The Replacement Wife

“She is a Whitney,” Bradford said in ringing tones from across the room, the pompous fool. “Whitneys have a certain standing—”

“She’s a cautionary tale,” Becca retorted, cutting her uncle off. The look she threw at him, and then turned on Theo, was equal parts chilly contempt and a fierce kind of pride that stirred something inside of him. Old memories of another time, another life. His own fists at his sides, his own voice—laced with bravado. “Anytime I am tempted to wish my mother had stayed here and suffered so I might have had an easier life, I simply open the nearest tabloid magazine and remind myself that it is far better to be poor than to be a useless parasite like Larissa Whitney.”

Theo winced. He heard Helen suck in a strangled, outraged breath, and a quick glance told him that Bradford’s face had turned an alarming shade of red. And yet Becca only gazed up at him, unafraid. Almost triumphant. Theo imagined she’d dreamed of delivering that speech for a long, long time. And why not? She had no doubt been treated shabbily by the mighty Whitneys, like so many others before her, Larissa included. Larissa especially.

Not that it could matter. Not now. Not to Theo. Not to Larissa, who had been lost long before he’d met her, long before she’d fallen so far.

“Larissa collapsed outside a nightclub last Friday night,” Theo said coolly, deliberately, watching the way the color changed in Becca’s face, the flush of courage dimming. “She is currently in a coma. There is no hope that she will ever recover.”

Becca’s mouth firmed to a taut line, and Theo could see the way she swallowed, as if her throat was suddenly dry, but she did not look away. He found he could not help but admire that, too.

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I did not mean to be cruel.” She shook her head slightly, looking uncertain for the first time since she’d met his gaze when he’d walked into the parlor. “I don’t understand why I’m here.”

“You happen to look enough like Larissa that you could, with some help, pass for her,” Theo said, matter-of-factly. “That’s why you’re here.”

Because there was no point wallowing in his grief—no need to dwell on the past. There was only the future and what must happen now. He had given Whitney Media everything he had, everything he was. It was time that he became an owner, not simply an employee. Gaining Larissa’s controlling interest would, with one stroke, make him the living embodiment of the American Dream. Rags to riches, just as he’d promised his mother before her death. Perhaps not exactly as he’d planned, but close enough. Even without Larissa.

“Pass for her?” Becca repeated, as if she could not make sense of the words.

“Larissa has a certain number of shares in Whitney Media,” Bradford said from his position on the couch, his voice completely devoid of emotion, as if he was not talking about his only child. Theo felt himself stiffen, and forced himself to let it go. None of that could matter now. “When she and Theo got engaged—”

At this, Becca’s eyes flew to his. Theo merely lifted a brow.

“I thought she was dating that actor,” Becca said stiffly. “The one who dates all the models and heiresses.”

“You should not believe everything you read,” Theo said with a careless shrug, and then wondered why he’d bothered. It was still so new, perhaps. He was still defending Larissa’s honor, when he knew perfectly well that if it was not that actor, it would have been another one. Or both. He still didn’t know what that made him. A fool, certainly. But he’d made that decision a long time ago, hadn’t he? If he wanted what she represented—and he had, he did—then he had to allow her to be who she was. He had to let her do as she pleased. And so he had. The end was more important than the means, he’d always thought.

“Larissa made Theo a gift of a significant amount of her shares,” Bradford was saying. “It would give him a controlling interest in the company. It was meant to be a wedding present.”

“I believe they call that a dowry,” Becca said, her disgust plain in her flashing eyes, the lift of her chin. “How quaint, in this day and age.”

“It was a gift,” Theo replied, his voice more clipped than it should have been. As if this stranger’s opinion mattered. “Not a dowry.” He had never apologized for going after what he wanted, using any means necessary. He would not start now.

“The terms were laid out explicitly in the prenuptial agreement,” Bradford continued. “The shares were to go to Theo upon their wedding day, or in the unfortunate event of her death. But we have reason to believe she altered her will.”

“Why would she alter her will?” Becca asked. She looked from Bradford to Theo and then back again, judgment plain on her face. Because of you, obviously, her expression read.

“My daughter has long been preyed upon by the unsavory,” Bradford said, in the first faux-fatherly tone Theo had heard from him since they’d received the call on Friday night. From anyone else, it might have been believable. “There’s a certain ne’er-do-well who would do anything to get his hands on Larissa’s shares. We think he succeeded.”

“That’s where you come in,” Theo said then, close enough to see the angry flash in Becca’s eyes when she looked at him. Close enough to feel his own shocking, searing reaction to it. Sex, he thought. This was about sex. He simply hadn’t expected it from this woman, under these circumstances. It was the surprise that was throwing him, he told himself. That was all. The odd similarities between her and the man he’d been once upon a time were simply coincidence, nothing more.

“I can’t imagine how,” she said, her voice cold. “What could I possibly have to do with a situation that already seems too complicated?”

“We cannot find a copy of the new version of her will.” Theo watched the muted emotions move over her face, and wished he could read them. Wished he could simply bend her to his will as he did most people. But that would come. “We think her lover has the only existing copy.”

“And you can’t ask him to show it to you, though the poor girl lies in a coma?” Becca sounded incredulous. And condemning, in equal measure. “Is this a soap opera?”

“I want you to pretend to be Larissa,” Theo said, because nothing could be gained by beating around the bush. There was too much at stake. All the long years of single-minded focus, determination. The bitter acceptance that once his usefulness as Larissa’s wrong side of the tracks lover had ended, their relationship had become purely business, cold and complicated. His searing, implacable focus on the end goal no matter what. “I want you to be so good at it that you fool her lover. And I want you to get me that will.”

There was a long, heavy silence, broken only by Helen’s delicate sniffles into her monogrammed handkerchief. Becca stared at him for a long, almost uncomfortable moment, as if her not-quite-green eyes could see into the parts of him he’d thought he’d buried long ago, and then she let out a sound that was a shade too hollow to be a laugh.

“No,” she said, simple and to the point.

Her refusal lay there for a moment, seeming to fill the elegant room, blocking out the late-afternoon light that poured in through the soaring windows.

“That’s it?” Theo asked softly, not sure he could believe what he’d heard. Not sure when someone had last said no to him, for that matter. Even Larissa had always said yes, no matter what she’d then gone on to do. “That’s all you have to say?”

“That is not, by any stretch of the imagination, all I have to say,” Becca threw back at him, her temper flaring in her that suddenly. It lit up her face, made it suddenly unlike Larissa’s—and yet remarkably, shockingly attractive. “But it is all I plan to say. You’re crazy.” She looked back at her aunt and uncle, her lips curling. “You’re all crazy. I’ve never been happier in my life that you people don’t claim me.”

And then she turned, her spine as straight as a queen’s, her head high, and walked through the door without looking back, more elegant in her ratty clothes than some debutantes looked in their opulent ball gowns. Looking just like Larissa at her haughtiest.

Bradford and Helen broke into a loud, angry noise, but Theo barely heard them.

She was magnificent, and, more to the point, she could be Larissa.

He was not about to let her get away.

Becca knew he would be the one to follow her, so she did not have to turn to identify the speaker when she heard the quiet command from behind her.

“Stop,” he said again.

Once more, she found herself obeying him without meaning to do so. She scowled at the marble floor beneath her feet, as if it was the fault of the stone she had an apparent weakness for this man.

“I do not have to follow your orders simply because you issue them,” she said, as if she had not already done so. “There is no agreement between us.”

“Your tender sensibilities do you credit, I’m sure,” Theo said. His voice was too dark, and wove far too many complicated patterns down the back of her neck, through her stomach, and even down to the soles of her feet. She knew that keeping her back to him was a mistake, that she begged for her own destruction that way.

But when she turned, he was right there in front of her, so dark and impossibly bright-eyed in the vast entry hall, so hopelessly compelling, and she was not sure that there was any way at all to be safe around this man. No matter what her treacherous mind whispered, as if it could discern something in him that was otherwise hidden—as if it wanted her to lay down her defenses then and there, on faith. But she had none. Not while she stood in the Whitney mansion, surrounded by enemies.

“I doubt that you really mean to compliment me,” she said, searching the angles and planes of his fascinating, addictive face for clues. “I suspect you only do so when you are preparing to throw your weight around.”

“The difference between me and whoever it is you think I am,” Theo said in that low, disturbingly sensual voice, his mouth crooking slightly, “is that I don’t have to throw my weight around to achieve my ends. My will is usually sufficient.”

“I’m so sorry to ruin your winning streak,” she murmured with cloying insincerity. “But I prefer my will to yours.”

He shrugged slightly, as if he could not bother to worry about the force of her will, so puny was it next to his own. “I’m depending on your practicality,” he said quietly. “I suspect it will win out before you make the great mistake of walking out that door.”

She didn’t know why she stood there so tensely, braced for attack, when he stood a few feet away and looked very nearly idle. In the way that great predators allowed themselves to appear idle moments before they pounced.

“Is this more of your sales pitch?” she asked. “I’m not interested. You and those people are nothing more than ghouls, waiting for that poor girl to die—”

“You know nothing about her,” he interrupted her, the rebuke in his voice not at all lessened by the smoothness of the delivery. “Nor about anything else that goes on in this family, or this company.”

“I don’t want to know anything about any of you!” she retorted, wondering why it should sting to hear him state the simple truth so baldly. Because, of course, he was right. She knew nothing about the family that had categorically rejected her since before her birth. “I don’t want to have another thought about any one of you the moment I walk out that door!”

He moved closer, his eyes glowing like embers, and she knew then, as her stomach tied itself into an aching knot, that he was truly a devil, this man. And that if she was not careful, he could have a power over her she’d never given anyone. But even so, she did not step back. She did not try to protect herself as she knew she should.

“The only person I want you to think about is your sister,” he said, in that voice of his, so dark, so sinful, that it seemed to move inside of her without her will.

“I always think about my sister, thank you,” she managed to say.

“Can you really pass up the opportunity to secure her future?” he asked, so reasonably. So calmly. “All because it suits you to feel morally superior to the family who denied you for so long?”

It was a hit straight to the heart, and he knew it. She could see that he knew it as she stared at him, stricken, and his remarkable eyes gleamed.

“Does it help your sister that you leave here with your righteous indignation firmly in place?” he asked in that same deadly calm way of his. “Or do you suppose, years down the line, that she might be somewhat more grateful for the Ivy League education you will deny her if you walk out now?”

The cold marble hall seemed to seep into her, chilling her. Her throat felt dusty, and there was that dangerous heat in her eyes. And he was right, damn him. She wanted to feel better about herself, to be better than them, but she wanted Emily’s future—Emily’s happiness—more. She’d promised her mother. She’d promised.

And wasn’t that why she’d come here in the first place? Wasn’t that why she’d put all of this into motion? How could she back out now, just because she didn’t like the terms? She’d known from the start that she wouldn’t like anything about these people. Why was she running away just because they were confirming her worst opinion of them now?

“You’ve made your point,” she said finally, when she could not bear the way he looked at her a moment longer—as if he knew exactly what she thought, what she felt. As if he’d manipulated this entire situation to reach this point, because it suited him. He was the most terrifying man she’d ever met—because he was so powerful, but even more because part of her thrilled to it, and wanted to melt right there in front of him. Wanted to surrender to the whispers in her own head, and pretend he might keep her safe rather than crush her.

But she would never let that happen. Accepting a situation and using it to further her own ends was not the same thing as surrendering. She wouldn’t let it be.

“I want Emily’s entire education assured,” she said, her voice clipped and tense to her own ears. “Freshman year through a postdoctoral degree, should she want one.”

“You’ll get your mother’s entire inheritance,” Theo said at once, almost offhandedly. As if he spoke of a minor allowance rather than a stunning fortune. His amber gaze seemed to bore into her, into her darkest, most secret places, taking her breath. “Everything that was taken from her, plus interest, from the day she left to give birth to you.”

Becca refused to let him see how that got to her, how the guilt still ate at her no matter how she told herself she should not feel it, that Caroline had made her own choices, and so she fought to keep her face, her voice, impassive.

“In writing, of course,” she clarified. “You’ll understand if I don’t trust you. Anything connected to the Whitney family is tainted.”

“My lawyers are standing by,” he replied in that deceptively easy way of his, as if this were not her soul they were discussing. “All you need to do is sign.”

She had the sense that she had gotten lost, somehow, without seeming to stray from the path. That she was in a dark woods, and there was no hope of sunlight. He watched her, his dark face and glowing eyes like some kind of beacon, beckoning to her, and she had the sudden panicked thought that if she did this, if she crossed this line, if she spent even one more second in this man’s company, she might as well write herself off entirely.

Because he would change her. Not just because he wanted her to pretend to be his comatose fiancée, which was morally questionable enough. But because he was … too much. Too dark. Too powerful. Too outside anything she’d ever experienced. How could she possibly handle this man? She couldn’t even handle this conversation!

But she thought again of Emily, and knew she had no choice. She had the means to set her sister free. She would do it. She had held her mother’s hand in that hospital bed, looked into her eyes, and she had promised.

“All right,” she said, and though her voice didn’t quite echo, it seemed to reverberate somehow, as if the world was changing all around her as she spoke. Or perhaps that was just the way his eyes gleamed, with heat and triumph, as he looked at her. As he won. “What do you want me to do?”

CHAPTER THREE

“I TRUST YOU were discreet,” Theo said in his intent, focused way, lounging with an indolence she could not quite believe in the back of the car that had met Becca’s flight. “As you agreed to be in the papers you signed.”

He had given her twenty-four hours to get her affairs in order.

Twenty-four hours to make sure Emily could stay with her best friend’s family while Becca “went away on business,” which Emily had done many times before while Becca worked on a trial—and this was certainly a kind of trial, wasn’t it? Twenty-four hours to explain to her employers that she needed the time off she’d saved up over the years—and that she needed it immediately, for “family reasons,” and no, she didn’t know when she’d be back.

She didn’t like to lie, but what could she tell her younger sister? Or the boss who had helped her out time and again while she’d struggled to raise Emily in the years after her mother’s death? How could she explain what she was doing when she hardly understood it herself? Twenty-four hours to pack a single, small bag and wonder why she bothered—especially when Theo had smirked and told her not to worry about a wardrobe, that it would be provided. His unsaid because yours is embarrassing to people like us seemed to singe her ears, making her flush with anger every time she thought of it. Of him.

Which she did with depressing, alarming regularity.

Twenty-four hours and then she was back in New York. This time, to stay. To become her cousin, a woman she had always comfortably disdained from afar.

Twenty-four hours, Becca discovered, was not very much time at all to prepare for your whole world to change.

“No,” she said now, pretending to be calm. Pretending that she had been inside a flashy limousine a million times before, and was thus unmoved by the casual opulence evident in the plush seats, the glossy wood-paneling, the crystal decanters. “I took out several ads in the Boston Globe and appeared on CNN to discuss our little deal.”

“Very amusing,” Theo said, in a tone that suggested he found her anything but. And yet that gleam in his amber gaze made her think he understood her, somehow. Wishful thinking, she told herself sharply. “I’m sure that kind of sarcasm serves you well in your chosen career.” Could he sound any more dismissive? Any more snide? As if paralegal was a synonym for prostitute?

Although perhaps she was in no position to cast stones, since she was sitting here for money, wasn’t she?

“I’m usually praised more for my work ethic than my wit,” Becca replied, clenching her hands together in her lap and forcing a tight smile. “Did you become the CEO of Whitney Media by telling silly jokes? I thought that kind of power had more to do with destroying lives and worshipping the almighty dollar above all things, including your own soul.”

“Oh,” he said softly, “I sold my soul. Have no doubt about that. But it was too long ago to matter now.”

“I think you’ll find that soullessness suits only those in your position,” Becca replied as if the flash in his gaze affected her not at all, as if she did not fight off a shiver. “The rest of us are preoccupied with, among other things, being human.”

They had wanted to send the private jet; Becca had insisted on flying coach on a commercial flight. It was, she’d thought, the last chance she’d have to do something normal for some time. And it was probably her last little rebellion, too.

But the flight had allowed her the time to think about what she was about to do, and something had solidified inside of her as the plane winged south along the eastern seaboard. She would step into this world, she told herself, the world of the Whitneys, to secure her sister’s future and to keep her promise to her mother. But it would be more than that. She would prove, once and for all, that they were all better off for being discarded and ignored. She would never again torture herself with questions about what her life might have been like had her mother stayed in New York, or whether Caroline’s great sacrifice had been in vain. She would never have to wonder again.

It would be worth almost any indignity to walk back out of the Whitney’s glittering, poisonous world with that knowledge secure inside of her. She could almost feel the satisfaction of it, in advance. She’d felt a sense of anticipation as she’d exited the plane, closer and closer to her fate with every step.

And still something in her had thrilled to the sight of a black-clad driver holding a sign with her name on it in the Baggage Claim. Some part of her had been more impressed than it should have been when the driver had taken her bag and escorted her to the waiting vehicle, gleaming black and expensive at the curb, in clear and arrogant violation of the strict No Parking regulations.

She had not expected Theo to be inside, sprawled out across the backseat, dressed in a dark-colored suit, which only called attention to the lean power of his big body. He was still far too dangerous, far too disturbing. She’d forgotten to breathe. And then his arresting, amber-colored eyes had fixed on her, sending electricity charging through her, lighting her up from the inside out.

She’d rather die than show him her reaction to his nearness—her reaction to being alone with him in an enclosed space. She thought she might die anyway, from the wild pounding of her heart, the shiver in her limbs and the trembling in her core. She wanted to believe her reaction came from trepidation, from fear of the world she was now going to have to learn how to live in, at least for a little while. The world that had chewed her mother up and spit her out. She might know deep inside that she would conquer it, but she still first had to survive it. She told herself it was nothing more than that.

He watched her for a moment, something not quite a smile flirting with his hard mouth, something too close to soft in his gaze. “I cannot imagine how you’ve come by your dire opinion of me,” he said after a long moment. “We’ve only just met.”

“You make quite an impression,” Becca said honestly, wishing that were not true. Wishing she was not so aware of him, that every cell in her body did not seem to sing out that awareness.

“You are supposed to be impressed,” he said, with a sardonic inflection she had to fight to ignore. “If not wholly overawed.”

“Oh, I am,” Becca replied at once, forcing herself to remember who she was. Why she was here. What she had to do. She squared her shoulders. “Though in contrast to your usual minions, I imagine, I’m a bit more awed by your conceit and arrogance than I am by your supposed magnificence.”

The curve of his mouth became a smile. “So noted,” he said.

His gaze warmed, and she warmed, too, and then wondered from one beat of her heart to the next what it would be like if he weren’t one of them. If he weren’t the enemy. If that look she’d glimpsed in his gaze now and again truly meant something. But that was ridiculous.

He shifted slightly in his seat. He was much too close.

“It’s too bad you’ve chosen to hate everyone you meet on this adventure so indiscriminately, Rebecca.”

“It’s Becca,” she said, ignoring the slight catch in her throat, the wild fluttering of her pulse. “And I would hardly call my feelings on the Whitney family and anyone tainted by a close association with them indiscriminate. It’s a reasonable response to who they are, I think. It’s also common sense.”

There was a slight, tense pause. The air seemed to contract around them.

“Everyone is more complicated than they appear on the surface,” Theo said finally in a soft voice. “You’d do well to remember that.”