blew out inside of her, with a rattle and then a loud pop. His smile lit up that fascinating face of his, making him seem at once more beautiful and more lethal than any man should be.
“Sit down,” he said. It was another order. “I have a proposition for you.”
“Nothing good has ever followed those words,” she replied, sticking her shaking hands on her hips to hide their state. She did not sit down, despite how fluttery her knees felt beneath her. “It’s like checking out the strange noise in a horror movie. It can’t possibly end well.”
“This is not a horror movie,” Theo replied silkily. “This is a simple, if unorthodox, business transaction. Do what I want, and you will receive all you ever wanted and more.”
“Let’s cut through all this buildup.” She smiled at him, fake and hard. “What’s the catch? There’s always a catch.”
For a moment he said nothing, only looked at her, and Becca had the craziest notion that he could see straight into her, that he could read her—that he knew both how determined she was to save her sister’s future and how baffled she was by her own reaction to his proximity.
“There are a number of catches,” he said, his dark voice soft, his eyes bright. “You will probably dislike many of them, but I suspect you will persevere because you’ll be thinking, always, about the end result. About what you will do with all the money we will give you if you do this thing we will ask of you. So none of these catches will matter.” His dark brows quirked then. “Save one.”
“And what is that?” She had some kind of premonition, perhaps. Or she already knew that this man could—would—devastate her. That he had only refrained from doing so already by sheer coincidence. That it would take so little to undo her. Another smile. Or, God help her, a touch.
She felt the fire between them, and something dark and confining, that seemed to wrap around her like a chain. Like a promise.
His amber-colored eyes seared into her, like molten gold, and she found she could not breathe.
“You will have to obey me,” he told her, mercilessly, and not without a certain gleam of male satisfaction in his unholy eyes. “Completely.”
“OBEY YOU?” BECCA repeated, her dismay more than evident on her expressive face. “You mean, like a trained animal?”
“Exactly like a trained animal,” he replied. Her eyes were an interesting hazel color, somewhere between green and brown, and they darkened with her emotions. He found himself unduly intrigued. She would have to wear contacts to achieve Larissa’s emerald-green shade, he thought, ignoring the shaft of pain that speared through him. “Like a faithful dog at my heel, in fact.”
“Clearly you did not rise to your exalted position through sales,” she said after a moment, only the faintest catch in her dry voice. “Because your pitch could use some work.”
Theo could not decide which was more shocking—the girl’s likeness to Larissa, or his own surprising, raging attraction to her. He had never hardened and blazed with need merely looking at Larissa. He had wanted her, but not like this. Not with his whole body, in this shower of flame and desire he could not seem to control.
That he should feel these things, while Larissa lay beyond reach, made him loathe himself.
This Becca … did something to him. She infected him, called out to him, even now when his grief should have made him immune. He could not imagine how he would transform this feral little creature into any believable version of his ethereal, effortlessly chic Larissa. But he was Theo Markou Garcia, crafted from proud Cypriot and Cuban stock. He had done far more impossible things, with far fewer resources. The fact that he stood here at all was proof of that.
And since he did not know how to lose, the only thing he could do was win what was left, as he’d planned.
“What do you know about your cousin Larissa?” he asked quietly. He watched a shadow pass over Becca’s face, and her hands balled into fists before she shoved them in the pockets of her jeans.
“What everyone knows,” she replied, with a shrug that Theo might have believed was casual had he not seen those telling fists. He felt a sudden surge of sympathy. He knew what those fists meant. He had once balled his own in exactly the same way—pride and anger and determination. He knew exactly what she felt, this stranger with Larissa’s face. He wished he did not have to ask her to do something he knew, without a doubt, would bruise the very pride that she clung to with such ferocity. But he had no choice. He had sold his soul long ago, and he could not give up now, not when he was so close. He could not.
“That she is famous for no particular reason,” Becca was saying. “That she has too much money and has never had to work for any of it. That there are never any consequences for her bad behavior. And that the tabloids are obsessed with her for some reason, and love nothing more than to follow her from party to party, recording her exploits.”
“She is a Whitney,” Bradford said in ringing tones from across the room, the pompous fool. “Whitneys have a certain standing—”
“She’s a cautionary tale,” Becca retorted, cutting her uncle off. The look she threw at him, and then turned on Theo, was equal parts chilly contempt and a fierce kind of pride that stirred something inside of him. Old memories of another time, another life. His own fists at his sides, his own voice—laced with bravado. “Anytime I am tempted to wish my mother had stayed here and suffered so I might have had an easier life, I simply open the nearest tabloid magazine and remind myself that it is far better to be poor than to be a useless parasite like Larissa Whitney.”
Theo winced. He heard Helen suck in a strangled, outraged breath, and a quick glance told him that Bradford’s face had turned an alarming shade of red. And yet Becca only gazed up at him, unafraid. Almost triumphant. Theo imagined she’d dreamed of delivering that speech for a long, long time. And why not? She had no doubt been treated shabbily by the mighty Whitneys, like so many others before her, Larissa included. Larissa especially.
Not that it could matter. Not now. Not to Theo. Not to Larissa, who had been lost long before he’d met her, long before she’d fallen so far.
“Larissa collapsed outside a nightclub last Friday night,” Theo said coolly, deliberately, watching the way the color changed in Becca’s face, the flush of courage dimming. “She is currently in a coma. There is no hope that she will ever recover.”
Becca’s mouth firmed to a taut line, and Theo could see the way she swallowed, as if her throat was suddenly dry, but she did not look away. He found he could not help but admire that, too.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I did not mean to be cruel.” She shook her head slightly, looking uncertain for the first time since she’d met his gaze when he’d walked into the parlor. “I don’t understand why I’m here.”
“You happen to look enough like Larissa that you could, with some help, pass for her,” Theo said, matter-of-factly. “That’s why you’re here.”
Because there was no point wallowing in his grief—no need to dwell on the past. There was only the future and what must happen now. He had given Whitney Media everything he had, everything he was. It was time that he became an owner, not simply an employee.
