“I am Theo Markou Garcia,” he said, in the way men did when they expected to be known, recognized. Celebrated.

“I’m Becca—the bastard daughter of the sister no one dares mention out loud.”

“I know who you are.” This time it was his low, insinuating voice that 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? And the only other question is, how far are you willing to go to get what you want?”

About the Author

CAITLIN CREWS discovered her first romance novel at the age of twelve. It involved swashbuckling pirates, grand adventures, a heroine with rustling skirts and a mind of her own, and a seriously mouthwatering and masterful hero. The book (the title of which remains lost in the mists of time) made a serious impression. Caitlin was immediately smitten with romances and romance heroes, to the detriment of her middle school social life. And so began her life-long love affair with romance novels, many of which she insists on keeping near her at all times.

Caitlin has made her home in places as far-flung as York, England, and Atlanta, Georgia. She was raised near New York City, and fell in love with London on her first visit when she was a teenager. She has backpacked in Zimbabwe, been on safari in Botswana, and visited tiny villages in Namibia. She has, while visiting the place in question, declared her intention to live in Prague, Dublin, Paris, Athens, Nice, the Greek Islands, Rome, Venice, and/or any of the Hawaiian islands. Writing about exotic places seems like the next best thing to moving there.

She currently lives in California, with her animator/comic book artist husband and their menagerie of ridiculous animals.

The Replacement Wife

Caitlin Crews

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Kate Rogers for her unsung, invaluable help before,

and to Megan Bassett, my editor,

for making all my books so very much better

CHAPTER ONE

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.”

CHAPTER TWO

“OBEY YOU?” BECCA repeated, her dismay more than evident on her expressive face. “You mean, like a trained animal?”

“Exactly like a trained animal,” he replied. Her eyes were an interesting hazel color, somewhere between green and brown, and they darkened with her emotions. He found himself unduly intrigued. She would have to wear contacts to achieve Larissa’s emerald-green shade, he thought, ignoring the shaft of pain that speared through him. “Like a faithful dog at my heel, in fact.”

“Clearly you did not rise to your exalted position through sales,” she said after a moment, only the faintest catch in her dry voice. “Because your pitch could use some work.”

Theo could not decide which was more shocking—the girl’s likeness to Larissa, or his own surprising, raging attraction to her. He had never hardened and blazed with need merely looking at Larissa. He had wanted her, but not like this. Not with his whole body, in this shower of flame and desire he could not seem to control.

That he should feel these things, while Larissa lay beyond reach, made him loathe himself.

This Becca … did something to him. She infected him, called out to him, even now when his grief should have made him immune. He could not imagine how he would transform this feral little creature into any believable version of his ethereal, effortlessly chic Larissa. But he was Theo Markou Garcia, crafted from proud Cypriot and Cuban stock. He had done far more impossible things, with far fewer resources. The fact that he stood here at all was proof of that.

And since he did not know how to lose, the only thing he could do was win what was left, as he’d planned.

“What do you know about your cousin Larissa?” he asked quietly. He watched a shadow pass over Becca’s face, and her hands balled into fists before she shoved them in the pockets of her jeans.

“What everyone knows,” she replied, with a shrug that Theo might have believed was casual had he not seen those telling fists. He felt a sudden surge of sympathy. He knew what those fists meant. He had once balled his own in exactly the same way—pride and anger and determination. He knew exactly what she felt, this stranger with Larissa’s face. He wished he did not have to ask her to do something he knew, without a doubt, would bruise the very pride that she clung to with such ferocity. But he had no choice. He had sold his soul long ago, and he could not give up now, not when he was so close. He could not.

“That she is famous for no particular reason,” Becca was saying. “That she has too much money and has never had to work for any of it. That there are never any consequences for her bad behavior. And that the tabloids are obsessed with her for some reason, and love nothing more than to follow her from party to party, recording her exploits.”

“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.”

“I’m not complicated at all,” Becca retorted, leaning back in the seat and crossing her legs, taking a perverse sort of pride in the look of distaste Theo fixed on her old jeans and battered boots. “What you see is exactly what you get.”

“Good lord,” Theo said, sweeping that same look over her whole body, from her feet to her hair. “I certainly hope not.”

Becca bristled, but tried to hide it behind a smile. “Is that how you go about winning people over?” she demanded. “Because I have to tell you, your approach needs work.”

“I don’t have to win you over,” he said, his own smile sharpening, those impossible eyes boring into her, making her fight against the urge to squirm in her seat. “I’ve already bought you.”

Theo lived in a vast two-story penthouse in Tribeca. He led Becca out of the most luxuriously appointed elevator she’d ever seen and into a wide, private marble lobby that opened into another entryway, accented with white-painted brick walls and graceful shelves holding art, books and various artifacts that struck Becca as decidedly Mediterranean. The entryway opened up into a great room with a ceiling two stories above, stretching out before her toward high, arching windows that led out to a wide brick terrace and beyond that, Manhattan itself in all its high-thrusting, slick glory.

She had never felt farther away from her tiny apartment in its not-so-great part of Boston.

The Whitney mansion had been easier to accept, somehow. Her mother had told stories of what it had been like to grow up in that house, and summer in another equally extravagant home in Newport, Rhode Island, so perhaps Becca had expected mythical modern castles on Fifth Avenue. It was just one more part of the Whitney mystique. But all that was inherited opulence, handed down from one Whitney to the next ever since the glory days of their Gilded Age friends and contemporaries, American royalty like the Carnegies, Rockefellers, and Vanderbilts.

But this … this was something else. Real people, Becca thought almost numbly, still looking around in awe, didn’t actually live like this.

Except Theo seemed perfectly at home. He had his cell phone to his ear and was murmuring something in an undertone as he sauntered through the elegant room, seemingly unmoved by the sheer luxury all around him. And yet Becca knew without a single doubt that it was all of his design—from the richly colored Oriental rugs at her feet, stretching across hardwood floors polished to a gleam, to the furniture she did not have to be told was incredibly expensive, all of it seeming to belong exactly where it was, as if it had grown there, mahoganies and blacks and scarlets, and all of it inviting, not stuffy. Her gaze rested for a moment on the set of deep, lush-looking sofas in one corner, set to take advantage of the fireplace and the dizzying view. There was interesting art on the walls and the shelves were lined with important-looking books and more intriguing objects—vases, small boxes, statues. A wrought iron spiral stair wound up to the floor above, that boasted an open gallery to take advantage of the great room’s vastness. Opulence and invitation, everywhere she turned.

Was she really expected to stay here? With a man who walked through this room as if it were commonplace, unworthy of his notice? A cold shiver worked its way down her spine, making goose bumps rise up in response. Who would she be when all of this was over? Because she knew, once again, on some deep, incontrovertible level, that what she’d put into motion by agreeing to be here would change her forever. What would be left? a small voice asked inside of her. Who would she be when she’d finished playing Larissa?

You will be yourself, she reminded herself sternly. Finally free of the notion that these people are important to you in any way—that they matter at all.

“Muriel will show you to your rooms,” he said, startling her when he stopped and turned. She was suddenly afraid that her mouth really had dropped open and that she’d been gaping at the things he owned like a country bumpkin. Like the poor relation to his wealthy employers that she, in fact, was.

As for the other things she’d been thinking, well—she shrugged them off. It was too late now, anyway. She was here. The papers were signed. And Emily needed this. More than that, she needed to do this for Emily, so Emily would never have to do anything like this, with these horrible people, herself.

She needed to make her mother proud, in whatever way she could, even all these years later. She owed her mother’s memory at least that much. At least.

And she would walk out of here with her head high, knowing exactly who she was. With all of the Whitney legacy firmly behind her. Finally.

Swallowing hard, she turned to the woman she hadn’t even seen enter the room from somewhere off to the left. The kitchen? Servants’ quarters? Narnia? Nothing would surprise her, at this point.

“I need to take a few calls, but I will come find you in about forty-five minutes,” Theo said, his voice all business, matter-of-fact. It made her realize that he had not been using that voice before, in the car. Or at the Whitney mansion. She frowned.

“Fine,” she said, her thoughts too muddled to say anything else. Why would this situation be anything but business to him? Why should his voice alter at all? Had she not imagined that softer look after all?

His amber eyes flicked over her, making clench her fists in unconscious response as her heart thumped painfully hard in her chest, an answer to her silently asked questions that she refused to acknowledge.

“Our first order of business will be your hair,” he said, those captivating, intriguing eyes narrowing slightly as he looked at her.

She reached up to touch the end of her chestnut-colored ponytail automatically, but she wasn’t surprised. Larissa was as famous for her peroxide-blond mane as she was for her questionable behavior and pointless existence. Becca hadn’t really thought through the specific details of this charade, but dying her hair made sense.

“Will you be making me a blonde yourself?” she asked, meaning to sound dry and arch, but her voice came out much softer, much more uncertain, than she’d intended, as she found herself imagining those strong hands in her hair, against her scalp.

His gaze seemed to darken, and it was worse than the usual kick of amber—it seemed to creep inside of her and turn her into something knotted and raw. She had to remind herself to breathe.

“I will make you exactly what you have to be,” he said. As if he’d heard her worst fears. As if she’d spoken them aloud. His dark head tilted slightly to one side. “The question is whether or not you can handle it.”

“I can handle anything,” she threw at him, feeling goaded beyond her endurance—and yet he only stood there, so calmly powerful, and watched her. It made panic—and something much hotter, much darker—roar through her, blistering everything in its path.

“We’ll see, won’t we?”

And with that, Theo Markou Garcia was gone, leaving Becca feeling overwhelmed—and something else, something she refused to call bereft—in the middle of the vast, beautiful room.

“Come,” Muriel said, and led Becca off to her doom.

Blonde, she was even more of a threat, Theo thought with a mixture of temper and resignation.

And then wondered why he’d used that word, as feelings he did not care to identify coursed through him. Threat. How could she possibly be a threat? He was Theo Markou Garcia and she … she was whatever he made her. He stared at the girl as she sat before the mirror in the guest suite he’d allocated her. She was looking at herself with her cloudy-green eyes dark. She looked fragile and a little unnerved, as if she did not know what she’d gotten herself into.

But most of all, she looked like Larissa.

Françoise was a hairdressing genius—known for her discretion even without the giant sum Theo had paid her to ensure her silence—and had created a true masterpiece. The hair was a symphony of blondes, from a sun-kissed pale shade to the lightest honey, cascading around her like an effortless blonde wave and framing the face that was undeniably Larissa’s.

Larissa, but with fire and emotion in her eyes. Larissa, but so much more alive. So much more aware. Not anesthetized and dull-eyed.

She was like a ghost in reverse, this girl, with her raggedy clothes and her off-color eyes, eyes that should have been green and were instead that mossy, changeable hazel, like a version of Larissa that had never been. Her nose, perhaps, was more narrow. Her chin was a touch stronger, her lips fuller. But he had to search out the differences. He had to look hard to see them. If he didn’t know better, he would have assumed this was Larissa Whitney herself.

No one would look at this woman and think she was anything but the real thing. Because no one saw what they did not expect to see. Theo knew this better than anyone. He had fought against the markers of his humble beginnings most of his life, until he’d met Larissa and had used that very roughness to hide behind. She’d thought she was taking home the kind of man her parents would hate, yet one more of her rebellions. She’d had no idea how ambitious Theo was. Not at first.

“It is an extraordinary likeness,” he said, because he had stared too long, and he could see the nerves Becca struggled to hide. He even sympathized. He remembered how nervous he’d been when Larissa had first noticed him, when she’d chosen him—and how cold he’d gone inside when he finally understood that she wanted only to use him to infuriate and appall Bradford. Just as he remembered what it had taken to turn instead into Bradford’s favorite. She’d never forgiven him.

He could see himself in the mirror, hovering behind her like some great Gothic brute—but he shook himself. That was the way Larissa had made him feel. Like the hulking, ill-mannered swine before whom her pearls were unfairly cast. Yet this was not Larissa. This was only a facsimile of her, and this woman had no greater claim to gentility than he did. Less, perhaps, since this was Manhattan and money made its own friends, especially when it was coupled with so much power and the blue-blooded Whitney stamp of authenticity, heritage and rank.

But oh, how he wished this woman were the real thing. And that she was his.

“I never really noticed it before,” Becca said quietly, turning her head from side to side. He might have thought she was calm, had he not been able to see the way her knee bounced in agitation. A nervous tic he would have to work on, he thought. Larissa had never been nervous. She had redefined languid.

He hated that she lay so helpless, and he was reduced to the past tense. It seemed suddenly terribly unfair that this woman—this pretender—should be so vibrant, sparkle with so much energy, when Larissa could not and would not, ever again. That Becca could be free of all that had weighted Larissa down, ruined her. That she should be so much like Larissa had been so long ago, when he’d first seen her—or in any case, as he’d thought Larissa had been back then, before he’d known her.

“I find that difficult to believe,” he said, dismissively. He reminded himself to be patient, to tamp down the mess of his emotions as was his way; that this was a process, not a race. “Larissa is a world-renowned beauty. Therefore, with your bone structure and likeness to her, you are, too.”

Her gaze met his in the mirror’s reflection. Held. “As it happens, I am a whole, entire person in my own right.” Her brows rose, challenging him, as far from Larissa’s deflecting smiles and easy laughter as it was possible to get. And despite himself, he wanted her. He felt her in his sex, his blood. “I have a life that has never, and will never, have anything to do with my resemblance to Larissa Whitney. In fact,” she said, turning around on the vanity bench to face him, her eyes wild with temper, “I’ll let you in on a little secret. In most places, Larissa Whitney is the punch line to a joke.”

“I suggest you do not tell that joke here,” Theo said, mildly enough, but he saw the color bloom in her cheeks. It seemed to echo in him, seemed to pound through him like need, like want—because Larissa had never responded to him. She had tolerated him, waved him away, pretended to be polite if there were witnesses nearby—but she’d never reacted to him. Not as a woman should respond to a man. Not like this.

But he could not let himself think of that truth.

He should not want this ghost. It was the worst betrayal, surely. Hadn’t he vowed to Larissa that he would never treat her that way, no matter what she did? No matter how she treated him in return? What kind of man was he to ignore that now? He should only want Becca for what her face could bring him, what he deserved after all these years of Larissa’s games and broken promises. But his body was not paying attention to him. At all.

“There’s no going back now, is there?” Becca asked. Or perhaps it was not really a question. “You’ve made me into her. Congratulations.”

Theo smiled slightly. “I’ve had your hair done like hers,” he corrected her. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There is the matter of your wardrobe—and, of course, your entire personal history.”

“It hurts me to say this,” she said, temper crackling in her voice, “but I am, genetically, just as much of a Whitney as she is. I simply wasn’t waited on hand and foot my entire life.”

“But she was,” he said brusquely, as much to curtail the decidedly carnal turn of his thoughts as to reprimand her. “And therein lies one of the major differences we must smooth over if you are to pass as her. Larissa went to Spence and Choate, and then Brown. She spent her summers sailing in Newport, when she wasn’t traveling the world. You did none of these things.” He shrugged. “This is not a value judgment, you understand—this is a statement of fact.”

“It’s true,” Becca said. Her knee began jumping again, and as if she could not bear to let him see it, she moved to her feet, tossing her gleaming blonde hair back from her face in a move that was so much like Larissa’s that it made Theo suck in a sharp breath, past and present colliding too suddenly, and not pleasantly. But the arch of her brows, the tilt of her head—so challenging, so fierce—that was all Becca.

“My mother died three days after my eighteenth birthday,” she said with no trace at all of emotion, just that blaze of green in her eyes and that scathing heat beneath her words. “My sister and I think of that as lucky—because if I hadn’t been eighteen, they would have taken her from me. I had to scrape and save and figure out a way to take care of myself and Emily, because no one else was going to. Certainly not Larissa or her family, who could have saved us a thousand times over, but chose not to, even though they were notified. Maybe they were too busy sailing in Newport.”

Her words hung in the air, condemnation and curse, and Theo wanted things he couldn’t have. Just as he always had, though he had gone to such lengths to make sure that nothing—and no one—would ever be out of his reach again. He told himself it was simply his knee-jerk reaction to a woman who looked like this, telling him what hurt her. He wanted to take away her pain. He wanted to rescue her. From the Whitneys. From the past. And it didn’t matter, because she was not Larissa, and Larissa had never allowed that, anyway. She would have scoffed at the thought.

“They probably didn’t care,” Theo said coldly, brutally, as much to snap himself back to reality as to slap her down.

He watched her pale, and sway very slightly on her feet—and for a moment he hated himself, because if anyone could understand the contours and complexity of her bitterness, it was him. And he did. But there were bigger things at play here. He could not lose sight of his goals. He never had, not since his desperate boyhood in the worst Miami neighborhoods. Not even when it might have saved his relationship with Larissa. Once he got those shares, he would be an owner. He would be one of them. He would be more than the hired help. Finally. He would do anything—had done anything—to make that a reality.

“Just as I do not care,” he continued in the same way, though he did not care for how it made him feel. “This is not a forum for your grievances against the Whitney family. This is not a therapy session.”

“You are a pig.” She spat out the words and in that sentiment, he thought with some trace of black humor, she was exactly like Larissa.

“I don’t care what you think of your cousin’s privileges, or her pampered existence, or her family,” he said, forcing himself to continue in that same heavy-handed way, making sure there was no doubt about how things stood. Start as you mean to go on, he told himself—and he could not let this woman get to him, manipulate him. Make him care. Just like Larissa had done, and look how that had ended up. “I’m sure their wealth and carelessness offends you. It doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is turning you into her, and I can’t do that if you waste our time telling me how much more meaningful your life is than hers, and how much harder you’ve struggled. I don’t care. Do you understand?”

“Perfectly.” Her voice was clipped. Her face was pale, though a hectic color shone in her dark hazel eyes. Hatred, he thought. It was nothing new.

What was new was that he wanted so much to change it.

“Wonderful,” he said. He let himself smile slightly, as if she did not get to him already, no matter what rules he’d tried to institute. As if he did not have the highly unusual urge to apologize to her, to make it better—or to make her understand. As if he really was the dark, forbidding monster he had no doubt at all she believed him to be. Hadn’t he gone to great lengths to make it so? “Let’s get started.”

CHAPTER FOUR

“YOU MUST LOVE HER very much,” Becca said at breakfast a week later, without knowing she meant to speak. But it was done, and her words hung there, seeming to fill up the space between them out on the terrace, rebounding back from the skyscrapers that towered all around them. But her words had as little effect on Theo Markou Garcia as the blazing heat lamps that kept off the March chill, as this man acknowledged no weather that did not suit him. She stabbed her grapefruit with the strange, serrated-edged spoon that had been provided for that singular purpose and continued grimly on. “If you are willing to go to such lengths to recreate her. Like Frankenstein’s bride.”

“Am I patching you together from bits and pieces? A carcass here, a limb or two there?” Theo asked without looking up from the sleek laptop computer he carried everywhere with him, and which Becca suspected was his real, true love. “I think my final product, at the very least, will be a bit smoother and more attractive in appearance than Frankenstein’s.”

There it was again—that hint that somewhere beneath his dark, impenetrable male beauty lurked a man with a sense of humor. Becca sometimes thought she was more likely to wake up one morning and believe herself to be Larissa Whitney in the flesh than Theo was to actually … be funny. Crack a real smile. Relax. Despite the evidence now and again to the contrary.

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