“It’s a miracle,” Helen said at once, piously, holding her hands in her lap as if she expected the queen to happen by and comment on her posture. “You can’t call it anything else.”
“I don’t care what you call it,” Bradford snapped. He eyed Becca with what she could only describe as loathing. It crawled over her skin, making goose bumps rise up even as her stomach twisted yet again. He waved a hand at Becca. “It means that we can get rid of this mess, and handle things the proper way. The way they should have been handled from the start, without involving outsiders.”
“You’re good at getting rid of messes, aren’t you?” Becca asked him, not knowing she meant to speak—but not doing anything to curtail it, either. “Poor Larissa. She thought she was escaping, and instead she has to wake up and suffer through more of your brand of parenting. She’s the one mess you can’t get rid of, isn’t she?”
“You’re nothing but trash,” Bradford said softly, and his face took on that faux-kindly glow that made him so monstrous, so horrifying. “Trash with my daughter’s face.”
“Watch yourself,” Theo advised him, but Bradford did not so much as look at him, rising to his feet and moving closer to Becca, presumably so she could comprehend fully the whole of his contempt as he glared at her. She glared back, unmoved.
“If it had been up to me, you never would have darkened the door of this house again,” Bradford told her in that same quietly horrible voice. “Nothing gives me greater pleasure than to send you packing without a single cent of the Whitney fortune. Neither you nor your low-class sister deserve a penny of it. Just like your tramp of a mother before you.”
There was, Becca discovered in that moment, a certain liberty in having lost everything—even those things she hadn’t known she could lose in the first place, like her heart. It made her entirely immune to bullies like this man.
“I used to think my mother was the victim here,” she told Bradford, meeting his glare with her own, not in the least bit afraid of him. “But I understand now that she was lucky to escape this place.”
“Yes,” Bradford sneered. “Lucky to live in poverty, passed from one inappropriate man to the next. Lucky to raise up two brats while working herself half to death. Yes, Caroline was lucky.” He laughed. “And you can look forward to being just as lucky, for the rest of your life.”
“Bradford.” Theo’s voice was all steel, all command. “Stop.” But still, the other man gave no sign of hearing him. Or perhaps he simply didn’t care. Neither did she.
“The truth is that I pity you,” Becca told him, leaning in just a little bit, looking him straight in the eye. “You have everything in the world—more than most people could possibly dream of having—and in the end you still have nothing.”
“Enough.” Becca hadn’t even heard Theo move, but then his hands came down on her shoulders and she could feel the way he looked at Bradford from behind her. “This is hardly the time for this kind of display,” he snapped.
“Get that creature out of my house,” Bradford hissed back, furious.
Theo moved so he was between Becca and Bradford, and Becca appreciated the implied chivalry of it even if she would have preferred to continue sniping at Bradford up close. It was much too satisfying—no doubt indicative of yet another character flaw. But it was far better to fight with a toad like Bradford than to think about everything she’d lost tonight. Far better to pretend she was bulletproof and everything just bounced right off her.
Theo moved again, nearer to Bradford, and it brought her closer to Larissa’s door. She couldn’t help glancing over. The sea of doctors parted, and for a long moment, a heartbeat and then another, Becca locked eyes with the real Larissa. They stared at each other until the doctors closed in again, and Becca turned away.
It shook her to the bone.
These were real people, she reminded herself, not puppets in some ancient feud. People—and one of those people was that poor woman on the bed in there, who deserved more than this depressing little show just inches from where she’d become a medical miracle. It was time for Becca to remember who she’d been back when she was real. It was time to go.
“You don’t have to tell me twice,” she told Bradford. She even smiled. “I’m happy to be rid of you, once and for all.” She raised her brows at him, challenging him. Daring him to insult her further, to push her one more time. “And the next time you need a doppelgänger for one of your Byzantine little plots, I’m busy.”
Bradford began to speak, but some swift motion by Theo cut him off. Becca let her gaze sweep over Helen, who stared back at her, all haughty affront, and she told herself it was just as well. She knew how to handle rejection. She knew how to roll with the same old punches she’d been dodging her whole life. If she wished that Helen had been as across-the-board repulsive as Bradford had, well, that was only because she was still so weak somewhere deep inside, where she would always be that not-good-enough girl. Where she wondered sometimes if she would ever feel anything but illegitimate. Helen’s small moment of near kindness hurt far more than any of Bradford’s tirades.
But she would lock that away, too. With everything else she now had to forget.
She didn’t bother looking at Bradford again, and she didn’t dare to so much as glance at Theo. Not directly. If she did, she suspected she would never leave, and he was not hers. He had never been hers. She should never have let herself imagine that he could be.
So she simply walked out the door.
Theo caught up with her again where he had once long ago, in the great entryway. When Becca had been someone else. She hardly remembered who.
“Stop,” he said, his voice ringing out, ringing in her, making her stop in her tracks just as she had so long before. Just as she always would, she suspected. “Please,” he added, and she wondered that he even knew the word.
“There is no point in further, unpleasant conversations,” she said. She could feel him as he closed the space between them, coming up behind her. She could sense the heat of him, the height and the power. Her eyes drifted closed—but she snapped them back open. This was no time for dreams about what could have been. It was long past time for reality.
“Bradford is an ass,” Theo said darkly. He moved around to face her, and it hurt her to see the set of his jaw, the tense way he held himself. “Obviously, you’ll receive the money you would have collected had you met with Van Housen tonight, as planned. No one could have foreseen … this.”
“'Met’ with him,” she murmured, trying to sound arch, amused. Yet she could barely manage anything much beyond shell-shocked. “That sounds so. sanitized.”
“I don’t think I could have let you go through with it,” he said, his gaze searching hers, his tone urgent. “When it came right down to it, I don’t think I could have borne it.”
She shook her head at him. There were so many things she could have said, that she wanted to say, but she couldn’t allow herself such luxuries. She would only regret them later.
“We’ll never know,” she said, with a shrug. His mouth tightened, and his eyes grew hard. He looked away—as if he fought for control—and when he met her gaze again he was cold, in control.
She hated it.
“You executed your part of the contract flawlessly,” he said, every inch the dispassionate CEO. “Of course you will receive what you were promised, no matter what tantrums Bradford throws.”
“I don’t care!” she threw at him, slashing her hand in the air—but he reached out and caught it in his. The sudden contact startled her into silence. It was too much. Too hot. Too right. Too … all the things it was not, all the things it could not ever be.
“You will.” His voice was so low. Too low. It made her … wish for things she couldn’t let herself want. “Perhaps not now. But you will.”
She pulled her hand from his, feeling a strange heat move through her, knowing she flushed bright with it but not able to stop it. Just as she was unable to push past him and walk away,
as she knew she should.
The moment seemed to grow, to echo, to consume them both. There was nothing in the world but his fierce, beloved face, and those arresting, impossibly amber eyes. There was nothing but the things they could not say, spinning between them, louder and louder with each breath.
“I know I should not ask this.” he began, as if the words hurt him.
“Then do not ask it,” she replied, firmly, desperately, though there was more of her than she wanted to admit that wanted him to ask it anyway. Whatever it was. Because if he asked, how could she resist? How would she be able to tear herself away? It was killing her already and she hadn’t even gone yet.
He whispered her name, and her heart—so broken already, so battered—crumbled into dust.
But she could see herself in the great mirror that graced the near wall, and she did not even look like herself. She looked like Larissa, and the real Larissa was awake—which meant that Becca had no idea, anymore, who she was. How could she? She’d gotten lost in this maze of a life, all mirrors and reflections and charades, for far too long. She had started to believe she belonged here. She had even started to want to belong here.
And because she loved this man, she had been prepared to walk into that club and perform whatever act was necessary to make him happy. She would have to live with that truth, with what that said about her and about what parts of herself she was willing to sacrifice for no very good reason. But she didn’t have to compound the error.
She’d been settling for less her whole life, and calling it a victory. She couldn’t do that any longer. She wouldn’t. Not when she’d let herself imagine how it would be if she wasn’t the secondhand girl, the throw-away girl. Not when she’d felt what it might be like to be the one finally chosen. It might have been an illusion, but it had changed her. For good.
And much as she wanted to be close to him, no matter what, she couldn’t go back from that. She couldn’t un-know it. Which meant that for once in her life, she couldn’t allow herself to settle. Not even if that meant keeping him somehow.
“I deserve more than the scraps from the Whitney family’s table,” she said, surprised to hear that her voice was clear. Even proud. No matter how much she shook inside. “I deserve more than to wonder who you really see when you look at me—or who you want to see.” She heard his muttered oath, but continued. “I deserve more than the little you have to give, the little that isn’t focused on what you really love.”
“I don’t love her.” His voice was stark. Sure.
“I was going to say power.” She could not let herself react to what he’d said. She could not let it matter. “Money. Wealth. All those things you dreamed of back in Miami.” She searched his face. “I understand it, but I deserve more, Theo. I deserve better.”
“Becca.” He looked so lost that it made her waver for a moment.
One last time, she forced herself to be strong—stronger than she should ever have had to be. She leaned in close, letting his scent tease at her, and she pressed a single kiss to his lean, hard jaw. And then, somehow, she pulled away.
“Please,” he whispered fiercely, his hands in fists at his side, his big body rigid and almost quivering with tension.
“Goodbye, Theo,” she whispered back, her throat tight with the tears she fought to keep at bay.
And then she walked away from him, from the only man she’d ever loved, toward whatever future awaited her without him. But at least, this once, she hadn’t settled for what she could get. It had to be better to hold out for what she really wanted—for what she deserved.
It just had to be.
It was two days, perhaps three—he’d long since lost track of time—when Theo finally found himself the single visitor in Larissa’s room. No doctors. No hovering Whitneys. Just him and the woman he was still engaged to marry. The woman he’d written off as dead, who as far as he was concerned had come back to life from the grave.
He hardly knew how to feel about that. Not that he could feel much of anything. He’d been numb ever since Becca had walked away from him, letting the grand door of the Whitney mansion slam shut behind her, severing whatever had been between them. Numb. He supposed that was better than what lurked beneath it.
And now he was the man who sat at the bedside of his convalescent fiancée, thinking of another woman.
So far from the man he’d thought he’d be, he reflected darkly, with no little self-loathing. So very far from the man he should have been.
She stirred, and woke, and Theo was still surprised that she was not Becca. That she was nothing like Becca at all. How had he convinced himself that they were similar? It wasn’t just that Larissa was so pale, so fragile-looking. It was that the whole bright thrust of Becca’s personality simply … wasn’t there. It was like looking at a black-and-white photograph when he’d grown so used to color.
“Am I hallucinating?” Larissa asked, her voice raspy, as if from a rough night in a bar. Theo wondered that his mind went there, directly, when he knew perfectly well it was from the tubes that had kept her alive. Or perhaps he shouldn’t wonder. She’d been in one of those bars before her collapse, hadn’t she? It would behoove him to remember that she was still Larissa, no matter how small and wan she looked today.
“I can’t imagine why you would hallucinate me,” he said. She smiled, and he saw the Larissa he’d liked the most peek out of her eyes for a moment. The Larissa he’d fantasized would be the one he’d marry, because he’d thought that was the real Larissa. The one she kept so deep inside, so locked away, that he doubted many people saw glimpses of her at all.
“Out there,” she said, nodding toward the outer room. She frowned in confusion. “I thought … I thought I saw.”
“You weren’t hallucinating,” he said quietly.
She looked at him for a long moment, her green eyes serious—very nearly contemplative—and all he could think was that she was a stranger to him. That he had known her for years and he’d never known her at all. He did not elaborate further, and she did not ask.
“Thank you,” she said. “You’ve always been honest with me.”
That pricked at his conscience, though he knew she could not mean it to do so.
She sat up slowly, awkwardly, but she waved him away when he moved to help, and eventually she propped herself up against her pillows, her breath coming hard. He should feel more, he thought, despairing of himself. He should feel more for her than pity.
“You should rest,” he said. “You’ll need all your strength to recover.”
“I forgot about the will,” she said, and coughed a little bit. “My father reminded me.” She sighed, and looked at her hands, and Theo had no trouble imagining how unpleasant that conversation must have been.
“Don’t worry about your father,” he said.
“I’m sorry.” She shook her head. “It’s not that I wanted to hurt you. I just wanted to make him … something. Anything. I don’t know.”
“We don’t have to talk about this,” Theo said gruffly. He could not remember the last time Larissa had spoken to him like this. No games, no ulterior motives. No tests. There was a time when it would have changed his whole world, when it would have filled him with hope and joy. It would have meant that he’d finally gotten precisely where he’d always wanted to go.
So why did he feel so empty? But he knew.
“We do,” she said. She pushed her pale hair back from her face, showing her high cheekbones that made him wish she was Becca, her mouth that was not quite Becca’s. And when she spoke, it was with her voice that was not Becca’s at all. “I’ll change the will. I’ll sign it all over to you.” She took a quick breath. “And I’ll marry you. I won’t.” She floundered for a moment, then her shoulders sank, and her face cleared of all expression. “I won’t resist anymore.” She looked at him then, her gaze more sad than anything else. “I promise.”
He should have been jubilant. He should have felt some hint of triumph, of victory. Because he b
elieved her. Whatever she’d just been through had changed her somehow, at least so far—and he could see it. He believed it. Which meant that she’d just offered him everything he’d ever wanted on a silver platter. It was his for the taking.
But everything he’d ever wanted didn’t mean the same things to him that it had once.
“Keep your shares,” he said. Her eyes flew to his.
“But—”
“Keep them,” he said. “They’re your birthright.”
“I don’t care about my birthright,” she told him. “I really don’t.”
“But it’s yours just the same,” he said gently. “And maybe someday you’ll think that the least you deserve for all the trouble of surviving this family is a stake in it all. You never know.”
The Replacement Wife Page 15