The Billionaire's Secret Princess Read online

  She must obey his command...

  Desperate to escape her stifling royal life, Princess Valentina swaps places with her newly discovered identical twin. But fooling her billionaire “boss” Achilles Casilieris is harder than Valentina imagined...especially when his every look makes her burn with longing!

  When closed-off Achilles discovers the game Valentina’s playing, he’s furious. But now the power is in his hands: it’s only a matter of time before her stunning facade cracks. He’ll push this perfect princess to her very limits...and he’s not afraid to use the full force of their attraction!

  Achilles smiled as Valentina settled herself across the coffee table from him, with a certain inbred grace that whispered of palaces and comportment classes and a lifetime of genteel manners.

  Because she thought she was tricking him.

  Which meant he could trick her instead. A prospect his body responded to with great enthusiasm as he studied her, this woman who looked like an underling a man in his position would never have touched out of ethical considerations—but wasn’t.

  She wasn’t his employee. He didn’t pay her salary. And she wasn’t bound to obey him in anything if she didn’t feel like it.

  But she had no idea that he knew that.

  Achilles almost felt sorry for her. Almost.

  Scandalous Royal Brides

  Married for passion, made for scandal!

  When personal assistant Natalie and Princess Valentina meet they can’t believe their eyes...they’re the very image of one another. They’re so similar it’s impossible that they’re anything but identical twins.

  Dissatisfied with their lives, they impulsively agree to swap places for six weeks only...

  But will they want to return to their old lives when the alpha heroes closest to them are intent on making these scandalous women their brides?

  Read Natalie and Prince Rodolfo’s story in

  The Prince’s Nine-Month Scandal

  Available now

  And discover Princess Valentina and Achilles Casilieris’s story

  The Billionaire’s Secret Princess

  Available now!

  The Billionaire’s Secret Princess

  Caitlin Crews

  www.millsandboon.co.uk

  USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award–nominated author CAITLIN CREWS loves writing romance. She teaches her favourite romance novels in creative writing classes at places like UCLA Extension’s prestigious Writers’ Program, where she finally gets to utilise the MA and PhD in English literature she received from the University of York in England. She currently lives in California, with her very own hero and too many pets. Visit her at caitlincrews.com.

  Books by Caitlin Crews

  Mills & Boon Modern Romance

  Castelli’s Virgin Widow

  At the Count’s Bidding

  Scandalous Royal Brides

  The Prince’s Nine-Month Scandal

  Wedlocked!

  Bride by Royal Decree

  Expecting a Royal Scandal

  One Night With Consequences

  The Guardian’s Virgin Ward

  The Billionaire’s Legacy

  The Return of the Di Sione Wife

  Secret Heirs of Billionaires

  Unwrapping the Castelli Secret

  Scandalous Sheikh Brides

  Protecting the Desert Heir

  Traded to the Desert Sheikh

  Vows of Convenience

  His for a Price

  His for Revenge

  Visit the Author Profile page

  at millsandboon.co.uk for more titles.

  To all the secret princesses cruelly stuck working in horrible offices: as long as you know the truth, that’s what matters.

  Contents

  Cover

  Back Cover Text

  Introduction

  Scandalous Royal Brides

  Title Page

  About the Author

  Dedication

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Extract

  Copyright

  CHAPTER ONE

  ACHILLES CASILIERIS REQUIRED PERFECTION.

  In himself, certainly. He prided himself on it, knowing all too well how easy it was to fall far, far short. And in his employees, absolutely—or they would quickly find themselves on the other side of their noncompete agreements with indelible black marks against their names.

  He did not play around. He had built everything he had from nothing, step by painstaking step, and he hadn’t succeeded the way he had—building the recession-proof Casilieris Company and making his first million by the age of twenty-five, then expanding both his business and his personal fortune into the billions—by accepting anything less than 100 percent perfection in all things. Always.

  Achilles was tough, tyrannical when necessary, and refused to accept what one short-lived personal assistant had foolishly called “human limitations” to his face.

  He was a man who knew the monster in himself. He’d seen its face in his own mirror. He did not allow for “human limitations.”

  Natalie Monette was his current executive assistant and had held the position for a record five years because she had never once asserted that she was human as some kind of excuse. In point of fact, Achilles thought of her as a remarkably efficient robot—the highest praise he could think to bestow on anyone, as it removed the possibility of human error from the equation.

  Achilles had no patience for human error.

  Which was why his assistant’s behavior on this flight today was so alarming.

  The day had started out normally enough. When Achilles had risen at his usual early hour, it had been to find Natalie already hard at work in the study of his Belgravia town house. She’d set up a few calls to his associates in France, outlined his schedule for the day and his upcoming meetings in New York. They’d swung by his corporate offices in the City, where Achilles had handled a fire he thought she should have put out before he’d learned of it, but then she’d accompanied him in his car to the private airfield he preferred without appearing the least bit bothered that he’d dressed her down for her failure. And why should she be bothered? She knew he expected perfection and had failed to deliver it. Besides, Natalie was never bothered. She’d acquitted herself with her usual cool competence and attitude-free demeanor, the way she always did or she never would have lasted five minutes with him. Much less five years.

  And then she’d gone into the bathroom at the airfield, stayed in there long enough that he’d had to go find her himself, and come out changed.

  Achilles couldn’t put his finger on how she’d changed, only that she had.

  She still looked the part of the closest assistant to a man as feared and lauded as Achilles had been for years now. She looked like his public face the way she always did. He appreciated that and always had. It wasn’t enough that she was capable of handling the complications of his personal and company business without breaking a sweat, that she never seemed to sleep, that she could protect him from the intrusive paparazzi and hold off his equally demanding board members in the same breath—it was necessary that she also look like
the sort of woman who belonged in his exalted orbit for the rare occasions when he needed to escort someone to this or that function and couldn’t trouble himself to expend the modicum of charm necessary to squire one of his mistresses. Today she wore one of her usual outfits, a pencil skirt and soft blouse and a feminine sort of sweater that wrapped around her torso and was no different from any other outfit she’d worn a million times before.

  Natalie dressed to disappear in plain sight. But for some reason, she caught his eye this odd afternoon. He couldn’t quite figure it out. It was as if he had never seen her before. It was as if she’d gone into the bathroom in the airport lounge and come out a completely different person.

  Achilles sat back in his remarkably comfortable leather chair on the jet and watched her as she took her seat opposite him. Did he imagine that she hesitated? Was he making up the strange look he’d seen in her eyes before she sat down? Almost as if she was looking for clues instead of taking her seat as she always did?

  “What took you so long in that bathroom?” he asked, not bothering to keep his tone particularly polite. “I should not have to chase down my own assistant, surely.”

  Natalie blinked. He didn’t know why the green of her eyes behind the glasses he knew she didn’t need for sight seemed...too bright, somehow. Or brighter, anyway, than they’d been before. In fact, now that he thought about it, everything about her was brighter. And he couldn’t understand how anyone could walk into a regular lavatory and come out...gleaming.

  “I apologize,” she said quietly. Simply. And there was something about her voice then. It was almost...musical.

  It occurred to Achilles that he had certainly never thought of Natalie’s voice as anything approaching musical before. It had always been a voice, pure and simple. And she had certainly never gleamed.

  And that, he thought with impatience, was one of the reasons that he had prized Natalie so much for all these years. Because he had never, ever noticed her as anything but his executive assistant, who was reasonably attractive because it was good business to give his Neanderthal cronies something worth gazing at while they were trying to ignore Achilles’s dominance. But there was a difference between noting that a woman was attractive and being attracted to that woman. Achilles would not have hired Natalie if he’d been attracted to her. He never had been. Not ever.

  But to his utter astonishment that was what seemed to be happening. Right here. Right now. His body was sending him unambiguous signals. He wasn’t simply attracted to his assistant. What he felt roll in him as she crossed her legs at the ankle and smiled at him was far more than attraction.

  It was need.

  Blinding and impossible and incredibly, astonishingly inconvenient.

  Achilles Casilieris did not do inconvenience, and he was violently opposed to need. It had been beaten into him as an unwanted child that it was the height of foolishness to want something he couldn’t have. That meant he’d dedicated his adult life to never allowing himself to need anything at all when he could buy whatever took his fancy, and he hadn’t.

  And yet there was no denying that dark thread that wound in him, pulling tight and succeeding in surprising him—something else that happened very, very rarely.

  Achilles knew the shadows that lived in him. He had no intention of revisiting them. Ever.

  Whatever his assistant was doing, she needed to stop. Now.

  “That is all you wish to say?” He sounded edgy. Dangerous. He didn’t like that, either.

  But Natalie hardly seemed to notice. “If you would like me to expand on my apology, Mr. Casilieris, you need only tell me how.”

  He thought there was a subtle rebuke in that, no matter how softly she’d said it, and that, too, was new. And unacceptable no matter how prettily she’d voiced it.

  Her copper-colored hair gleamed. Her skin glowed as she moved her hands in her lap, which struck him as odd, because Natalie never sat there with her hands folded in her lap like some kind of diffident Catholic schoolgirl. She was always in motion, because she was always working. But tonight, Natalie appeared to be sitting there like some kind of regal Madonna, hands folded in her lap, long, silky legs crossed at the ankles, and an inappropriately serene smile on her face.

  If it wasn’t impossible, he would have thought that she really was someone else entirely. Because she looked exactly the same save for all that gold that seemed to wrap itself around her and him, too, making him unduly fascinated with the pulse he could see beating at her throat—except he’d never, ever noticed her that way before.

  Achilles did not have time for this, whatever it was. There was entirely too much going on with his businesses at the moment, like the hotel deal he’d been trying to put together for the better part of the last year that was by no means assured. He hadn’t become one of the most feared and fearsome billionaires in the world because he took time off from running his businesses to pretend to care about the personal lives of his employees.

  But Natalie wasn’t just any employee. She was the one he’d actually come to rely on. The only person he relied on in the world, to be specific.

  “Is there anything you need to tell me?” he asked.

  He watched her, perhaps too carefully. It was impossible not to notice the way she flushed slightly at that. That was strange, too. He couldn’t remember a single instance Natalie had ever flushed in response to anything he’d done. And the truth was he’d done a lot. He didn’t hide his flashes of irritation or spend too much time worrying about anyone else’s feelings. Why should he? The Casilieris Company was about profit—and it was about Achilles. Who else’s feelings should matter? One of the things he’d long prized about his assistant was that she never, ever reacted to anything that he did or said or shouted. She just did her job.

  But today Natalie had spots of red, high on her elegant cheekbones, and she’d been sitting across from him for whole minutes now without doing a single thing that could be construed as her job.

  Elegant? demanded an incredulous voice inside him. Cheekbones?

  Since when had Achilles ever noticed anything of the kind? He didn’t pay that much attention to the mistresses he took to his bed—which he deigned to do in the first place only after they passed through all the levels of his application process and signed strict confidentiality agreements. And the women who made it through were in no doubt as to why they were there. It was to please him, not render him disoriented enough to be focusing on their bloody cheekbones.

  “Like what, for example?” She asked the question and then she smiled at him, that curve of her mouth that was suddenly wired to the hardest part of him, and echoed inside him like heat. Heat he didn’t want. “I’ll be happy to tell you anything you wish to hear, Mr. Casilieris. That is, after all, my job.”

  “Is that your job?” He smiled, and he doubted it echoed much of anywhere. Or was anything but edgy and a little but harsh. “I had started to doubt that you remembered you had one.”

  “Because I kept you waiting? That was unusual, it’s true.”

  “You’ve never done so before. You’ve never dared.” He tilted his head slightly as he gazed at her, not understanding why everything was different when nothing was. He could see that she was exactly the same as she always was, down to that single freckle centered on her left cheekbone that he wasn’t even aware he’d noticed before now. “Again, has some tragedy befallen you? Were you hit over the head?” He did nothing to hide the warning or the menace in his voice. “You do not appear to be yourself.”

  But if he thought he’d managed to discomfit her, he saw in the next moment that was not to be. The flush faded from her porcelain cheeks, and all she did was smile at him again. With that maddeningly enigmatic curve of her lips.

  Lips, he noticed with entirely too much of his body, that were remarkably lush.

  This was insupportable.

 
; “I am desolated to disappoint you,” she murmured as the plane began to move, bumping gently along the tarmac. “But there was no tragedy.” Something glinted in her green gaze, though her smile never dimmed. “Though I must confess in the spirit of full disclosure that I was thinking of quitting.”

  Achilles only watched her idly, as if she hadn’t just said that. Because she couldn’t possibly have just said that.

  “I beg your pardon,” he said after a moment passed and there was still that spike of something dark and furious in his chest. “I must have misheard you. You do not mean that you plan to quit this job. That you wish to leave me.”

  It was not lost on him that he’d phrased that in a way that should have horrified him. Maybe it would at some point. But today what slapped at him was that his assistant spoke of quitting without a single hint of anything like uncertainty on her face.

  And he found he couldn’t tolerate that.

  “I’m considering it,” she said. Still smiling. Unaware of her own danger or the dark thing rolling in him, reminding him of how easy it was to wake that monster that slept in him. How disastrously easy.

  But Achilles laughed then, understanding finally catching up with him. “If this is an attempt to wrangle more money out of me, Miss Monette, I cannot say that I admire the strategy. You’re perfectly well compensated as is. Overcompensated, one might say.”

  “Might one? Perhaps.” She looked unmoved. “Then again, perhaps your rivals have noticed exactly how much you rely on me. Perhaps I’ve decided that I want more than being at the beck and call of a billionaire. Much less standing in as your favorite bit of target practice.”

  “It cannot possibly have bothered you that I lost my temper earlier.”

  Her smile was bland. “If you say it cannot, then I’m sure you must be right.”

  “I lose my temper all the time. It’s never bothered you before. It’s part of your job to not be bothered, in point of fact.”