The Replacement Wife (9 page)

She looked down the length of her own body to see his dark head, shockingly black against her own pale skin, his skin shades darker than hers, the contrast seeming to emphasize how much bigger he was, and how strong. He held her hips in his hands and made love to her navel, and then traveled lower, making the fire she’d thought extinguished roar back into life.

She tried to tug at his shoulders, to pull him away from what seemed far too intimate, far too
telling,
somehow—but he refused to budge. He looked up at her, his eyes nearly gold with desire. She could not help the shiver that ran through her then.

“I want you,” she whispered, her hands on him, urging him up. “I want you inside me.”

“So forward,” he chided her, teasingly, as his hands wrapped around her bottom and tilted her hips toward him. “We hardly know each other yet.”

“Theo,” she began, even as that drumbeat began again in her, that demanding passion, thudding out her want, her need. Her hunger.

“Luckily,” he continued, spreading her thighs even wider with his shoulders as he bent between her legs, “I have the perfect remedy.”

And then he leaned down, pressed his mouth against her sex, and tasted her, long and slow and deep.

S
HE CLIMAXED AGAIN
almost immediately, but Theo couldn’t stop. She was irresistible. He felt off balance, intoxicated—lost in her. And he could not get enough of it.

He tasted her, honey and cream, and though his sex was so hard it ached, he could not tear himself away. She moaned out his name, and he liked it. He liked it far too much. He licked into her, making her shudder and moan, and only when her head thrashed back and forth on the bedcover yet again did he roll away to rid himself of his trousers.

She lay before him like a goddess, like a dream. Her breasts were full and perfect, and tasted like a marvel. Her curves intoxicated him, and he could not get enough of her taste, so delicate and female and
Becca.

She met him when he came back to the bed, rising up to kneel before him, and he gloried in the feel of her nakedness against his, finally, and the softness of her belly like satin, cradling the hardest part of him.

He wanted her so much it actually caused him something akin to pain. But he could not think about that now. The late-afternoon light cast shadows all around them, but she still seemed to shine, bright and true, in the middle of it.

God, how he wanted that light. How he wanted
her.

He couldn’t wait any longer. He lifted her into his chest, rolled his hips and thrust deep into her.

She cried out, and her head fell back. She moved to put her legs around his waist and he eased them both back down onto the bed. Only then did he move, thrusting deep inside of her and then out again, testing his length, marveling at the slick, sweet fit.

She was his. She was finally his.

He felt as if he’d been longing for her forever. As if she had been crafted for his hands alone, made to fit him perfectly, her body and his like a lock and key. He could feel the dead bolt click over inside of him. He welcomed it.

And then passion took over. He set a hard, demanding pace, and she met him, her hips rising to meet his, her hands urging him on, her nails digging into his flesh. He bent his head to hers and put his mouth against the slender column of her neck, grazing it with his teeth, making her sob out his name. He rocked against her, feeling her stiffen and hearing her moan, and when she climaxed for the third time, she screamed.

He called out her name, and followed.

Much later, she stirred against him, and he felt himself harden yet again, his length still buried deep inside her.

Her startled laughter was husky, still laced with the passion they’d just spent, the fires they’d banked. It moved over his body like a caress.

“Not possible,” she murmured. “Not even for the great Theo Markou Garcia.”

He grinned, and rolled, so she lay sprawled on top of him, her soft breasts pressed into his chest, her ripe curves his to explore. Watching her expression, he pulled
back until he was almost clear of her entrance, then slowly thrust back in. Teasing. Tantalizing. Building the fire anew.

She sighed, pleasure making her features that much softer, that much prettier.
Mine,
he thought.
All mine.

“I told you,” he said, thrusting into her slowly, so very slowly, and watching her mercurial eyes darken with that same need. “Once is not nearly enough.”

And then he claimed her lush, wanton mouth with his, and lost himself in her.

Again.

The week had passed in a sensual haze, then continued into the next, and when reality intruded once more in the form of the vile Whitney family, Becca was woefully unprepared.

It was almost as if she’d forgotten the reason she was here at all, she reflected as she put the final touches on her evening’s outfit. As if she had just magically appeared in this penthouse, in Theo’s bed, and everything that had brought her here was blurred and opaque. Or perhaps she’d simply wished for that to be true, she thought, facing the unpleasant truth.

Because it was far easier to simply live for the hours she and Theo spent in bed, wrapped around each other, exploring each other’s bodies with a wild passion and a creative flair that made her shiver to think about, even now. Theo was a man who liked to cover all of his bases. He did his research and he was as determined as he was methodical. He was ruthless, focused and as deliciously, sensually demanding in bed as he was when he acted as her personal trainer. All the qualities that made him an overbearing temporary employer made him a phenomenal, masterful lover.

Oh, the things he could do. And did.

“Wake up,” he had ordered her that very morning, his dark voice husky as his hands had streaked over her, as he’d slid deep into her, both waking and arousing her with each deep thrust.

She had burst into flame before she’d remembered where—or who—she was, shattering into pieces all around him.

Becca squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, as that insistent ache pulsed in her core, that same familiar longing welling up in her anew. The more she had him, the more she wanted him, with a hunger that nothing ever seemed to satisfy. That was one more thing she didn’t dare think about. One more item she filed away and vowed she’d look at … later.

But tonight she had to face her demons. Her so-called relatives. Tonight, the rude reality of her presence here could no longer be avoided.

She took a last, long look in the mirror, and squared her shoulders. She knew she looked as she should. Like Larissa. She wore her hair in classic Larissa-style, the pale blond strands swept high in front and then cascading to brush her shoulders. She’d picked a simple pale gold dress that shimmered when she moved, picking up the light and seeming to reflect it, as if she was bottled sunshine. She’d done her makeup to perfection, and she’d even started wearing the contact lenses that made her eyes glow green, like a cat’s. She was as Larissa as she was likely to get.

And still her stomach was clenched tight, like a pretzel. Like an unbreakable knot. She let her hands rest there for a moment, trying to soothe the clenched feeling away.

“We will dine at Whitney House tonight,” Theo had
said over breakfast, that implacable command in his voice. He had not looked up from his computer. It had been as if she had not screamed out his name only a scant half hour before, as if he had not left a mark on her collarbone with his teeth when he’d found his release.

It had been as if they were back to the same place they’d been at the start. So long ago, she’d thought, that at first she hadn’t understood what was happening. And when she’d finally comprehended it, she was surprised at how much it hurt. How deeply it seemed to cut into her.

“I can’t think of anything I would like to do less,” she had said, determined not to show him that he’d struck a blow. Determined, for that matter, not to admit it to herself. She’d lounged in her chair, languid and unconcerned, every inch the pampered little princess she’d been pretending to be for weeks.

She hadn’t much cared for the way he’d looked at her then, his amber gaze something much too close to condemning. Or was it simply that he’d reverted to the all-business, hyperfocused version of himself, that she hadn’t seen in over a week?

“It wasn’t a request,” he’d said softly, his voice brooking no argument.

And that simply, he’d reminded her. Of her place. Of the situation. He had not come out and
said
it. He hadn’t had to
say
anything.

He might as well have dropped her over the side of the penthouse wall, letting her plummet to the Manhattan street so far below. That was how hard Becca had hit the ground.

Wake up, you fool,
she’d mocked herself.
Welcome back to reality.

Because the harsh truth was that he might want her
in his bed. He might groan out her name and murmur words she was afraid to attach too much importance to in the light of day. He might smile at her sometimes as if she was capable of lighting up his world. But most of all, above all things, he wanted her to pretend to be Larissa. Maybe he’d been pretending she was Larissa already, this whole time.

The thought made her sick to her stomach.

But more fool, she, for putting that possibility—that likelihood—out of her mind for even a moment. Much less for all these days and endless nights that blended together and sat on her, in retrospect, like a great weight.

And she was a fool to the end, because even now, she thought as she walked through the soaring rooms of the penthouse, nodding at the driver who waited for her in the foyer—even now she wished he was here instead of meeting her over at the Whitney mansion, wished she could touch him, wished she could feel that inevitable rush and burn that she was beginning to think would always consume her when she saw him. That it was simply the effect Theo had on her.

He had ruined her, she thought with a flash of something too close to despair, and she hadn’t even started the hard part of this charade. At this rate, she’d be lucky to leave in pieces.

Much sooner than she was comfortable with, Becca found herself sitting outside the Whitney mansion, staring up at it from within the depths of the low-slung limousine that had whisked her here from the penthouse’s underground garage—the garage that Theo had deliberately not used the day he’d had them run the paparazzi gauntlet.

Funny how that memory made desolation yawn open
within her tonight, when she hadn’t minded back when it had happened. Quite the opposite—she had understood so completely it had propelled her directly into Theo’s bed, and she had hardly come up for air since.

What had happened to her? She’d known better than to let this happen—she’d known it from the moment he’d strode into that room in the Whitney mansion so long ago now. Her whole body had rioted in warning, aware of the threat he presented. He’d made her display herself for him, he’d ordered her around, and none of that seemed to matter. She could not even work up the appropriate level of outrage now, as she considered her own fall from grace. She had lost herself, she knew. Perhaps forever.

It was the way he looked at her. When she knew he saw
only
her, and it stole her breath and filled her heart. She didn’t have it in her to withstand that look. She didn’t even want to try.

The car came to a stop, snapping her out of her reverie. She climbed out of the car when the driver opened the door, and paused for a moment as she gazed up at the house. It was not an icon of a bygone era by accident. The mansion rose up from Fifth Avenue, a proud ghost of a bygone age, all flamboyant grace and style. Becca eyed the curved bay windows that opened up over the avenue, the balustraded balconies and the dramatic roof that soared high above in a nod to a French château. The house sprawled the length of the block, self-assured and deeply self-satisfied. It looked different at night, more sinister, or perhaps more impressed with itself as the security lights shone up on its elegant facade, each light carefully placed to highlight and dramatize the house’s Gothic appeal.

It was impossible not to feel like the doomed ingenue
marching to her certain end, Becca thought as she made her way up the grand stairs. No matter how very far removed from an ingenue she might have been. Or perhaps it was simply an echo of the last time she’d been in this precise spot. She could hardly remember herself back then, and that was what made her pause in her tracks, right there on the threshold. She looked down at herself, at the elegant dress and the high, fanciful shoes. The luxurious, deep red wrap she’d worn to keep off the night air and the jeweled bag she held in one hand.

A far cry from her ripped-up jeans and battered old hooded sweatshirt, she thought. She had a sudden premonition then—a perfect vision of herself in her old boots, wearing her old clothes, but still with Larissa’s hair and this new way of carrying herself, headed back up to Boston, all alone. Some strange hybrid of her cousin and herself, but all, still, in this same body. She should have rolled her eyes at the image, or smirked it away as she would have done, once. But instead, she felt something like sadness well up from deep within. And she couldn’t allow herself the time or space to figure out why. This was the den of the enemy. This night was going to hurt, one way or another.

There was no time for sadness.

She reached out before she could think better of it and rang the heavy bell.

Anger, she found not ten minutes later, served her far better. It was a weapon. It could be wielded.

She stood in yet another interchangeably elegant room of this offensively spacious palace, holding a glass of perfectly chilled wine from some unspeakably expensive vintage in one hand, and holding on to her temper with everything else she possessed.

“Well,” her aunt Helen said with a sniff, breaking the long and far-from-comfortable silence that had lasted since the moment Becca had been ushered into the room. “The likeness is truly astonishing. There’s no debating that.”

There was no one else in the large, faintly chilly room. Theo and Bradford, Becca imagined grimly, were closeted off somewhere, no doubt comparing their bank balances and ruining lives. That left only the censorious Helen to serve as the welcoming committee. She sat on one of the fussy, stiff and uninviting-looking chairs near the cold stone fireplace, the face that so greatly resembled her mother’s—had Caroline been as coddled and as bitter as this woman—screwed into a disapproving frown.

“One couldn’t really imagine how it was possible,” Helen continued, her voice the precise cadence and pitch to suggest that she was being scrupulously courteous, when in fact, she was not. “After all, when you appeared here last you were in such a wild, unmanageable state.”

“I think by that you mean I looked
poor,”
Becca said smoothly, smiling hard enough to draw blood. Her fingers tightened around the stem of her wineglass, so tight she thought she might snap the glass in two. She loosened her grip. Slightly. “Which I understand, to you, is anyone not in possession of their own private jet and selection of secondary residences. The rest of us simply call that
normal.”

The older woman stared at her, affront written all over her face. She was like all the other women of her particular station, all the other upper-class East Coast women with their lustrous pedigrees and their Seven Sisters degrees, their carefully selected yet never
ostentatious jewelry, and their quiet, pervasive aura of superiority. Her clothes were all understated elegance, her hair carefully bobbed and smooth on either side of her narrow, moderately attractive face. Yet her natural expression, Becca had no doubt, was this very glare she was delivering now, from down the length of her patrician nose.