smoothly, his dark brows rising, as if shocked to the core that Becca hadn’t known that at a glance.
“I don’t care what it is,” Becca had replied, flushing with embarrassment at once again being proved so small, so provincial, and yet determined never to admit that. Never. She glared at him through the full-length mirror in the dressing room adjacent to her guest suite that was, she was sure, larger than the living room/dining room/kitchen area in her small apartment. “It’s ugly.”
“Your job here is not to choose garments that you might like to wear for a day in your life,” Theo had replied, in that inexorable way of his that made her want to obey him, please him, almost as much as she wanted to run screaming from him. He had moved closer to her, once again standing behind her in the mirror.
“Because a day in my life would, of course, be like a fate worse than death,” she’d said bitterly, pretending she hadn’t noticed the heat of him, so near to her. That she’d been unaware of the way her breasts had felt fuller, her thighs looser, her skin hotter. She’d hated herself for that weakness.
“The point is to observe a dress like this and try to understand the art of its creation,” he’d said softly, his gaze dark in the mirror, his head too close to hers, much too close. That glimmer in his eyes made her believe that he was not what he seemed, not just another Whitney family minion. “Larissa had an effortless sense of style. You will not have to dress yourself without help, of course, but understanding what drew her eye will help you understand her.”
“All I understand,” she’d said, her heart thumping too fast, her voice too thin, “is that rich people apparently have the time and the money to pick clothes to make statements rather than to serve a purpose. Like, for example, simply clothing themselves.”
“They pick whole lives just to make statements,” Theo had replied, his gaze clashing with hers, daring her to look away, yet snaring her in its amber grip. “Because they can.”
“And by they, you mean you,” she’d whispered, desperate to sound fierce yet fearing she sounded only pointlessly defiant.
A smile she’d have called painful were he someone else had crossed his dangerous mouth then, and his eyes had darkened. She’d thought she’d felt the faintest of touches on the back of her hair, as if he’d run his hand down the gleaming blond length of it. As if he was caressing a ghost.
“You are here to understand Larissa,” he said quietly. “Not me. You should not try. I doubt you’d like what you find.”
What did it mean that for a single moment, yearning and bittersweet, she had almost wanted to be Larissa for him?
She told herself that it was easier when he was off tending to his multitude of duties as CEO of Whitney Media, sequestered away in his home office that boasted its own elevator lobby and entrance, so that his endless succession of business meetings could take place without anyone any the wiser that a doppelganger sat right across the hall, learning how to be a bored, vapid socialite the world thought was locked away in a very private rehabilitation center, safe from prying eyes and tabloid articles.
Not that the lack of access to Larissa kept the tabloids from speculating about her very public collapse. They hired doctors who had never treated her to opine on her supposed course of treatment. They printed her greatest hits—a parade of embarrassing pictures under screaming headlines supposedly expressing concern—and made up sightings. Becca was almost tempted to feel some sort of sympathy for the poor girl. Almost.
She told herself that the long hours she was left to her own devices—expected to keep reading up on Larissa’s highly pedigreed history so she could spout it off by rote, left to roam around Theo’s stunning home like the ghost she sometimes wondered if she was becoming—were better. That being around him irritated her and infuriated her. And perhaps that was true, but she couldn’t deny that her heart leaped when he returned to her. That she looked forward to it—and to the nights spent learning table manners fit for dining with royalty, nights filled with his endless corrections. How to stand, how to sit, how to laugh, how to appear politely indifferent. She found she looked forward to fencing words with him far, far more than she should. More than she was willing to admit, even to herself.
There was something in the darkness he carried within him and brandished like both shield and sword that called to her, much as she wanted to deny it. Something that agitated her, that stirred her blood and kept her awake late into the night, tossing and turning on a wide, luxurious bed that she could not seem to get comfortable in, ever. Something that seemed to call out to her, to sing in her, too, like a perfect harmony she’d been waiting to sing her whole life.
Don’t be ridiculous, she told herself now, snapped back into the present morning on the terrace, with the faint sounds of angry rush hour horns and the inevitable sirens rising from the New York City streets far below. The man is in love with his comatose fiancée. And you are showing worrying signs of Stockholm Syndrome.
“So you do,” she heard herself say, her mouth doing as it liked with no thought to the consequences. As if she would not have to pay the price for her foolishness.
“I do what?” He did not even look at her. Tap tap tap on the keyboard, nations his to command at will. His voice was completely dismissive, letting her know exactly where he ranked her in his estimation.
She had the passing thought that he seemed to go out of his way to do so, when she had only ever seen him treat his actual servants with a warmth and a respect that suggested he did not consider himself quite so lofty … but why should he treat her any differently? But she was still talking, apparently—still belaboring the point.
“Love her.” She studied the side of his beautiful face, the elegant line of his jaw that was somehow wholly masculine, the rich black of his thick hair. “You love Larissa.”
She told herself she did not shiver when his amber gaze, dark and measuring, met hers, a fire she could not understand building in those mesmerizing depths.
“She was my fiancée,” he said in that clipped tone that she knew by now meant she should stop talking, that he was losing his temper. But she couldn’t seem to do it. There was something swelling inside of her, rolling through her, that she couldn’t understand. It made her want to poke at him, to prod at him, and she didn’t even know why. Because she did not— could not—want this man, not like that. Not the way he clearly wanted his perfect princess, his lost Larissa.
“She had a lover, too,” she said—suicidally. “What do you think he feels for her?”
Theo closed his laptop with a careful, gentle movement that was somehow more unnerving than if he’d slammed the screen shut. Becca swallowed, and let her grapefruit spoon clatter to her plate. What was the matter with her? Why was she determined to get under his skin? Was she that desperate to compete with a woman she’d never met, but who she saw more of in the mirror every day?
A cold sort of awareness swept over her, through her, then—making the hair on the back of her neck and along her arms stand on end.
“You’ll have to ask him what he feels,” Theo said in that mild way of his that sent every alarm in her body off in a wild cacophony of sound and panic. She felt herself straightening against her chair again, in unconscious defense, and couldn’t bring herself to stop it even as she felt it happen. “But in my experience, Chip Van Housen has never loved anything, not even himself.”
“You know him.” It was a breath of sound, hardly speech at all.
Theo
