say that as if I have been in a pitched battle for control of the company since my eighteenth birthday, like some desperate heroine on a daytime soap opera,” she murmured. One delicate hand went to her neck, as if testing the shape of her collarbone beneath her fingers. In another woman, he would call it a nervous tic, a telling gesture. But this was Larissa. She had no tells, only traps. She met his gaze without apparent distress. “I hate to disabuse you of your melodramatic notions, but I’ve had a proxy vote for me for as long as I can remember.” She made a face. “I can’t really think of anything that would bore me more deeply than a board meeting. Particularly if that board had anything to do with a company I was tired of hearing about before I reached kindergarten.” Her perfectly arched brows rose. Her stormy gaze was cool. Deceptively so, he thought. “As you already know, I really don’t like to be bored.”
“Your father and your former fiancé handled your shares,” Jack said ruthlessly, ignoring her performance. Because what else could it be? What else could bring her here but her own self-interest? He didn’t know why she thought she could hide it—or why she bothered to try. “But your fiancé, who was always your champion, has disappeared and everyone knows you are no favorite of your father’s. This meeting may be your only chance to wrest control of your own inheritance for the foreseeable future.”
That was the squalid little truth, he thought, watching her face now that he’d slapped that down on the table, out in the open, between them. He thought a faint flush rose high on her cheekbones, but it could as easily have been the heat of the crackling fire.
He wanted her to admit it. To admit that this was why she’d turned up here, like his own personal ghost. That he was only the means to an end. He knew exactly what securing him—marrying him, even—would do for Larissa, what it would mean for her reputation and prospects. He should be more sympathetic to her plight. Weren’t his grandfather’s latest decrees about Jack’s duty to marry well, and soon, much the same kind of pressure? Wasn’t he taking this time on the island to come to terms with that inevitability? He really ought to relate.
But Larissa sighed, musical and put-upon all at once, and any sympathy he might have had vanished. They were nothing alike. Jack spent every moment of his day doing his duty, making himself the worthy successor to his family’s legacy. Larissa only wanted unrestricted access to her family’s money, the better to spend her life shopping it all away. He felt his jaw tense.
“I have other sources of income,” she said, waving a hand as if such sources grew thick in the trees. But then, in their world of endless privilege, stretching back across centuries, they often did. “It was Theo who was so obsessed with Whitney Media. He and my father and their high-stakes corporate games. I begin to nod off to sleep whenever the topic comes up. I’m getting remarkably drowsy now.”
Jack laughed then, despite himself, and moved across the room in a few sure steps. He leaned down toward her, bracing himself on the arms of the chair, bringing his face far too close to hers as he trapped her in her seat.
“Let me tell you what I think,” he said, satisfaction surging through him at the faint alarm that flashed across her face. At least it was an honest reaction. Any reaction.
“If you feel you must,” she drawled, but he could see the pulse beat against the tender flesh of her neck, and he knew she was not nearly as unmoved as she pretended. He leaned closer.
“I think that you came to this island in the worst of the fall storms to drag me into this little battle you pretend you don’t care about.” He could smell her scent again, and it made his body harden, though he still held himself just slightly apart from her. There were many forms of revenge, after all, and not all of them required that he betray himself. “As you keep pointing out, I have become so boring, haven’t I? Positively respectable. Not one of your usual doomed bad-boy projects or untrustworthy celebrity lovers. I’d be the perfect ally, wouldn’t I, Larissa? I’d make you look reborn. Your father would eat right out of your hand if you brought him me on a silver platter, wouldn’t he?”
It was a fantastic plan, Larissa thought, her eyes searching his dark, commanding gaze. Brilliant, even. Nothing thrilled her father more than pedigrees that matched and/or exceeded his own. Bradford Whitney cared about nothing at all save the Whitney legacy, by which he meant his own continued wealth and consequence and all that entailed. Larissa had long been a grave disappointment to him in this area.
When she had brought Theo Markou Garcia home as her boyfriend, and had eventually made him her fiancé, she had mostly been interested in the fact that he came from absolutely nothing—a sin she’d been certain Bradford could never overlook. But she had underestimated Theo. He had taken over the company, becoming the son Bradford had never had in the process. That he had finally left her was, Larissa knew, something Bradford would never find it in him to forgive her. Much less the fact that Theo’s near-miraculous ability as CEO to make Whitney Media rake in profits had disappeared with him.
But Jack Endicott Sutton would be exactly the right kind of salve for Bradford’s bruised ego and slightly depressed portfolio. Any suggestion that Larissa, the great disappointment and stain upon the Whitney name, could link herself to a man like Jack? The single heir to two separate great American families, from Mayflower Boston and Upper Ten Thousand New York both—and the vast fortunes that came with each? A man who had transformed himself from notorious if beloved rake to dependable, hardworking, worthy successor to all his family’s innumerable riches? Bradford would be beside himself.
Larissa imagined that somewhere in the depths of the iconic Whitney mansion that sprawled over a whole city block on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, her father was suddenly filled with an unimaginable if unclear joy, simply because the very idea of linking the Gilded Age splendor of the Whitney name to the august Bostonian Endicotts and the clever Sutton robber-barons-turned-bankers had occurred to someone, somewhere. It would be like his personal Christmas.
But, of course, she’d had no such plan. She’d been running away from all of that noise and obligation since the day she’d woken up from her coma, more or less, and she’d had no plans to return to New York City at all—much less to Whitney Media, and she’d certainly had no plans to involve herself in some doomed scheme toward respectability with Jack Sutton.
Jack was the very last man she would ever have sought out. Ever. She couldn’t trust herself anywhere near him, as tonight had already proven beyond any shadow of a doubt. But, of course, in order to explain to him why that was so, she would be forced to admit the kind of power he had always had over her. She couldn’t do it. There was too much to lose—and anyway, she was used to his low opinion of her. It was nothing new. She told herself it hardly even hurt.
“So quiet,” he murmured, taunting her, his voice snapping her back into the tense, dangerous present. Where his mouth was much too close to hers, his eyes were much too knowing, and the banked fire he lit in her was stoked to a worrying blaze already. “Did you really think that you could fool me? Did you imagine that your presence here would be casual in some way? This island is as inhospitable as they come. There can be no reason at all for you to be here at this time of year. None. Save one.”
“You are so conceited,” she managed to say, fighting her voice’s urge toward a much-too-telling tremor.
“You’re a terrible actress,” he replied, far too easily.
He squatted down in front of her chair, still caging her between his strong arms, but now his muscled thighs spread open before her and his face, his mouth, were much too close to hers. She dared not move. He was so big, so male, and as dangerous as he was compelling. She wanted to leap out of this chair and run, screaming, from the room—the inn—the island. But more than that, she wanted to lean forward and touch him. Both propositions were terrifying.
“Why
