And she, ever the moth to the most convenient and most disastrous flame, wherever it might burn and the more destructive the better, had come running. How could she explain that away?
He’d kissed her again before he’d left—a hard, branding press of his clever mouth to hers while his large hand had covered the nape of her neck. Keeping her still, and easy to plunder. Claiming her, she’d thought with some mix of panic and dizzy desire—marking his territory. And then he’d stalked off into the wet night with a muttered curse as if he hadn’t meant to do that, leaving her to shake and shudder in his wake.
Damn him.
The trouble with islands was that there was no running away, she’d thought then, and thought again now as she sat, paralyzed, in the front seat of a rented Dodge Calibre that smelled of old pine deodorizer and the stale air of the incompetent defroster. And Larissa had absolutely no doubt that should she fail to appear at Jack’s table tonight as he wished, as he had commanded, he would come find her. She’d decided it would be better to walk knowingly into his lair than let him trap her once again in hers.
But who was she kidding? What kind of story was she trying to sell herself? She let out a slight, bitter laugh.
She had promised not to lie to herself, no matter what. No matter the provocation. No matter that it would be so much easier than the inevitably painful truth. A great wave of shame, her now-familiar companion, crashed through her then, making her breath catch in her throat as her stomach knotted hard, and heat speared the back of her eyes. She was so damnably weak. Didn’t she prove it to herself again and again and again?
She had been on the run for months—hiding from her past, hiding from herself. From her old ways and her old friends, her dirty, shameful history. And she’d been so proud of herself—or she’d been getting there. Look at me, nowhere near Manhattan, barely recognizable any longer, she’d thought to herself, running her hands through the short black hair that still surprised her—that she sometimes dreamed was still long, blond and lustrous. Look at my self-imposed exile, my willingness to disguise myself. I can be new, different. I can change.
She’d been the closest she’d ever come to real. That was what she’d been thinking as she’d stared out at the Maine storm, the dangerous, exhilaratingly powerful sea. She’d felt battered and bruised, and undoubtedly shaky—but for the first time, she’d also felt truly alive.
And then Jack Sutton had sauntered into that bar, temptation in perfect male form, the ultimate symbol of her old life and her dissolute past—and eight months of committed soul-searching disappeared. Ash and smoke, as if they had never happened. As if she’d learned nothing.
How could she have so little self-control, even now? Despair and something else, something uglier, flooded through her. How could she ignore everything she knew, everything she was only beginning to admit she needed, for a man who had never done anything but make her act like the worst version of herself?
How could she possibly justify her presence here tonight? How was it anything but the worst kind of backsliding into the very pit she’d been so determined to climb her way out of? Her very first test, and she’d already failed it with flying colors.
This is who you are, that little voice, her father’s voice, whispered deep inside of her—so harsh and, she feared, so true. This is what you do. Fail. Disappoint. And then fail again.
She pressed her fingers to her mouth, as if pushing back the small sob that escaped her lips. She didn’t have to do this. She threw the car into reverse—but even as she did it, before she could even lift her foot from the brake pedal, the grand doors of Scatteree Pines swung open, spilling light out across the drive. Larissa froze.
Jack stood there, tall and imposing in the great entry-way, his dark eyes immediately slamming into hers through the windshield, across the storm. Connecting hard with that shaky part of her where her spine should have been. Making her shiver with a dizzying sense of helplessness. With the inevitability of this. With her own terrible need that she hardly understood.
She couldn’t seem to breathe. Her heart was like a cannonball, ricocheting against her ribs. She knew she needed to leave. She knew it. Before she let the tears fall, let the wildness within her out of its cage. Before she betrayed herself even further than she already had.
But she parked the car instead. She turned the key in the ignition, and the engine clicked off.
She took one breath, and then another, and still Jack watched her. As if he had every confidence in the world that she would do exactly what he wanted her do. As if it were a foregone conclusion.
And she hated herself, because she did it.
She climbed out of the car slowly, and took a deep breath, pulling the clean, damp air deep into her lungs. She let her legs ease into holding her there, and made sure they’d support her. The rain had let up for the moment, though the wind was still fierce, raging all around—smelling of the sea and the cold, crisp inevitability of the coming winter. She could smell the tang of wood smoke and wet pine, the rich earth of the forest and the wild, coarse salt of the ocean. The night was dark and dense, like a velvet fist, though the great house before her blazed with light. She preferred the darkness, she thought, helplessly. She was so very tired of finding ways to disappear in the glare of all those spotlights.
Jack stood there, silently watching her, compelling her, and she couldn’t tell if he was dark or light, or what he would do to her. What she would do. What she had already done by coming here, by climbing out of the car, by putting all of this into motion. Something in her felt drawn to him, called to him, on some deep, primitive level that hummed in her bones—but she knew better than to trust the things she wanted. They had only ever hurt her.
She told herself it was the deep, northern chill, the wet and windy fall storm, that made her tremble, made her feel so alive, so exhilarated. So scared. So unsure of everything, even the familiar tools she’d always used to hide so easily in plain sight, that she found so hard to summon now, when she needed them the most. It’s only the cold, she thought.
But then Jack smiled at her, that peremptory, knowing curve of his beautiful mouth, and she knew better.
He wanted flippancy and fakeness, his preferred version of That Shallow Larissa Whitney, and so that was what she gave him, however much it cost her. She told herself she would deal with it later. She pulled in a deep breath and then breezed up the steps toward him, keeping her face as bland as it could be, pulling that persona around her like a familiar old cloak.
“No staff?” she asked mildly, sweeping past him as if she was dripping in couture and trailed by a red carpet entourage instead of garbed in a pair of worn jeans and a turtleneck sweater, the better to wrap her traitorous body away from his beguiling, incendiary touch. Her boots came up to her knees and she was not in the least afraid to kick him with them, she told herself. In fact, she wanted to kick him. “I’m shocked to the core. I thought scions of such great families preferred to be waited upon, lest they forget their own greatness for even a moment.”
“You would know more about that than I would,” Jack said dryly. But his gaze locked to hers, and it made the world seem to tilt. Larissa looked away, shaken. It had never been so difficult to keep up her act before. Not even with him.
He had exchanged the T-shirt for a sweater in a rich burgundy cashmere that her fingers itched to touch, though his jeans remained the same, slung low on his narrow hips and clinging to his hard thighs like a pliant lover. Yet somehow, surrounded by this house, this unmistakable marker of who he really was, there was no possibility of pretending there was anything everyday about him. Larissa swallowed, and wordlessly handed him her heavy black peacoat and charcoal-gray scarf when he gestured for them, draping them over his arm as if he was a butler. Some part of her preferred the fantasy version of this man that she’d seen earlier in battered old jeans and work boots, as if he was just another local fisherman. As if that—or anything—could make him more palatable.
“I
watched you sit out there in your car,” he said, some kind of mockery in his voice, and something else, something darker, making his eyes gleam. “You looked …” He didn’t finish the sentence. Larissa forced herself to smile, to be mysterious and unknowable. Empty, as he would expect. “Did you change your mind?”
“About what?” she asked idly. “Dinner?”
“That, too,” he said. He disposed of her coat and then indicated that she should follow him, leading the way down a hallway only intermittently lit. Larissa concentrated on the house itself—far better, far safer that than the man who moved with such easy self-assurance in front of her, who strode ahead without glancing around, arrogantly expecting her to follow.
Which, of course, she did. Though she could not bring herself to focus on that grave personal failing—not just then. She looked at the house instead.
It was the particular conceit of a certain kind of New Englander, she knew, to treat their own vast wealth like some kind of embarrassing, potentially contagious disease. They kept their houses cold, the rugs threadbare. They drove depressingly practical cars into states of disrepair, found the slightest displays of wealth repulsive in the extreme, and went out of their way to avoid drawing attention to themselves in any capacity. The Puritan work ethic still ran like steel in their blue-blooded veins. Unlike many of Larissa’s socialite peers, their philanthropic gestures were never empty. The Endicott family—particularly Jack’s forbidding and formidable grandfather, she knew, as everyone knew—was precisely this sort of anti-aristocrat.
But despite all that, there was nothing at all shabby about the Endicott house. It was simply, quietly comfortable, on every level. The wealth of the Endicott family was evident everywhere, yet never overt. It was in the way the furniture was so well-maintained, despite the salt in the air and the fact that a summer house could not possibly see as much use as a primary residence. It was clear in the well-appointed ease of the sitting room Jack led her into, the quiet excellence that seemed to perfume the air.
It was as if people really lived here, she thought, maybe even a real family—and then she told herself she was being fanciful. A house was a house, and Jack was no different from anyone else in their empty little plastic-fishbowl world. There was no reason she ought to feel flushed with some kind of deep, pointless yearning for things that could not exist. Not for people like them.
She told herself it was only the fire, cheerful and bright, that warmed the room and took the edge off the night’s chill. She felt unsteady—awkward—so she moved to the sofa and lowered herself onto it, assuming as languid a pose as she could without sliding off. Yet another one of her many skills. She should thank him for allowing her to showcase them all.
“Drink?” Jack was already moving toward the bar in the corner.
“By all means, anesthetize yourself,” she said coolly. “I prefer a clear head while making huge mistakes.”
Jack laughed, and ice cubes rattled against crystal. “Since when?”
She could only take that hit, which she’d walked right in to, and pretend it didn’t sting.
“It’s a recent affectation,” she replied after a moment. “Didn’t you rush to remind me that I just spent time in rehab?”
He threw her a dark, shrewd look. “Are you suggesting you took any of that seriously?” he asked, his voice too even. “You?”
Because that would be impossible, she thought bitterly. Larissa Whitney could never change. She would never want it, she could never do it even if she did want it, and—more to the point—no one would let her try. Why did she keep telling herself otherwise?
“I don’t see why you’d bother,” he continued far too easily, though when he turned, a tumbler of amber liquid in his hand, there was that dangerous light in his cool brown eyes.
“Maybe I’m following in your footsteps,” she said, forcing herself not to look away. Forcing herself to raise her brows in challenge. “Maybe I’m refashioning myself, rehabilitating my tarnished image and starting all over. Brand-new. Just like you.”
“I don’t see why,” he said, with an insulting flash of irritation in his gaze, as if he could not possibly imagine that anything she’d just said could have the slightest shred of truth in it. She was too far gone. Too lost.
She thought the same thing often enough, but Larissa found that when he concurred, she didn’t like it. Not at all. It made something itchy and hard move through her, kicking the despair out of the way.
“Yes, well,” she murmured, hating him—for a searing moment, even more than she hated herself. “There’s a great deal you don’t see, isn’t there?”
He looked at her for a long moment. The tension between them pulled tight, crushing the air out of the room, out of her lungs. He didn’t cross to her—but then, he didn’t have to. He only kept that cool, too-astute gaze on her, and Larissa had to fight to keep all her rolling, storming emotions inside, locked away.
“I think I see all too clearly,” he said. “You need a new, appropriate fiancé and you think you can manipulate me into doing your bidding. Why not? You’re good at it, and we both know you’ve done it before.”
There was no hint of heat now. There was only that cool assessment, that shattering calm. This, Larissa realized in a kind of panic, was the man he had become in the past five years. Perhaps the man he had always been. And he was not in the least bit blind.
“Did I manipulate you that weekend?” she managed to ask. She thrust aside any notion of Jack Sutton as her fiancé. It was too … much. She made herself smile, as if she felt cocky and amused. “I only remember leaving.”
Something moved across his face then, but still, he only gazed at her for another long breath. She felt that shaking deep inside her, as if her very foundations stuttered when he was near.
“I will never do anything that might shake my grandfather’s faith in me,” he said and then smirked. “Tenuous as that faith may be, given the way I used to behave. It took me far too long to be the man I should have been, and I won’t give him reason to doubt it. Do you understand me?”
She thought she understood him all too well. It made her feel sick. Despair and shame and a hard kick of temper collided inside her, knotting her stomach.
“Like, for example, if you were seen with the likes of me,” she forced herself to say, amazed at how clear her voice was, at how calm she managed to sound. “That would soil you beyond redemption, surely.”
He only watched her for a moment, as if he was waiting for a certain reaction. A temper tantrum? Something violent and shocking? Or perhaps he thought she might simply roll her eyes and shrug it off? Make some light little remark—make it flirtatious and somehow safe? Or perhaps all of the above?
“I’m sorry if that hurts your feelings,” he said, in the way men did when they were not, in fact, the least bit apologetic. When they were only sorry that you hadn’t genuflected in gratitude as they eviscerated you. “But it’s the simple truth. You won’t get what you want from me, Larissa. Not tonight, not ever. No matter what happens.”
“What is it you think I want?” she asked, her voice a bare thread of sound. “And what do you think I’m willing to do to get it?”
And Jack only smiled, those dark eyes burning into her, the heat between them unmistakable. He stood there, so impossibly beautiful and so cruel, so confident that he could insult her like this, that she thought so little of herself that she would take it. That she would even use her body to try to sway him to her side—because he believed this was all some grand scheme of hers. That she was as obsessed with fortunes and spread sheets and inheritances as her family was—as he was.
That she would prostitute herself for it.
Another flash of temper ignited in her, setting off a chain—a wildfire. She had to take a breath to keep from letting it out in a scream of fury. At him, for believing such a thing. At herself, for having lived the kind of life that allowed for that impression.
She had never really gotten mad before, not rea
lly. She had always made certain to be too numb for that kind of thing. She’d always pushed unpleasant emotions off into other things—hidden them, or translated them into some other behavior, or acted them out in some other, inappropriate way.
But she wasn’t that person anymore, no matter what Jack Sutton seemed to think. She wasn’t. She wouldn’t be.
There was something freeing, she thought in some detached part of her brain, that she could be this angry at this man right here, right now, in this moment. Surely that was progress, however scraped raw she felt.
But she knew, on some deep level, that simply screaming at him was not the answer. He would only see it as some kind of confirmation. So she forced herself to take a breath, and then she bared her teeth at him, not her pretty little public smile at all.
“I don’t see the point of this conversation,” she said. “If you’re not going to play, why get in the game at all?”
“I want to see how far you’ll go,” he said at once—too quickly, she thought. His dark eyes were condemning now. His mouth twisted. “I want to see just how little shame you really have, Larissa.”
God, how she hated him. What a hypocrite he was. As if his own past didn’t look remarkably like her own! But if he wanted to play a game of chicken, she could do that, too. Because she knew that he was no more in control of the electricity sizzling between them than she was. She remembered that, if nothing else. And clearly he remembered it, too, or why else would he have brought her here to punish her?
He wasn’t the only one who could call a bluff.
She stood then, slowly. Sinuously. Making sure his eyes tracked her every move—and smiling when they did.
“I’m shameless,” she told him huskily, meeting his gaze. “But you know that already.”
Heiress Behind the Headlines Page 5