outside the car window, though his eyes never left hers. “Are you ready?”
“How can I possibly know if I’m ready?” she asked with perfect, baffled honesty, blinking. Could anyone be ready for that kind of intrusion? She looked out the thankfully tinted window, swallowing nervously when she saw the scrum of shady-looking men already jostling for position outside the car—already snapping pictures and shouting. One even slapped his hand against the car itself.
“They want a reaction,” Theo said, his voice even. Calm. She jerked her attention away from the chaos in the street and back to him. “The more emotional you are, the better. They will say anything to goad you into the reaction they want. Anything. Do you understand?”
He was so at ease. So unperturbed that there were jackals baying out his name, separated from them by only a flimsy bit of steel and tinted glass. Becca felt the panicked fluttering of her heart slow as she looked at him. He was so. solid. So sure. As if he could save them both, by the sheer force of his will. As if he were the anchor in rough seas, and she needed only to hold on to him.
He wants this particular storm, she reminded herself. He probably called these awful men himself!
But that knowledge didn’t change the fact that when he looked at her like that, as if he knew she was capable of whatever lay before her, she felt as strong as he believed her to be. As if she could do anything at all. Even run this gauntlet.
For him, a different, treacherous voice whispered, and she was so far gone she did not even shudder in horror. She only ignored it. And forced herself to smile.
“How bad can it be?” she asked lightly. She shook her ponytail back over her shoulder. “No matter what they say, they won’t be talking about me, will they?”
How many times had he watched Larissa navigate these baying hounds? How many times had he marveled—sometimes with more cynicism than admiration, it was true—at her seemingly innate ability to use this kind of attention to serve her purposes, to send the messages she wanted to send or cause the exact sort of commotion she wanted to cause? How many times had he dealt with them himself, and regretted only that dealing with them meant giving them some kind of legitimacy?
The Whitneys lived in an endless media glare. The great American celebrity fishbowl. Theo had never questioned that. He had only learned what he could about it, and used that knowledge to his advantage. Larissa had never had to learn it—she had been brought up in it. She had courted the attention she received, and, he’d eventually realized, used the narratives the press spun about her as shorthand for her own life, until it was sometimes uncertain where the press ended and Larissa began. He had known this, and still, he had merely watched his fiancée perform the intricate steps of this peculiar dance. He had never interfered, not even when they turned on her. Not even when they turned on him, too.
And yet this time, with this woman, he nearly lost his cool. This time he wanted to rend them apart, these squalid little men with their sordid insinuations. He wanted to break the arm of the man who dared shove against Becca as she moved past him, ducking against the driver’s burly frame and outstretched arm, her face concealed behind big, dark sunglasses.
Theo was used to them—hell, he expected them, and even on occasion utilized them, like today. And yet he wanted to have them all thrown in jail for trespassing, for assault, for something—because he could see how difficult an ordeal the short walk from the car was for Becca. How her breath caught in her throat in panicked little gasps, how her body swayed every time they shouted Larissa’s name. How she looked as if they were physically attacking her. But they were immune to any reprisals, these cockroaches, and Becca was stronger than she should have been. More warrior than woman, he thought. Quixote to the end. She simply kept walking. And the scum were forced to stop at the door to the apartment building, where the staff of doormen stood ready to do battle to keep them from the premises.
Theo found that he was holding on to his temper by the barest thread.
“I would have saved you from that if I could,” he said quietly, taking her by the arm and steering her toward his private elevator. He could not read her gaze behind those sunglasses, but he could see the turn of her mouth, the faint quiver of her lower lip. And yet she stood too straight, too tall. As if she dared not bend, lest she break apart.
“But that would have defeated the purpose of taking me out to lunch,” she said, her voice devoid of inflection. Of emotion. Of Becca. “So what would be the point?”
He said her name as the heavy doors slid closed behind them, enclosing them in the lush maroon-and-gold elevator car. But it was too quiet, suddenly, too close, and she was still standing there like a soldier.
“I had no idea that was what it felt like,” she continued in that same empty voice. “All those cameras. All those people. So many of them, and so close.” She squared her shoulders, in a show of bravery that seemed to roll through him, leaving marks.
“Becca,” he said again, but she wasn’t listening to him.
“But this is what you wanted, isn’t it?” She slid her sunglasses up over her forehead and into her hair, and fixed him with those mossy-green eyes, so serious now, so dark. “I assume that’s why you didn’t prepare me. So I wouldn’t look confident, or used to them. So I would look fragile instead. Like someone just recovered from a collapse and fresh from private rehab somewhere should look.”
He had never hated himself more than he did at that moment. She was not even condemning him—which made it that much worse. She was simply accepting his ulterior motives, and he could not pretend that they weren’t true. That he hadn’t had exactly that thought, that hope. That he hadn’t set the scene with exactly that end in mind.
What did that make him? He almost laughed at himself then—make him? This was clearly who he already was. Who he’d been for some time. What that meant, he wasn’t at all sure he wanted to know.
“Becca,” he said again, his voice unusually thick—as if it belonged to someone else. “I’m—”
“Don’t you dare apologize!” she snapped at him, some kind of temper flaring in her—but at least that was better than the blankness. “This was the deal. This is the job. Did I say I couldn’t handle it?”
“I didn’t know you,” he said, urgently, not meaning to move closer to her, not meaning to take her shoulders in his hands, not meaning to draw her into him, so her head tilted back and she looked up at him with those damned eyes of hers, that seemed to turn him into a stranger to himself. “I didn’t know you at all. I only knew that you looked like her. I had no idea that this would be anything but a game for you to play.”
She looked at him, and he had the uncomfortable sense that she saw things he didn’t even realize were there. Something dark passed over her face, and when she smiled, it was brittle.
“Who says that it’s not?” she asked. “It turns out that I’m good at passing for a spoiled little princess. Who could have guessed?” She laughed, a little bit wildly. “It must be those Whitney genes, after all.”
“Don’t do this,” he said then, that urgency moving through him, making his voice rougher than it should have been.
“I don’t understand,” she said, her own voice uneven in return, the wildness fading from her expression, and something far older, far sadder, taking its place. “Is it that you don’t want me to play this game according to the rules you
