The Replacement Wife (3 page)

He moved closer, his eyes glowing like embers, and she knew then, as her stomach tied itself into an aching knot, that he was truly a devil, this man. And that if she was not careful, he could have a power over her
she’d never given anyone. But even so, she did not step back. She did not try to protect herself as she knew she should.

“The only person I want you to think about is your sister,” he said, in that voice of his, so dark, so sinful, that it seemed to move inside of her without her will.

“I always think about my sister, thank you,” she managed to say.

“Can you really pass up the opportunity to secure her future?” he asked, so reasonably. So calmly. “All because it suits you to feel morally superior to the family who denied you for so long?”

It was a hit straight to the heart, and he knew it. She could see that he knew it as she stared at him, stricken, and his remarkable eyes gleamed.

“Does it help your sister that you leave here with your righteous indignation firmly in place?” he asked in that same deadly calm way of his. “Or do you suppose, years down the line, that she might be somewhat more grateful for the Ivy League education you will deny her if you walk out now?”

The cold marble hall seemed to seep into her, chilling her. Her throat felt dusty, and there was that dangerous heat in her eyes. And he was right, damn him. She wanted to feel better about herself, to be better than
them,
but she wanted Emily’s future—Emily’s happiness—more. She’d promised her mother. She’d
promised.

And wasn’t that why she’d come here in the first place? Wasn’t that why she’d put all of this into motion? How could she back out now, just because she didn’t like the terms? She’d known from the start that she wouldn’t like anything about these people. Why was
she running away just because they were confirming her worst opinion of them now?

“You’ve made your point,” she said finally, when she could not bear the way he looked at her a moment longer—as if he knew exactly what she thought, what she felt. As if he’d manipulated this entire situation to reach this point, because it suited him. He was the most terrifying man she’d ever met—because he was so powerful, but even more because part of her thrilled to it, and wanted to melt right there in front of him. Wanted to surrender to the whispers in her own head, and pretend he might keep her safe rather than crush her.

But she would never let that happen. Accepting a situation and using it to further her own ends was not the same thing as surrendering. She wouldn’t let it be.

“I want Emily’s entire education assured,” she said, her voice clipped and tense to her own ears. “Freshman year through a postdoctoral degree, should she want one.”

“You’ll get your mother’s entire inheritance,” Theo said at once, almost offhandedly. As if he spoke of a minor allowance rather than a stunning fortune. His amber gaze seemed to bore into her, into her darkest, most secret places, taking her breath. “Everything that was taken from her, plus interest, from the day she left to give birth to you.”

Becca refused to let him see how that got to her, how the guilt still ate at her no matter how she told herself she should not feel it, that Caroline had made her own choices, and so she fought to keep her face, her voice, impassive.

“In writing, of course,” she clarified. “You’ll understand if I don’t trust you. Anything connected to the Whitney family is tainted.”

“My lawyers are standing by,” he replied in that deceptively easy way of his, as if this were not her soul they were discussing. “All you need to do is sign.”

She had the sense that she had gotten lost, somehow, without seeming to stray from the path. That she was in a dark woods, and there was no hope of sunlight. He watched her, his dark face and glowing eyes like some kind of beacon, beckoning to her, and she had the sudden panicked thought that if she did this, if she crossed this line, if she spent even one more second in this man’s company, she might as well write herself off entirely.

Because he would change her. Not just because he wanted her to pretend to be his comatose fiancée, which was morally questionable enough. But because he was … too much. Too dark. Too powerful. Too outside anything she’d ever experienced. How could she possibly handle this man? She couldn’t even handle this conversation!

But she thought again of Emily, and knew she had no choice. She had the means to set her sister free. She would do it. She had held her mother’s hand in that hospital bed, looked into her eyes, and she had promised.

“All right,” she said, and though her voice didn’t quite echo, it seemed to reverberate somehow, as if the world was changing all around her as she spoke. Or perhaps that was just the way his eyes gleamed, with heat and triumph, as he looked at her. As he won. “What do you want me to do?”

“I
TRUST YOU
were discreet,” Theo said in his intent, focused way, lounging with an indolence she could not quite believe in the back of the car that had met Becca’s flight. “As you agreed to be in the papers you signed.”

He had given her twenty-four hours to get her affairs in order.

Twenty-four hours to make sure Emily could stay with her best friend’s family while Becca “went away on business,” which Emily had done many times before while Becca worked on a trial—and this was certainly a kind of trial, wasn’t it? Twenty-four hours to explain to her employers that she needed the time off she’d saved up over the years—and that she needed it immediately, for “family reasons,” and no, she didn’t know when she’d be back.

She didn’t like to lie, but what could she tell her younger sister? Or the boss who had helped her out time and again while she’d struggled to raise Emily in the years after her mother’s death? How could she explain what she was doing when she hardly understood it herself? Twenty-four hours to pack a single, small bag and wonder why she bothered—especially when Theo had smirked and told her not to worry about a wardrobe, that it would be provided. His unsaid
because yours is
embarrassing to people like us
seemed to singe her ears, making her flush with anger every time she thought of it. Of him.

Which she did with depressing, alarming regularity.

Twenty-four hours and then she was back in New York. This time, to stay. To become her cousin, a woman she had always comfortably disdained from afar.

Twenty-four hours, Becca discovered, was not very much time at all to prepare for your whole world to change.

“No,” she said now, pretending to be calm. Pretending that she had been inside a flashy limousine a million times before, and was thus unmoved by the casual opulence evident in the plush seats, the glossy wood-paneling, the crystal decanters. “I took out several ads in the
Boston Globe
and appeared on CNN to discuss our little deal.”

“Very amusing,” Theo said, in a tone that suggested he found her anything but. And yet that gleam in his amber gaze made her think he understood her, somehow.
Wishful thinking,
she told herself sharply. “I’m sure that kind of sarcasm serves you well in your chosen career.” Could he sound any more dismissive? Any more snide? As if
paralegal
was a synonym for
prostitute?

Although perhaps she was in no position to cast stones, since she was sitting here for money, wasn’t she?

“I’m usually praised more for my work ethic than my wit,” Becca replied, clenching her hands together in her lap and forcing a tight smile. “Did you become the CEO of Whitney Media by telling silly jokes? I thought that kind of power had more to do with destroying lives and worshipping the almighty dollar above all things, including your own soul.”

“Oh,” he said softly, “I sold my soul. Have no doubt about that. But it was too long ago to matter now.”

“I think you’ll find that soullessness suits only those in your position,” Becca replied as if the flash in his gaze affected her not at all, as if she did not fight off a shiver. “The rest of us are preoccupied with, among other things,
being human.”

They had wanted to send the private jet; Becca had insisted on flying coach on a commercial flight. It was, she’d thought, the last chance she’d have to do something
normal
for some time. And it was probably her last little rebellion, too.

But the flight had allowed her the time to think about what she was about to do, and something had solidified inside of her as the plane winged south along the eastern seaboard. She would step into this world, she told herself, the world of the Whitneys, to secure her sister’s future and to keep her promise to her mother. But it would be more than that. She would prove, once and for all, that they were all better off for being discarded and ignored. She would never again torture herself with questions about what her life might have been like had her mother stayed in New York, or whether Caroline’s great sacrifice had been in vain. She would never have to
wonder
again.

It would be worth almost any indignity to walk back out of the Whitney’s glittering, poisonous world with that knowledge secure inside of her. She could almost feel the satisfaction of it, in advance. She’d felt a sense of anticipation as she’d exited the plane, closer and closer to her fate with every step.

And still something in her had thrilled to the sight of a black-clad driver holding a sign with her name on it in the Baggage Claim. Some part of her had been more
impressed than it should have been when the driver had taken her bag and escorted her to the waiting vehicle, gleaming black and expensive at the curb, in clear and arrogant violation of the strict No Parking regulations.

She had not expected Theo to be inside, sprawled out across the backseat, dressed in a dark-colored suit, which only called attention to the lean power of his big body. He was still far too dangerous, far too disturbing. She’d forgotten to breathe. And then his arresting, amber-colored eyes had fixed on her, sending electricity charging through her, lighting her up from the inside out.

She’d rather die than show him her reaction to his nearness—her reaction to being alone with him in an enclosed space. She thought she might die anyway, from the wild pounding of her heart, the shiver in her limbs and the trembling in her core. She wanted to believe her reaction came from trepidation, from fear of the world she was now going to have to learn how to live in, at least for a little while. The world that had chewed her mother up and spit her out. She might know deep inside that she would conquer it, but she still first had to survive it. She told herself it was nothing more than that.

He watched her for a moment, something not quite a smile flirting with his hard mouth, something too close to soft in his gaze. “I cannot imagine how you’ve come by your dire opinion of me,” he said after a long moment. “We’ve only just met.”

“You make quite an impression,” Becca said honestly, wishing that were not true. Wishing she was not so
aware
of him, that every cell in her body did not seem to sing out that awareness.

“You are supposed to be impressed,” he said, with
a sardonic inflection she had to fight to ignore. “If not wholly overawed.”

“Oh, I am,” Becca replied at once, forcing herself to remember who she was. Why she was here. What she had to do. She squared her shoulders. “Though in contrast to your usual minions, I imagine, I’m a bit more awed by your conceit and arrogance than I am by your supposed magnificence.”

The curve of his mouth became a smile. “So noted,” he said.

His gaze warmed, and she warmed, too, and then wondered from one beat of her heart to the next what it would be like if he weren’t one of them. If he weren’t the enemy. If that look she’d glimpsed in his gaze now and again truly meant something. But that was ridiculous.

He shifted slightly in his seat. He was much too close.

“It’s too bad you’ve chosen to hate everyone you meet on this adventure so indiscriminately, Rebecca.”

“It’s Becca,” she said, ignoring the slight catch in her throat, the wild fluttering of her pulse. “And I would hardly call my feelings on the Whitney family and anyone tainted by a close association with them
indiscriminate.
It’s a reasonable response to who they are, I think. It’s also common sense.”

There was a slight, tense pause. The air seemed to contract around them.

“Everyone is more complicated than they appear on the surface,” Theo said finally in a soft voice. “You’d do well to remember that.”

“I’m not complicated at all,” Becca retorted, leaning back in the seat and crossing her legs, taking a perverse sort of pride in the look of distaste Theo fixed on her
old jeans and battered boots. “What you see is exactly what you get.”

“Good lord,” Theo said, sweeping that same look over her whole body, from her feet to her hair. “I certainly hope not.”

Becca bristled, but tried to hide it behind a smile. “Is that how you go about winning people over?” she demanded. “Because I have to tell you, your approach needs work.”

“I don’t have to win you over,” he said, his own smile sharpening, those impossible eyes boring into her, making her fight against the urge to squirm in her seat. “I’ve already bought you.”

Theo lived in a vast two-story penthouse in Tribeca. He led Becca out of the most luxuriously appointed elevator she’d ever seen and into a wide, private marble lobby that opened into another entryway, accented with white-painted brick walls and graceful shelves holding art, books and various artifacts that struck Becca as decidedly Mediterranean. The entryway opened up into a great room with a ceiling two stories above, stretching out before her toward high, arching windows that led out to a wide brick terrace and beyond that, Manhattan itself in all its high-thrusting, slick glory.

She had never felt farther away from her tiny apartment in its not-so-great part of Boston.

The Whitney mansion had been easier to accept, somehow. Her mother had told stories of what it had been like to grow up in that house, and summer in another equally extravagant home in Newport, Rhode Island, so perhaps Becca had expected mythical modern castles on Fifth Avenue. It was just one more part of the Whitney mystique. But all that was inherited opulence, handed
down from one Whitney to the next ever since the glory days of their Gilded Age friends and contemporaries, American royalty like the Carnegies, Rockefellers, and Vanderbilts.

But this … this was something else. Real people, Becca thought almost numbly, still looking around in awe, didn’t actually live like
this.

Except Theo seemed perfectly at home. He had his cell phone to his ear and was murmuring something in an undertone as he sauntered through the elegant room, seemingly unmoved by the sheer luxury all around him. And yet Becca knew without a single doubt that it was all of his design—from the richly colored Oriental rugs at her feet, stretching across hardwood floors polished to a gleam, to the furniture she did not have to be told was incredibly expensive, all of it seeming to belong exactly where it was, as if it had grown there, mahoganies and blacks and scarlets, and all of it inviting, not stuffy. Her gaze rested for a moment on the set of deep, lush-looking sofas in one corner, set to take advantage of the fireplace and the dizzying view. There was interesting art on the walls and the shelves were lined with important-looking books and more intriguing objects—vases, small boxes, statues. A wrought iron spiral stair wound up to the floor above, that boasted an open gallery to take advantage of the great room’s vastness. Opulence and invitation, everywhere she turned.

Was she really expected to stay here? With a man who walked through this room as if it were commonplace, unworthy of his notice? A cold shiver worked its way down her spine, making goose bumps rise up in response. Who would she be when all of this was over? Because she knew, once again, on some deep, incontrovertible level, that what she’d put into motion
by agreeing to be here would change her forever.
What would be left?
a small voice asked inside of her.
Who would she be when she’d finished playing Larissa?

You will be yourself,
she reminded herself sternly.
Finally free of the notion that these people are important to you in any way—that they matter at all.

“Muriel will show you to your rooms,” he said, startling her when he stopped and turned. She was suddenly afraid that her mouth really had dropped open and that she’d been gaping at the things he owned like a country bumpkin. Like the poor relation to his wealthy employers that she, in fact, was.

As for the other things she’d been thinking, well—she shrugged them off. It was too late now, anyway. She was here. The papers were signed. And Emily needed this. More than that,
she
needed to do this for Emily, so Emily would never have to do anything like this, with these horrible people, herself.

She needed to make her mother proud, in whatever way she could, even all these years later. She owed her mother’s memory at least that much.
At least.

And she would walk out of here with her head high, knowing exactly who she was. With all of the Whitney legacy firmly behind her. Finally.

Swallowing hard, she turned to the woman she hadn’t even seen enter the room from somewhere off to the left. The kitchen? Servants’ quarters? Narnia? Nothing would surprise her, at this point.

“I need to take a few calls, but I will come find you in about forty-five minutes,” Theo said, his voice all business, matter-of-fact. It made her realize that he had not been using that voice before, in the car. Or at the Whitney mansion. She frowned.

“Fine,” she said, her thoughts too muddled to say
anything else. Why would this situation be anything but business to him? Why should his voice alter at all? Had she not imagined that softer look after all?

His amber eyes flicked over her, making clench her fists in unconscious response as her heart thumped painfully hard in her chest, an answer to her silently asked questions that she refused to acknowledge.

“Our first order of business will be your hair,” he said, those captivating, intriguing eyes narrowing slightly as he looked at her.

She reached up to touch the end of her chestnut-colored ponytail automatically, but she wasn’t surprised. Larissa was as famous for her peroxide-blond mane as she was for her questionable behavior and pointless existence. Becca hadn’t really thought through the specific details of this charade, but dying her hair made sense.

“Will you be making me a blonde yourself?” she asked, meaning to sound dry and arch, but her voice came out much softer, much more uncertain, than she’d intended, as she found herself imagining those strong hands in her hair, against her scalp.

His gaze seemed to darken, and it was worse than the usual kick of amber—it seemed to creep inside of her and turn her into something knotted and raw. She had to remind herself to breathe.