Читать книгу The Platinum Collection: Surrender To The Devil: The Replacement Wife / Heiress Behind the Headlines / A Devil in Disguise - CAITLIN CREWS - Страница 13

BECCA WOKE THE next morning feeling unaccountably fragile.

She moved slowly, sitting up and pushing her hair back from her face carefully, as if suffering from some kind of emotional hangover. Gingerly, she made her way into the vast, luxurious shower that had at first seemed shockingly lush and that she was now already far too comfortable using. She stood under the hot spray for a long, long time, willing the odd tilt and whirl of her feelings away.

Because this was Theo’s world, a carafe of hot coffee waited for her in the elegant blue-and-white bedroom when she walked back into it. She poured herself a mug of the rich, nearly decadent brew, and took several bracing sips before she completed the final step of her morning ritual in this bizarre place and allowed herself to look in the mirror.

Where she saw only Larissa looking back.

She blinked, and saw herself again—and then had to put her hand against her abdomen to ease the knot of panic there away.

Things had gotten far too confused, she thought then, fighting off the odd sense of something like vertigo. It was all too messy, somehow. She was a stranger with her own face. How could that be anything but a mess? But she could change it, surely.

Just because that arrogant man thought he got to decide if she existed or not didn’t make it true, she reminded herself fiercely, shaking off all the echoes of her illegitimate childhood, all of Bradford’s harsh words, that Theo’s comments last night had dredged up. It meant only that he was even more full of himself than she’d previously believed.

And if a hollow ache seemed to gape open behind her ribs and then bloom in the pit of her stomach, well, no one had to know that but her. And she was getting very, very good at burying the things she didn’t want to think about, she thought wryly. Far too good, in fact.

She checked in with Emily quickly, making sure her sister was doing well even as she hurried off the phone—too conscious of the lies she had to tell to linger. But hearing her sister’s voice was like a much-needed wake-up call. She would pack these unwanted emotions away and concentrate on the job at hand. On her purpose for being here—which was not to figure out the mysteries of Larissa or, more to the point, of Theo Markou Garcia. It didn’t matter how intriguing he was, how her body hummed to life at the very thought of his hard mouth, his strong hands. She had to play a part, that was all. Then she would collect her mother’s inheritance—Emily’s future—and leave this empty, shiny life exactly as she’d found it. She would be happy to be rid of it.

That was the plan. That had always been the plan. She should feel happier about it, surely.

She dressed slowly, pulling together the kind of fashionable outfit that she imagined Larissa might wear. She chose a flirty little scarlet dress and a pair of boots, then fashioned her hair in a Larissa-esque slicked-back ponytail, low on her neck. She then sat down at the vanity table and began the laborious process of applying the kind of makeup women like Larissa, apparently, viewed as the bare essentials for everyday wear. She had to live under the expectation that she might be photographed at any moment, she reminded herself, an echo of Theo’s lecturing tone ringing in her head. She had to learn that only in her private bedroom could she drop her defenses and be something other than public property.

Normally, Becca hated every moment of the process. She’d liked a bit of mascara and some judicious eyeliner now and then when she’d been back in her own life, but she’d always erred on the side of practical rather than pretty. Larissa’s seventeen coats of this followed by a dusting of that seemed absurdly excessive to her. But today she found that she was almost grateful for the excuse. For the ability to put on a mask, layer by layer. Coat by coat.

Because last night had left her feeling much too raw, far too exposed. She didn’t want to feel anything even approaching vulnerable. She wanted to lock the soft parts of herself away, because she had to concentrate on her endgame—on Emily—if she was going to make it through this.

It didn’t matter how fascinating he was. It couldn’t.

She had to find a way to remember that.

Theo was all business when she found him again, behind his massive desk in the office suite of the penthouse. He barely spared her a glance when she walked in, and even turned his high leather seat around toward the window to continue his phone conversation. She heard the terms market share and network overhead, and tuned out.

She wondered if he made everyone stand there, like a supplicant, waiting for the great gift of his attention. Why wouldn’t he? Hadn’t he told her last night to remember her place? This was a naked display of power. He was too busy to deal with her the moment she arrived—though the housekeeper had told her to go to his office—and yet she was too insignificant to be kept separated from his conversation. She was meant to feel more and more uncomfortable as she stood there, ignored.

It was shocking to think that he’d learned tricks like this, that they hadn’t been genetically bestowed upon him at birth. Everything about him shouted out his dominance, his masculine arrogance, his mastery of himself and everything around him. Becca found she couldn’t imagine him as a young boy, desperate to acquire even some small part of what was now his. In her mind, he must always have been this way. Larger than life.

“I trust you are not as sentimental today as you were last night,” he said coldly, snapping her attention back to the present. He replaced the phone in its cradle and eyed her from across the wide expanse of his gleaming black desk.

Becca stiffened. “Are you?” she replied. When his dangerous brows arched, she sniffed. “Or is it not my place to ask such questions?”

She could feel the tension in the room skyrocket. It clenched a hard hand around her, like a fist, and squeezed tight, and she knew he must feel it, too, though he did not move so much as a muscle. His eyes somehow got more amber; lit up from within, temper and heat and something much darker she could not name.

Though it took her breath.

“I think you have Larissa’s appearance well in hand,” he said after a moment, as if she had not spoken at all. His gaze flicked over her, and she took the absence of criticism to mean approval.

How sad you are, she told herself when she realized she actually felt a little glow go through her at the thought of his approval. As if that was the Holy Grail.

“Is that how you play this game?” she asked quietly, clamping down on her anger—at herself most of all. “You will simply pretend not to hear me as it suits you?”

“If you are planning to throw a childish tantrum,” he said in his dark, commanding way, making her flush too hot and feel that warmth sear the back of her eyes—was she so eager to please him? “Please let me know now, so I do not pointlessly rearrange my schedule.”

“Heaven forfend,” she murmured. She glared at him with all the force she could manage, which, unsurprisingly, had no noticeable effect on him at all. “It’s not as if I’ve given up weeks of my life, and rearranged everything. Why should you be inconvenienced?”

He gazed at her, and this time, even though she knew it was deliberate and that he intended for her to feel foolish and small, she had to bite down on the inside of her cheek to keep from squirming. But she could do nothing about the way she flushed yet again, or the creep of that red heat across her face and down her chest.

And even then, , there was still that part of her that wanted nothing more than to reach out and touch him.

Damn him.

“If you’re finished,” he said, so calmly. So coolly. “I think it’s time for a field experiment.”

Theo studied her in the flattering light that spilled through the floor-to-ceiling windows, bathing the trendy SoHo restaurant in afternoon sunshine. She looked radiant. Beautiful, serene.

And she was driving him slowly insane.

He had lost sleep over this woman, an occurrence so rare that he had not allowed himself to admit it was possible until he found himself standing at his window in the dark of night, drinking whiskey and brooding. And thinking only of the way she’d argued with him—the way she’d looked at him as if she hurt for him.

He could not seem to wrap his head around that. He could not make sense of it.

He no longer knew what he saw when he looked at her. It had all become tangled. Knotted and snarled beyond any possible redemption. He had shared things with her he’d never shared with anyone, and he’d tried to slap her back down when it had all become too much—and none of it had helped. And yet he found himself mesmerized by the way she held the heavy silverware in her delicate hands, the way she sneaked glances around her when she thought he wasn’t looking. And why shouldn’t she? This was the restaurant of the moment. Had Theo cared to, he could no doubt have identified most of the other patrons packing the place, as they all had to be very famous, very wealthy, or both, to get in at all.

What was this childish part of him that wanted her to know that? Wasn’t it enough that he knew it?

He had no idea what was happening to him.

“Tell me about your childhood,” he heard himself ask, breaking the silence between them. He toyed with his glass, and could not seem to breathe when she licked her full lips. Was that an indication of her nerves? Or this same fire that burned in him? He decided he didn’t care. Nothing mattered but this lunch, this woman, this moment. Surely.

“Is that an order?” she asked, that challenging look on her face.

“Merely a request.” But he smiled slightly, because she never quit, this woman.

“I hesitate to make myself more human in your eyes,” she continued crisply, cutting into her steak with a certain deliberate precision that he suspected was the only outward sign of her temper, aside from her tone of voice. “That might make me exist independent of your permission to do so, and then where would we be?”

His smile deepened. “The futility of the fight never seems to faze you,” he murmured, as much to himself as to her. She was his very own Don Quixote, tilting wildly at any windmill that caught her attention, and he could not help but admire her passion. Her foolish courage.

She put down her silverware with a thunk and met his gaze. Hers was that color between brown and green, and it called to him. So serious. So sincere. So unreasonably brave.

“Whereas you try to dominate everything you come into contact with,” she countered. “Whether you need to prove something or not.”

“You make me sound like a stray dog, humping your leg,” he said dryly. Her eyebrows rose, and she did not refute it. He laughed then, throwing his head back and letting it pour from him—because she was right. Something about this woman made him feel reckless and untried. As if he had to prove himself. No wonder he was acting like a fool. When he looked at her again, her bright eyes looked almost dazed.

“I didn’t know you were capable of laughter,” she said, clearing her throat. She looked away, then back at him with her cool mask back in place. “I thought it was all gloom and ghosts with you.”

“You don’t know me very well,” he said. He leaned forward, and idly picked up her hand, sliding his palm against hers, reveling in the contact. “But I assure you, I have better technique than a randy dog.”

She pulled her hand away, but not before he felt her tremble, and saw the heat bloom in her cheeks, in her gaze.

“I’ll have to take your word on it,” she said primly. He sat back in his seat and she watched him warily for a moment. “Why this change of heart?” she asked. “Last night you were in a high temper, and now you want to know about my childhood? Why?”

“There is no reason we can’t be friendly, Rebecca,” he said, his voice low. Insinuating. He hadn’t meant to sound as if he meant to seduce her … had he?

“There is every reason,” she said, her voice husky though he could see how she fought it—it was written across her face. She sat straighter in her chair. “For one thing, the fact that you keep calling me by the wrong name. It’s Becca, not Re-becca.”

“Becca is a nickname for Rebecca,” he replied, shrugging.

“It is,” she agreed, smiling tightly. “If your name happens to be Rebecca. But my mother named me Becca. B-E-C-C-A. No nickname. No longer name. Just Becca.” She tilted her head slightly as she looked at him. “Is that part of how you assert control? Play your little dominance games? You don’t like someone’s name so you change it—and they’re too afraid of you to complain?”

“I hear no fear at all, but a great deal of complaint,” he pointed out, still lounging across from her, almost idly. “This tactic cannot be very successful, can it?”

She pressed her lips together, then dropped her hands into her lap. He imagined he could feel the table move, as if her knee was bouncing in its usual agitation, and then it stopped—as if she’d slapped it down with the hands he couldn’t see.

“What is the point of this?” she asked, finally. “You don’t care about my childhood, and you didn’t bring me here, to a restaurant like this, to be friendly. You have an ulterior motive. You always do.”

There was accusation and something else in her voice, something that tugged at him even as it hung between them for a moment, dancing in the bright sunshine yet just out of sight.

“Why must it be one or the other?” he asked, almost forgetting himself.

She smiled. It was a sharp-honed weapon, hardly a smile at all. “Because that’s how you operate,” she said. She glanced around her, flipping her sleek ponytail back over her shoulder. “I suppose this is a decent test run. What did you call it—a field experiment?“ She frowned slightly as her gaze swept the crowded restaurant. “I’ve already seen at least five people take pictures of me—of us—with their cell phones. I assume that’s what you wanted.” Her voice dropped and she swayed forward, revealing her perfect cleavage and the hollow between them. “Larissa Whitney and her long-suffering fiance at a quiet, uneventful lunch, just like normal people.”

He could not deny a single thing she’d said, and yet some part of him wished he could. That there were no ulterior motives at all. That they were simply two people at lunch, learning about each other. Why did he yearn for that with parts of himself he hardly recognized?

“Can’t I enjoy an afternoon with a beautiful woman?” he asked softly. “Can’t I get to know her?”

“No,” she said, low and sure. Fierce. “You can’t.”

He wanted to protest. He wanted to truly forget everything but this moment, this crippling need that raged through him—but he could not quite do that. Not after everything he’d given up to get here. Not now. “Why not?” he asked instead.

“Because my only value to you is my resemblance to someone else,” she said very deliberately, very calmly. Too calmly. “Therefore, my personal information is mine. You don’t get access to it. You don’t get to know me when what you’re really after is her.”

He had spent years planning to run Whitney Media, and then, in due time, to own it. He had focused on nothing but that singular goal, casting everything else aside in pursuit of it. Larissa had liked him when he was her rough-edged lover calculated to irritate her father; she had lost interest in him when he became more of a Whitney than the Whitneys themselves. But even so, they had hammered out their devil’s bargain, their sad little dance toward Theo’s lifelong dream. And he was so close to achieving that dream—the dream that had meant everything to him for almost as long as he allowed himself to remember, last night’s trip down memory lane notwithstanding. He was so close.

And yet he looked across the small table and the city outside faded away, the bustle and chatter of the Manhattan hot spot disappeared, and all he could see was Becca. Her mysterious gaze, like the secret, shaded hollows of some cool, forgotten forest. The intelligence and the challenge. The invitation he was not even sure she knew she was broadcasting. But he knew. He could feel it throughout his body, hardening him, readying him, making his need for her burn like a wildfire through his limbs.

He could not seem to help himself. He looked at her and wanted more, more than he’d thought himself capable of before. More than he’d had.

“And what if I want you?” he asked, as if he was a free man. As if he was someone else. As if she’d been the dream all along. “Just you. What then?”