Heiress Behind the Headlines (15 page)

Which was what she’d wanted, after all. What she’d set out to do the moment she’d laid eyes on him. Because that was what she did, that was how she survived—she showed people whatever they wanted to see. She was whoever they wanted her to be. So why should it bother her so much now? Why should she feel as if it was killing her—actually, physically killing her—to let him think the worst of her?

But she knew why. The impossible, unwanted truth clawed at her insides and made her clench her hands into fists, panic and terror and a ferocious kind of joy she’d never imagined before storming through her body—but she knew.

There were words for the way she felt, but she could not bring herself to use them. Not those words. Not for her. She was Larissa Whitney. She had set her course long ago, and she knew with a certain grim matter-of-factness that the things others took for granted—those happily-ever-afters, those white picket fences—were not on the table for her.
Not ever. Even the most docile and well-behaved members of her social circle could, at best, look forward only to the sorts of lives their parents had laid out for them at birth. Impersonal marriages, necessary children to carry on the family lines and inherit the family wealth, eventual affairs and hushed-up scandals, and the slow, inevitable slide into high-functioning substance abuse that was ruthlessly suppressed at the great charity balls at which all of Manhattan society appeared to lie so eloquently to each other about their supposed happiness.

That was the kind of dutiful marriage Jack would have, she knew. To some fresh-faced, inoffensive girl who would never know the way he could tear her apart in bed. But that bright prospect was not for Larissa, not unless she was very, very lucky. She was too notorious. And if her life had taught her anything—if Jack had taught her anything—it was that she was certainly not likely to turn up
lucky
anytime soon.

Larissa sat up, swinging her legs over the side of the bed and clenching her toes against the cold floorboards at her feet. She couldn’t help looking back over her shoulder at Jack, fighting back the spike of heat behind her eyes, the echoing tightness in her chest, her throat. Outside, the clouds shifted and the moon shone in through the tall windows, only highlighting his heartbreaking perfection. He was all the things that she’d never admitted she wanted. He was still so golden, so impossibly beautiful. He wasn’t tainted, as she was. Ruined beyond repair. He wasn’t scandalous, the punch line to jokes, everybody’s favorite warning.

She could have him, she knew, if she could just find a way to overlook the way he felt about her. If she could simply close her eyes and tolerate it. If she could pretend it didn’t matter, that it didn’t hurt. If she could resign herself
to living as the creature he saw when he looked at her instead of who she really was—whoever that might be.

It scared her that she was tempted. So terribly, seductively tempted. There was far too much of her that wanted to just climb back in the bed, curl up into his heat, and let him treat her any way he liked. Anything, if she could stay with him a little bit longer. Anything, if she could just hold on to him for a while.

But she couldn’t do it. Because she might not believe in herself either, but the difference was that she knew she should. And she wanted to.

For long moments she sat there, paralyzed. Panicked. But she knew what she had to do, however little she wanted to do it. This time, he did not reach for her. This time, there was no confusion. He stayed fast asleep. She had to decide on her own, with no interference.

And so, eventually, though it took more courage than it should have and far more than she’d imagined she possessed, she stood. She couldn’t let herself look at him. Her mind played out scenes for her instead. Jack’s cool brown eyes, searing into hers. His flashes of tenderness, here and there, over these past long days. His careful, gentle hands juxtaposed with his wicked, delicious mouth. His cruelty. His kindness.

How could she leave him?
Again?

She remembered that long-ago weekend then, with a thud of recognition in the vicinity of her heart. She might not have had the clarity she did now, but even then, she’d known that Jack Sutton posed a much greater threat to her than all the other issues in her life combined. She could not even have said why. She’d only known that she’d had to go, though her body had longed for him and the intensity of it had dizzied her. She’d sneaked out of his apartment while he’d been in the shower, as if she’d had something
to be guilty about, and she’d jumped on the first plane to Europe. Then to the Maldives. By the time she’d returned some weeks later, Jack had stopped looking for her. She had told herself, repeatedly, that it was just what she’d wanted. And then she had told herself that she might as well accept Theo’s latest proposal. She had told herself it didn’t matter anyway, that she had simply gotten carried away that weekend with Jack … but on some level she’d always known the truth.

He was too much. He was too dangerous. He was the only man she could ever imagine falling in love with, she was terrified that she already had, and she could never, ever have him. Not really. Not the way she knew she’d end up wanting him, with all of her heart and her soul. She’d known that then, and it had made her panic.

She knew it now, and it was worse—because she’d glimpsed what things could be like between them. All the things she’d never known. This house, filled with life and family, so much so that it clung to the very walls. This private sanctuary of an island, where there were no cameras, no expectations. The two of them, alone here, being exactly who they were instead of who they were supposed to be. She’d allowed herself the fantasy, the
what if.
That little slice of hope. If her life were not so complicated. If he were not so determined to be above reproach in his grandfather’s particularly Puritan way, and marry appropriately—do his duty. If she could be someone else, someone he could be proud of, or at any rate not ashamed of.

If he did not think she was, in fact, some kind of whore.

Her chest hurt when she pulled in a breath, and when she let it out it was more like a sob. She stifled it with her hands. This time, she was not numb. Not at all. This time, she knew exactly what she was giving up. And she couldn’t believe how deep the hurt of it went, how it made her legs
feel hollow and her stomach twist into knots. Part of her would have done anything, put up with anything, pretended anything at all, to make that go away.

But Jack had inadvertently taught her—simply by existing, by causing this very riot of feelings in her—that she deserved more. Not because he offered anything like it, she thought bitterly, or thought
the likes of her
deserved it, but because she was no longer willing to settle for less. Eight months ago she wouldn’t have cared if she was with someone who hated her, but she wasn’t that person any longer. She might not know who she was, really, but for the first time since she’d woken up from her coma, she had an inkling of who she wanted to be. And she didn’t hate herself. Not anymore. So how could she stay with someone who did? It would mean going back to that numb, paralyzed place, and she couldn’t do it. Not again. Not knowingly.

She dressed quickly and quietly in the pale light of the November moon, then piled her few things haphazardly into the small bag she’d been living out of these past months. She let herself look at him one last time, held her breath to keep from sobbing, and ached. Oh, how she ached. For everything they would never be, and for all the things she knew he would think of her when he woke to find her gone.

But it was better this way.

It had to be.

There was a ferry leaving at dawn, just as he’d told her in the beginning, and she would be on it.

J
ACK
was deeply bored. Possibly terminally bored.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art was splendid, as ever—and he knew all about its many charms in exhaustive detail, having had several ancestors involved in its founding. Jack had spent so much time in the famous and much-beloved landmark that he was fairly certain that he could blindfold himself, wander away from the tuxedos and lavish gowns that dotted the Charles Engelhard Court in the American Wing for tonight’s charity event, which was indistinguishable from all other charity events as far as he could tell, and find his way by memory alone to the Medieval Sculpture Hall where, he knew because it was December and thus tradition, he would find an eighteenth-century Neapolitan Nativity scene and the famous candlelit tree.

The fact that he had any such urge at all, despite his longheld dislike of all holidays and any decorations thereof, only confirmed what he had already suspected the moment he’d picked up his date for this predictably ostentatious evening to benefit the good cause
du jour:
he was not going to marry Miss Elizabeth Shipley Young despite his grandfather’s fervent desire that he do so. Not when he could not imagine how he was going to get through the night without expiring of acute disinterest right there in the center of the
grand party, tucked up at a banquet table lavishly decorated with holly and mistletoe, with his grandfather on one side and the entirely too beige and uninteresting Elizabeth on the other.

“Are you all right?” his date asked, her voice trilling as she laughed—no doubt nervously, Jack told himself, and why not? He had been nothing but grim and humorless since the moment he’d arrived at her apartment building earlier in the evening. Restless, preoccupied. Able only to mouth the expected pleasantries. Not quite the debonair Jack Sutton she’d been expecting, he was sure. No charm, no grace. It was as if he’d left that part of himself back on Endicott Island, awash in all the rain.

But he knew she wouldn’t see all that. They never did. She would see
Jack Endicott Sutton
no matter how he behaved.

“I couldn’t be better,” he lied, forcing a smile. It felt stiff. Strained.

He did not have to look to his left to know that his grandfather was sitting there, with perfect posture and a beetled brow, watching Jack’s every move as if the force of his will would lead to the wedding he wanted that very evening. But the smile dropped from Jack’s face the moment his date excused herself to find the ladies’ room, and despite the fact he was surrounded on all sides by the gossipy piranhas who made up New York’s highest society and his own deeply censorious relative, he couldn’t seem to force it back into place.

“You’re about as charming as a pallbearer tonight,” came the inevitable gruff voice from beside him. Jack checked his impatience. Barely.

“I’m here, aren’t I?” He raised his brows at the old man, daring him to comment further. “As commanded.”

“I shouldn’t have to
command
you to do your duty to this
family,” his grandfather began, his august forehead crumpling into a scowl as he began the familiar complaint. But Jack was too out of sorts tonight, too irritable. He couldn’t take it the way he usually did.

“You don’t
have
to worry over my dedication to my duty at all,” Jack said from between his teeth, his tone still technically polite, still respectful, if only barely. “You
choose
to. I have long presumed it is one of the great joys of your life.”

His grandfather eyed him for a long, tense moment, and Jack braced himself for the inevitable storm. He wondered idly when he’d become so reckless—when he’d stopped walking around on the eggshells he’d always felt littered the ground between his grandfather and himself. But his grandfather only sniffed before turning away and engaging the person on his other side in conversation.

Jack lounged back in his chair and stared up at the looming old bank facade that dominated the far wall of the great courtyard. But he hardly saw it. He admitted the fact that he had not quite been himself for several weeks now, however little he wanted to admit anything of the sort. And he knew why. He had been this way since he had woken up to find that Larissa Whitney had run away from him.

Again.

He just couldn’t seem to get past that.

He’d carried on, of course, as if he hadn’t cared one way or the other. He’d told himself that he hadn’t. He’d closed up the house and headed for the mainland. He’d suffered through the indignity of a long, drawn-out Thanksgiving dinner at his grandfather’s old townhome in Boston’s elite Louisburg Square, as ordered. But while he’d calmly assured the old man that he had every intention of settling down and carrying on the family name as expected, while
studiously ignoring his father and his father’s latest wife, he’d been unable to think of anything but Larissa.

His grandfather had listed the pros and cons of every supposedly appropriate heiress under the age of forty on the East Coast, but Jack had only seen one pair of stormy green eyes, one decadent mouth and that sharp intelligence she went to such great lengths to hide. His grandfather had pontificated about the merging of great families and the responsibilities visited upon those with legacies to protect and nurture throughout the march of time—and he had thought only of her defiance in the Scatteree Pines sitting room, half-naked like a goddess and far more powerful, far more compelling. How, he had wondered while picking dispiritedly as course after course of traditional plates were laid in front of him, was he ever going to settle for someone
appropriate
when he could still taste Larissa? Still feel her? Still
want
her with every cell in his body?

Not that he had mentioned that to his grandfather.

It was as if he’d been enchanted, bewitched. As if he still was. Jack could think of no other explanation. She was just as addictive as he’d feared, and he was just as susceptible as he’d always been. Why had he thought he could control that? Her? And he wanted her. God help him, even now, weeks after and in the midst of Manhattan’s finest, even though she’d left without so much as a word, he still wanted her. He could think of nothing else, like a man obsessed.

If he was honest with himself, he thought darkly as he rose to pull out his date’s chair with all due chivalry and seat her once again at their table, he didn’t particularly care to think of anything else. He had come back to New York and back to his daily work overseeing the Endicott Foundation and all that entailed, but all he thought about was her. He even dreamed about her.