Heiress Behind the Headlines (21 page)

“You won’t say no to me,” he said, with a scoffing, nasty sort of laugh that made her blood chill.

“Are you sure?” she asked, an edge in her voice. “Because I think I just did.”

“You don’t say no, Larissa,” he told her in that same awful voice. He moved in closer, his face a mask of contempt. “Ever. What game do you think you’re playing? Do you really think anyone will fall for it?”

As little as Larissa had liked it when Jack had asked her similar questions, she liked it even less now. She forced her shoulders back as if she felt brave, when inside, it was as if everything had frozen solid. It was one thing to stand up to her father. But how was she supposed to stand up to the very personification of the worst of her past? She felt shame crawl over her skin, thick and greasy, but she refused
to show it. She refused to let him see any part of her at all.

“Let me make this simple for you, Chip,” she said, in a voice that sounded friendly on the surface, but wasn’t. “You need to leave me alone. I’m not going to have a debate about it.”

“You don’t get to tell me what you will and won’t—” he began, crowding her, using his body to try to cow her into submission. She stuck her chin in the air and refused to move.

“Stop trying to bully me,” she said, her tone calm. Deliberate. It cost her. “I understand that you may not have noticed this, but I’m not the person you knew. And she’s not coming back, so you’re going to have find someone else to take part in all your sordid little escapades.”

He stared at her for a moment, and Larissa realized, with a dawning sort of wonder, that she loathed him. That she always had. That there was no part of him that she remembered with anything but disgust. Had he always been her most effective weapon of self-destruction? How had she not realized that before? And why had she used this weak, nasty man to bludgeon herself for so long?

“This is all very inspiring, Larissa,” he said, sneering. “The town whore all dressed up like someone who matters. Like a real person instead of a joke. How long do you think it will last before you end up in the nearest gutter? And who do you think is really buying it? Not one person at this party—in this city—will ever forget exactly who and what you are.” He laughed that nasty laugh. “Not one.”

She felt a wave of self-loathing flood her then, nearly taking her off her feet. Shame. Horror. Everything she’d tried so hard to fight. And in that moment, she knew he was right. She could see it. She felt heat on her face, at the back of her eyes, and she knew that if she looked around,
they would all be laughing at her. All of them, snickering at Larissa’s delusions, at her wild fantasies that she could ever be more than the tiny, worthless creature she’d always believed herself to be. That her father had told her she was. As if all the work she’d done these past weeks, and the months before, had been for nothing.

She felt her stomach hollow out, and she thought for a moment she might be sick.

But she didn’t die of the shame, as perhaps she wanted to do. She breathed, her heart continued to beat, and as she stared back at Chip it occurred to her that of the two people standing there, she was the one who knew who she was. Not this lowlife, all dressed up in his black-tie costume but profoundly ugly beneath.

“Who do you think you are?” he taunted her.

And she knew in that moment that it didn’t matter what Chip Van Housen—or anyone else—thought of her. She got to decide who she was.
She did.
And the shame was only powerful—could only hurt her—if she let it.

“I’m Larissa Whitney,” she replied, not bothering with her stock smile, not trying to be polite, and she didn’t care at all who overheard her. She was brimming with her own strength, with her own choices, and she was the one who decided what her past made her. Not Chip. Not ever. “And I don’t care who you think I am.”

And then she turned, sweeping away from Chip and his gaping mouth, and walked directly into Jack.

Who was standing there as if he’d been there for some time.

As if he’d heard every horrible word.

L
ARISSA
wanted to die, right there and then.

She wanted to be sucked down into the bowels of New York City and left there to rot—anything but this. Anything but staring in horror at the man she loved, the man whose good opinion meant more to her than anything else in the world or in her life, with Chip’s words ringing in the air all around them. Polluting everything.

All that strength and power seemed to contract inside of her, and she had to suck in a breath to keep the sudden dizziness from sending her to her knees. He reached out a hand and took her arm, his palm so warm, so perfect against her skin, and she felt a sea of regret pull her under then, fierce and unfightable, and there was nothing she could do but look at him. At that beautiful face, beloved by so many. At those bittersweet-chocolate eyes that saw too much and not enough, and at that lush, dangerous mouth that could tease her into ecstasy and tear her into pieces.

What was the point of changing her whole life—of vanquishing her father and seizing control of all that was hers—if she still couldn’t have this man? If he thought the very worst of her and could have it confirmed on a random Friday night in December, unsolicited and unprovoked, from the vilest of sources? She felt contaminated by her own history.

She wanted to die, but she didn’t. She never did. And so she had no choice but to look Jack in the eye and try not to dissolve into tears. If she couldn’t have what she wanted more than anything else, she might as well attempt to hang on to some shred of her dignity.

“It looks like you were right about me after all,” she said, and she couldn’t manage to make her voice light. She forced a smile instead, though it felt more like a grimace. “You must feel so vindicated.”

He did not react for a long moment, staring down at her as if he was trying to translate her words, break the code, figure her out. As if she was written in hieroglyphics and he could not begin to imagine the meaning of each shape in the stone. Something passed over his face, through his eyes and then was gone.

He looked over her shoulder at Chip, and his fingers tightened slightly against the bare skin of her upper arm, making goose bumps rise, making her fight off a shiver. Then he returned his gaze to hers, dark and determined. And smiled. A bright, happy smile. Charming. Delicious.

“Dance with me,” he said.

Of all the things she’d imagined he might have said, that was not on the list. She blinked at him, trying to process his words as well as that devastating, surprising smile.

“Dance?” she echoed.

“I know you know how,” he said, in that way of his that called to mind his golden, summer self, outshining all the rest of them on all those New England beaches. It made her chest feel tight. It made heads turn, seeking out all that light, all that sun, in the middle of a chilly winter night. “I’ve seen you do it.”

“With you?” She felt thick and simultaneously too light. Feverish. She thought perhaps she should go lie down in a quiet corner somewhere and wait for morning. Or perhaps
for next year. But she couldn’t seem to bring herself to move.

“I’m an excellent dancer, Larissa,” he said, still in full
Jack Endicott Sutton
mode. He was dazzling. And he was drawing ever more attention as he spoke. “My grandfather would have it no other way.”

And then it clicked, finally. Larissa felt something like relief—and something much sharper, much more damaging—slice through her then, making her feel that she could breathe. Or anyway, understand. He was doing this deliberately. It was a far greater repudiation of Chip to treat her like someone worthy of the famous Jack Sutton charm than it was to slap back at the other man.

Larissa just couldn’t understand why he would bother.

She let him draw her with him toward the dance floor and then let him pull her into his arms. She felt too hot and then too cold, as if a volcano was set to erupt beneath her skin. As if the ground beneath them was buckling and heaving. She looked at him and the world seemed to spin too fast all around her, and she had to look away to keep her balance.

She saw all the grand families of New York City arrayed around the courtyard. All that Knickerbocker and Gilded Age gentility, Upper Ten Thousand denizens, robber barons and railway tycoons, New England blue bloods, and the infusion, here and there yet never talked about in good company, of new money or Hollywood glamour. She and Jack were made of this place, these people. And yet she found herself yearning with all of her battered soul for that grand old house on a lonely hill, hidden away on a desolate island, where they had been so close to whomever they’d wanted to be, for a little while. Just a little while, but she still told herself it mattered.

She rested one hand on his strong shoulder, and let him
close the other in his as he led her around the floor in an easy, perfectly executed waltz. The heat of his other palm seemed to burn into the small of her back, branding her. Making her flush anew with the heat that was always, only, his. Her body felt too alive, too sensitive. Too aware. And yet she could still feel the echo of Chip’s words like a film over her skin, making her feel dirty and desperate. It almost hurt to be so close to Jack, and know that, in reality, she’d never been further away from him.

She did not have to be told that this would be the last time they touched. It made sense, now, to look back at the other night and recognize that it had been their goodbye. He had never lied to her, had he? He had been completely up front about what was expected of him and why he would do as he was told. His duty. She even admired him for it, on some level.

Even as it crushed her.

“It’s nice of you to do this,” she said, unable even to pretend to smile. She fixed her gaze at some point over his shoulder, and forced herself to keep her chin in the air, her eyes clear and dry. “I had no idea your charitable intentions cast so wide a net. We fallen women of New York High Society salute you.”

He turned his head and caught her gaze, and she swallowed, hard. Her stomach flipped. His mouth was too close and there was a certain kindness in those bittersweet depths—and it broke her heart all over again.

“What do you think is happening here?” he asked mildly. Almost indulgently.

“I have no idea.” Her tongue was turning to ash in her mouth. Why was he doing this to her? Why was he prolonging the agony?

“Use that magnificent brain of yours, Larissa,” he suggested.
“The one, I am reliably informed, that you used to outsmart your father just yesterday.”

She was pleased he knew. Too pleased. Reality reasserted itself, unpleasantly, and she looked away again.

“I can’t play these games with you, Jack,” she said quietly. “You should not let your grandfather see you with me. There are, no doubt, a flock of appropriate young heiresses happy to fight over you. I can see at least five of them by the bar.”

He pulled her closer, too close and yet not close enough, never close enough and never again—but she could not seem to do anything but fall into his gaze again when he looked at her, into her.

“I don’t want them,” he said. Softly. Deliberately. “I want you.”

“You do not,” she said, her voice something like affronted. It would have made him laugh, had he not seen the darkness that lurked in her gaze.

“I have already proven it,” he said. “Over and over again. I’m crushed that you haven’t been paying attention.”

“You’re talking about sex,” she said, and there was a crack in her voice. “Because what else could you possibly be talking about?”

The dullness in her tone made him feel violent. He wanted to find that Van Housen creature again and put a fist through his pretty, dissipated face. But he restrained himself.

“Why would you listen to anything that—” he began.

“I haven’t listened to Chip Van Housen in years, if ever,” she said, cutting him off. Her eyes shimmered in the lights from the winter lanterns, and the green in them glowed. Her lips crooked into something wry and painful. “But I listened to you.”

He could hear his own voice, lashing into her, tearing strips off her, and for what? To make himself feel better that he couldn’t seem to let go of her? That she’d haunted him for so many years? What did that make him?

“Larissa …” He whispered her name.

“You hate me,” she said, her voice clear. Direct. Just like that damning green gaze. “You think I’m a worthless whore.”

That sat between them, carried on the sweet notes from the band, batted into the air and showering back down over them like the lights from above. And suddenly, he saw the whole of their time in Maine as if through a different lens. A different view. Hers.

Because if Larissa had been telling the truth about herself, about why she had turned up there, about everything—and Jack admitted to himself that it had been quite some time since he’d truly doubted her, no matter what he might have said—if all of that was true, it made him the greatest bastard of all time.

He stared down at her, at the stark pain that he could see etched so clearly into her face, her eyes. He could not imagine why she was even here, looking at him like this, holding him as if there was some part of her that didn’t detest him as she should.

“I do not hate you,” he said, the words coming from a place inside him he wasn’t sure he’d ever accessed before, except in grief. “I love you.”

He wasn’t sure what he’d expected. A choir? The band to swell into a chorus?

But something like temper moved over her face, and she only blinked.

“How nice,” she murmured, with acid insincerity. “That, of course, fixes everything. It’s the adult version of calling
a do-over, really. I’ll just pretend that nothing that happened between us actually happened—”

He wasn’t sure if he’d stopped moving before, or if he stopped then. But he couldn’t keep up the farce of dancing when she was this close to slipping away from him. All over again, and for good this time. He couldn’t bring himself to care about any of the people around them, his grandfather—none of it. Larissa was the only person who had mattered to him in longer than he could remember.