The Replacement Wife (7 page)

He could not deny a single thing she’d said, and yet some part of him wished he could. That there were no ulterior motives at all. That they were simply two people at lunch, learning about each other. Why did he yearn for that with parts of himself he hardly recognized?

“Can’t I enjoy an afternoon with a beautiful woman?” he asked softly. “Can’t I get to know her?”

“No,” she said, low and sure. Fierce.
“You
can’t.”

He wanted to protest. He wanted to truly forget everything but this moment, this crippling need that raged through him—but he could not quite do that. Not after everything he’d given up to get here. Not now. “Why not?” he asked instead.

“Because my only value to you is my resemblance to someone else,” she said very deliberately, very calmly. Too calmly. “Therefore, my personal information is mine. You don’t get access to it. You don’t get to know me when what you’re really after is her.”

He had spent years planning to run Whitney Media, and then, in due time, to own it. He had focused on nothing but that singular goal, casting everything else aside in pursuit of it. Larissa had liked him when he was her rough-edged lover calculated to irritate her father; she had lost interest in him when he became more of a Whitney than the Whitneys themselves. But even so, they had hammered out their devil’s bargain, their sad little dance toward Theo’s lifelong dream. And he was so close to achieving that dream—the dream that had meant everything to him for almost as long as he allowed himself to remember, last night’s trip down memory lane notwithstanding. He was
so close.

And yet he looked across the small table and the city outside faded away, the bustle and chatter of the Manhattan hot spot disappeared, and all he could see was Becca. Her mysterious gaze, like the secret, shaded hollows of some cool, forgotten forest. The intelligence and the challenge. The invitation he was not even sure she knew she was broadcasting. But he knew. He could feel it throughout his body, hardening him, readying him, making his need for her burn like a wildfire through his limbs.

He could not seem to help himself. He looked at
her and wanted
more,
more than he’d thought himself capable of before. More than he’d had.

“And what if I want you?” he asked, as if he was a free man. As if he was someone else. As if she’d been the dream all along. “Just you. What then?”

H
EAT LIGHTNING CRACKLED
between them, making Becca’s nipples pull tight. A low, insistent ache bloomed between her legs. She felt heat flood her face, and something too bright, too hot to be tears sear through her eyes.

She did not even know if she was breathing.

And Theo only lounged there, so close and yet separated by the fancy table and the fussy centerpiece, his gaze hard on her, like a fierce caress. She had the sudden sense that he was far more primitive than his elegant suit and carefully manicured appearance might suggest. She could suddenly
see
him, deep into him, as if somewhere inside they were the same—a matched set. She could
see
all the wildness and passion and heat that burned in him, and burned in her, too.

How could she want him like this? A bone-deep longing crashed over her then, moving through her like the rising tide, making her whole body, every cell and every stretch of her skin,
yearn.

But they were in public, this was all a charade, and she would never really know
who
he was looking at that way, would she?

It made her heart hurt. She reached up as if to cover it with her hand before she knew what she meant to
do. Her palm flexed below her collarbone before she dropped it back in her lap.

“You don’t,” she said. She meant to sound strong. Dismissive. But instead, her voice got tangled in her throat, and it was only a whisper. “You don’t want me.”

“Don’t I?”

“Of course not.” She tore her gaze from his, and looked down at her plate, scowling fiercely to stem the panic, the emotion, the threat of tears. “You want whatever you’ve been carrying around in your head all these years. I’m the captive audience as well as the show. That’s what you want, not me.”

“I want to know how you taste,” he said, his voice like a drug, narcotic and thrilling, moving over her like his mouth had last night, spinning out fires in every direction, though he did not move. He did not need to move. “Your neck. That hollow between your breasts. I want to taste every inch of you. And then start again.”

She could not breathe. She could not look at him. She was paralyzed—as afraid of what he might say next as she was terrified that he would stop speaking. How could she be so conflicted? Why did he torment her so much? She had never had any trouble with men, and she had thought that all her coworkers’ talk of theatrics and fireworks and life-altering complications were just the stories people told themselves, the way they brightened things up, as real as their claims that they would join the Peace Corps, write that book, or pack up and move to Fiji someday.

But now she knew better. Now she
knew.
She’d been waiting for Theo to incinerate her. Her whole life she’d waited, and now she burned, and he was in love with a woman he could never have—a woman Becca could
never be, no matter what she looked like. It might not be her idea of love—it might make her angry to think it was what he thought he deserved—but none of this was within her control, was it?

“I want to move inside of you until the only thing you know, the only thing you can say, is my name,” he continued, unaware, perhaps, of what he was doing to her with just those silky, disturbing, sensual words. Or all too aware it.

“Stop,” she said then, her voice much weaker than it should have been. Almost as if she was pleading with him. “We’re in public. People are watching.”

“You should feel safe, then,” he said, so arrogant. So offhandedly powerful. So at peace with the sensual danger that thickened in the breathing space between them. “What can happen here, with all of New York looking on?”

“What about your plan?” she threw at him, desperate, even as her breasts seemed to swell and she felt very nearly feverish, hot and then cold. “Is this how you and Larissa acted in restaurants?”

The name was like a slap of cold water. She could see the way it worked on Theo, reminding him. Changing him.

She had thrown the name out there deliberately. So she should not have felt so … betrayed by the way he reacted. So hurt.

“You have already achieved what I wanted today,” he said, all that electricity slipping behind his smooth, corporate mask. Though his eyes still burned, still bored deep into her and stirred her in ways that should not thrill her as they did. “You have been seen in public, all in one piece. No one has looked at you as if you are anything but what and who you appear to be.”

“Wonderful,” Becca said tightly.

He surprised her then, by leaning forward and taking her hand in his again, this time gently holding on when she tried to pull it away. His skin against hers. The heat of him, exploding into her palm, sending shock waves up her arm and into her breasts, her belly.

“But you and I both know what lies beneath the surface,” he said, in that snake charmer’s voice, smoky and low, while his amber eyes made promises that left her aching all over. For him. For things she dared not even think through.

“I already told you,” she gritted out. “You don’t know me, and you won’t. That’s not part of the deal.”

“I know you.” His gaze dropped to their linked hands, and she was sure she could feel the heat of it, scorching her, leaving marks on her skin. “You are prickly and full of pride. Qualities I recognize and even admire. You’ve sacrificed yourself for your sister, no doubt your mother, too.”

“My mother—” she began fiercely.

“Made her own choices,” he interrupted smoothly. With perfect confidence that she would fall silent, and she did, not even hating herself for that acquiescence as she thought she should. As she knew she would later. “But still, you feel guilty. And so you are here, an angry hen set down amongst the foxes, to get what should have been yours by birth.”

“You are a randy dog and I am a chicken,” she said dryly. “What other residents of the barnyard will we be before this is over, I wonder?”

“You use this attitude and your wit as a shield,” he continued as if she had not spoken. “And sometimes as a weapon. You attack before you can be attacked. And
you do not back down, even when you must know you should. Sometimes retreat is a strategy, Becca.”

“Then feel free to employ it,” she snapped at him. She wanted to squirm in her seat. She wanted to yank back her hand, leap to her feet and bolt for the door. She could lose herself in the city within moments. She could be back in Boston by evening. She and Emily would figure something out. They always did.

But she didn’t move.

“And you are as fascinated by me as I am by you,” he said then, his fingers tracing patterns against hers, his amber eyes pinning her, paralyzing her—reading into her, seeing truths that she knew she’d never be able to take back.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” she whispered, but she didn’t pull her hand from his. She didn’t look away. And she thought her heart was beating so loud that it might drown out the restaurant all around them. The city beyond. The planet.

“I don’t have to flatter myself,” he said softly. Intently. “I have only to look at you.”

And see who?
that cold, suspicious,
rational
part of her brain hissed. And that easily, it broke the spell. Becca yanked her hand from his as if she’d suddenly found it on a red-hot burner. She sat as far back in her chair as she could, though it was not nearly enough space. He seemed so big. As if he was the whole world.

“My mother had no idea how to take care of herself, much less a baby,” she said abruptly, throwing her words out like a lifeline. Theo only watched her.
Waiting,
that small voice warned her.
Lying in wait.
But she could not stop talking. There was that reckless part of her that thought she saw more in him—that thought she saw
him.
“She found men who helped, in one form or another.
Though how helpful any of them were is really open to interpretation.” She sucked in a breath. “Eventually we settled in Boston, where she actually married Emily’s father. He was nice enough. Unless he was drinking.”

Theo shifted in his chair, and Becca found her gaze drawn, inexorably, to the hard muscles in his chest, his toned torso. He was too beautiful. Too lethal. She should not play with fire, not with him. That way lay only ash and regret.

“So eventually she kicked him out and it was just the three of us. We did the best we could.” She shrugged, feeling panicked and resentful suddenly—as if he had forced her to say those things, as if she had not simply offered them up because of the emotional currents between them that she was afraid to examine more closely. “Is that what you wanted to hear? My idyllic, illegitimate youth?”

“So defensive,” he observed. Was that sympathy she saw move through his hypnotic eyes? Or worse—pity? She found the thought unbearable. “You have nothing to be ashamed of.”

“I know that!” Her temper flared, and all those old wounds, scarred over with years of guilt, seemed to hurt all over again. Like they were new. “But my mother was ashamed anyway. She’d had bigger, better plans for herself. And for her daughters. I think that if she’d lived, she would have come to Bradford herself.” She shook her head, and then glared at him. “And she didn’t happen to conveniently resemble anyone. So she would have humiliated herself in front of that little toad of a man,
her brother,
and he would have sneered at her and sent her away. Just because he could.”

That lay there between them for a moment, as heavy as the centerpiece. Becca couldn’t understand why she’d
said that in the first place and why, having said it and knowing it all to be true, she felt as if she’d gone too far. As if she’d blamed Theo unfairly for Bradford’s theoretical behavior. What was the matter with her? If Theo wasn’t guilty of this particular thing, that didn’t mean he was blameless. After all, she was only here because of his Machiavellian little plan, wasn’t she?

“You’re probably right,” Theo said after a moment, in that relentlessly unsentimental way of his. She should have found it brutal. Instead, oddly, she found his honesty far more soothing than any platitudes might have been. “But the fact that Bradford is not much of a human being should hardly matter to you,” he continued. “Why should you care?”

“It doesn’t,” she said, though it did. “I don’t.”

But she had said too much, she realized, as a new silence fell between them, and Theo gestured imperiously for the check. She had said too much, revealed too much, and now she was in exactly the position she had resolved to avoid. He didn’t deserve to know a damned thing about her. He didn’t deserve anything save what he’d paid for.

So why, knowing that, had she opened herself up anyway?

Becca still hadn’t answered that question to her own satisfaction when they arrived back at Theo’s private Manhattan castle. They’d spent the ride back from the restaurant in silence; Theo stretched out in the limo’s expansive backseat tapping away on his BlackBerry while Becca pretended to gaze out the window at the frenetic crowds on the city streets. In truth, she was obsessively going over every detail of their lunch in her head. She couldn’t help but feel that everything had
shifted between them, beneath her feet. That between last night’s series of revelations and today’s unbearable heat, the geography of their arrangement had remade itself. She just couldn’t seem to figure out the map. Or if she’d ceded too much ground without realizing it.

The car glided to a smooth stop at the curb, and Becca jolted in her seat when Theo laid his big, warm hand on her arm.

When she raised her gaze to his, there was amusement in those amber depths. And the same electricity she felt in a white-hot current just beneath her skin. Yet when he spoke, his voice was cool.

“The paparazzi are here,” he said. He inclined his head toward the sidewalk outside the car window, though his eyes never left hers. “Are you ready?”

“How can I possibly know if I’m ready?” she asked with perfect, baffled honesty, blinking. Could anyone be ready for that kind of intrusion? She looked out the thankfully tinted window, swallowing nervously when she saw the scrum of shady-looking men already jostling for position outside the car—already snapping pictures and shouting. One even slapped his hand against the car itself.

“They want a reaction,” Theo said, his voice even. Calm. She jerked her attention away from the chaos in the street and back to him. “The more emotional you are, the better. They will say anything to goad you into the reaction they want.
Anything.
Do you understand?”

He was so at ease. So unperturbed that there were jackals baying out his name, separated from them by only a flimsy bit of steel and tinted glass. Becca felt the panicked fluttering of her heart slow as she looked at him. He was so.
solid.
So sure. As if he could save them both, by the sheer force of his will. As if he were
the anchor in rough seas, and she needed only to hold on to him.

He
wants
this particular storm,
she reminded herself.
He probably called these awful men himself!

But that knowledge didn’t change the fact that when he looked at her like that, as if he knew she was capable of whatever lay before her, she felt as strong as he believed her to be. As if she could do anything at all. Even run this gauntlet.

For him,
a different, treacherous voice whispered, and she was so far gone she did not even shudder in horror. She only ignored it. And forced herself to smile.

“How bad can it be?” she asked lightly. She shook her ponytail back over her shoulder. “No matter what they say, they won’t be talking about me, will they?”

How many times had he watched Larissa navigate these baying hounds? How many times had he marveled—sometimes with more cynicism than admiration, it was true—at her seemingly innate ability to use this kind of attention to serve her purposes, to send the messages she wanted to send or cause the exact sort of commotion she wanted to cause? How many times had he dealt with them himself, and regretted only that
dealing with them
meant giving them some kind of legitimacy?

The Whitneys lived in an endless media glare. The great American celebrity fishbowl. Theo had never questioned that. He had only learned what he could about it, and used that knowledge to his advantage. Larissa had never had to learn it—she had been brought up in it. She had courted the attention she received, and, he’d eventually realized, used the narratives the press spun about her as shorthand for her own life, until it was sometimes uncertain where
the press
ended and
Larissa
began. He had known this, and still, he had merely watched his fiancée perform the intricate steps of this peculiar dance. He had never interfered, not even when they turned on her. Not even when they turned on him, too.