The Replacement Wife (12 page)

“Tonight, Becca.” His voice was hard, and she told herself that was why it seemed as if everything around them shattered, as if they were only fragments themselves, all of it broken into a thousand pieces. And yet they still sat here, so politely. So quietly. Staring at each other while the world ended. He cleared his throat. “The party is tonight. You can be home in Boston in a matter of days.”

And that was that. That was the end, right there. And he’d said it so unemotionally, as if all that had ever mattered to him was this deception she would perform, and all the rest had simply been filling time. Waiting.

Just as Helen had warned her. Just as she’d suspected herself, in her more lucid moments. Just as he’d promised from the start, by promising nothing at all.

It took everything she had to pull in a breath, to meet his gaze evenly, to conjure up some hint of a smile.

It didn’t matter that her heart felt broken in her chest, jagged and dangerous, likely to puncture her lung and kill her where she sat. It didn’t matter. Because she had signed a contract, and everything else had been a daydream, and she knew her place. She always had, hadn’t she?

So she smiled, damn him, with everything she had.

“Tonight,” she echoed, fighting to keep the dullness from her voice, the ache from her eyes. “At last.”

And if she wanted to break down, curl into a ball and cry, she kept that to herself.

B
ECCA HAD NEVER LOOKED
more beautiful than she did tonight, Theo thought as a kind of bitterness and a pounding, clawing feeling he suspected must be jealousy, real jealousy—though he had never felt such a thing before—surged through him. Theo lounged in the armchair in her dressing room, eyeing her as she put the finishing touches on her outfit. It was not that she looked so much like Larissa—though she did. It was that she was so clearly, adamantly
not
Larissa to his eyes. He could see her strength, her courage. Her intelligence and wit. It lit her up from within in a way Larissa never could have matched.

He wanted her in ways he had never wanted Larissa. In ways he had never imagined before he met her.

He did not want her to do this. Every cell in his body protested the very idea—though he was well aware he was the one who had asked her to do it. Who
needed
her to do it.

He could not understand himself.

Her final outfit was vintage Larissa, yet with a fresh twist. The dress was bold, seeming to bare all while cleverly managing to show very little. It alternately clung and draped, making her seem ethereal. Untouchable. She’d gone for a smoky look around her eyes, and had
left her hair wild around her shoulders. Her long, perfectly toned legs went on for several lifetimes before they ended up in scandalously impractical shoes.

She looked edible, and he wanted a taste. A feast.

How was he possibly going to hand her over to a lowlife like Van Housen? Even if it was only for a little while, and for a specific purpose?
She was his.
He had never been more sure of anything. And it still didn’t matter.

Because he had to have those shares. He had to have the control he’d never had as a child. He had never given up, not at any point along the way. He couldn’t start now. He didn’t know how.

But what he could not seem to understand was why that should seem to him, tonight, like a deep character flaw instead of his greatest strength.

“Tell me again,” she said in a low voice, inspecting her mascara in the mirror. “I can’t wrap my head around how, exactly, you think I’ll be able to fool this man into thinking I’m a woman he knows. Biblically.”

“You understand how,” Theo said, mildly enough. “You simply don’t want to believe what I’ve already told you, several times.”

“Because it’s absurd,” she said. She took one last, hard look at her reflection, then pivoted to look at him. “He’ll know something’s wrong.
Off.”

“Possibly.” Theo shrugged. “But you are underestimating the power of suggestion, Becca. When you arrive, everyone, including Van Housen, will assume you are exactly who you appear to be. No one will look at you and think, that’s not
quite
Larissa—I wonder if it could be her cousin instead, made up to look like her?”

“You really believe that I can simply walk up to this
man and convince him that I’m someone he’s known his entire life?” Her voice was skeptical. And the look in her eyes made him feel restless. Guilty. “And that he won’t suspect a thing?”

“That has been the point of this entire exercise, has it not?” His voice was colder than he meant it to be. Harsher. Her lips pressed together, and something dark moved through her bright emerald eyes.

“Indeed, it has.” She smiled, though it seemed brittle.

“You could be her twin,” he said, and there was a great pressure in him suddenly, some terrible danger lurking near that he could sense but could not avoid. He could do nothing but look at her, losing her with more and more certainty, with every word he spoke. “I could mistake you for her myself.”

He saw how stricken she looked for one single split second—before she hid it away, her smooth, tough exterior slamming back into place.

He hated himself. He wanted to hold her. He wanted to stop all of this right here, right now, when the only people they’d hurt were themselves. While there was still time.

But he was not a man who knew how to lose. How to walk away. How to do anything but win, by any means necessary. Even this.

Even if winning this long battle for Whitney Media meant losing Becca. He did not know how he would live without either—and he’d wanted that damned company first.

“All right, then,” she said, dropping her gaze as if what she’d seen in his was too much, too upsetting. “We might as well get going, then.”

The ride over to Van Housen’s exclusive party, thrown in what was sure to be a deliberately intimidating club in the West Village, was excruciating.

Becca felt hot, then cold. Feverish. She could not do this. She could not.

And yet she had no choice. Not simply because she’d signed that damned contract, but because she knew how terribly Theo wanted those shares. How he even believed he needed them, as if they would complete him—make up, somehow, for his childhood. And if she had it in her power to give them to him, how could she do anything but?

No matter what it cost her. No matter what it took.

But, God, how could she
do
this?

“You must make sure he takes you back to his apartment following the party,” Theo said as the car slowed in a sea of yellow taxicabs, all fighting their way up the avenue.

“I know,” she said, not looking at him. She sat there, tense and rigid, and tried to tell herself that everything would be okay despite all clear evidence to the contrary. That all of this would work out somehow—but she couldn’t quite believe it.

“Do you?” He turned then, trapping her, and she was thrown back to the day she’d first met him, when he’d looked at her just like this—so calculating, so cold. She wanted to squirm away from him, put distance between them, because she feared that what she truly wanted to do was throw herself into his arms and make him put a stop to this cold and nasty little nightmare.

But it was no nightmare—it was the situation Theo had created. Deliberately. This night had always been coming. This was always how this would all end. How had she let herself forget it?

“Of course,” she hissed, temper mixing with hopelessness and making her sound far braver than she felt. “I may have agreed to play dress up and prostitute myself on your orders, Theo, but that lapse in judgment does not affect my ability to understand what’s expected of me.”

His amber eyes gleamed, boring into her, but she couldn’t bring herself to look away, to give even that much. Suddenly it seemed as if everything—the whole world, her heart, this terrible night—hinged on her ability to hold her own. To challenge him. To … not meekly accept tonight what she’d signed up for in such ignorance weeks before.

“I do not recall asking you to prostitute yourself,” he bit out. She tilted her head slightly to one side, considering him for a moment.

“What do you think will happen?” she asked lightly, though she could feel her own temper, her own fear, beneath. “When this man sees his lover walk into the room, after all these weeks, what do you think he will expect of her when he takes her home? A cozy chat?” She laughed, though it was a hollow sound. “That’s not very realistic, is it?”

“Let me make sure I fully comprehend you,” he said, seemingly from between his teeth. “Your expectation is that you will have to sleep with Van Housen to get the will?”

She shrugged with far more nonchalance than she felt, refusing to look away from him, no matter how grim his amber-colored gaze grew.

“How else could this play out?” she asked. “This is real life, Theo, not some game. Real people will presumably have real expectations. Are you pretending you haven’t considered the possibility?”

She should not have latched on to that flash of temper that he reined in so quickly, nor clung so tightly to the look of something very like anguish that shone briefly in his eyes. The truth was, this was Theo. He might very well feel any number of things. But he wanted that will more. He wanted those shares. She even understood why—he was a man who came from nothing, and had built this whole life for himself with nothing but his determination, his single-minded focus. What was she next to all of that? At best, she was one more sacrifice he’d have to make in service of his ambitions, no doubt one among a great many.

If her heart was broken, that was no one’s fault but her own.

“Van Housen is usually entirely too addled by whatever substance he happens to be using to threaten anyone’s virtue,” Theo said quietly. “The only thing I would worry about, if I were you, is the possibility of his getting sick. Perhaps all over you.”

“Please.” She leaned back against the seat, and scoffed at him. “He will be reuniting with his longtime lover, and you think he’ll simply swoon out of the way? How convenient your imagination is, Theo. But I think you’ll find real life is rarely so neat and orderly.”

A muscle moved in his jaw, and he reached over to pull a strand of her hair between his fingers, tugging on it gently. Why should so simple a gesture make her ache inside, make her hover too close to tears?

“You seem unduly eager to live up to your worst expectations of this evening,” he said, his voice a ribbon of sound, a low growl.

“I’m
realistic,”
she contradicted him. She met his gaze, challenge and plea. “Wasn’t this what you wanted,
Theo? Isn’t this what all of this has been about? Creating the perfect honey trap?”

“No!” he gritted out, and she could see it cost him. She could see how he fought himself. She should not take a kind of pleasure in that. She should not let hope cling so hard to her heart, making it swell when it should know better. When
she
should know better.

“Then what?” She was taunting him, goading him. She couldn’t seem to help herself. He moved closer now, his hands taking her shoulders in a tight grip, hauling her to him, his hard mouth a scant, tortured breath from hers.

“I don’t want him touching you,” he whispered, so low she almost didn’t hear him at all, and then he kissed her.

He claimed her. Possessed her utterly. His mouth took and took, branding her. And she exulted in it, feeling fire surge into a wild blaze beneath his hands, wriggling closer to him on the seat, her whole being focused on this kiss, on his mouth, on
Theo … .

But then he set her away from him, his face shuttered. Blank. He sat back and stared out the window, his expression brooding. Distant. And she knew. Before he opened his mouth, she knew.

“I must have that will,” he said, his voice hoarse. As if it hurt him, too.

“Of course you must,” she replied, not at all successful at keeping the bitterness from her voice, even as her lips still tasted of his kiss, even as her whole mouth felt deliciously swollen, even as she fought to keep herself from pulling him close and losing herself in him one more time.

“You say that as if I have deceived you in some way,” he said, still looking out at the city streets, the lights of
the bodegas and the ebb and flow of people and cars, the famous pulse of Manhattan just outside the window. “As if this was not the plan from the start. The plan to which you agreed, and for which you will be handsomely compensated.”

She laughed then, because of course he was right, and hadn’t she been telling herself the very same thing? But hearing him say it cracked something inside of her, ripped it right open, and she couldn’t seem to help the feelings that swamped her then. Anger. Betrayal. Deep, deep hurt. The love for him that made her want to fix this, fix him,
fix it
somehow.

And beyond all that, her fatalistic understanding that, as usual, she would not be the one chosen here. She was the discarded child, the Whitney family bastard. Never the golden girl. Never the first choice—always the substitute. She would not win him. She would win nothing. She would leave with her motherís estate, Emily’s tuition money, a new hairstyle, memories that she would hoard for a lifetime, and the weary knowledge that she was a survivor. So she would survive this—him—too, little as she could imagine it now. She would. That was what she always did, didn’t she? One way or another.

It all added up to more than she’d had when she’d come here, she thought, and wanted nothing more than to give in to the heat that threatened to spill from her eyes. But she couldn’t. She just couldn’t, not even here, when the wretched little truth of her feelings for him—and more to the point, the paleness of his for her—was so horribly, spectacularly clear to her.

None of it made her want to spare
his
feelings. Not when hers were in shreds all around her.

“You decided what kind of man you wanted to be long before you met me, Theo,” she said then, sadly. His
head snapped around, and she found her knee jumping again in agitation. She pressed it down with both hands, amazed to see that her fingers weren’t shaking.

“I beg your pardon?” His voice was icy. Or was that pain? How terrible that she wanted it to be. She
wanted
to hurt him, she acknowledged, because she wanted to know if it was possible for him to
be
hurt, especially by her. Because—she could admit—some part of her clung to the idea that it would mean something if he felt what she felt, or even some small part of it. It had to. Didn’t it have to?

“This is who you are,” she said, because she had nothing to lose. She had nothing at all. So why not speak the truth, at the very least? “This will is more important to you than anything else.”

“You don’t—” he began, his eyes so very grim, but she couldn’t seem to help herself.

“More important than me, to be sure,” she said, interrupting him.

“Becca …”

“Don’t!” she blurted out, that great well of despair crashing over her, threatening to drown her then and there. Somehow, she kept her head above the water. Somehow. “Don’t pretend that this is something that’s not.”

“Maybe it is,” he said, stealing her breath, but he was shaking his head, his eyes so intent on hers. It seemed as if centuries stretched between them, as if they hung suspended in time, and she hardly noticed when the car slid to a stop at the curb.

He reached over and took her hand, holding it in his, and she wanted to howl—to scream—to rage. To weep. But she only sat there, captured by him as securely as
if he held her in his fist, and wanted what she couldn’t have. Again.