The Billionaire's Secret Princess by Caitlin Crews

Author:Caitlin Crews [Crews, Caitlin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarlequinUKLtd
Published: 2017-06-14T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

IN THE DAYS that followed that strange night and Achilles’s world-altering kiss that had left her raw and aching and wondering if she’d ever feel like herself again, Valentina found she couldn’t bear the notion that she was twenty-seven years old and somehow a stranger to herself.

Her future was set in stone. She’d always known that. And she’d never fought against all that inevitability because what was the point? She could fight as much as she wanted and she’d still be Princess Valentina of Murin, only with a stain next to her name. That had always seemed to her like the very definition of futility.

But in the days that followed that kiss, it occurred to her that perhaps it wasn’t the future she needed to worry about, but her past. She hadn’t really allowed herself to think too closely about what it meant that Natalie had been raised by the woman who was very likely Valentina’s own mother. Because, of course, there was no other explanation for the fact she and Natalie looked so much alike. Identical twins couldn’t just randomly occur, and certainly not when one of them was a royal. There were too many people watching royal births too closely. Valentina had accepted the story that her mother had abandoned her, because it had always been couched in terms of Frederica’s mental illness. Valentina had imagined her mother living out her days in some or other institution somewhere, protected from harm.

But the existence of Natalie suggested that Frederica was instead a completely different person from the one Valentina had imagined all this time. The woman who now called herself Erica had clearly not wasted away in a mental institution, all soothing pastels and injections and no ability to contact her own child. On the contrary, this Erica had lived a complicated life after her time in the palace that had nothing to do with any hospital—and though she’d clearly had two daughters, she’d taken only one with her when she’d gone.

Valentina didn’t entirely understand how she could be quite so hurt by a betrayal that had happened so long ago and that she hadn’t known about until recently. She didn’t understand why it mattered so much to her. But the more she tried to tell herself that it was silly to be so bothered, the more bothered she got.

It was only when she had gone round and round and round on that almost too many times to count that Valentina accepted the fact she was going to have to do something about it.

And all these years, she’d never known how to go about looking for her mother even if she’d wanted to. She would have had to ask her father directly, the very idea of which made her shudder—even now, across an ocean or two from his throne and his great reserve and his obvious reluctance to discuss Frederica at all. Barring that, she would have had to speak to one of the high-level palace

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