chance. At what, she might not know. But she did know that the arrival of Jack Sutton was like throwing a bomb into the middle of it. He was uncontrollable. Impossible. And those were two of his better qualities.
She settled back in her chair, assuming the careless, languid sort of position that came to her so easily, like a second skin. The usual Larissa Whitney insouciance she could summon at will, automatically adjusting to his assumptions, to what he no doubt already saw when he looked at her. She was so good at living down to the world’s expectations. She sometimes wondered if it was her only true skill.
“Are you in disguise?” he continued, in that same lethally soft voice that made the fine hairs on the back of her neck rise. His cool brown gaze flicked over her, made her want to squirm. But she only lounged, making herself look like the very essence of boredom. “Or on the run? Do I even want to know what fantasy you’re playing at here?”
“Why are you so interested?” she asked, letting out a light sort of laugh. “Are you afraid it doesn’t include you?”
“Quite the opposite.” His tone was curt, his eyes hard. As if she’d done something to him, personally. She blinked, taken aback. She certainly could have, of course. She just thought she’d remember it. Jack Sutton wasn’t the sort of man anyone forgot. Repressed, yes. Forgot? Never.
“I heard Maine is lovely this time of year,” she said, forestalling whatever character assassination he might be about to unleash on her. She wasn’t certain she could survive it—not from him. It made her stomach ache just to look at him. “How could I resist?”
She nodded toward the window, inviting him to do the same. The sky had darkened, the clouds moving fast against the swollen pewter clouds. Rain beat at the glass, while below, the rocks withstood the angry assault of the waves. She felt like those rocks, battered and beleaguered, yet somehow still standing—with her own past the tragic, inescapable crash of the sea. Jack, she thought, was just the rain. A cold, depressing insult on top of a far greater injury.
“You’ve had a banner year already, haven’t you,” Jack said, in that way. That knowing way. “Or so I hear.”
It made her feel horribly exposed, naked and vulnerable—things she strove to avoid at all costs, especially around this man, after the last time—and the worst part was that she couldn’t even tell him the real story. She couldn’t defend herself. She had to accept the fiction—and worse, the fact that everyone so easily believed that the fiction was truth. Why did it hurt so much this time? It was no different than any other scandal, was it? It was only that this time around, the fiction wasn’t of her own making.
“Oh, yes,” Larissa agreed, hating him. Hating herself more. “A little tour of duty in rehab, a silly little broken engagement. Thanks so much for reminding me.” What could she say? That wasn’t me. I was in a coma, and there was a woman who masqueraded as me, who ended up with my fiancé … Hardly. Her life was enough of a soap opera without all the gory, patently unbelievable details.
After all, the entire world knew that Larissa Whitney, famous for being nothing more than a worthless party girl and a great embarrassment to her storied family, had collapsed outside of an elite Manhattan club one night some eight months ago. Thanks to the endless scrutiny of the tabloids—and the usual manipulations her media-savvy family was so well versed in—the world also knew what had happened next. Larissa had been packed away to a private rehabilitation center for a while, then paraded around Manhattan on the arm of her long-suffering fiancé, Theo, the CEO of her family’s company. Until Theo had left Larissa and—more shocking by far, given his well-documented ambitions—Whitney Media behind. Everyone blamed faithless, heartless Larissa. And why not? She’d gone out of her way to hurt Theo as publicly and as repeatedly as possible. For years. She was the obvious villain.
The fact that she had never been in rehab—and that she’d been hidden away for two months in a hospital bed in the family mansion, expected to die while her family engaged in their usual cruel machinations over her comatose body—well, that wasn’t nearly as interesting a story, was it? Not nearly as familiar, as expected.
But he wouldn’t believe her anyway. No one would. And she had no one to blame for that but herself, as usual.
“Haven’t you caused enough trouble?” Jack asked then, as if he’d read her mind. She believed that if anyone could, it was Jack, and the thought made that shiver roll through her again. He shook his head slightly, as if she wearied him unto his soul. “Do you think you’re going to drag me into one of your messes? You might want to think again, Larissa. I stopped playing your kind of games a long time ago.”
“If you say so,” she said, as if she was bored. As if she was not even now struggling to keep herself from jumping to her feet and bolting for the door. Anything to get away from that awful, judgmental look in his eyes—eyes that seemed to look deep into her and see nothing but her darkest secrets. Her shame.
God, she hated him.
But she’d rather die than show him that he’d hurt her. She certainly couldn’t tell him why she was really here, on a pine-studded scrap of land eight miles out from Bar Harbor, in the middle of the lashing wind with only the desolate sea in every direction. She couldn’t tell him she’d ended up on the ferry because she’d been trying so hard to disappear for months now, to really be as invisible as she felt—she wouldn’t even know how to say those things. Or to explain how she felt about this miraculous second chance she’d been given at a life she’d ruined so thoroughly, treated so carelessly, the first go-round. And certainly not to Jack, whom she still thought of as bright and shining and untouchable, no matter the dark, hard look he was training on her now. No matter the power and command he seemed to wear like a second skin.
She had promised herself that she would never lie to herself, not ever again, and she meant to keep that promise. But that didn’t mean she owed him the same courtesy. And there was so little of her left, so little of her she could even identify as her own, and she knew, somehow, that if she gave him even a tiny bit of that he could crush her forever. She just knew.
So she gave him what he wanted. What he already saw. She smiled at him, the mysterious, closemouthed smile she’d learned to give the press a long time ago—the smile that made men crazy, that exuded sex, that made everyone project all their fantasies and wishes and dreams onto her while she simply stood there and was empty. Nothing. Just a screen.
She was good at that, too.
She cocked her head to the side, and met his gaze as if his words had rolled right off her, as if they were nothing at all. As if this was nothing but a flirtation, some delicious kind of foreplay they were both engaging in. She let her brows rise, let her lips part suggestively. She made her voice low, sexy. The expected fantasy. She could produce it by rote, and no one ever suspected a thing.
“Tell me more, Jack,” she purred. “What kind of games do you like to play?”
CHAPTER TWO
SHE looked so fragile. Those delicate, perfect cheekbones that had announced her identity from across the room, even when he’d been unable to imagine what a creature like her, better used to lounging about in Manhattan’s most elite circles surrounded by sycophants and other fashionably bored and useless socialites, could possibly be doing in a place as remote as this island. Those mysterious, always-sad eyes of a haunted, storm-tossed green that hinted at depths she would never, could never, possess.
That was the great lie of Larissa Whitney, he thought with no little distaste—almost aimed more at himself for his susceptibility to that lie than at her for perpetuating it. Almost.
