Читать книгу The Replacement Wife - CAITLIN CREWS - Страница 6

THE HOUSE HAD not improved since she’d seen it last. It loomed over New York City’s tony Fifth Avenue like a displeased society matron, all disapproving elegance and a style that dated to the excesses of the Gilded Age. Becca Whitney sat in the vast and chilly parlor, stuffed with priceless paintings and fussy, disturbingly detailed statuary, and tried to pretend she couldn’t feel the way her two so-called relatives were glaring at her. As if her presence there, as the illegitimate daughter of their disinherited and long-disparaged late sister, polluted the very air.

Maybe it did, Becca thought. Maybe that was one reason the great hulking mansion felt like a soulless crypt.

The strained silence—that Becca refused to break, since she’d been called here this time and was thankfully no longer the supplicant—was broken suddenly, by the slight creaking sound of the ornate parlor door.

Thank God, Becca thought. She had to keep her hands tightly laced together in her lap, her teeth clenched in her jaw, to keep the bitter words she’d like to say from spilling out. Whatever this interruption was, it was a relief.

Until she looked up and saw the man who stepped inside the room. Something like warning, like anticipation, seemed to crackle over her skin, making it hum in reaction. Making her sit straighter in her chair.

“Is this the girl?” he asked, his voice a low, dark rumble, his tone brisk. Demanding.

Everything—power, focus, the strained air itself—shifted immediately. Away from the horrible aunt and uncle she’d never planned to see again and toward the man, dark and big and goose bump-raising, who moved as if he expected the world to shuffle and rearrange itself around him—and with the kind of confidence that suggested it usually did exactly that.

Becca felt her lips part slightly as their eyes met, across centuries of artifacts and the frowns of these terrible people who had tossed her mother out like so much trash twenty-six years ago. His were a rich, arresting color, an electric amber, and seared into her, making her blink. Making her wonder if she’d been scarred by the contact.

Who was he?

He was not particularly tall, not much over six feet, but he was … there. A force to be reckoned with, as if a live wire burned in him, and from him. He wore the same kind of clothes they all wore in this hermetically sealed world of wealth and privilege—expensive. Yet unlike her fussy relatives, in their suits and scarves and ostentatious accessories, everything about this man was stripped down. Lean. Powerful. Impressive. A charcoal-gray sweater that clung to his perfectly shaped torso, and dark trousers that outlined the strength of his thighs and his narrow hips. He looked elegant and elemental all at once.

He gazed at her, his head cocking slightly to one side as he considered her, and Becca knew two things with every cell in her body. The first was that he was dangerous in a way she could not quite grasp—though she could see the fierce intelligence in him, coupled with a certain ruthless intensity. And the second was that she had to get away from him. Now. Her stomach cramped and her heart pounded. Something about him just … spooked her.

“You see it, then,” Becca’s pompous uncle Bradford said in the same patronizing tone he’d used when he’d thrown Becca out of this very same house six months ago. In the very same tone he’d used to tell her that she and her sister Emily were mistakes. Embarrassments. Certainly not Whitneys. “The resemblance.”

“It is uncanny.” The man’s remarkable, disconcerting eyes narrowed, focused entirely on Becca even as he spoke to her uncle. “I thought you exaggerated.”

Becca stared back at him. Something was alive, hot, in the air between them. She felt her mouth dry, her palms twitch. Panic, she thought. It was only panic, and perfectly reasonable! She wanted to leap to her feet and run out into the streets, far away from this overwrought place and the scene unfolding around her that she no longer wanted to understand—but she couldn’t seem to move. It was the way he looked at her. The command in it, perhaps. The heat. It kept her still. Obedient.

“I still don’t know why I’m here,” Becca said, forcing herself to speak. To do something other than mutely obey. She turned and looked at Bradford, and her mother’s pursed-mouthed sister, the censorious Helen. “After the way you threw me out the last time—”

“This has nothing to do with that,” her uncle—a technical title at best, in Becca’s opinion—sniffed impatiently. “This is important.”

“So is my sister’s education,” Becca replied, a snap in her voice. She was too aware of the other man, like a dark shadow in her peripheral vision. She could feel the way his eyes ate her up, consumed her. It made her lungs feel tight in her chest. It made her body… ache.

“For God’s sake, Bradford,” Helen murmured to her brother, twisting the elegant rings on her fingers. “What can you be thinking? Look at this creature. Listen to her! Who would ever believe that she was one of us?”

“She has about as much interest in being ‘one of you’ as she does in walking back home to Boston naked, over a sea of broken glass,” Becca retorted, but then reminded herself to focus on the reason she’d come back here, the reason she’d subjected herself to this. “All I want from you people is what I’ve always wanted from you. Help with my sister’s education. I still don’t see how that’s too much to ask.”

She waved a hand at the immense and obvious wealth all around them, from the thick, soft rugs beneath their feet to the paintings all over the walls, to the graceful ceilings above them, bursting with exquisite chandeliers. To say nothing of the fact that this was a family-owned mansion that took up a full city block in the middle of New York City. Becca did not have to know anything about Manhattan real estate to understand that the family who didn’t want to claim her could certainly afford to do so, if they wished, without noticing the difference.

Not that it was Becca who needed them to claim her. It was her seventeen-year-old sister, Emily. Bright, smart, destined-for-great-things Emily, who deserved more than the kind of life Becca could fashion for her on a paralegal’s salary. Only Emily’s need could ever have inspired Becca to seek out these people and prostate herself before them in the first place. Only Emily’s best interests could ever have compelled her to respond to this latest summons after Bradford had called her mother a whore and had Becca removed from these very premises half a year ago. Just as it was only thoughts of the tuition money Emily still desperately needed, now that Becca’s savings were depleted, that kept her from making a rude gesture at Bradford as he scowled at her now.

That and the fact she’d made her mother a promise on her deathbed: that she would do whatever she had to do to protect Emily from suffering. Anything at all. And how could she break that promise when her mother had given up this whole, glittering world for Becca years ago?

“Stand up,” came the silky demand from beside her—much closer than it should have been. Becca jumped slightly in her seat, and then hated herself for showing that much weakness. Somehow, she knew it would count against her. She turned, and the devil himself was standing too close to her, still looking at her in that disturbing way.

What was it about this man that got under her skin like this? So quickly? So completely? When she didn’t even know his name?

“I … what?” she asked, startled.

This close, she could see that, while he could never be called handsome, precisely, the way his features came together—so dark and brooding, with that olive skin and his piercing eyes—made him distractingly compelling in a purely, breathtakingly masculine way. It was as if the very fact of his full lips made something in her want to revel in her own femininity, like a cat in a sunbeam.

Where had that thought come from?

“Stand up,” he said again, with that note of command ringing in his voice, and she found she was moving without meaning to do so. Drifting up and on to her feet like a marionette in his control. Becca was horrified at herself. It was as if he’d hypnotized her—as if those eyes of his were a snake charmer’s, and she was helpless to do anything but dance for his pleasure.

On her feet, she found he was taller than she’d thought, forcing her to tilt her head back slightly to meet his gaze—which she did, even though the wild beat of her pulse wanted her to break and run, to escape, to get far away from him … .

“This is fascinating,” he murmured. His lean, intriguing face was closer now, and she had the sense of the great control he practiced, the power he kept to himself, the hum and the kick of it, as if he operated on a different frequency than the rest of the world. “Turn.”

Becca only stared at him, and so he lifted a hand and twirled a finger in the air, demonstration and command. It was a hard, strong hand. Not soft and pale like her uncle’s. It was the hand of a man who was not afraid to use it to do his own work. She had a sudden, stark and erotic vision of that hand against her own skin, and had to swallow against it. Hard.

“I would love nothing more than to obey your every command,” she managed to say, shocked at the sudden swell of carnal need that washed through her, and fighting to shove it behind her carefully cultivated tough exterior. “But I don’t even know who you are, or what you want, or why you think you have the right to command anyone in the first place.”

As if from a distance, she heard her aunt and her uncle let out sharp gasps and exclamations, but Becca couldn’t bring herself to care about them. She was mesmerized, spellbound, caught up in the man before her and his searing amber eyes.

How strange that she should find him so unsettling, while at the same time she had the notion that he could keep her safe. Even here. She pushed the absurdity away. Unlikely, she thought. This man is about as safe as broken glass.

He did not smile. But his gaze warmed, and Becca felt an answering warmth flood her, turning into flame wherever it touched.

“I am Theo Markou Garcia,” he said in the way men did when they expected to be known, recognized. Celebrated. When she only stared back at him, his lips curved slightly—almost wryly, she thought. “I am the CEO of Whitney Media.”

Whitney Media was the great jewel of the Whitney family—the modern-day reason they still held on to so much of their old robber baron money and were able to maintain latter-day castles like this one. Becca knew very little about the actual company. Except perhaps that through it and because of it, thanks to the newspapers and cable channels and movie studios, the Whitneys owned far too much, had too much influence, and had come to regard themselves as demigods in the way only the very rich could.

“Congratulations,” she said dryly. She raised her eyebrows. “I’m Becca, the bastard daughter of the sister no one dares mention out loud.” She shot a look toward her aunt and uncle, wishing she could incinerate them with the force of it. “Her name was Caroline, and she was better than the both of you put together.”

“I know who you are.” This time, it was his low, insinuating voice that blocked out the noise from the other, legitimate, and now further affronted Whitneys. It seemed to reverberate behind her ribs, and spread out through her bones. “As for what I want, I don’t think that’s the right question.”

“It’s the right question if you want me to whirl around in front of you,” Becca countered, some recklessness charging through her, making her courageous. “Though I doubt you’ll give me the right answer.”

“The right question is this—what do you want, and how can I give it to you?” He crossed his arms over his chest, and Becca was distracted by the play of his lean muscles, his corded strength. The man was a deadly weapon, and she felt as if she’d already sustained a body blow.

“I want to fund my sister’s Ivy League education,” Becca said, wrenching her gaze back to his, ordering herself to concentrate. “I don’t much care if you give me money or they do. I only know that I can’t do it myself.” The unfairness of it almost choked her then, the sheer injustice that allowed worthless human beings like Bradford and Helen so much money, so much easy access to things like a college education—things they probably took for granted—while Becca fought to make her rent each month. It was maddening.

“Then the only other question is, how far are you willing to go to get what you want?” Theo asked softly, his gaze still so intent on hers, still managing to make her feel as if they were all alone in the room—the world.

“Emily deserves the best,” Becca said fiercely. “I’ll do whatever I have to do to make sure she gets it.”

Life wasn’t fair. Becca didn’t begrudge a single thing she’d had to do. But she wouldn’t stand by and watch Emily’s dreams slip away when they didn’t have to. Not when she’d vowed to her mother that she’d never let that happen. Not when Becca could do something to fix it. Even if it was this.

“I admire ruthlessness and ambition in a woman,” Theo said, but there was a grim satisfaction in his voice that Becca didn’t understand. Yet she had no difficulty whatsoever understanding him when he raised that hand of his again, and once more motioned for her to spin around.

“It must be nice to be so ridiculously rich that you can barter an entire four years’ worth of tuition for one little twirl,” Becca said, resisting the urge to fidget, to bite at her lip. She recognized, on some level, that she was stalling. “But who am I to argue?”

“I don’t actually care who you are,” Theo replied, his voice hardening, and she understood then that he was not a man to be trifled with, not a man to tease. Not safe at all, she chided herself. He was, she understood on some primal level, the most dangerous creature she’d ever encountered. The truth of that blazed in his oddly colored eyes, danced through her and left her breathless. “I care what you look like. Do not make me ask you again. Turn around. I want to see you.”

And, unbelievably, Becca turned. She felt a hectic heat flood her cheeks, and a terrifying dampness prickle behind her eyes, but she did as she was told. Her heart thudded hard against her chest, humiliation and something else, something that made her tremble even as a sweet ache bloomed to life low in her belly. And still, she slowly pivoted in front of him.

Last time, she had dressed as if she was going to a work interview. A smart, conservative suit. Her best shoes, and her heavy chestnut-colored hair carefully combed back from her face. She’d hated herself, afterward, for trying so hard. This time, she hadn’t cared what they might think of her. She didn’t even know why they’d summoned her here. So she hadn’t bothered to try. She’d worn a ratty pair of jeans, her battered old motorcycle boots, and an old T-shirt beneath an even older hooded sweatshirt. She’d thrown her hair back in a messy ponytail and called it a day. It had been perfectly comfortable on the train, and had had the added benefit of making her snooty relatives cringe when they saw her walk in. She’d been pleased with herself—until now.

Now, she wished she’d worn something else. Something … different. Something that could grab this man’s attention, instead of putting that smirk on his frankly sensual mouth. Why would you want that? she asked herself, confused by the riot of emotion that surged through her. What was he doing to her? Reeling, she completed the circle, and met his hooded gaze.

“Satisfied?” she asked, with a bravado she wished she felt deep inside of her.

“With the raw materials,” he said in that cutting way of his, that somehow made her want to fight him even as, absurdly, it also made her want to please him. “If nothing else.”

“I’ve read that many major CEOs and assorted other captains of industry are sociopaths,” she replied, almost conversationally. “I imagine you fit right in.”

He really did smile then, and it was so unexpected, so shocking, that Becca actually stepped back. It was as if a fuse blew out inside of her, with a rattle and then a loud pop. His smile lit up that fascinating face of his, making him seem at once more beautiful and more lethal than any man should be.

“Sit down,” he said. It was another order. “I have a proposition for you.”

“Nothing good has ever followed those words,” she replied, sticking her shaking hands on her hips to hide their state. She did not sit down, despite how fluttery her knees felt beneath her. “It’s like checking out the strange noise in a horror movie. It can’t possibly end well.”

“This is not a horror movie,” Theo replied silkily. “This is a simple, if unorthodox, business transaction. Do what I want, and you will receive all you ever wanted and more.”

“Let’s cut through all this buildup.” She smiled at him, fake and hard. “What’s the catch? There’s always a catch.”

For a moment he said nothing, only looked at her, and Becca had the craziest notion that he could see straight into her, that he could read her—that he knew both how determined she was to save her sister’s future and how baffled she was by her own reaction to his proximity.

“There are a number of catches,” he said, his dark voice soft, his eyes bright. “You will probably dislike many of them, but I suspect you will persevere because you’ll be thinking, always, about the end result. About what you will do with all the money we will give you if you do this thing we will ask of you. So none of these catches will matter.” His dark brows quirked then. “Save one.”

“And what is that?” She had some kind of premonition, perhaps. Or she already knew that this man could—would—devastate her. That he had only refrained from doing so already by sheer coincidence. That it would take so little to undo her. Another smile. Or, God help her, a touch.

She felt the fire between them, and something dark and confining, that seemed to wrap around her like a chain. Like a promise.

His amber-colored eyes seared into her, like molten gold, and she found she could not breathe.

“You will have to obey me,” he told her, mercilessly, and not without a certain gleam of male satisfaction in his unholy eyes. “Completely.”