He’d driven into the village without further comment, though she’d been able to feel the ever-present tension that simmered beneath the silence, and he had led her to her room in the attic of the small inn. She’d walked in her door, looked around the cheerful little room, and had had the sudden, unreasonably terrifying suspicion that he was going to leave her. Just that easily, she’d thought, and while she was still too disarmed from his lovemaking to do anything but stand there and watch him do it.
And it would be no more than what she deserved, she’d told herself sternly then, for being such a damned fool where this man was concerned. How did you think this would end? she’d asked herself incredulously.
“Pack your things,” he’d said after a long, too-quiet moment, his brown eyes cool again, once more unreadable. That strange tension had seemed to pull tight then, cinching her around the chest and waist like a particularly vicious corset. But she’d forced herself to breathe. Somehow.
“Has the ferry come?” she’d asked, proud of the way her voice remained steady, calm. As if she hadn’t been able to muster up the strength to care. As if nothing that had been about to happen could possibly affect her one way or the other. As if she couldn’t still feel the way he’d moved between her legs, so powerful, so devastating. “Are you tossing me off your island, just as you promised?”
She hadn’t liked the way he’d looked at her then, a certain assessment moving through those far-too-discerning eyes, across that fascinating face. His head had tilted slightly to one side as he’d regarded her, as if she was a problem he planned to solve. He’d been the very picture of powerful indolence, one shoulder propped against the door as if he was completely relaxed, but she’d known better than to believe it. She’d certainly known better than to relax her own guard.
“Is that what you want?” he’d asked, his voice, she’d thought, carefully blank. She’d wanted that to mean things it couldn’t. She’d wanted that caution to indicate some great, hidden wealth of emotion. She’d wanted too much, as usual. “The next ferry to safety and sanity?”
She’d laughed slightly, defensively, wrapping her arms around herself and not caring what he might read into it. She’d tried not to notice that she was still wearing one of the bulky sweaters he’d given her, telling her they had been his when he was a boy. She’d forbidden herself from remembering what Jack had been like way back when, so lean and young and bathed in effortless gold. Wearing his old clothes, she’d chastised herself then, should feel like nothing more than a convenience. Not like some kind of connection.
“I was under the impression it went to Bar Harbor,” she’d said dryly. “Are safety and sanity separate stops along the same route?”
He’d only watched her for another moment, but the fact he’d stayed so still—like some kind of deadly predator moments before the attack—had made her pulse pound in her temples, her neck, her wrists.
“I’m beginning to understand this little act of yours,” he’d said, in that suspiciously casual tone that she’d realized, belatedly, was Jack at his most lethal. She’d felt a trickle of something like foreboding ease down her back. “You answer every question with another question, never letting anyone suspect your actual feelings or wishes. And the world takes it at face value, don’t they? No one ever talks about how quick you must be, how agile, to do this so often and so well.”
She’d hated him in that moment—hated the way he’d looked at her, as if he’d been able to read her like a particularly simple children’s book. As if she’d telegraphed her every thought to him and he was lazily dissecting each and every one of them.
“No one talks about you much at all,” she’d replied with sweet, false sincerity. “Not anymore. The perils of becoming tediously domesticated when you used to be the Jack Endicott Sutton.”
His dark eyes had narrowed, and she’d thought he’d tensed, but if he had, he’d quickly suppressed it. He’d still lounged there against the door, dominating the room without even fully entering it. She’d had that same thought yet again: that he was far too dangerous a game to play. And yet she hadn’t moved.
“You deflect and redirect,” he’d said softly, as if he’d been summarizing her. Studying her. “You do it every time the topic strays anywhere near something that might require you to express a want, a desire. You’re careful only to react, never to act.” His brown eyes had seemed, once again, to tear into her. To burn her from the inside out. “Why?” he’d asked in that same quiet way, much worse than the seething anger she’d sensed in him that first night in that same place.
She shouldn’t have felt that surge of panic—less in response to what he’d said than to her own suicidal urge to confide in him. She’d been appalled anew at her own capacity for self-delusion.
“You tell me,” she’d said. She’d shrugged, as if deeply bored. “I thought I was trying to trap you into being my brand-new fiancé. Is this not the best way to do that? Are you not beguiled?”
“Of course,” he’d said, his voice moving through her like a blow, contemptuous and cold. She’d managed not to react to it, somehow. “Whitney Media and your fortune. How could I forget it for a moment?”
Something hard had seemed to wrap around her then, and Larissa had had to fight off a new, darker suspicion. Why was he so interested in Whitney Media? Why did he keep bringing it up? Was he just like all the rest, even Theo—who would do anything to get their hands on her shares? Not that it mattered, she’d told herself, though something inside her had spasmed around a sharp pain. She’d certainly grown used to that, hadn’t she?
“If you want me to leave, Jack,” she’d drawled, “you can just say so. You don’t have to conduct a highly unnecessary psychological excavation of my inner demons.” She’d shuddered theatrically. “That would be a full-time job, let me assure you. And this is your vacation home, after all.”
His gaze had darkened and narrowed still further, but he’d only watched her for a long, uncomfortable moment. Larissa had had to fight to remain calm, to appear unruffled, when her body had reacted to his intense, focused attention as if it had been positive. Sexual.
She had despaired of herself. Again.
“What if I want you to stay?” he’d asked, that brown gaze far too knowing, and she’d had to fight the swell of relief—and something else, something far more frightening and far more threatening that she’d refused to acknowledge—that had threatened to take her knees out from beneath her.
“It’s hard to believe you’re the same man who handcuffed me to his bed,” she’d said when she could trust herself to speak. “I’d expect a little more command and mastery in situations like these, and a little less of the leading questions and melodramatic character sketches. You either want me to stay or you don’t.”
“Nothing with you is ever so cut-and-dried, Larissa,” he’d said, straightening from the door. She shouldn’t have felt that simple movement as if it was electric—as if it had lit up the whole room. And her. Always her, from the inside out.
“Whereas your behavior is transparent?” she’d asked, ignoring her physical reaction to him—pretending it hadn’t been happening. She’d laughed derisively. “Please, Jack. You’re about as transparent as a swamp.”
“I want you to pack up your things, get in the car and get your pretty little ass back to my house and into my bed,” he’d said in a deliberate, too-even voice that hit her like a punch of blistering heat.
His eyes had been dark again with that same all-consuming passion that nothing seemed to extinguish. She’d wondered helplessly if anything ever could. He’d moved closer, until his chest was just a whisper away from her, and her breath had caught. She hadn’t been sure if she’d cared what he’d wanted—what he’d been after. And he’d known it. She’d seen it.
He smirked then, daring her. Again. “Is that transparent enough for you?”
Whether or not it had been transparent, Larissa thought now—curled up on one of the absurdly comfortable sofas in the Scatt
eree Pines sitting room with a butter-soft, emerald-green throw tucked around her to ward off the evening chill—it had certainly been effective. She lost track of days when she was with him—when she was lost in him. And she was, quite obviously, completely lost. She had left the inn several days before, at his command, and had hardly thought about what staying here, in this house, meant for her. What it was likely to do to her. Would she lose track of herself, too? Or was it already too late?
She was afraid she already knew the answer to that. She just didn’t want to know it. Didn’t want to admit it. It was as if his touch had done more than teach her things she hadn’t known about her body’s desires, her own capacity for feeling. It had taught her how to let herself hope, too. That terrified her most of all.
She could hear him out in the hallway, his voice clipped if unfailingly polite, and knew he was talking to his perpetually disapproving grandfather. She recognized the tone of voice he used. She was known to employ a similar one, though she was historically far less courteous, when speaking to her own father.
The thought of Bradford was unwelcome and chilling. Larissa pulled the throw closer around her body, trying to ward off the effect of him from all these hundreds of miles away, as if his very name called down the pitiless beacon of his condemnation, like a laser from on high. He’d left his usual collection of tri-weekly messages on her voice mail over the past two weeks, none of which she’d been able to force herself to listen to. What would be the point? She could recite her own flaws and sins by rote—she didn’t need to listen to her cold, vicious father launch into his favorite litany of the same. Nor did she need to hear more examples of his palpable disapproval and active dislike of her to make her feel small. She could do that all on her own, thank you.
She already spent far too much time thinking about the people she’d hurt with her own self-destructive behavior. Just as she’d spent the past days thinking about how she didn’t seem to feel that restless need here. With Jack. That she could simply … be herself. Bradford was unlikely to help with that fragile, shimmering new feeling.
She knew enough to remain silent when Jack walked into the room. He threw her an inscrutable glance, but did not stop near the couch where she’d curled herself up into a ball. He moved to stand near the fire, picking up the heavy iron poker and using it against the burning logs with more force than was strictly necessary. She didn’t know why that made her long to go to him, to wrap her arms around him and rest her face against his back. As if that might comfort him. As if she was the sort of person who was capable of comforting anyone, much less someone like Jack Sutton.
As if he would let her.
What ideas she was giving herself, the longer she stayed here! She couldn’t see any of this ending any way but badly. Horribly. And yet, even knowing that, she didn’t move. She couldn’t. Not yet, she told herself, ignoring the yawning pit in the depths of her stomach that warned her of what was to come. Not just yet …
Because she’d had a taste of hope—a glimpse of something she hadn’t known she could want, something better than she’d dared imagine—and she couldn’t bear to give it up. She couldn’t bear to give him up.
She was already lost irrevocably, she knew then, with a certain fatalistic sense of the inevitability of it. Perhaps she had been the moment she’d seen him, and she knew she had been the moment his lips had touched hers. She was like a princess in reverse, she thought with a flash of black humor—lost at first kiss, rather than found.
Larissa let her gaze travel down the length of his strong back, marveling anew at the physical perfection he wore so easily, so carelessly, the sweep of clean, athletic lines along with the low-slung jeans he wore like a second skin on this island, where the usual designer wardrobe he was celebrated for in New York City would have seemed fussy, out of place. Here he was as much a part of the land, the great house, as the great pines that towered all around them. He was all lean, smoothly muscled power, danger and desire wrapped in one delicious package. No wonder she could hardly bear to ask herself what his motivations might be. She didn’t want to know. She wanted to stay here, out of time and place, forever.
“I hope you gave your grandfather my respects,” she said, looking back down at her magazine when he turned toward her, careful to veil any emotion she might inadvertently show him. She risked another glance when she was sure she’d controlled it. “I haven’t seen him in years.”
Something unpleasant flashed in his eyes then. His mouth twisted, and she felt the bottom of her stomach fall away.
“Is that your endgame, Larissa?” he asked sharply, his voice like a lash. “Is this some extended, desperate attempt to get your hooks into my grandfather? I suppose I should have seen that coming.”
She felt as if he’d slapped her, and hard. She had to call on all her years of burying her reactions, her emotions, to contain herself. To keep from breathing heavily—from registering the body blow. It was so unlike her to forget herself so completely, to leave herself so wide open. To forget all the things he’d accused her of doing, of planning, of wanting. Had she really thought he’d forgotten all that? His bone-deep mistrust of her, his sneering belief in her ulterior motives? Just because of their sexual chemistry?
She remembered it now. In stark detail.
“I am to marry,” Jack said then, abrupt and cold. “Soon. My grandfather has selected a handful of suitable candidates, and he expects me to pick one of them to do honor to our family name. None of them are you. So I suppose he’s the next logical choice, isn’t he?”
Larissa thought her heart might tear itself into pieces. For long moments, she couldn’t move. Much less breathe.
He had called her a whore, and then she had slept with him. Repeatedly. What did that make her? Why was she surprised that he thought exactly that? She’d practically ensured that he would think nothing else, so carried away was she with these intense feelings; she’d lost her mind completely. Her stomach knotted hard, then twisted ruthlessly, and for a beat of her heart, then the next, she thought she might be sick. But somehow, she managed to swallow it down, lock it away. Somehow she kept the angry, appalled tears from spilling out and shaming her even further.
If this was what it was like to feel, she thought bitterly, she’d been much better off keeping herself completely and totally numb. For years.
And still she raised her brows at him, and forced herself to lounge back against the sofa’s cushions, as if she was the very personification of languid. As if she was some kind of ancient, reclining empress. She told herself she was furious with him, but she knew better. Jack thought exactly what she’d wanted him—and the entire rest of the world—to think. She’d gone out of her way to make sure they all believed in the Larissa Whitney myth. Hell, she’d believed in it herself for far too long, hadn’t she? And with good reason. It was no one’s fault but her own that everyone—absolutely everyone, from paparazzo to random person on the street to her own father to this man right in front of her—believed what she’d wanted them to believe.
That she enjoyed that out-of-control, dripping-with-excess life she was famous for. That she was exactly as shallow, greedy, lazy and disappointing as she’d acted. That she never wanted anything from her life but a long, extended party, forever and ever without end. She’d made that bed, no one else. Now she had to lie in it. Over and over again.
It wasn’t Jack she was furious with—it was herself.
“Is your grandfather single?” she asked, as if mildly intrigued by the idea—instead of deeply appalled by it and by the fact Jack could suggest such a thing at all. Charles Talbot Endicott was eighty-five years old if he was a day. What did Jack think of her? But she knew what he thought. She forced herself to shrug airily. “I’ve always liked older men. And I certainly wouldn’t have to worry that he was after me for my money, would I?” She aimed her smile at him, mysterious and sharp, burying her feelings beneath it as she always did. As she always would. “I think I’d be an excellent May to his D
ecember, don’t you?”
The look he sent her then was brutal, but she preferred it to the other part of him she’d thought she’d seen—the part that made her want to cuddle with him as if they were both other people, safer and less complicated people, and thereby opened her up to sucker punches like the one he’d just landed. The one that still had her head spinning.
He likes to have sex with you, she told herself coldly. Harshly. He doesn’t like you. No one likes you. Don’t forget that again.
“Let me hasten to assure you that my grandfather would not touch the likes of you with a ten-foot pole,” Jack told her, almost scoffing, though there was something much darker in him. She could feel it even if she could not quite see it. It occurred to her that Jack was just as good at hiding as she’d learned to be. She shook the thought aside.
“By that I assume you mean the likes of me are pretty,” she murmured, indulgently, as if she was incapable of feeling his insults. As if they bounced right off of her bright plastic surface. Maybe if she pretended to be bulletproof, she would finally feel that way. Maybe. “And you might be surprised who finds their way to a ten-foot pole when I’m at the other end of it.”
Jack shook his head, letting out one of those hollow laughs that usually meant she was getting to the person laughing like that. That she was in the act of disappointing them in some profound way. She congratulated herself on yet another successful round of selling her own myth to the world. Maybe it was time to accept that it would define her no matter what, no matter what epiphanies she reached on her own or how much she knew she’d changed inside. Somehow, right at this moment, with this man, of all men, looking at her as if she was despicable down into her very bones, she couldn’t face that with any measure of equanimity.
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