Heiress Behind the Headlines (6 page)

This was her world, too, Larissa reminded herself sharply. So why did she feel so much like an alien, set down into it but never quite of it? That was the milliondollar question, wasn’t it?

The rain pounded down on the roof of the car, washing over the front window despite the energetic efforts of the windshield wipers, drumming into her head, her battered heart, her traitorous limbs. She didn’t know which storm was more dangerous—the one with all the rain and the wind outside the confines of the car, or the far more damaging one inside her.

But she couldn’t let herself think about that. She glared through the window, staring at the blurry, watery house that stood so proud and pretty before her, plump and confident in the dark, wet night.

She didn’t know why she’d let the car drift to a stop like this, gawking up at the place as if she’d never seen a grand old house before. As if she was some poor country mouse on her first trip somewhere special. As if she hadn’t, in fact, grown up in one of the most coveted remaining mansions in New York City, the toast of what was left of the Gilded Age Manhattan lifestyle. Perhaps it was because this particular house was so … private.

Scatteree Pines sat up on the highest part of the hill, its unobstructed view of the whole of the Atlantic Ocean that spread out from the rocks below, its elegant back to the tiny village as if it held itself quietly apart, aloof. The house was a gabled, grand old affair that nodded toward the Victorian style, with a pitched central roof and two sprawling wings that spread away from the arresting front entrance. But it was located down a long and winding private drive in the
farthest corner of one of the most remote islands in North America. It was not, like the Whitney summer “cottage” in self-consciously posh Newport, Rhode Island, located squarely on the tourist-ridden and world-famous Cliff Walk, the better to impress the passing unwashed masses with the storied Whitney legacy and its fifty-plus rooms of gilt-edged opulence.

But that shouldn’t matter, Larissa told herself sharply. Scatteree Pines was no more a quiet little “cottage” than Jack himself was the everyday sort of man he’d been masquerading as today. Maybe she’d needed this reminder. Maybe his battered old jeans and casual T-shirt had confused her, making her forget that whatever else Jack was, whatever he seemed to do to her with his slightest glance, he was one of the wealthiest men in the world. He came from a very long line of equally wealthy men, dating back to the original Colonies and before that, to a very elite selection of powerful and well-connected men in England. He was the heir to centuries of power, and he wore it with the carelessness of perfect comfort, evident in every cell and sinew of his well-toned body. She needed to remember that he knew exactly how to wield that power, and would do so—did do so—with absolutely no compunction.

Just like her own father. Just like all the sparkling and profoundly vicious people she knew—and had run from eight months ago. And yet here she was, trotting out in the pouring rain to have dinner at his command, even when she suspected
dinner
was a euphemism. She was sitting outside his door like an overwrought teenager, having driven herself right over, the very picture of obedience—and there was no gun to her head. No force, no compulsion. He’d only dared her.

And she, ever the moth to the most convenient and most disastrous flame, wherever it might burn and the more destructive the better, had come running. How could she explain that away?

He’d kissed her again before he’d left—a hard, branding press of his clever mouth to hers while his large hand had covered the nape of her neck. Keeping her still, and easy to plunder. Claiming her, she’d thought with some mix of panic and dizzy desire—marking his territory. And then he’d stalked off into the wet night with a muttered curse as if he hadn’t meant to do that, leaving her to shake and shudder in his wake.

Damn him.

The trouble with islands was that there was no running away, she’d thought then, and thought again now as she sat, paralyzed, in the front seat of a rented Dodge Calibre that smelled of old pine deodorizer and the stale air of the incompetent defroster. And Larissa had absolutely no doubt that should she fail to appear at Jack’s table tonight as he wished, as he had commanded, he would come find her. She’d decided it would be better to walk knowingly into his lair than let him trap her once again in hers.

But who was she kidding? What kind of story was she trying to sell herself? She let out a slight, bitter laugh.

She had promised not to lie to herself, no matter what. No matter the provocation. No matter that it would be so much easier than the inevitably painful truth. A great wave of shame, her now-familiar companion, crashed through her then, making her breath catch in her throat as her stomach knotted hard, and heat speared the back of her eyes. She was so damnably weak. Didn’t she prove it to herself again and again and again?

She had been on the run for months—hiding from her
past, hiding from herself. From her old ways and her old friends, her dirty, shameful history. And she’d been so proud of herself—or she’d been getting there.
Look at me, nowhere near Manhattan, barely recognizable any longer,
she’d thought to herself, running her hands through the short black hair that still surprised her—that she sometimes dreamed was still long, blond and lustrous.
Look at my self-imposed exile, my willingness to disguise myself. I can be new, different. I can change.

She’d been the closest she’d ever come to
real.
That was what she’d been thinking as she’d stared out at the Maine storm, the dangerous, exhilaratingly powerful sea. She’d felt battered and bruised, and undoubtedly shaky—but for the first time, she’d also felt truly
alive.

And then Jack Sutton had sauntered into that bar, temptation in perfect male form, the ultimate symbol of her old life and her dissolute past—and eight months of committed soul-searching disappeared. Ash and smoke, as if they had never happened. As if she’d learned nothing.

How could she have so little self-control, even now? Despair and something else, something uglier, flooded through her. How could she ignore everything she knew, everything she was only beginning to admit she needed, for a man who had never done anything but make her act like the worst version of herself?

How could she possibly justify her presence here tonight? How was it anything but the worst kind of backsliding into the very pit she’d been so determined to climb her way out of? Her very first test, and she’d already failed it with flying colors.

This is who you are,
that little voice, her father’s voice, whispered deep inside of her—so harsh and, she feared, so true.
This is what you do. Fail. Disappoint. And then fail again.

She pressed her fingers to her mouth, as if pushing back the small sob that escaped her lips. She didn’t have to do this. She threw the car into reverse—but even as she did it, before she could even lift her foot from the brake pedal, the grand doors of Scatteree Pines swung open, spilling light out across the drive. Larissa froze.

Jack stood there, tall and imposing in the great entry-way, his dark eyes immediately slamming into hers through the windshield, across the storm. Connecting hard with that shaky part of her where her spine should have been. Making her shiver with a dizzying sense of helplessness. With the inevitability of this. With her own terrible need that she hardly understood.

She couldn’t seem to breathe. Her heart was like a cannonball, ricocheting against her ribs. She knew she needed to leave. She knew it. Before she let the tears fall, let the wildness within her out of its cage. Before she betrayed herself even further than she already had.

But she parked the car instead. She turned the key in the ignition, and the engine clicked off.

She took one breath, and then another, and still Jack watched her. As if he had every confidence in the world that she would do exactly what he wanted her do. As if it were a foregone conclusion.

And she hated herself, because she did it.

She climbed out of the car slowly, and took a deep breath, pulling the clean, damp air deep into her lungs. She let her legs ease into holding her there, and made sure they’d support her. The rain had let up for the moment, though the wind was still fierce, raging all around—smelling of the sea and the cold, crisp inevitability of the coming winter. She could smell the tang of wood smoke and wet pine, the rich earth of the forest and the wild, coarse salt of the ocean. The night was dark and dense, like a velvet fist, though the
great house before her blazed with light. She preferred the darkness, she thought, helplessly. She was so very tired of finding ways to disappear in the glare of all those spotlights.

Jack stood there, silently watching her, compelling her, and she couldn’t tell if he was dark or light, or what he would do to her. What she would do. What she had already done by coming here, by climbing out of the car, by putting all of this into motion. Something in her felt drawn to him, called to him, on some deep, primitive level that hummed in her bones—but she knew better than to trust the things she wanted. They had only ever hurt her.

She told herself it was the deep, northern chill, the wet and windy fall storm, that made her tremble, made her feel so alive, so exhilarated. So scared. So unsure of everything, even the familiar tools she’d always used to hide so easily in plain sight, that she found so hard to summon now, when she needed them the most.
It’s only the cold,
she thought.

But then Jack smiled at her, that peremptory, knowing curve of his beautiful mouth, and she knew better.

He wanted flippancy and fakeness, his preferred version of That Shallow Larissa Whitney, and so that was what she gave him, however much it cost her. She told herself she would deal with it later. She pulled in a deep breath and then breezed up the steps toward him, keeping her face as bland as it could be, pulling that persona around her like a familiar old cloak.

“No staff?” she asked mildly, sweeping past him as if she was dripping in couture and trailed by a red carpet entourage instead of garbed in a pair of worn jeans and a turtleneck sweater, the better to wrap her traitorous body away from his beguiling, incendiary touch. Her boots came up to her knees and she was not in the least afraid to kick
him with them, she told herself. In fact, she wanted to kick him. “I’m shocked to the core. I thought scions of such great families preferred to be waited upon, lest they forget their own greatness for even a moment.”

“You would know more about that than I would,” Jack said dryly. But his gaze locked to hers, and it made the world seem to tilt. Larissa looked away, shaken. It had never been so difficult to keep up her act before. Not even with him.

He had exchanged the T-shirt for a sweater in a rich burgundy cashmere that her fingers itched to touch, though his jeans remained the same, slung low on his narrow hips and clinging to his hard thighs like a pliant lover. Yet somehow, surrounded by this house, this unmistakable marker of who he really was, there was no possibility of pretending there was anything
everyday
about him. Larissa swallowed, and wordlessly handed him her heavy black peacoat and charcoal-gray scarf when he gestured for them, draping them over his arm as if he was a butler. Some part of her preferred the fantasy version of this man that she’d seen earlier in battered old jeans and work boots, as if he was just another local fisherman. As if that—or anything—could make him more palatable.

“I watched you sit out there in your car,” he said, some kind of mockery in his voice, and something else, something darker, making his eyes gleam. “You looked …” He didn’t finish the sentence. Larissa forced herself to smile, to be mysterious and unknowable. Empty, as he would expect. “Did you change your mind?”

“About what?” she asked idly. “Dinner?”

“That, too,” he said. He disposed of her coat and then indicated that she should follow him, leading the way down a hallway only intermittently lit. Larissa concentrated on the house itself—far better, far safer that than the man who
moved with such easy self-assurance in front of her, who strode ahead without glancing around, arrogantly expecting her to follow.

Which, of course, she did. Though she could not bring herself to focus on that grave personal failing—not just then. She looked at the house instead.

It was the particular conceit of a certain kind of New Englander, she knew, to treat their own vast wealth like some kind of embarrassing, potentially contagious disease. They kept their houses cold, the rugs threadbare. They drove depressingly practical cars into states of disrepair, found the slightest displays of wealth repulsive in the extreme, and went out of their way to avoid drawing attention to themselves in any capacity. The Puritan work ethic still ran like steel in their blue-blooded veins. Unlike many of Larissa’s socialite peers, their philanthropic gestures were never empty. The Endicott family—particularly Jack’s forbidding and formidable grandfather, she knew, as everyone knew—was precisely this sort of anti-aristocrat.

But despite all that, there was nothing at all shabby about the Endicott house. It was simply, quietly comfortable, on every level. The wealth of the Endicott family was evident everywhere, yet never overt. It was in the way the furniture was so well-maintained, despite the salt in the air and the fact that a summer house could not possibly see as much use as a primary residence. It was clear in the well-appointed ease of the sitting room Jack led her into, the quiet excellence that seemed to perfume the air.

It was as if people really lived here, she thought, maybe even a real family—and then she told herself she was being fanciful. A house was a house, and Jack was no different from anyone else in their empty little plastic-fishbowl world. There was no reason she ought to feel flushed with
some kind of deep, pointless yearning for things that could not exist. Not for people like them.

She told herself it was only the fire, cheerful and bright, that warmed the room and took the edge off the night’s chill. She felt unsteady—awkward—so she moved to the sofa and lowered herself onto it, assuming as languid a pose as she could without sliding off. Yet another one of her many skills. She should thank him for allowing her to showcase them all.