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The Princes
COLLECTION
January 2020
Finding Her Prince
February 2020
An Heir for the Prince
March 2020
Her Exotic Prince
April 2020
Working for the Prince
May 2020
Deceiving Her Prince
June 2020
Seducing Her Prince
About the Authors
CAITLIN CREWS discovered her first romance novel at the age of twelve and has since conducted a life-long love affair with romance novels, many of which she insists on keeping near her at all times. She currently lives in the Pacific Northwest, with her animator/comic book artist husband and their menagerie of ridiculous animals.
A New York Times bestselling author, CHRISTINE RIMMER has written over ninety contemporary romances for Mills & Boon. Christine has won the Romantic Times BOOKreviews Reviewers Choice Award and has been nominated six times for the RITA® Award. She lives in Oregon with her family. Visit Christine at http://www.christinerimmer.com
BRENDA HARLEN is a multi-award winning author for Mills & Boon who has written over twenty-five books for the company.
Deceiving Her Prince
The Prince’s Nine-Month Scandal
Caitlin Crews
How to Marry a Princess
Christine Rimmer
The Prince’s Cowgirl Bride
Brenda Harlen
www.millsandboon.co.uk
ISBN: 978-0-008-90727-3
DECEIVING HER PRINCE
The Prince’s Nine-Month Scandal © 2017 Caitlin Crews How to Marry a Princess © 2013 Christine Rimmer The Prince’s Cowgirl Bride © 2008 Brenda Harlen
Published in Great Britain 2020
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
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Table of Contents
Cover
About the Authors
Title Page
Copyright
Note to Readers
The Prince’s Nine-Month Scandal
Back Cover Text
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
How to Marry a Princess
Back Cover Text
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
The Prince’s Cowgirl Bride
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Epilogue
About the Publisher
The Prince’s Nine-Month Scandal
Caitlin Crews
A shocking royal pregnancy!
Personal assistant Natalie Monette’s life transforms when she meets her secret identical twin. Except Valentina is a sophisticated princess, unhappily engaged to the supremely arrogant Crown Prince Rodolfo. Impulsively, Natalie agrees to swap identities for six weeks. Her plan is to put Rodolfo in his place...until she’s enticed by the heat between them!
Prince Rodolfo can’t understand why, having never felt any desire for his betrothed, he now can’t keep his hands off this captivating woman. But scandal abounds when he discovers who he’s taken to his bed...and that she’s carrying his heir!
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 life up on top of it. So she had no idea why instead, she opened up her mouth and shared her deepest, secret shame with this woman.
“I’ve never met my father,” she told this total stranger who looked like an upscale mirror image of herself. There was no reason she should feel as if she could trust a random woman she met in a bathroom, no matter whose face she wore. It was absurd to feel as if she’d known this other person all her life when of course she hadn’t. And yet she kept talking. “My mother’s always told me she has no idea who he was. That Prince Charming was a fantasy sold to impressionable young girls to make them silly, and the reality was that men are simply men and untrustworthy to the core. 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.”
Valentina laughed. It was a low, smoky sound, and Natalie recognized it, because it was hers. A shock of recognition went through her. Though she didn’t feel like laughing. At all.
“My father is many things,” the princess said, laughter and something more serious beneath it. “Including His Royal Majesty, King Geoffrey of Murin. What he is not now, nor has ever been, I imagine, is forgettable.”
Natalie shook 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.”
Once again, she had no idea why she was telling this stranger things she hardly dared admit to herself.
“My mother was the noblewoman Frederica de Burgh, from a very old Murinese family.” Valentina watched Natalie closely as she spoke. “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?”
Her hands felt numb, so Natalie shifted her bag from her shoulder to the marble countertop beside her. “She calls herself Erica.”
For a moment neither one of them spoke. Neither one of them mentioned that Erica sounded very much like a shortened form of Frederica, but then, there was no need. Natalie was aware of too many things. The far-off sounds of planes outside the building. The television in the lounge on the other side of the door, cued to a twenty-four-hour news channel. She was vaguely surprised her boss hadn’t already texted her fifteen furious times, wondering where she’d gone off to when it was possible he might have need of her.
“I saw everyone’s favorite billionaire, Achilles Casilieris, out there in the lounge,” Valentina said after a moment, as if reading Natalie’s mind. “He looks even more fearsome in person than advertised. You can almost see all that brash command and dizzying wealth ooze from his pores, can’t you?”
“He’s my boss.” Natalie ran her tongue over her teeth, that reckless thing inside of her lurching to life all over again. “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.”
She had worked for Achilles Casilieris—and by extension the shockingly hardy, internationally envied and recession-proof Casilieris Company—for five very long years. That was the first marginally negative thing she’d said about her job, ever. Out loud, anyway. And she felt instantly disloyal, despite the fact she’d been psyching herself up to quit only moments ago. Much as she had when she’d opened her mouth about her mother.
How could a stranger who happened to look like her make Natalie question who she was?
But the princess was frowning at the slim leather clutch she’d tossed on the bathroom counter. Natalie heard the buzzing sound that indicated a call as Valentina flipped open the outer flap and slid her smartphone out, then rolled her eyes and shoved it back in.
“My fiancé,” she said, meeting Natalie’s gaze again, her own more guarded. Or maybe it was something else that made the green in her eyes darker. The phone buzzed a few more times, then stopped. “Or his chief of staff, to be more precise.”
“Congratulations,” Natalie said, though the expression on Valentina’s face did not look as if she was precisely awash in joyous anticipation.
“Thank you, I’m very lucky.” Valentina’s mouth curved, though there was nothing like a smile in her eyes and her tone was arid. “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 murmured. It only confirmed her long-held suspicions about such men.
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 didn’t know why she laughed at that, but she did. More out of commiseration than anything else, as if they really were the same person. And how strange that she almost felt as if they were. “It’s going to be a terrific couple of months all around, then. Mr. Casilieris is in rare form. He’s putting together a particularly dramatic deal and it’s not going his way and he...isn’t used to that. So that’s me working twenty-two-hour days instead of my usual twenty for the foreseeable future, which is even more fun when he’s cranky and snarling.”
“It can’t possibly be worse than having to smile politely while your future husband lectures you about the absurd expectation of fidelity in what is essentially an arranged marriage for hours on end. The absurdity is that he might be expected to curb his impulses for a year or so, in case you wondered. The expectations for me apparently involve quietly and chastely finding fulfillment in philanthropic works, like his sainted absentee mother who everyone knows manufactured a supposed health crisis so she could live out her days in peaceful seclusion. It’s easy to be philanthropically fulfilled while living in isolation in Bavaria.”
Natalie smiled. “Try biting your tongue while your famously short-tempered boss rages at you for no reason, for the hundredth time in an hour, because he pays you to stand there and take it without wilting or crying or selling whinging stories about him to the press.”
Valentina’s smile was a perfect match. “Or the hours and hours of grim palace-vetted pre-wedding press interviews in the company of a pack of advisors who will censor everything I say and inevitably make me sound like a bit of animated treacle, as out of touch with reality as the average overly sweet dessert.”
“Speaking of treats, I also have to deal with the board of directors Mr. Casilieris treats like irritating schoolchildren, his packs of furious ex-lovers each with her own vendetta, all his terrified employees who need to be coached through meetings with him and treated for PTSD after, and every last member of his staff in every one of his households, who like me to be the one to ask him the questions they know will set him off on one of his scorch-the-earth rages.”
They’d moved a little bit closer then, leaning toward each other like friends. Or sisters, a little voice whispered. It should have concerned Natalie like everything else about this. And like everything else, it did and it didn’t. Either way, she didn’t step back. She didn’t insist upon her personal space. She was almost tempted to imagine her body knew something about this mirror image version of her that her brain was still desperately trying to question.