the pale blond strands swept high in front and then cascading to brush her shoulders. She’d picked a simple pale gold dress that shimmered when she moved, picking up the light and seeming to reflect it, as if she was bottled sunshine. She’d done her makeup to perfection, and she’d even started wearing the contact lenses that made her eyes glow green, like a cat’s. She was as Larissa as she was likely to get.
And still her stomach was clenched tight, like a pretzel. Like an unbreakable knot. She let her hands rest there for a moment, trying to soothe the clenched feeling away.
“We will dine at Whitney House tonight,” Theo had said over breakfast, that implacable command in his voice. He had not looked up from his computer. It had been as if she had not screamed out his name only a scant half hour before, as if he had not left a mark on her collarbone with his teeth when he’d found his release.
It had been as if they were back to the same place they’d been at the start. So long ago, she’d thought, that at first she hadn’t understood what was happening. And when she’d finally comprehended it, she was surprised at how much it hurt. How deeply it seemed to cut into her.
“I can’t think of anything I would like to do less,” she had said, determined not to show him that he’d struck a blow. Determined, for that matter, not to admit it to herself. She’d lounged in her chair, languid and unconcerned, every inch the pampered little princess she’d been pretending to be for weeks.
She hadn’t much cared for the way he’d looked at her then, his amber gaze something much too close to condemning. Or was it simply that he’d reverted to the all-business, hyperfocused version of himself, that she hadn’t seen in over a week?
“It wasn’t a request,” he’d said softly, his voice brooking no argument.
And that simply, he’d reminded her. Of her place. Of the situation. He had not come out and said it. He hadn’t had to say anything.
He might as well have dropped her over the side of the penthouse wall, letting her plummet to the Manhattan street so far below. That was how hard Becca had hit the ground.
Wake up, you fool, she’d mocked herself. Welcome back to reality.
Because the harsh truth was that he might want her in his bed. He might groan out her name and murmur words she was afraid to attach too much importance to in the light of day. He might smile at her sometimes as if she was capable of lighting up his world. But most of all, above all things, he wanted her to pretend to be Larissa. Maybe he’d been pretending she was Larissa already, this whole time.
The thought made her sick to her stomach.
But more fool, she, for putting that possibility—that likelihood—out of her mind for even a moment. Much less for all these days and endless nights that blended together and sat on her, in retrospect, like a great weight.
And she was a fool to the end, because even now, she thought as she walked through the soaring rooms of the penthouse, nodding at the driver who waited for her in the foyer—even now she wished he was here instead of meeting her over at the Whitney mansion, wished she could touch him, wished she could feel that inevitable rush and burn that she was beginning to think would always consume her when she saw him. That it was simply the effect Theo had on her.
He had ruined her, she thought with a flash of something too close to despair, and she hadn’t even started the hard part of this charade. At this rate, she’d be lucky to leave in pieces.
Much sooner than she was comfortable with, Becca found herself sitting outside the Whitney mansion, staring up at it from within the depths of the low-slung limousine that had whisked her here from the penthouse’s underground garage—the garage that Theo had deliberately not used the day he’d had them run the paparazzi gauntlet.
Funny how that memory made desolation yawn open within her tonight, when she hadn’t minded back when it had happened. Quite the opposite—she had understood so completely it had propelled her directly into Theo’s bed, and she had hardly come up for air since.
What had happened to her? She’d known better than to let this happen—she’d known it from the moment he’d strode into that room in the Whitney mansion so long ago now. Her whole body had rioted in warning, aware of the threat he presented. He’d made her display herself for him, he’d ordered her around, and none of that seemed to matter. She could not even work up the appropriate level of outrage now, as she considered her own fall from grace. She had lost herself, she knew. Perhaps forever.
It was the way he looked at her. When she knew he saw only her, and it stole her breath and filled her heart. She didn’t have it in her to withstand that look. She didn’t even want to try.
The car came to a stop, snapping her out of her reverie. She climbed out of the car when the driver opened the door, and paused for a moment as she gazed up at the house. It was not an icon of a bygone era by accident. The mansion rose up from Fifth Avenue, a proud ghost of a bygone age, all flamboyant grace and style. Becca eyed the curved bay windows that opened up over the avenue, the balustraded balconies and the dramatic roof that soared high above in a nod to a French château. The house sprawled the length of the block, self-assured and deeply self-satisfied. It looked different at night, more sinister, or perhaps more impressed with itself as the security lights shone up on its elegant facade, each light carefully placed to highlight and dramatize the house’s Gothic appeal.
It was impossible not to feel like the doomed ingenue marching to her certain end, Becca thought as she made her way up the grand stairs. No matter how very far removed from an ingenue she might have been. Or perhaps it was simply an echo of the last time she’d been in this precise spot. She could hardly remember herself back then, and that was what made her pause in her tracks, right there on the threshold. She looked down at herself, at the elegant dress and the high, fanciful shoes. The luxurious, deep red wrap she’d worn to keep off the night air and the jeweled bag she held in one hand.
A far cry from her ripped-up jeans and battered old hooded sweatshirt, she thought. She had a sudden premonition then—a perfect vision of herself in her old boots, wearing her old clothes, but still with Larissa’s hair and this new way of carrying herself, headed back up to Boston, all alone. Some strange hybrid of her cousin and herself, but all, still, in this same body. She should have rolled her eyes at the image, or smirked it away as she would have done, once. But instead, she felt something like sadness well up from deep within. And she couldn’t allow herself the time or space to figure out why. This was the den of the enemy. This night was going to hurt, one way or another.
There was no time for sadness.
She reached out before she could think better of it and rang the heavy bell.
Anger, she found not ten minutes later, served her far better. It was a weapon. It could be wielded.
She stood in yet another interchangeably elegant room of this offensively spacious palace, holding a glass of perfectly chilled wine from some unspeakably expensive vintage in one hand, and holding on to her temper with everything else she possessed.
“Well,” her aunt Helen said with a sniff, breaking the long and far-from-comfortable silence that had lasted since the moment Becca had been ushered into the room. “The likeness is truly astonishing. There’s no debating that.”
There was no one else in the large, faintly chilly room. Theo and Bradford, Becca imagined grimly, were closeted off somewhere, no doubt comparing their bank balances and ruining lives. That left only the censorious Helen to serve as the welcoming committee. She
