissely, Ferdinand IV, held all the duties of the monarchy in his tight fists and showed no signs of easing his grip anytime soon. Despite the promise he’d made his only remaining son and heir that he’d give him a more than merely ceremonial place in the principality’s government following Rodolfo’s graduate work at the London School of Economics. That had been ten years back, his father had only grown more bitter and possessive of his throne, and Rodolfo had...adapted.

Life in the principality was sedate, as befitted a nation that had avoided all the wars of the last few centuries by simple dint of being too far removed to take part in them in any real way. Rodolfo’s life, by contrast, was...stimulating. Provocative by design. He liked his sport extreme and his sex excessive, and he didn’t much care if the slavering hounds of the European press corps printed every moment of each, which they’d been more than happy to do for the past decade. If his father wished him to be more circumspect, to preserve and protect the life of the hereditary heir to Tissely’s throne the way he should—the way he’d raced about trying to wrap Felipe in cotton wool, restricting him from everything only to lose him to something as ignoble and silly as an unremarkable cut in his finger and what they’d thought was the flu—he needed only to offer Rodolfo something else with which to fill his time. Such as, perhaps, something to do besides continue to exist, thus preserving the bloodline by dint of not dying.

In fairness, of course, Rodolfo had committed himself to pushing the boundaries of his continued existence as much as possible, with his group of similarly devil-may-care friends, to the dismay of most of their families.

“Congratulations,” Ferdinand had clipped out one late September morning last fall in yet another part of his vast offices in the Tisselian palace complex. “You will be married next summer.”