Heiress Behind the Headlines (11 page)

But right now, tonight, his duty seemed a far-off thing. There was only this woman stretched out in his bed, waiting for him, flushed and near enough to naked.

“At the moment,” he said quietly, intently, the words sounding like a promise he knew better than to make, and had no intention of keeping, “you are mine.”

H
E RELEASED
her from the handcuffs much later that long and breathtakingly intense night, but the hold he kept on her, Larissa thought many days later when she was still on the island and still deep under his spell—was proving much harder to break.

She had woken the following morning feeling bruised—and not physically, which she imagined might have been easier to deal with, all things considered. Physically, though, she’d felt wonderful. More than wonderful—she’d felt
alive.
Vibrant. As if she’d finally understood, after all this time, what her body had been made to do, though she’d tried not to think of it that way.

No, the bruises she’d sustained were of the emotional variety, and Larissa had wanted only to hurry back to her tiny room at the inn, bury herself in the deep and forgiving bath, and try her best not to poke at them. She’d eased herself out from under the delicious weight of Jack’s heavy arm, and had moved to the edge of the bed. She’d told herself that her trepidation was only because it was a cold morning, with the rain still beating down against the bay windows that allowed in only a thin, weak light to indicate the night had passed. It was chilly and wet, and she’d known she had to walk all the way to the kitchen to locate
her clothes. That, surely, had been reason enough to want to stay in the bed.

But then his hand had snaked out and his arm had wrapped around her waist, capturing her that easily. Not that she’d put up much of a fight. Or any fight. She’d been too busy repressing the deep sigh of contentment that threatened to spill out, just because he’d been touching her again.

Her weakness, she’d told herself then, was truly astonishing. There was so much she’d needed to think about, to come to terms with. The night before had blazed inside her, neon and vivid, and she’d not been at all certain she was the same person she’d been the day before. She’d had no idea who she might have become.

But even so, all she’d wanted to do was lean into him, lose herself in him, as if none of that mattered when he was near.

There would be time for that later, she’d promised herself. When the storm passed, when the smoke from this particular fire cleared. When sanity reasserted itself. She’d deal with it later. She’d have to.

“Do I have to chain you to the bed again?” he’d asked, his voice thick with sleep and far too appealing, dancing down her spine like a touch, like his clever, demanding hands.

“Are you asking for permission this time?” She’d had to force her voice to sound light. He’d tugged on her, gently, until she’d had no choice but to fall back against him, and she’d sighed involuntarily when he’d tucked her back into the heat of his chest, his mouth moving along her neck to tease the tender skin below her ear.

She’d felt him all around her, holding her—his hard chest and his strong thighs behind her, and the evidence of his unquenchable desire stirring against her bottom. He should
not have felt so good, she’d told herself with something too close to despair. The rough silk of his skin next to hers should not have made her quiver in delight. She should have been done with him after the night they’d shared. She should have thrown off his arm and walked away. For sheer self-preservation, if nothing else.

But instead Larissa had tilted back her head and met his lips, tasting him as if the desire that flared so easily, so wildly, between them was something other than destructive. As if it might sanctify her somehow, instead of ripping her apart.

“Stay,” he’d murmured against her mouth, then turned his attention back to her neck, his hand moving to cup her breast, sending arrows of sensation spiraling through her. “For breakfast.”

“I don’t eat breakfast,” she’d managed to reply, her voice breathy in the morning air as once again her body shook for him, melted against him, did exactly as he’d bade it.

He’d moved over her then, his beautiful face taut with sensual hunger, his eyes much too aware, then twisted his hips and slid deep into her in one smooth, devastating thrust.

She should not have loved that, gloried in it, but she did.

“We’ll have to come up with something else to do, then,” he’d said roughly against her neck, her mouth.

And then he’d started to move, and she’d stopped thinking for a long, long while.

He hadn’t proved any more interested in her leaving throughout the whole of that day and into the next. After an abbreviated walk in the woods a few days after that—an attempt at getting out of the house which had ended with Larissa gripping on to one of the ghostly white birch trees while Jack took her with knee-weakening finesse from
behind, his mouth against the back of her neck while he braced himself with one arm on the same tree, whispering things she was afraid to listen to too closely—he’d packed her into his SUV. She had still been shaking from the aftereffects of the shattering climax he’d just given her, no matter how hard she’d tried to pretend she’d been unaffected.

He’d driven into the village without further comment, though she’d been able to feel the ever-present tension that simmered beneath the silence, and he had led her to her room in the attic of the small inn. She’d walked in her door, looked around the cheerful little room, and had had the sudden, unreasonably terrifying suspicion that he was going to leave her. Just that easily, she’d thought, and while she was still too disarmed from his lovemaking to do anything but stand there and watch him do it.

And it would be no more than what she deserved, she’d told herself sternly then, for being such a damned fool where this man was concerned.
How did you think this would end?
she’d asked herself incredulously.

“Pack your things,” he’d said after a long, too-quiet moment, his brown eyes cool again, once more unreadable. That strange tension had seemed to pull tight then, cinching her around the chest and waist like a particularly vicious corset. But she’d forced herself to breathe. Somehow.

“Has the ferry come?” she’d asked, proud of the way her voice remained steady, calm. As if she hadn’t been able to muster up the strength to care. As if nothing that had been about to happen could possibly affect her one way or the other. As if she couldn’t still feel the way he’d moved between her legs, so powerful, so devastating. “Are you tossing me off your island, just as you promised?”

She hadn’t liked the way he’d looked at her then, a certain assessment moving through those far-too-discerning eyes, across that fascinating face. His head had tilted
slightly to one side as he’d regarded her, as if she was a problem he planned to solve. He’d been the very picture of powerful indolence, one shoulder propped against the door as if he was completely relaxed, but she’d known better than to believe it. She’d certainly known better than to relax her own guard.

“Is that what you want?” he’d asked, his voice, she’d thought, carefully blank. She’d wanted that to mean things it couldn’t. She’d wanted that caution to indicate some great, hidden wealth of emotion. She’d wanted too much, as usual. “The next ferry to safety and sanity?”

She’d laughed slightly, defensively, wrapping her arms around herself and not caring what he might read into it. She’d tried not to notice that she was still wearing one of the bulky sweaters he’d given her, telling her they had been his when he was a boy. She’d forbidden herself from remembering what Jack had been like way back when, so lean and young and bathed in effortless gold. Wearing his old clothes, she’d chastised herself then, should feel like nothing more than a convenience. Not like some kind of connection.

“I was under the impression it went to Bar Harbor,” she’d said dryly. “Are safety and sanity separate stops along the same route?”

He’d only watched her for another moment, but the fact he’d stayed so still—like some kind of deadly predator moments before the attack—had made her pulse pound in her temples, her neck, her wrists.

“I’m beginning to understand this little act of yours,” he’d said, in that suspiciously casual tone that she’d realized, belatedly, was Jack at his most lethal. She’d felt a trickle of something like foreboding ease down her back. “You answer every question with another question, never letting anyone suspect your actual feelings or wishes. And
the world takes it at face value, don’t they? No one ever talks about how quick you must be, how agile, to do this so often and so well.”

She’d hated him in that moment—hated the way he’d looked at her, as if he’d been able to read her like a particularly simple children’s book. As if she’d telegraphed her every thought to him and he was lazily dissecting each and every one of them.

“No one talks about you much at all,” she’d replied with sweet, false sincerity. “Not anymore. The perils of becoming tediously domesticated when you used to be
the
Jack Endicott Sutton.”

His dark eyes had narrowed, and she’d thought he’d tensed, but if he had, he’d quickly suppressed it. He’d still lounged there against the door, dominating the room without even fully entering it. She’d had that same thought yet again: that he was far too dangerous a game to play. And yet she hadn’t moved.

“You deflect and redirect,” he’d said softly, as if he’d been summarizing her. Studying her. “You do it every time the topic strays anywhere near something that might require you to express a want, a desire. You’re careful only to react, never to act.” His brown eyes had seemed, once again, to tear into her. To burn her from the inside out. “Why?” he’d asked in that same quiet way, much worse than the seething anger she’d sensed in him that first night in that same place.

She shouldn’t have felt that surge of panic—less in response to what he’d said than to her own suicidal urge to confide in him. She’d been appalled anew at her own capacity for self-delusion.

“You tell me,” she’d said. She’d shrugged, as if deeply bored. “I thought I was trying to trap you into being my
brand-new fiancé. Is this not the best way to do that? Are you not beguiled?”

“Of course,” he’d said, his voice moving through her like a blow, contemptuous and cold. She’d managed not to react to it, somehow. “Whitney Media and your fortune. How could I forget it for a moment?”

Something hard had seemed to wrap around her then, and Larissa had had to fight off a new, darker suspicion. Why was he so interested in Whitney Media? Why did he keep bringing it up? Was he just like all the rest, even Theo—who would do anything to get their hands on her shares? Not that it mattered, she’d told herself, though something inside her had spasmed around a sharp pain. She’d certainly grown used to that, hadn’t she?

“If you want me to leave, Jack,” she’d drawled, “you can just say so. You don’t have to conduct a highly unnecessary psychological excavation of my inner demons.” She’d shuddered theatrically. “That would be a full-time job, let me assure you. And this is your vacation home, after all.”

His gaze had darkened and narrowed still further, but he’d only watched her for a long, uncomfortable moment. Larissa had had to fight to remain calm, to appear unruffled, when her body had reacted to his intense, focused attention as if it had been positive. Sexual.

She had despaired of herself. Again.

“What if I want you to stay?” he’d asked, that brown gaze far too knowing, and she’d had to fight the swell of relief—and something else, something far more frightening and far more threatening that she’d refused to acknowledge—that had threatened to take her knees out from beneath her.

“It’s hard to believe you’re the same man who handcuffed me to his bed,” she’d said when she could trust herself to speak. “I’d expect a little more command and mastery in situations like these, and a little less of the leading questions
and melodramatic character sketches. You either want me to stay or you don’t.”

“Nothing with you is ever so cut-and-dried, Larissa,” he’d said, straightening from the door. She shouldn’t have felt that simple movement as if it was electric—as if it had lit up the whole room. And her. Always her, from the inside out.

“Whereas your behavior is transparent?” she’d asked, ignoring her physical reaction to him—pretending it hadn’t been happening. She’d laughed derisively. “Please, Jack. You’re about as transparent as a swamp.”

“I want you to pack up your things, get in the car and get your pretty little ass back to my house and into my bed,” he’d said in a deliberate, too-even voice that hit her like a punch of blistering heat.

His eyes had been dark again with that same all-consuming passion that nothing seemed to extinguish. She’d wondered helplessly if anything ever could. He’d moved closer, until his chest was just a whisper away from her, and her breath had caught. She hadn’t been sure if she’d cared what he’d wanted—what he’d been after. And he’d known it. She’d seen it.

He smirked then, daring her. Again. “Is that transparent enough for you?”

Whether or not it had been transparent, Larissa thought now—curled up on one of the absurdly comfortable sofas in the Scatteree Pines sitting room with a butter-soft, emerald-green throw tucked around her to ward off the evening chill—it had certainly been effective. She lost track of days when she was with him—when she was lost in him. And she was, quite obviously, completely lost. She had left the inn several days before, at his command, and had hardly thought about what staying here, in this house, meant for
her. What it was likely to do to her. Would she lose track of herself, too? Or was it already too late?

She was afraid she already knew the answer to that. She just didn’t want to know it. Didn’t want to admit it. It was as if his touch had done more than teach her things she hadn’t known about her body’s desires, her own capacity for feeling. It had taught her how to let herself hope, too. That terrified her most of all.

She could hear him out in the hallway, his voice clipped if unfailingly polite, and knew he was talking to his perpetually disapproving grandfather. She recognized the tone of voice he used. She was known to employ a similar one, though she was historically far less courteous, when speaking to her own father.