The Replacement Wife (4 page)

“I will make you exactly what you have to be,” he said. As if he’d heard her worst fears. As if she’d spoken them aloud. His dark head tilted slightly to one side. “The question is whether or not you can handle it.”

“I can handle anything,” she threw at him, feeling goaded beyond her endurance—and yet he only stood there, so calmly powerful, and watched her. It made panic—and something much hotter, much darker—roar through her, blistering everything in its path.

“We’ll see, won’t we?”

And with that, Theo Markou Garcia was gone, leaving Becca feeling overwhelmed—and something else, something she refused to call
bereft
—in the middle of the vast, beautiful room.

“Come,” Muriel said, and led Becca off to her doom.

Blonde, she was even more of a threat, Theo thought with a mixture of temper and resignation.

And then wondered why he’d used that word, as feelings he did not care to identify coursed through him.
Threat.
How could she possibly be a
threat?
He was Theo Markou Garcia and she … she was whatever he made her. He stared at the girl as she sat before the mirror in the guest suite he’d allocated her. She was looking at herself with her cloudy-green eyes dark. She looked fragile and a little unnerved, as if she did not know what she’d gotten herself into.

But most of all, she looked like Larissa.

Françoise was a hairdressing genius—known for her discretion even without the giant sum Theo had paid her to ensure her silence—and had created a true masterpiece. The hair was a symphony of blondes, from a sun-kissed pale shade to the lightest honey, cascading around her like an effortless blonde wave and framing the face that was undeniably Larissa’s.

Larissa, but with fire and emotion in her eyes. Larissa, but so much more
alive.
So much more aware. Not anesthetized and dull-eyed.

She was like a ghost in reverse, this girl, with her raggedy clothes and her off-color eyes, eyes that should have been green and were instead that mossy, changeable hazel, like a version of Larissa that had never been. Her nose, perhaps, was more narrow. Her chin was a
touch stronger, her lips fuller. But he had to search out the differences. He had to look hard to see them. If he didn’t know better, he would have assumed this was Larissa Whitney herself.

No one would look at this woman and think she was anything but the real thing. Because no one saw what they did not expect to see. Theo knew this better than anyone. He had fought against the markers of his humble beginnings most of his life, until he’d met Larissa and had used that very roughness to hide behind. She’d thought she was taking home the kind of man her parents would hate, yet one more of her rebellions. She’d had no idea how ambitious Theo was. Not at first.

“It is an extraordinary likeness,” he said, because he had stared too long, and he could see the nerves Becca struggled to hide. He even sympathized. He remembered how nervous he’d been when Larissa had first noticed him, when she’d chosen him—and how cold he’d gone inside when he finally understood that she wanted only to use him to infuriate and appall Bradford. Just as he remembered what it had taken to turn instead into Bradford’s favorite. She’d never forgiven him.

He could see himself in the mirror, hovering behind her like some great Gothic brute—but he shook himself. That was the way Larissa had made him feel. Like the hulking, ill-mannered swine before whom her pearls were unfairly cast. Yet this was not Larissa. This was only a facsimile of her, and
this
woman had no greater claim to gentility than he did. Less, perhaps, since this was Manhattan and money made its own friends, especially when it was coupled with so much power and the blue-blooded Whitney stamp of authenticity, heritage and rank.

But oh, how he wished this woman were the real thing. And that she was his.

“I never really noticed it before,” Becca said quietly, turning her head from side to side. He might have thought she was calm, had he not been able to see the way her knee bounced in agitation. A nervous tic he would have to work on, he thought. Larissa had never been nervous. She had redefined
languid.

He hated that she lay so helpless, and he was reduced to the
past tense.
It seemed suddenly terribly unfair that this woman—this pretender—should be so vibrant, sparkle with so much energy, when Larissa could not and would not, ever again. That Becca could be free of all that had weighted Larissa down, ruined her. That she should be so much like Larissa had been so long ago, when he’d first seen her—or in any case, as he’d thought Larissa had been back then, before he’d known her.

“I find that difficult to believe,” he said, dismissively. He reminded himself to be patient, to tamp down the mess of his emotions as was his way; that this was a process, not a race. “Larissa is a world-renowned beauty. Therefore, with your bone structure and likeness to her, you are, too.”

Her gaze met his in the mirror’s reflection. Held. “As it happens, I am a whole, entire person in my own right.” Her brows rose, challenging him, as far from Larissa’s deflecting smiles and easy laughter as it was possible to get. And despite himself, he wanted her. He felt her in his sex, his blood. “I have a life that has never, and will never, have anything to do with my resemblance to Larissa Whitney. In fact,” she said, turning around on the vanity bench to face him, her eyes wild with temper, “I’ll let you in on a little secret. In
most
places, Larissa Whitney is the punch line to a joke.”

“I suggest you do not tell that joke here,” Theo said, mildly enough, but he saw the color bloom in her cheeks. It seemed to echo in him, seemed to pound through him like need, like
want
—because Larissa had never responded to him. She had tolerated him, waved him away, pretended to be polite if there were witnesses nearby—but she’d never
reacted
to him. Not as a woman should respond to a man. Not like this.

But he could not let himself think of that truth.

He should not want this ghost. It was the worst betrayal, surely. Hadn’t he vowed to Larissa that he would never treat her that way, no matter what she did? No matter how she treated him in return? What kind of man was he to ignore that now? He should only want Becca for what her face could bring him, what he deserved after all these years of Larissa’s games and broken promises. But his body was not paying attention to him. At all.

“There’s no going back now, is there?” Becca asked. Or perhaps it was not really a question. “You’ve made me into her. Congratulations.”

Theo smiled slightly. “I’ve had your hair done like hers,” he corrected her. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There is the matter of your wardrobe—and, of course, your entire personal history.”

“It hurts me to say this,” she said, temper crackling in her voice, “but I am, genetically, just as much of a Whitney as she is. I simply wasn’t waited on hand and foot my entire life.”

“But she was,” he said brusquely, as much to curtail the decidedly carnal turn of his thoughts as to reprimand her. “And therein lies one of the major differences we must smooth over if you are to pass as her. Larissa went to Spence and Choate, and then Brown. She spent her summers sailing in Newport, when she wasn’t traveling
the world. You did none of these things.” He shrugged. “This is not a value judgment, you understand—this is a statement of fact.”

“It’s true,” Becca said. Her knee began jumping again, and as if she could not bear to let him see it, she moved to her feet, tossing her gleaming blonde hair back from her face in a move that was so much like Larissa’s that it made Theo suck in a sharp breath, past and present colliding too suddenly, and not pleasantly. But the arch of her brows, the tilt of her head—so challenging, so fierce—that was all Becca.

“My mother died three days after my eighteenth birthday,” she said with no trace at all of emotion, just that blaze of green in her eyes and that scathing heat beneath her words. “My sister and I think of that as lucky—because if I hadn’t been eighteen, they would have taken her from me. I had to scrape and save and figure out a way to take care of myself and Emily, because no one else was going to. Certainly not Larissa or her family, who could have saved us a thousand times over, but chose not to, even though they were notified. Maybe they were too busy
sailing
in Newport.”

Her words hung in the air, condemnation and curse, and Theo wanted things he couldn’t have. Just as he always had, though he had gone to such lengths to make sure that nothing—and no one—would ever be out of his reach again. He told himself it was simply his knee-jerk reaction to a woman who looked like this, telling him what hurt her. He wanted to take away her pain. He wanted to rescue her. From the Whitneys. From the past. And it didn’t matter, because she was not Larissa, and Larissa had never allowed that, anyway. She would have scoffed at the thought.

“They probably didn’t care,” Theo said coldly, brutally,
as much to snap himself back to reality as to slap her down.

He watched her pale, and sway very slightly on her feet—and for a moment he hated himself, because if anyone could understand the contours and complexity of her bitterness, it was him. And he did. But there were bigger things at play here. He
could not
lose sight of his goals. He never had, not since his desperate boyhood in the worst Miami neighborhoods. Not even when it might have saved his relationship with Larissa. Once he got those shares, he would be an
owner.
He would be one of
them.
He would be more than the hired help. Finally. He would do anything—had done anything—to make that a reality.

“Just as I do not care,” he continued in the same way, though he did not care for how it made him feel. “This is not a forum for your grievances against the Whitney family. This is not a therapy session.”

“You are a pig.” She spat out the words and in that sentiment, he thought with some trace of black humor, she was exactly like Larissa.

“I don’t care what you think of your cousin’s privileges, or her pampered existence, or her family,” he said, forcing himself to continue in that same heavy-handed way, making sure there was no doubt about how things stood.
Start as you mean to go on,
he told himself—and he could not let this woman get to him, manipulate him. Make him care. Just like Larissa had done, and look how that had ended up. “I’m sure their wealth and carelessness offends you. It doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is turning you into her, and I can’t do that if you waste our time telling me how much more meaningful your life is than hers, and how much harder you’ve struggled.
I don’t care.
Do you understand?”

“Perfectly.” Her voice was clipped. Her face was pale, though a hectic color shone in her dark hazel eyes.
Hatred,
he thought. It was nothing new.

What was new was that he wanted so much to change it.

“Wonderful,” he said. He let himself smile slightly, as if she did not get to him already, no matter what rules he’d tried to institute. As if he did not have the highly unusual urge to apologize to her, to make it better—or to make her understand. As if he really was the dark, forbidding monster he had no doubt at all she believed him to be. Hadn’t he gone to great lengths to make it so? “Let’s get started.”

“Y
OU MUST LOVE HER
very much,” Becca said at breakfast a week later, without knowing she meant to speak. But it was done, and her words hung there, seeming to fill up the space between them out on the terrace, rebounding back from the skyscrapers that towered all around them. But her words had as little effect on Theo Markou Garcia as the blazing heat lamps that kept off the March chill, as this man acknowledged no weather that did not suit him. She stabbed her grapefruit with the strange, serrated-edged spoon that had been provided for that singular purpose and continued grimly on. “If you are willing to go to such lengths to recreate her. Like Frankenstein’s bride.”

“Am I patching you together from bits and pieces? A carcass here, a limb or two there?” Theo asked without looking up from the sleek laptop computer he carried everywhere with him, and which Becca suspected was his real, true love. “I think my final product, at the very least, will be a bit smoother and more attractive in appearance than Frankenstein’s.”

There it was again—that hint that somewhere beneath his dark, impenetrable male beauty lurked a man with a sense of humor. Becca sometimes thought she was more likely to wake up one morning and believe herself
to be Larissa Whitney in the flesh than Theo was to actually … be funny. Crack a real smile. Relax. Despite the evidence now and again to the contrary.

But then again, she told herself, not for the first time, the man was undoubtedly grieving in some distinctly wealthy male way that was lost on her. He obviously had strong feelings about Larissa. At the very least, he’d studied her so completely that, as he’d demonstrated over the past seven days, he could dissect the ways Becca was not her in excruciating detail.

“Slouch more,” he said now, barely sparing her a glance as he kept tapping away at his keyboard, no doubt buying and selling whole countries at a keystroke. “Larissa did not sit so straight in her chair, like an overly enthusiastic high school student. She was jaded. Bored. She reclined, and waited to be served.”

Becca curved her spine back into the wrought iron chair, and lounged like a dissolute pasha. Like
him.

“She sounds delightful,” she said dryly. “As ever.”

It had been a long week.

Becca was not an actor and had never tried to be one, so perhaps this was simply a part of the actor’s job that she had never considered before—but she had been taken aback to discover that Theo wanted her to research every aspect of Larissa’s life as if she could expect to be quizzed upon it at any moment, from any quarter.

“I don’t remember who
I
was friends with in the sixth grade,” she’d protested, while sitting before the stacks of notes and photographs, papers and yearbooks that Theo had compiled for her review—all of it spread across the polished mahogany table in the book-studded library, almost covering it completely. She’d looked over at Theo, who sat with that merciless expression on his hard face in one of the deep leather chairs near the
stone fireplace, playing idly with the globe in a brass stand next to him, his big frame deceptively relaxed-looking.

“I suspect that you would,” he’d replied, entirely unperturbed, “if those friends included Rockefellers, movie stars and minor European royalty.”

And what argument was there to that? Becca had gritted her teeth, and started to read what he’d put in front of her—uncovering the facts of Larissa Whitney’s life, page by page. She’d tried not to notice that said facts seemed like little more than a dream of the high life to someone like Becca. European tours, stints in Hawaii and exclusive ranches near the Rocky Mountains. The Maldives for Easter, the Hamptons for weekend parties. New Year’s parties in old Cape Cod mansions and more low-key vacations at the family beachside estate in Newport. Horseback riding, ballroom dancing classes, French and Italian lessons at the hands of private tutors; name the luxury, and Larissa had been handed it on the proverbial silver platter. Over and over again.

The more Becca read about the way Larissa, only a year or so older than she was, had been raised, the harder it was to soldier on. But she did.

The days had fallen into a certain routine. Up early for breakfast with Theo, and his latest round of casual personal insults couched as constructive advice on bettering her Larissa impression. Then an hour in the private, state-of-the-art gym—located near Theo’s office on the first floor of the penthouse—with the most sadistic personal trainer imaginable: Theo himself.

“I am already in perfectly fine shape,” she’d gritted out at him, when he’d decreed she should lift a heavier set of weights before running another set of
intervals on his treadmill. Becca had come to loathe that treadmill.

“No one is debating that,” he’d said. The way his gaze had flicked over her then seemed to leave scorch marks, making her wish she’d had on a head-to-toe cloak instead of a skimpy tank top over running shorts—even as the body he seemed to view so dispassionately had reacted to him against her will. Her core had softened, her skin had begun tingling. “But we are not talking about the reality before us here, we are talking about the accepted aesthetic in the circles Larissa ran in.”

“You mean the kinds of circles that don’t eat food of any kind and have wildly expensive recreational drug hobbies?” she’d thrown back at him.

“Larissa used to model in her spare time, Rebecca,” he’d said in that cutting way, as if mocking her for thinking she had the right to her own opinion. “I don’t know if you’ve looked at the fashion magazines lately, but
emaciated
is, unfortunately, the preferred look. You are not nearly skeletal enough.”

“My name,” she had said, panting from a toxic combination of rage, running and his dazzling proximity in his gym shorts and a soft T-shirt that made love to his hard pectorals, “is
Becca.”

“Run faster,” he’d advised her softly. “Talk less.”

He was a maddening, impossible man. That was the conclusion she’d reached in the long days of her first week in his relentless presence. The endless hours of Larissa Studies, followed by afternoons of clothes, makeup, and what Theo called
finishing school
with his usual sardonic inflection. That involved trying on pieces of Larissa’s wardrobe—all of it too small, too revealing, or too outlandish for Becca—and learning how to dress and act like Larissa had under his ever-critical eye.

“This dress looks ridiculous,” she’d muttered, plucking at the odd concoction that seemed to be all ruffle, no dress. “Where would anyone go in something like this?”

“That is a custom-made Valentino gown,” Theo had replied smoothly, his dark brows rising, as if shocked to the core that Becca hadn’t known that at a glance.

“I don’t care what it is,” Becca had replied, flushing with embarrassment at once again being proved so small, so provincial, and yet determined never to admit that. Never. She glared at him through the full-length mirror in the dressing room adjacent to her guest suite that was, she was sure, larger than the living room/dining room/kitchen area in her small apartment. “It’s ugly.”

“Your job here is not to choose garments that you might like to wear for a day in your life,” Theo had replied, in that inexorable way of his that made her want to obey him, please him, almost as much as she wanted to run screaming from him. He had moved closer to her, once again standing behind her in the mirror.

“Because a day in my life would, of course, be like a fate worse than death,” she’d said bitterly, pretending she hadn’t noticed the heat of him, so near to her. That she’d been unaware of the way her breasts had felt fuller, her thighs looser, her skin hotter. She’d hated herself for that weakness.

“The point is to observe a dress like this and try to understand the art of its creation,” he’d said softly, his gaze dark in the mirror, his head too close to hers,
much too close.
That glimmer in his eyes made her believe that he was not what he seemed, not just another Whitney family minion. “Larissa had an effortless sense of style. You will not have to dress yourself without help,
of course, but understanding what drew her eye will help you understand
her.”

“All I understand,” she’d said, her heart thumping too fast, her voice too thin, “is that rich people apparently have the time and the money to pick clothes to make statements rather than to serve a purpose. Like, for example, simply clothing themselves.”

“They pick whole lives just to make statements,” Theo had replied, his gaze clashing with hers, daring her to look away, yet snaring her in its amber grip. “Because they can.”

“And by
they,
you mean
you,”
she’d whispered, desperate to sound fierce yet fearing she sounded only pointlessly defiant.

A smile she’d have called
painful
were he someone else had crossed his dangerous mouth then, and his eyes had darkened. She’d thought she’d felt the faintest of touches on the back of her hair, as if he’d run his hand down the gleaming blond length of it. As if he was caressing a ghost.

“You are here to understand Larissa,” he said quietly. “Not me. You should not try. I doubt you’d like what you find.”

What did it mean that for a single moment, yearning and bittersweet, she had almost wanted to be Larissa for him?

She told herself that it was easier when he was off tending to his multitude of duties as CEO of Whitney Media, sequestered away in his home office that boasted its own elevator lobby and entrance, so that his endless succession of business meetings could take place without anyone any the wiser that a doppelganger sat right across the hall, learning how to be a bored, vapid socialite the world thought was locked away in a very
private rehabilitation center, safe from prying eyes and tabloid articles.

Not that the lack of access to Larissa kept the tabloids from speculating about her very public collapse. They hired doctors who had never treated her to opine on her supposed course of treatment. They printed her greatest hits—a parade of embarrassing pictures under screaming headlines supposedly expressing concern—and made up sightings. Becca was almost tempted to feel some sort of sympathy for the poor girl. Almost.

She told herself that the long hours she was left to her own devices—expected to keep reading up on Larissa’s highly pedigreed history so she could spout it off by rote, left to roam around Theo’s stunning home like the ghost she sometimes wondered if she was becoming—were better. That being around him irritated her and infuriated her. And perhaps that was true, but she couldn’t deny that her heart leaped when he returned to her. That she looked forward to it—and to the nights spent learning table manners fit for dining with royalty, nights filled with his endless corrections. How to stand, how to sit, how to laugh, how to appear politely indifferent. She found she looked forward to fencing words with him far, far more than she should. More than she was willing to admit, even to herself.

There was something in the darkness he carried within him and brandished like both shield and sword that called to her, much as she wanted to deny it. Something that agitated her, that stirred her blood and kept her awake late into the night, tossing and turning on a wide, luxurious bed that she could not seem to get comfortable in, ever. Something that seemed to call out to her, to sing in her, too, like a perfect harmony she’d been waiting to sing her whole life.

Don’t be ridiculous,
she told herself now, snapped back into the present morning on the terrace, with the faint sounds of angry rush hour horns and the inevitable sirens rising from the New York City streets far below.
The man is in love with his comatose fiancée. And you are showing worrying signs of Stockholm Syndrome.

“So you do,” she heard herself say, her mouth doing as it liked with no thought to the consequences. As if she would not have to pay the price for her foolishness.

“I do what?” He did not even look at her.
Tap tap tap
on the keyboard, nations his to command at will. His voice was completely dismissive, letting her know exactly where he ranked her in his estimation.

She had the passing thought that he seemed to go out of his way to do so, when she had only ever seen him treat his actual servants with a warmth and a respect that suggested he did not consider himself
quite
so lofty … but why should he treat her any differently? But she was still talking, apparently—still belaboring the point.

“Love her.” She studied the side of his beautiful face, the elegant line of his jaw that was somehow wholly masculine, the rich black of his thick hair. “You love Larissa.”

She told herself she did not shiver when his amber gaze, dark and measuring, met hers, a fire she could not understand building in those mesmerizing depths.

“She was my fiancée,” he said in that clipped tone that she knew by now meant she should stop talking, that he was losing his temper. But she couldn’t seem to do it. There was something swelling inside of her, rolling through her, that she couldn’t understand. It made her want to poke at him, to prod at him, and she didn’t even know why. Because she did not— could not—
want
this man, not like that. Not the way he clearly wanted his perfect princess, his lost Larissa.

“She had a lover, too,” she said—suicidally. “What do you think he feels for her?”

Theo closed his laptop with a careful, gentle movement that was somehow more unnerving than if he’d slammed the screen shut. Becca swallowed, and let her grapefruit spoon clatter to her plate. What was the matter with her? Why was she determined to get under his skin? Was she that desperate to compete with a woman she’d never met, but who she saw more of in the mirror every day?

A cold sort of awareness swept over her, through her, then—making the hair on the back of her neck and along her arms stand on end.

“You’ll have to ask him what he feels,” Theo said in that mild way of his that sent every alarm in her body off in a wild cacophony of sound and panic. She felt herself straightening against her chair again, in unconscious defense, and couldn’t bring herself to stop it even as she felt it happen. “But in my experience, Chip Van Housen has never loved anything, not even himself.”