was accusation and something else in her voice, something that tugged at him even as it hung between them for a moment, dancing in the bright sunshine yet just out of sight.
“Why must it be one or the other?” he asked, almost forgetting himself.
She smiled. It was a sharp-honed weapon, hardly a smile at all. “Because that’s how you operate,” she said. She glanced around her, flipping her sleek ponytail back over her shoulder. “I suppose this is a decent test run. What did you call it—a field experiment?“ She frowned slightly as her gaze swept the crowded restaurant. “I’ve already seen at least five people take pictures of me—of us—with their cell phones. I assume that’s what you wanted.” Her voice dropped and she swayed forward, revealing her perfect cleavage and the hollow between them. “Larissa Whitney and her long-suffering fiance at a quiet, uneventful lunch, just like normal people.”
He could not deny a single thing she’d said, and yet some part of him wished he could. That there were no ulterior motives at all. That they were simply two people at lunch, learning about each other. Why did he yearn for that with parts of himself he hardly recognized?
“Can’t I enjoy an afternoon with a beautiful woman?” he asked softly. “Can’t I get to know her?”
“No,” she said, low and sure. Fierce. “You can’t.”
He wanted to protest. He wanted to truly forget everything but this moment, this crippling need that raged through him—but he could not quite do that. Not after everything he’d given up to get here. Not now. “Why not?” he asked instead.
“Because my only value to you is my resemblance to someone else,” she said very deliberately, very calmly. Too calmly. “Therefore, my personal information is mine. You don’t get access to it. You don’t get to know me when what you’re really after is her.”
He had spent years planning to run Whitney Media, and then, in due time, to own it. He had focused on nothing but that singular goal, casting everything else aside in pursuit of it. Larissa had liked him when he was her rough-edged lover calculated to irritate her father; she had lost interest in him when he became more of a Whitney than the Whitneys themselves. But even so, they had hammered out their devil’s bargain, their sad little dance toward Theo’s lifelong dream. And he was so close to achieving that dream—the dream that had meant everything to him for almost as long as he allowed himself to remember, last night’s trip down memory lane notwithstanding. He was so close.
And yet he looked across the small table and the city outside faded away, the bustle and chatter of the Manhattan hot spot disappeared, and all he could see was Becca. Her mysterious gaze, like the secret, shaded hollows of some cool, forgotten forest. The intelligence and the challenge. The invitation he was not even sure she knew she was broadcasting. But he knew. He could feel it throughout his body, hardening him, readying him, making his need for her burn like a wildfire through his limbs.
He could not seem to help himself. He looked at her and wanted more, more than he’d thought himself capable of before. More than he’d had.
“And what if I want you?” he asked, as if he was a free man. As if he was someone else. As if she’d been the dream all along. “Just you. What then?”
HEAT LIGHTNING CRACKLED between them, making Becca’s nipples pull tight. A low, insistent ache bloomed between her legs. She felt heat flood her face, and something too bright, too hot to be tears sear through her eyes.
She did not even know if she was breathing.
And Theo only lounged there, so close and yet separated by the fancy table and the fussy centerpiece, his gaze hard on her, like a fierce caress. She had the sudden sense that he was far more primitive than his elegant suit and carefully manicured appearance might suggest. She could suddenly see him, deep into him, as if somewhere inside they were the same—a matched set. She could see all the wildness and passion and heat that burned in him, and burned in her, too.
How could she want him like this? A bone-deep longing crashed over her then, moving through her like the rising tide, making her whole body, every cell and every stretch of her skin, yearn.
But they were in public, this was all a charade, and she would never really know who he was looking at that way, would she?
It made her heart hurt. She reached up as if to cover it with her hand before she knew what she meant to do. Her palm flexed below her collarbone before she dropped it back in her lap.
“You don’t,” she said. She meant to sound strong. Dismissive. But instead, her voice got tangled in her throat, and it was only a whisper. “You don’t want me.”
“Don’t I?”
“Of course not.” She tore her gaze from his, and looked down at her plate, scowling fiercely to stem the panic, the emotion, the threat of tears. “You want whatever you’ve been carrying around in your head all these years. I’m the captive audience as well as the show. That’s what you want, not me.”
“I want to know how you taste,” he said, his voice like a drug, narcotic and thrilling, moving over her like his mouth had last night, spinning out fires in every direction, though he did not move. He did not need to move. “Your neck. That hollow between your breasts. I want to taste every inch of you. And then start again.”
She could not breathe. She could not look at him. She was paralyzed—as afraid of what he might say next as she was terrified that he would stop speaking. How could she be so conflicted? Why did he torment her so much? She had never had any trouble with men, and she had thought that all her coworkers’ talk of theatrics and fireworks and life-altering complications were just the stories people told themselves, the way they brightened things up, as real as their claims that they would join the Peace Corps, write that book, or pack up and move to Fiji someday.
But now she knew better. Now she knew. She’d been waiting for Theo to incinerate her. Her whole life she’d waited, and now she burned, and he was in love with a woman he could never have—a woman Becca could never be, no matter what she looked like. It might not be her idea of love—it might make her angry to think it was what he thought he deserved—but none of this was within her control, was it?
“I want to move inside of you until the only thing you know, the only thing you can say, is my name,” he continued, unaware, perhaps, of what he was doing to her with just those silky, disturbing, sensual words. Or all too aware it.
“Stop,” she said then, her voice much weaker than it should have been. Almost as if she was pleading with him. “We’re in public. People are watching.”
“You should feel safe, then,” he said, so arrogant. So offhandedly powerful. So at peace with the sensual danger that thickened in the breathing space between them. “What can happen here, with all of New York looking on?”
“What about your plan?” she threw at him, desperate, even as her breasts seemed to swell and she felt very nearly feverish, hot and then cold. “Is this how you and Larissa acted in restaurants?”
The name was like a slap of cold water. She could see the way it worked on Theo, reminding him. Changing him.
She had thrown the name out there deliberately. So
