He wanted. That was the problem—he wanted too much. He always had, with this woman. Why did he want so badly to pretty this up into something it was not?
“I was in a coma, not in rehab,” she said, surprising him. Her shoulders tensed, but then dropped, and he had the sense that she’d ordered herself to relax. He wished, fervently, that he did not find that endearing. He did not ask himself if he believed her. “And all I wanted when I woke up was for everything to get back to normal—to act as though nothing had happened, because I was so scared. So terrified that everything had changed, that I had changed, and I had no idea how to deal with that.” She shook her head. “I hated that everyone knew. What had happened to me, that I was so fragile. That I’d collapsed so publicly. I hated it.”
He was surprised by the fierce tone she used, and the scowl she directed at the fire, though he understood she was seeing something else entirely. He wondered what. He wondered what her ghosts looked like, what haunted her. What demons she thought lurked within her, if she thought such things at all. If anything she said was true. And then he wondered why it mattered to him. She was the only woman he had ever felt inspired to protect, and she was the one who needed his protection least. It was insanity.
“Larissa …” He didn’t know what he meant to say. He hadn’t meant to speak in the first place.
“I didn’t care that Theo left,” she said, ignoring him. She made a hollow sound. “Doesn’t that say it all? A person—a real person, a good one—should care that her fiancé never loved her, not really. But then, a real person would never have gotten engaged to someone that she didn’t love herself, so I suppose it doesn’t really matter.” She shifted, and pulled the blanket tighter around her thin frame. “Either way, he left.”
“You don’t have to talk about this,” he said. In fact, he wished she wouldn’t. It was easier when she was playing her usual role, vamping and flirting and acting up in all the ways he expected of her. This was something else altogether, something unsettling and much too close to the kind of realness he’d thought he wanted. But he wasn’t sure how he felt about it now that it was happening.
“And … everything was normal,” she continued. “Just as I wanted it.” She sighed. “But I wasn’t normal. There was nothing about me that was how it had been before. I should have died, but I lived.” She turned to look at him then, and the look in her eyes made something punch through his gut. “Why?”
The question hung in the air for a moment. Jack couldn’t tear his gaze away from hers.
“Are you asking me?” His voice seemed too loud. Too brash. “Or was that rhetorical?”
Larissa smiled, and while it was not that fake smile he’d come to hate, it was heartbreaking all the same.
“I had no one to ask at all,” she said simply. It made something flash through him, sharp and cold. Fierce. “Not my father, who, as you pointed out, has hated me for years. Not my mother, who has lived out her life since I was nine wholly medicated. Not my friends, such as they are. They cared the least. They laughed about my ‘wild night’ and wanted only to hit the next party and forget it had ever happened.”
Jack knew exactly who her friends were. He knew all their games, their obsessions, their addictions and their delusions. Many of them had once been his old friends, his partners in crime. He knew everything there was to know about the circles she ran in. Nothing she was saying should have surprised him. It didn’t. Nor did it surprise him that the truth of her condition had been kept quiet—that was how families like theirs operated. But still, there was that vulnerable cast to her face, and it tugged at him. Made him want to wade in and rescue her.
But from what? a cynical voice asked inside his head. Her own mess? The one she made all by herself? The one she’s here to get you to fix?
“They’re idiots,” he said harshly. Dismissively. “They always have been.”
“It took me almost three weeks to realize that no one was ever going to care that I’d almost died,” she said in that same quiet manner, as if the things she spoke of were far too terrible to embellish in any way. He wanted to gather her close, hold her, soothe her somehow. But he didn’t know how to reach for her, and he wasn’t at all certain she would let him, even if he did. “And another week to understand that if I stayed there, I’d stop caring, too. Which I decided meant I might as well have died as I was supposed to.” She faced him then, her eyebrows high, her gaze direct. “People look at me and see what they expect to see. Nothing more and nothing less. So I decided that the solution was not to be seen.”
“That’s what this camouflage is, then,” he said, indicating her hair. She ran her palm over it, smoothing the gleaming black cap against her skull. He pictured the other version of her—all that long, blond hair. The masses of it, the public’s obsession with it. The earnest copycats, the snide impersonators. The way it had always marked her, set her apart, made her shine. No wonder it had been the first thing to go, he thought, surprised to feel even that much sympathy for her.
“I decided to see who I was when I wasn’t Larissa Whitney,” she said, letting her shoulders rise and fall. “When I wasn’t in Manhattan. When I wasn’t a walking, talking embarrassment to my family’s legacy. When I was just me.”
What was absurd, Jack thought, was how much he wanted to believe her. How much he already did. When he knew—he knew—that she was nothing more than a slick little liar. As good at what she did as his father was. He was on to wife number five, who had to be some ten years Jack’s junior. Jack knew better than to believe another smooth-talker. Especially one who looked like Larissa, and could turn him so easily to putty in her pretty little hands.
“And how has this experiment worked out for you?” he asked, watching the wariness creep back into her gaze as she heard his tone.
“It was working fine,” she said evenly. “Until you showed up.”
He actually laughed then. “This is crap,” he said. She stiffened, paled, but he ignored it. “You can play make-believe all you want. You can dye your hair every color in the rainbow. That doesn’t change anything.”
“Of course not,” she said, her eyes hard. “Because I’m a monster.”
“No,” he retorted. “Because you’re Larissa Whitney. Your father sounds unpleasant. So is mine. What does it matter? There are bigger things at stake here than interpersonal relationships. Or hurt feelings. For God’s sake, Larissa. You complain that you’re treated like a monster—”
“I’ve never complained,” she snapped out, and there was an affronted look in her eyes then, as if it was crucially important to her that he see that.
“Not directly,” he conceded. He shook his head. “But then you turn around and act like a spoiled child, throwing a six-month tantrum because you don’t like the situation you found yourself in when you woke up. A situation you made yourself.”
“I’ve never denied that.” Her lips thinned. “This isn’t a pity party, Jack. I know who I am. I know what I did. I have no illusions about myself at all.”
“I’m sure that’s what you tell yourself.” He raked his fingers through his hair, fighting the desire to put them on her curves instead. But that would only complicate this particular conversation. He blew out a breath. “You might even believe it.”
“I’m sorry to disappoint you,” she said, but there was a dark undercurrent to her dry tone. She shrugged, and he got the distinct impression that it was a defensive gesture, that it hid something vulnerable beneath. Why did he want to see it—see her—more than he could remember wanting anything else? “But I don’t think you know me the way you seem to think you do.”
“I know that you could have the capacity to do tremendous good in the world, like everyone else who was born to the kind of privileges we were,” Jack said, searching her face, wishing he could see behind that damned mask of hers. Wishing he didn’t have this crazy urge to reach her somehow, to change her. As if anyone ever changed. Much less on demand. Much less a woman like this, crafted
of greed and selfishness, a monument to entitlement. “You have an unimaginable amount of money at your disposal and you could have that kind of power, too, if you stopped hiding from it.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” she bit out, but he saw a darkness in her eyes then, and he thought perhaps he’d struck a nerve.
“No one has a better idea than I do,” he countered. “Have you forgotten who you’re talking to? Whitney Media is your birthright. Pretending otherwise because you have issues with your family doesn’t make you strong, it makes you a coward.”
“Let me guess,” she said, with a bitter laugh. “You want my shares, too, like everyone else.”
He met her gaze. Held it. “The only thing I want less than Whitney Media, Larissa,” he said, astounded at the depths of his own cruelty, his capacity to hurt her, to want to hurt her as much as he wanted to protect her, yet couldn’t, “is you.”
She looked at him for a long, tense moment. He could see her chest rise and fall, too rapidly, and her green eyes were far too troubled. But when she spoke, her voice was smooth. Relentlessly, impossibly smooth. For the first time, he wondered what it cost her.
“Hilariously,” she said, as if she was choosing her words with great care, as if she was afraid they might bite back, “I keep thinking that you’ve said the worst possible thing you could say—that your opinion of me could not possibly sink any lower. And I am always proved wrong.”
“I’m not trying to insult you.” He didn’t know what he was trying to do. He could only see those beautiful eyes, that siren’s face, and he wanted things that could never be. That he could not fully admit. That, if he were smart, he would never permit himself to want in the first place. “But what you do is run away, isn’t it? You’ve never faced anything in your life. You drown yourself in whatever might let you escape from the things you don’t like or can’t handle. Do you want to know who you really are, Larissa? Just look at what you do.”
Her head was bowed by the time he finished, her mouth a tight, flat line, but though her gaze was overbright when she looked up, no tears fell.
“Thank you,” she said, and he hated how much he liked the fact that her voice was uneven. That he’d finally gotten to her. That there was something there beneath the mask, the fantasy, after all. That the carefully constructed and maintained Larissa Whitney surface was not the sum of her. She cleared her throat. “And I’m sure that this intervention was launched purely out of an altruistic concern for my character, and has nothing at all to do with the fact that one of the things I ran from—notably—was you.”
She could pack a punch. He could admit it. He sat there for a moment, filled with reluctant admiration. He’d never thought to give her any credit for how tough she must have had to be to survive like this as long as she had. For always managing to keep playing this game while showing only the tiniest of cracks in her armor. She was a master at it.
But he had nothing left to lose.
“Yes,” he said, holding her gaze, willing her to be what he knew she could not. Wanting it anyway. “You left me that weekend. My mother had just died and I was foolish enough to believe that what happened between us meant something.” He smiled coolly. “But don’t worry, Larissa. I stopped believing in you a long time ago.”
The worst part was that she’d stayed with him after that, Larissa thought much later that night, when he slept beside her in the great iron bed while she lay awake. Much too awake. She stared at the shifting darkness beyond the big bay windows and wondered how she’d let all of this happen. How she’d lost herself so completely, when she had only so recently felt as if she’d recovered some pieces of who she ought to be at all. Or why, after all the things he had said to her and all the ways he had demonstrated how little he thought of her, she hadn’t simply left. The sad truth was that she hadn’t even tried.
Maybe she didn’t believe in herself, either.
Instead, she had channeled all that hurt and fury and pain into the only thing they seemed to agree on—passion. The simple truth of his skin against hers, his mouth fused to hers, their bodies moving together, as one. As if that could save her. As if that meant something more than sex.
And now he slept peacefully at her side, his big body sprawled over the bed in a show of masculine abandon, while her stomach churned and her heart pounded. She could not seem to avoid the truth of things as she’d been trying to do ever since he’d walked back into her life. She’d hidden in the powerful sensuality of their connection, the wildfire of his touch, but she couldn’t do it anymore. Tonight had changed something inside her—flipped a switch—and she couldn’t pretend anymore. She couldn’t let herself go numb and act as if it didn’t matter. And she couldn’t lie to herself—no matter how hard she’d tried to do exactly that in the past couple of weeks.
Jack hated her.
Her breath left her then, in a jagged rush, even as a kind of tidal wave of anguish crashed over her, raking across her skin and leaving her panting in its aftermath. She turned to her side and curled into a ball, hugging herself tight. It was true. He hated her—he had for years. Oh, he might like the chemistry between them. He couldn’t keep his hands off her! But in every way that mattered, on every level beyond the physical, he thought she was worthless. He did not need to actually sneer at her—his every word and action did it for him. A sneer would be superfluous.
And maybe that wouldn’t have felt quite so terrible to her, quite so shattering, if her own feelings weren’t just as painfully obvious to her in the cold and the dark. What she felt for Jack Sutton defied all reason and logic. It was too big, too chaotic. It hurt. She must have suspected that feeling so much could be damaging, she thought, or why would she have gone to such lengths to avoid it for most of her life? She’d stopped visiting Provence when she was a girl because she’d thought it had hurt too much to leave. She hadn’t known she could feel so much that she wondered if it was some kind of heart attack, as if it was something she might not survive intact. Or at all. If this was what feeling was like, some part of her thought she’d been better off when she’d been incapable of it.
She wanted him in ways she had never imagined one person could want another. In ways she had never known she could want anything or anyone.
She hurt. For him.
She didn’t simply want to lose herself in the wild glory of their physical connection, though there was part of her that wanted only that, even now—she wanted him to know her. To see her. To understand all the things she’d never dared say out loud, and would never risk saying to him. She, who had spent the whole of her life making sure that no one could ever peek behind that curtain. She, who wasn’t even sure what there was to see back there, where no one had ever gone, not even, she knew, herself.
But every time she looked at Jack, it was harder and harder to keep up her act. It cost more. It seemed to leave deeper marks. And the truth was, she was so tired of it all. Exhausted. Of herself, of her image, of the fact those things were held to be interchangeable. She had never felt the need to defend herself before—and how could she when she was guilty of everything they accused her of, and no doubt more besides—but knowing that Jack believed the worst of her made a hollow space carve itself out in the center of her chest. And it yawned wider and deeper the longer she spent with him and the more he looked at her as if she was only confirming his lowest expectations with every word she said, every expression that crossed her face.
Which was what she’d wanted, after all. What she’d set out to do the moment she’d laid eyes on him. Because that was what she did, that was how she survived—she showed people whatever they wanted to see. She was whoever they wanted her to be. So why should it bother her so much now? Why should she feel as if it was killing her—actually, physically killing her—to let him think the worst of her?
But she knew why. The impossible, unwanted truth clawed at her insides and made her clench her hands into fists, panic and terror and a ferocious kind of joy she’d neve
r imagined before storming through her body—but she knew.
There were words for the way she felt, but she could not bring herself to use them. Not those words. Not for her. She was Larissa Whitney. She had set her course long ago, and she knew with a certain grim matter-of-factness that the things others took for granted—those happily-ever-afters, those white picket fences—were not on the table for her. Not ever. Even the most docile and well-behaved members of her social circle could, at best, look forward only to the sorts of lives their parents had laid out for them at birth. Impersonal marriages, necessary children to carry on the family lines and inherit the family wealth, eventual affairs and hushed-up scandals, and the slow, inevitable slide into high-functioning substance abuse that was ruthlessly suppressed at the great charity balls at which all of Manhattan society appeared to lie so eloquently to each other about their supposed happiness.
That was the kind of dutiful marriage Jack would have, she knew. To some fresh-faced, inoffensive girl who would never know the way he could tear her apart in bed. But that bright prospect was not for Larissa, not unless she was very, very lucky. She was too notorious. And if her life had taught her anything—if Jack had taught her anything—it was that she was certainly not likely to turn up lucky anytime soon.
Larissa sat up, swinging her legs over the side of the bed and clenching her toes against the cold floorboards at her feet. She couldn’t help looking back over her shoulder at Jack, fighting back the spike of heat behind her eyes, the echoing tightness in her chest, her throat. Outside, the clouds shifted and the moon shone in through the tall windows, only highlighting his heartbreaking perfection. He was all the things that she’d never admitted she wanted. He was still so golden, so impossibly beautiful. He wasn’t tainted, as she was. Ruined beyond repair. He wasn’t scandalous, the punch line to jokes, everybody’s favorite warning.
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