The Prince's Nine-Month Scandal. CAITLIN CREWS
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CHAPTER ONE
NATALIE MONETTE HAD never done a rash thing in her entire twenty-seven years, something she’d always viewed as a great personal strength. After a childhood spent flitting about with her free-spirited, impetuous mother, never belonging anywhere and without a shred of anything resembling permanence including an address, Natalie had made her entire adulthood—especially her career—a monument to all things dependable and predictable.
But she’d finally had enough.
Her employer—never an easy man at the best of times—wasn’t likely to accept her notice after five long years with anything like grace. Natalie shook her head at the very notion of grace and her cranky billionaire boss. He preferred a bull-in-china-shop approach to most things, especially his executive assistant. And this latest time, as he’d dressed her down for an imagined mistake in front of an entire corporate office in London, a little voice inside her had whispered: enough.
Enough already. Or she thought she might die. Internally, anyway.
She had to quit her job. She had to figure out what her life was like when not at the beck and call of a tyrant—because there had to be better things out there. There had to be. She had to do something before she just...disappeared.
And she was thinking that a rash move—like quitting here and now and who cared if her boss threw a tantrum?—might just do the trick.
Natalie was washing her hands in the marbled sink in the fancy women’s bathroom that was a part of the moneyed elegance evident everywhere in the high-class lounge area at her boss’s preferred private airfield outside London. She was trying to slow her panicked breathing and get herself back under control. She prided herself on being unflappable under normal circumstances, but nothing about the messy things swirling around inside of her today felt normal. She hardly paid any attention when one of the heavy stall doors behind her opened and a woman stepped up to the sink beside hers. She had the vague impression of the sort of marked glamour that was usually on display in these places she only visited thanks to her job, but then went back to wondering how on earth she was going to walk out of this bathroom and announce that she was done with her job.
She couldn’t imagine how her boss would react. Or she could, that was the trouble. But Natalie knew she had to do it. She had to do it. Now, while there was still this feverish thing inside her that kept pushing at her. Because if she waited, she knew she wouldn’t. She’d settle back in and it would be another five years in an instant, and then what would she do?
“I beg your pardon, but you seem to look a great deal like someone I know.”
The woman’s voice was cultured. Elegant. And it made Natalie feel...funny. As if she’d heard it before when she knew that was impossible. Of course she hadn’t. She never knew anyone in these ultra high-class places her job took her. Then she looked up and the world seemed to tilt off its axis. She was shocked she didn’t crumple to the ground where she stood.
Because the woman standing beside her, staring back at her through the mirror, had her face. The exact same face. Her coppery hair was styled differently and she wasn’t wearing Natalie’s dark-rimmed glasses over her own green eyes, but there was no denying that every other aspect was exactly the same. The fine nose. The faintly pointed chin. The same raised eyebrows, the same high forehead.
The other woman was taller, Natalie realized in a rush of something more complicated than simple relief. But then she looked down to see that her impossible, improbable twin was wearing the sort of sky-high stilettos only women who didn’t have to walk very often or very far enjoyed, easily making her a few inches taller than Natalie in the far more serviceable wedges she wore that allowed her to keep up with her irascible employer’s long, impatient stride.
“Oh.” The other woman breathed the syllable out, like a sigh, though her eyes gleamed. “I thought there was an amusing resemblance that we should discuss, but this...”
Natalie had the bizarre experience of watching her own mouth move on another woman’s face. Then drop open slightly. It was unnerving. It was like the mirror coming alive right in front of her. It was impossible.
It was a great deal more than an “amusing resemblance.”
“What is this?” she asked, her voice as shaky as she felt. “How...?”
“I have no idea,” the other woman said quietly. “But it’s fascinating, isn’t it?” She turned to look at Natalie directly, letting her gaze move up and down her body as if measuring her. Cataloging her. Natalie could hardly blame her. If she wasn’t so frozen, she’d do the same. “I’m Valentina.”
“Natalie.”
Why was her throat so dry? But she knew why. They said everyone on earth had a double, but that was usually a discussion about mannerisms and a vague resemblance. Not this. Because Natalie knew beyond the shadow of any possible doubt that there was no way this person standing in front of her, with the same eyes and the same mouth and even the same freckle centered on her left cheekbone wasn’t related to her. No possible way. And that was a Pandora’s box full of problems, wasn’t it? Starting with her own childhood and the mother who had always rather sternly claimed she didn’t know who Natalie’s father was. She tried to shake all that off—but then Valentina’s name penetrated her brain.
She remembered where she was. And the other party that had been expected at the same airfield today. She’d openly scoffed at the notification, because there wasn’t much on this earth she found more useless than royalty. Her mother had gotten that ball rolling while Natalie was young. While other girls had dressed up like princesses and dreamed about Prince Charming, Natalie had been taught that both were lies.
There’s no such thing as happily-ever-after, her mother had told her. There’s only telling a silly story about painful things to make yourself feel better. No daughter of mine is going to imagine herself anything but a realist, Natalie.
And so Natalie hadn’t. Ever.
Here in this bathroom, face-to-face with an impossibility, Natalie blinked. “Wait. You’re that princess.”
“I am indeed, for my sins.” Valentina’s mouth curved in a serene sort of half smile that Natalie would have said she, personally, could never pull off. Except if someone with an absolutely identical face could do it, that meant she could, too, didn’t it? That realization was...unnerving. “But I suspect you might be, too.”
Natalie couldn’t process that. Her eyes were telling her a truth, but her mind couldn’t accept it. She played devil’s advocate instead. “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—and the family home, for that matter, which I’m pretty sure is a giant castle because all princesses have a few of those by virtue of the title alone—dates back to the Roman Conquest.”
“Give or take a few centuries.” Valentina inclined her head, another supremely elegant and vaguely noble gesture that Natalie would have said could only look silly on her. Yet it didn’t look anything like silly on Valentina. “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.”
“You’d think, wouldn’t you?” The princess shifted back on her soaring heels and regarded Natalie more closely. “Conspiracy theorists claim my mother was killed and the death hushed up. Senior palace officials assured me 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.”
Natalie wanted to run out of this bathroom, lose herself in her work and her boss’s demands the way she usually did, and pretend this mad situation had never happened. This encounter felt rash enough for her as it was. No need to blow her