The Billionaire's Secret Princess

She had the hectic notion, connected to that knot beneath her breastbone that was preventing her from taking anything like a deep breath, that it wasn’t the enclosed space that was the issue. That he would have this same effect anywhere. All that brooding ruthlessness he didn’t bother to contain—or maybe he couldn’t contain even if he’d wanted to—seemed to hum around him like a kind of force field that both repelled and compelled at once.

If she was honest, the little glimpse she’d had of him in the airport had been the same—she’d just ignored it.

Valentina had been too busy racing into the lounge so she could have a few precious seconds alone. No staff. No guards. No cameras. Just her perched on the top of a closed toilet seat, shut away from the world, breathing. Letting her face do what it liked. Thinking of absolutely nothing. Not her duty. Not her father’s expectations.

Certainly not her bloodless engagement to Prince Rodolfo of Tissely, a man she’d tuned out within moments of their first meeting. Or their impending wedding in two months’ time, which she could feel bearing down on her like a thick hand around her throat every time she let herself think about it. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to do her duty and marry the Crown Prince of Tissely. She’d been promised in marriage to her father’s allies since the day she was born. It was that she’d never given a great deal of thought to what it was she wanted, because want had never been an option available to her.

And it had suddenly occurred to her at her latest wedding dress fitting there in London that she was running out of time.

Soon she would be married to a man in what was really more of a corporate merger of two great European brands, the houses of Tissely and Murin. She’d be expected to produce the necessary heirs to continue the line. She would take her place in the great sweep of her family’s storied history, unite two ancient kingdoms, and in so doing fulfill her purpose in life. The end.

The end, she’d thought in that bathroom stall, high-end and luxurious but still, a bathroom stall. My life fulfilled at twenty-seven.

Valentina was a woman who’d been given everything, including a healthy understanding of how lucky she was. She didn’t often indulge herself with thoughts of what was and wasn’t fair when there was no doubt she was among the most fortunate people alive.

But the thing was, it still didn’t seem fair. No matter how hard she tried not to think about it that way.

She would do what she had to do, of course. She always had and always would, but for that single moment, locked away in a bathroom stall where no one could see her and no one would ever know, she basked in the sheer, dizzying unfairness of it all.

Then she’d pulled herself together, stepped out and had been prepared to march onto her plane and head back to the life that had been plotted out for her since the day she arrived on the planet.

Only to find her twin standing at the sinks.

Her identical twin—though that was, of course, impossible.

“What is this?” the other woman had asked when they’d faced each other, looking something close to scared. Or unnerved, anyway. “How...?”

Valentina had been fascinated. She’d been unable to keep herself from studying this woman who appeared to be wearing her body as well as her face. She was dressed in a sleek pencil skirt and low heels, which showed legs that Valentina recognized all too well, having last seen them in her own mirror. “I’m Valentina.”

“Natalie.”

She’d repeated that name in her head like it was a magic spell. She didn’t know why she felt as if it was.

But then, running into her double in a London bathroom seemed something close enough to magic to count. Right then when she’d been indulging her self-pity about the unchangeable course of her own life, the universe had presented her with a glimpse of what else could be. If she was someone else.

An identical someone else.

They had the same face. The same legs, as she’d already noted. The same coppery hair that her double wore up in a serviceable ponytail and the same nose Valentina could trace directly to her maternal grandmother. What were the chances, she’d wondered then, that they weren’t related?

And didn’t that raise all kinds of interesting questions?

“You’re that princess,” Natalie had said, a bit haltingly.

But if Valentina was a princess, and if they were related as they surely had to be...

“I suspect you might be, too,” she’d said gently.

“We can’t possibly be related. I’m a glorified secretary who never really had a home. You’re a royal princess. Presumably your lineage dates back to the Roman Conquest.”

“Give or take a few centuries.” Valentina tried to imagine having a job like that. Or any job. A secretary, glorified or otherwise, who reported to work for someone else and actually did things with her time that weren’t directly related to being a symbol. She couldn’t really wrap her head around it, or being effectively without a home, either, having been a part of Murin since her birth. As much Murin as its beaches and hills, its monuments and its palace. She might as well have been a park. “Depending which branch of the family you mean, of course.”

“I was under the impression that people with lineages that could lead to thrones and crown jewels tended to keep better track of their members,” Natalie had said, her tone just dry enough to make Valentina decide that given the right circumstances—meaning anywhere that wasn’t a toilet—she’d rather like her doppelganger.

And she knew what the other woman had been asking.

“Conspiracy theorists claim my mother was killed and her death hushed up. Senior palace officials have assured me my whole life that no, she merely left to preserve her mental health, and is rumored to be in residence in a hospital devoted to such things somewhere. All I know is that I haven’t seen her since shortly after I was born. According to my father, she preferred anonymity to the joys of motherhood.”

And she waited for Natalie to give her an explanation in turn. To laugh, perhaps, and then tell her that she’d been raised by two perfectly normal parents in a happily normal somewhere else, filled with golden retrievers and school buses and pumpkin-spiced coffee drinks and whatever else normal people took for granted that Valentina only read about.

But instead, this woman wearing Valentina’s face had looked stricken. “I’ve never met my father,” she’d whispered. “My mother’s always told me she has no idea who he was. And she bounces from one affair to the next pretty quickly, so I came to terms with the fact it was possible she really, truly didn’t know.”

And Valentina had laughed, because what else could she do? She’d spent her whole life wishing she’d had more of a family than her chilly father. Oh, she loved him, she did, but he was so excruciatingly proper. So worried about appearances. His version of a hug was a well-meaning critique on her latest public appearance. Love to her father was maintaining and bolstering the family’s reputation across the ages. She’d always wanted a sister to share in the bolstering. A brother. A mother. Someone.

But she hadn’t had anyone. And now she had a stranger who looked just like her.

“My father is many things,” she’d told Natalie. It was too soon to say our father. And who knew? Maybe they were cousins. Or maybe this was a fluke. No matter that little jolt of recognition inside her, as if she’d been meant to know this woman. As if this was a reunion. “Including His Royal Majesty, King Geoffrey of Murin. What he is not now, nor has ever been, I imagine, is forgettable.”

Natalie had shaken her head. “You underestimate my mother’s commitment to amnesia. She’s made it a life choice instead of a malady. On some level I admire it.”

“My mother was the noblewoman Frederica de Burgh, from a very old Murinese family.” Valentina watched Natalie closely as she spoke, looking for any hint of...anything, really, in her gaze. “Promised to my father at birth, raised by nuns and kept deliberately sheltered, and then widely held to be unequal to the task of becoming queen. Mentally. But that’s the story they would tell, isn’t it, to explain why she disappeared? What’s your mother’s name?”

Natalie sighed and swung her shoulder bag onto the counter. Valentina had the impression that she’d really, truly wanted not to answer. But she had. “She calls herself Erica.”

And there it was. Valentina supposed it could be a coincidence that Erica was a shortened form of Frederica. But how many coincidences were likely when they resulted in two women who’d never met—who never should have met—who happened to be mirror images?

If there was something in her that turned over at the notion that her mother had, in fact, had a maternal impulse after all—just not for Valentina—well, this wasn’t the time to think about that. It might never be the time to think about that. She’d spent twenty-seven years trying her best not to think about that.

She changed the subject before she lost her composure completely and started asking questions she knew she shouldn’t.

“I saw Achilles Casilieris, out there in the lounge,” she’d said instead. The notorious billionaire had been there on her way in, brooding in a corner of the lounge and scowling at the paper he’d been reading. “He looks even more fearsome in person. You can almost see all that brash command and dizzying wealth ooze from his pores, can’t you?”

“He’s my boss,” Natalie had said, sounding amused—if rather darkly. “If he was really oozing anything, anywhere, it would be my job to provide first aid until actual medical personnel could come handle it. At which point he would bite my head off for wasting his precious time by not curing him instantly.”

Valentina had been flooded with a rash of follow-up questions. Was the biting off of heads normal? Was it fun to work for a man who sounded half-feral? Most important, did Natalie like her life or merely suffer through it?

But then her mobile started buzzing in her clutch. She’d forgotten about ferocious billionaires and thought about things she knew too much about, like the daredevil prince she was bound to marry soon, instead, because their fathers had agreed regardless of whether either one of them liked it. She’d checked the mobile’s display to be sure, but wasn’t surprised to find she’d guessed correctly. Lucky her, she’d had another meeting with her husband-to-be in Murin that very afternoon. She’d expected it to go the way all their meetings so far had gone. Prince Rodolfo, beloved the world over for his good looks and devil-may-care attitude, would talk. She would listen without really listening. She’d long since concluded that foretold a very happy royal marriage.

“My fiancé,” she’d explained, meeting Natalie’s gaze again. “Or his chief of staff, to be more precise.”

“Congratulations,” Natalie murmured.

“Thank you, I’m very lucky.” Valentina’s mouth curved, though her tone was far more dry than Natalie’s had been. “Everyone says so. Prince Rodolfo is objectively attractive. Not all princes can make that claim, but the tabloids have exulted over his abs since he was a teenager. Just as they have salivated over his impressive dating history, which has involved a selection of models and actresses from at least four continents and did not cease in any noticeable way upon our engagement last fall.”

“Your Prince Charming sounds...charming,” Natalie had said.

Valentina raised one shoulder, then dropped it. “His theory is that he remains free until our marriage, and then will be free once again following the necessary birth of his heir. More discreetly, I can only hope. Meanwhile, I am beside myself with joy that I must take my place at his side in two short months. Of course.”

Natalie had laughed, and the sound had made Valentina’s stomach flip. Because it sounded like her. It sounded exactly like her.