The Replacement Wife (11 page)

Oh, what a liar she was. Even to herself. And she hadn’t even known it until tonight. Until now, when it seemed everything lay about her in ruins, though she stood in such august surroundings, and she wondered how broken she was after all. Because suddenly, there was no escape from the truth.

It was sick, she thought now, and sad, and any number
of other things she felt too raw to face, that there had been that part of her that had wondered if maybe, once these vile, cruel people had seen her all dressed up like Larissa—the one, some still-hurt part of her reminded her, they’d loved enough to keep—they might have had second thoughts about Becca. About how they’d treated her all these years. About how easily, how happily, they’d forgotten about her.

The reality of that lay on her like a great, wet blanket, miserable and awful, and hating herself for her own naïveté only made it worse.

She’d thought she was so tough, so prepared for this world and what it could do. She’d thought she was immune. But instead, she was still the little girl who didn’t understand why the rest of her family didn’t love her. The little girl who believed, damn Bradford, that she truly had ruined her mother’s life. It didn’t matter how many times she argued that little girl into submission—the truth was in how hollowed out she felt right now, how scraped raw, by the things that awful man had said to her.

And worse, from the grim knowledge that he believed those things to be true. Worst of all—there was a huge part of her that believed it, too.

She was the beggar at the feast and always had been, no matter how many times she told herself she didn’t want what they had. That didn’t mean she could understand, even now, how easily they could deny her.

She hated that it hurt her. That Bradford had hurt her. That Helen’s moment of near tenderness had fooled her, even momentarily, into believing these people could be anything less than monstrous.

And more than that, she hated that Theo had gotten so far under her skin, had come to matter so much, that
she had actually believed the way he looked at her. She had actually believed that she could handle Bradford herself, that it would not leave this deep wound. That she could be the person Theo seemed to believe she was. Strong enough to fight that battle without his help. Strong enough not to need him. Strong enough to walk right out of that door as if she was perfectly fine on her own. And for a few moments in that dining room, she’d believed it. She’d believed that Theo was there for her, watching silently, and would have jumped in had she needed it. She’d
believed.

It made her want to collapse on the floor and cry, right here in this hushed hallway, because she knew better.

She was alone. She had always been alone. She’d been the odd girl out in the little family her mother had made with her husband and Emily; the shameful memory of Caroline’s sordid past and reduced circumstances. Then, after Caroline had died, she’d truly been on her own, fighting with all she had to keep Emily with her—and to live up to her mother’s wishes, as the very least she owed to the woman who had lost everything for her. So why should the fact that she was alone here, in this alien place where cruelty seemed as much a part of the decor as the recognizably famous paintings on the wall, make her stomach ache, her eyes water? Why should this come as any kind of surprise?

Why, she asked herself as she headed toward the end of the hall without knowing she meant to move, had she thought for even a moment that anything should be different? Light spilled out of a room up ahead of her, and so she made her way toward it—but her mind was far, far away.

She thought of Theo’s dark head, bent to hers. She
thought of his hot mouth, his demanding hands. Her body sang out for him as if he was beside her, and she had to bite back something she feared was much too close to a sob. She would have slapped herself if she could have, because she knew, suddenly, what she’d been denying for much too long already. She knew why she’d so foolishly expected anything at all from a man she should have viewed as nothing but her enemy.

She loved him. A bitter sort of laugh escaped her lips then, echoing down the hall. How could this have happened? How had she let it? But there it was. The truth of it moved in her like a song, high and sweet and sure, but it was not one she was likely to let herself sing.

She was an idiot. A fool of the highest degree. But there was no getting around the facts of it. The truth. She was not the sort of person who fell into bed with just anyone, no matter how beautiful they might be, or how unusually compelling she might find them. She’d known on some level when she’d turned to him for comfort after the paparazzi gauntlet that he’d put her through deliberately. She’d known even sooner, when she’d been so desperate to understand how he could possibly feel as he did for the shallow, seemingly spiteful Larissa. And she’d certainly known this past week or so, when she’d managed to put her reason for being here, and Emily herself, out of her mind, all to lose herself in him.

“Congratulations, Becca,” she told herself, her voice little more than a whisper, hushed by the wealth and finery surrounding her, her high heels sinking into the plush Oriental rug that stretched toward the light. “You’ve managed to make a bad situation that much worse.”

She loved him, she thought. She loved Theo Markou Garcia, a man who loved money and power above all
things. A man who thought he was in love with a woman he’d hardly known—a fantasy, a dream. A man who would never, could never, love her back. Not even if he wanted to, and she very much doubted he did. After all, as Helen had said, he was a man who wanted the very best. Not its stand-in. Not its low-rent stunt double.

She reached the end of the hallway, and stepped into the room that waited there, brightly lit and notably different from the rest of the house. The door was wide-open, so she moved into what looked like a sitting area, all clean lines and a brisk, contemporary sensibility. She drifted toward the windows, vaguely imagining that she’d be able to figure out where she was in the house if she could see the street, and only when she was halfway there did she catch something out of the corner of her eye.

There was another room, leading off this one. Becca stopped, as her heart seemed to drop to her stomach with the force of a blow. She sucked in a breath and turned, not believing what she could see right there, right in front of her.

The adjoining room was cool and blue and dominated by the hospital bed in its center. There were machines and IV trees clustered around it, but Becca didn’t notice them. She hadn’t even heard the gentle beeping until now, when she was much too close. She saw only the slight figure on the bed, unmoving beneath the blankets, her pale hair spread out around her like a halo. So fragile. So small. So incapable, it would seem, of causing the commotion she had—both in this world of hers and, Becca thought in no little shame, inside of her.

Larissa.

M
INUTES COULD HAVE
passed, or hours, and still Becca stood there in the doorway, watching the woman she looked like—yet who was still a stranger to her—fade away into nothing on that bed.

Not that Larissa was fading, necessarily. Becca wasn’t a doctor. What she knew about comas came largely—and presumably inaccurately—from the soap operas she’d watched when home from school as a child. But it seemed impossible to reconcile the person she knew—the Larissa of the diaries she’d read, the photographs she’d studied, the vast and varied tabloid appearances she knew so well—with this wan creature, so silent and still.

It felt as if the ground shook beneath her feet, though she knew on a more rational level that nothing moved. Nothing external. Becca shot out a hand and held on to the doorjamb, unable to fully take in what she was seeing—much less the howling emotional reaction that charged through her like a tidal wave.

We are the same,
she thought, and she shook her head slightly to clear it, because thinking such a thing made her feel dazed. There was a faint ringing in her ears then, and her heart seemed to thud hard against her chest.

She had had so many opinions about Larissa over the years, opinions that had solidified over the past weeks. She had been so sure she knew her, that she
understood
her, and that Larissa had been nothing more than a spoiled, arrogant little princess. She’d thrown those words at Bradford, but she hadn’t truly meant them. How could she have? She hadn’t, even then,
understood.

But for some reason, she thought she did now.

It had something to do with how frail Larissa seemed. It made Becca see her as … someone else, someone hurt and helpless, someone who was more or less the same age that she was and did not deserve this kind of end. Or any of the rest of this madness. It seemed to erase all those tabloid pictures from her head, made her reassess all the conclusions she’d reached about her cousin’s character in these weeks of poring over her every move. It made Becca realize that Larissa was … not so different from Becca, when all was said and done.

It felt very nearly revolutionary to think such a thing.

But they were the same. Chess pieces, as expendable as pawns. Staring at the cousin who looked so much like her, enough that she could pass for her, Becca had a flash of unpleasant and searing insight.
They were the same.
They were both of them formed by the monolith of the Whitney fortune, the Whitney legacy, the Whitney name. Larissa by being thrown headfirst into all of it since birth, Becca by being denied access to it by virtue of her illegitimacy.

Had either one of them ever had a chance?

Who might they each have been—if they hadn’t been Whitneys?

“Becca.”

Her eyes slipped closed at the sound of his voice, but
not because she did not want to hear it. She suspected that no matter what, no matter where, her whole being would leap with joy at the sound of Theo’s dark tones. Even now. Even here.

Even knowing the futility of her own feelings.

“You should not be in here,” he said, as his hand came down on her shoulder, his thumb gently smoothing over her bare skin, soothing her that easily, despite everything.

“It’s not as if she can complain, can she?” Becca asked, but she turned away from the bed and looked at him.

She didn’t know what she expected to see. She felt as if she’d lived through a wholescale sea change, an earthquake of sorts, and surely such a thing should show on her face, shouldn’t it? Surely it should alter everything she came into contact with—but Theo was as he always was. Elemental. Electric. His dark, brooding eyes connected with hers, seeing far too deeply into her, and she felt that same, inevitable fire kindle anew inside of her, making her thighs clench, her nipples tighten into high, hard points.

Loving this man was perhaps the most profoundly stupid thing she’d ever done. She knew this with a deep, abiding certainty. But looking at him, taking in his enigmatic expression and his breathtaking masculine beauty, shown to such advantage in the exquisite suit he wore so easily, she could not see how she could have done anything differently. How she could have saved herself.

“What is it?” he asked softly, reaching out and tracing the line of her cheek with his fingers.

“Nothing I have any intention of discussing,” she said, truthfully enough. It was astonishing how hard it was not to simply blurt out her feelings. And how, though
she knew better, some desperate part of her wanted to cling to the possibility that he was the man she imagined him to be—the man who, she sometimes thought as he moved within her and she held him so close to her, felt more for her than perhaps even he knew.

But she was not that colossal a fool.

Not yet.

“You handled Bradford well,” he said after a moment, his dark eyes searching hers.

“I assumed that was the point of the exercise.” She smiled wryly. “Was it not?” She had never felt more vulnerable, and yet this practiced veneer had snapped into place, keeping her safe even when she knew she was not.

“I wish I knew,” he muttered, but his voice was so low, only the barest thread of sound, Becca wondered if she’d imagined it. Just as she wondered at the flash of something far darker she saw move through his eyes—something she might have called regret.

But this was one of the most powerful men in the world. This was not a man who felt regret—for anything. And certainly not for her.

“Come,” he said after a strained moment, heavy with portents and signs she could not begin to decipher. “Let’s go home.”

He held out his hand, and she took it. She did not question her own eagerness, her own acquiescence. Her time was limited here, she knew, and she was not about to pretend, simply out of spite, she did not want him in any way she could get him. What would be the point? She was the one who would suffer.

And she had the very real fear that there would be suffering enough, when all of this was done.

She did not look back at Larissa as he led her away.

She did not need to. She knew somehow that Larissa would be with her, the true ghost, ever after.

He woke before dawn. The room was gray and Becca was not in his bed where she belonged.

He jackknifed up, and the panic that had seized him eased when he saw her, wrapped in the coverlet and curled up on the leather chaise that looked out over his private balcony, and his own stunning view of Manhattan, shining in the early-morning gloom.

Yet his view right now put all of that to shame.

He rose from the bed, unconcerned with his own nakedness, and moved across the room. At some point she heard him, and swiveled around, her mouth curving in welcome. But not before he’d seen the desolation written so plainly across her face, that she worked to conceal as she turned.

He wanted to demand that she tell him what bothered her, so he could fix it at once—but he did not dare. There was the all too real possibility that what had chased her from his bed in the middle of the night was him. Or any one of the many parts of this situation that would not—could not—change.

So he did not speak. Instead, he reached down and picked her up, holding her against him as he sat down in the chaise himself. He deposited her between his legs, settling her against him, her elegant back snug against his chest. He could smell the subtle fragrance of her hair, and wrapped his arms around her as if he could hold the world away from the both of them. As if he could keep everything else out.

She sighed, her breath fanning across his arm, making his skin heat, making him hard and ready. He
always wanted her. He could no longer remember what it was like to want anything or anyone else.

“Emily was so smart, even as a little girl,” Becca said after a moment or two, her voice hushed in the early-morning quiet. “It’s always been clear that she was destined for better things than the rest of us.”

Theo did not speak. He smoothed his hand through her hair, admiring the satiny texture, the enchanting hint of flowers that teased his senses.

“My mother used to call her our little professor,” Becca said, and laughed. She shifted in his arms. “Mom wasn’t anything like
them,”
she said in a low voice. “She might not have made the best choices when it came to men, but she wasn’t like them at all. She was kind. Funny. I always remember her laughing, no matter how bad things were.” She dragged in a ragged-sounding breath. “She was never cruel.”

Theo did not have to ask who
they
were.

“Bradford and Helen have calcified in their own sense of consequence,” he said. “It’s a side effect of that kind of wealth.”

“Excessive?” she asked dryly.

“Hereditary,” he said, smiling against the back of her glossy head. “They did nothing to earn the fortune they so enjoy, so they are overzealous in their need to protect it at all costs. They care about nothing else. Not their spouses. Not their children. Not their own sister.”

He felt her shiver, and then she was turning in his arms, swiveling around until she faced him. He helped her, holding her as she settled with one leg on either side of his, kneeling up over him, only the coverlet separating them.

For a long, timeless moment, she only gazed down at him. Her eyes were big, her expression solemn, and
Theo could do nothing but meet it. And hold her, even as the coverlet slid down her shoulder, exposing the swell of her breast, just inches from his mouth.

“I want you,” she whispered, and her voice was too heavy, her gaze too troubled—but then she leaned down and kissed him, and he let it go. Because her mouth tasted sweet and warm, and he couldn’t get enough of it. Of her.

And because he did not want to start digging into the things they kept hidden from each other here. He was too afraid of what they might find.

She controlled the kiss, angling her head for a better fit, and he let her. He let her tease him. He let her play. And each time she deepened the kiss, he let himself taste her as he wanted to do, hot and wet and
his.

Her breath quickened, and she moaned slightly against his mouth. He reached between them and pulled the coverlet aside, pulling her close to him when she was finally, gloriously naked. Her skin soft and hot against his. Her breasts, tipped in pink and taut against his tongue. And the softest part of her, melting against him, driving him insane.

“If you want me,” he whispered, his voice thick with desire, “then take me.”

And she did.

Becca took him deep inside of her, shivering in mindless ecstasy as she felt the hot, hard length of him filling her, making her want to cry out loud.

She didn’t understand what had happened here, in the not-quite-dark, but she could feel the dampness on her cheeks, and she could see the tortured look in his gaze, and she rode him. She simply moved her hips in an ancient, feminine motion, and destroyed them both.

He called out her name. She heard herself sigh. He pressed his mouth to her neck, then traveled all along her collarbone, his breath hot and his mouth too delicious to bear. And still she rode him, abandoned and powerful, slick and hot, rocking them both closer and closer to the edge.

His hands stroked her back, traced patterns against her skin. He held on to her hips, and set his own pace for a while, making her whole body arch backward, offering herself up to this pleasure. To his touch. To him.

Her first climax hit her, fast and wild, and it was not until the keening noise faded away that she realized she’d cried out in the first place. Theo laughed against her neck, a sensual, stirring sound. He pulled her closer to him, his hips moving fast now, thrusting harder and harder, giving her no chance to recover.

Aftershocks still raced through her, but she met his thrusts, clenching her hands against his shoulders, her gaze heavy-lidded as she looked down at him. His face was severe in his own passion, his mouth set, his eyes glittering. And inside of her, he was so big, so hard.
Hers.
Here, now—hers.

And still he moved. He bent and took a nipple into his mouth, as her hips moved even more urgently in time with his. The searing jolt of pleasure lit her up, from her taut nipple down into her core, and when he pressed his fingers against her sex, she shattered yet again.

This time, he followed. This time, Becca sagged against him, and when he shifted her so she lay curled up against his chest, she could only smile sleepily, and then doze. Content. And more deeply in love than she dared admit, even to herself. Even then.

When she woke again, the sun was blazing in through the windows, and Theo was seated at the foot of the
chaise, fully dressed in his slick, off-putting corporate finery, watching her.

The smile that came so automatically when she saw him faded as she took in the grimness of his expression, the set of his jaw. She sat up, pushing her hair away from her face, and pulling the discarded coverlet over her, suddenly chilled. She felt herself flush, deep and red, and wondered with no little despair how he could still reduce her to that, after everything they’d done. After last night.

She only gazed at him, refusing to ask, and eventually he straightened his shoulders, his dark eyes never leaving hers.

“The time has come,” he said, expressionless. But she no longer believed the mask he wore. She eyed him, seeing the temper and the anguish hidden in that demanding dark gaze. “Chip Van Housen’s birthday party. It’s an elaborate affair, but presents the perfect opportunity for you to lure him back to his apartment and find that will.”

“Chip Van Housen,” she echoed, as if testing out the name. “Hasn’t he wondered why his lover has failed to reach out to him this whole time? Surely he would be able to find her no matter how private her facility is supposed to be?”

“He wonders loudly and profanely,” Theo said matter-of-factly. “Often several times a day. He is more than happy to believe my jealous rage is what keeps her from contacting him.”

“Fine,” she said. She cleared her throat, wondering why he was still looking at her like that, as if she’d already failed him.
As if you’re already lost to him,
some voice suggested.
As if you always were.
She ignored it. “Are you opposed to birthday parties?” she asked
mildly, though it cost her to sound so nonchalant. “Is that why you’re sitting there like a—”