She rested one hand on his strong shoulder, and let him close the other in his as he led her around the floor in an easy, perfectly executed waltz. The heat of his other palm seemed to burn into the small of her back, branding her. Making her flush anew with the heat that was always, only, his. Her body felt too alive, too sensitive. Too aware. And yet she could still feel the echo of Chip’s words like a film over her skin, making her feel dirty and desperate. It almost hurt to be so close to Jack, and know that, in reality, she’d never been further away from him.
She did not have to be told that this would be the last time they touched. It made sense, now, to look back at the other night and recognize that it had been their goodbye. He had never lied to her, had he? He had been completely up front about what was expected of him and why he would do as he was told. His duty. She even admired him for it, on some level.
Even as it crushed her.
“It’s nice of you to do this,” she said, unable even to pretend to smile. She fixed her gaze at some point over his shoulder, and forced herself to keep her chin in the air, her eyes clear and dry. “I had no idea your charitable intentions cast so wide a net. We fallen women of New York High Society salute you.”
He turned his head and caught her gaze, and she swallowed, hard. Her stomach flipped. His mouth was too close and there was a certain kindness in those bittersweet depths—and it broke her heart all over again.
“What do you think is happening here?” he asked mildly. Almost indulgently.
“I have no idea.” Her tongue was turning to ash in her mouth. Why was he doing this to her? Why was he prolonging the agony?
“Use that magnificent brain of yours, Larissa,” he suggested. “The one, I am reliably informed, that you used to outsmart your father just yesterday.”
She was pleased he knew. Too pleased. Reality reasserted itself, unpleasantly, and she looked away again.
“I can’t play these games with you, Jack,” she said quietly. “You should not let your grandfather see you with me. There are, no doubt, a flock of appropriate young heiresses happy to fight over you. I can see at least five of them by the bar.”
He pulled her closer, too close and yet not close enough, never close enough and never again—but she could not seem to do anything but fall into his gaze again when he looked at her, into her.
“I don’t want them,” he said. Softly. Deliberately. “I want you.”
“You do not,” she said, her voice something like affronted. It would have made him laugh, had he not seen the darkness that lurked in her gaze.
“I have already proven it,” he said. “Over and over again. I’m crushed that you haven’t been paying attention.”
“You’re talking about sex,” she said, and there was a crack in her voice. “Because what else could you possibly be talking about?”
The dullness in her tone made him feel violent. He wanted to find that Van Housen creature again and put a fist through his pretty, dissipated face. But he restrained himself.
“Why would you listen to anything that—” he began.
“I haven’t listened to Chip Van Housen in years, if ever,” she said, cutting him off. Her eyes shimmered in the lights from the winter lanterns, and the green in them glowed. Her lips crooked into something wry and painful. “But I listened to you.”
He could hear his own voice, lashing into her, tearing strips off her, and for what? To make himself feel better that he couldn’t seem to let go of her? That she’d haunted him for so many years? What did that make him?
“Larissa …” He whispered her name.
“You hate me,” she said, her voice clear. Direct. Just like that damning green gaze. “You think I’m a worthless whore.”
That sat between them, carried on the sweet notes from the band, batted into the air and showering back down over them like the lights from above. And suddenly, he saw the whole of their time in Maine as if through a different lens. A different view. Hers.
Because if Larissa had been telling the truth about herself, about why she had turned up there, about everything—and Jack admitted to himself that it had been quite some time since he’d truly doubted her, no matter what he might have said—if all of that was true, it made him the greatest bastard of all time.
He stared down at her, at the stark pain that he could see etched so clearly into her face, her eyes. He could not imagine why she was even here, looking at him like this, holding him as if there was some part of her that didn’t detest him as she should.
“I do not hate you,” he said, the words coming from a place inside him he wasn’t sure he’d ever accessed before, except in grief. “I love you.”
He wasn’t sure what he’d expected. A choir? The band to swell into a chorus?
But something like temper moved over her face, and she only blinked.
“How nice,” she murmured, with acid insincerity. “That, of course, fixes everything. It’s the adult version of calling a do-over, really. I’ll just pretend that nothing that happened between us actually happened—”
He wasn’t sure if he’d stopped moving before, or if he stopped then. But he couldn’t keep up the farce of dancing when she was this close to slipping away from him. All over again, and for good this time. He couldn’t bring himself to care about any of the people around them, his grandfather—none of it. Larissa was the only person who had mattered to him in longer than he could remember.
He let his hands move to her hips, anchoring her in front of him, as if she might try to run for the street.
“I am an ass,” he said, distinctly. She sucked in a shocked sort of breath. But she didn’t pull away. “You are the only woman who has ever gotten to me.”
“The only one who walked away from you, you mean,” she interjected.
“Repeatedly,” he agreed. He searched her face. “And still I can’t stay away from you. I can’t bear to be apart from you. I think I’ve been in love with you since we met at that party more than five years ago.”
“You wouldn’t know love if it bit you!” she hissed at him, but he could see the storm gathering in her, dark and wild, like the rains that swept across his beloved island, and that cold, hard knot in his solar plexus began to ease.
“Then why don’t you bite me, Larissa, and see what happens,” he suggested. She flushed, and he felt that fear loosen even more. He took her hands in his, pulling them up to his chest. Holding her gaze, he kissed each one. “I love you. I do. I don’t know how to prove it to you, but I will. Give me the chance, and I will. I promise.”
She stared at him. Hours might have passed. Days. She let out a long breath, and then she started and looked around them. They were standing in the center of the dance floor, in the middle of one of the biggest parties of the year. They were not exactly hidden. If he was worried about being seen with her, it was clearly already too late. He could see the speculation, hear the murmurs. No doubt, she could, too. She reddened slightly, and looked back at him.
“You are making a scene,” she hissed at him, but there was something else in her eyes. Something he recognized. The truth of Larissa Whitney, the one, he thought with satisfaction, that only he knew.
“I don’t care,” he replied.
And she smiled. Not that mysterious, calculated smile that she used as her armor, but something real. It was beautiful and rare, and it lit up her face, and him and the whole of Manhattan. It made him feel like flying. It made him think he already was.
“You say that now,” she teased him. “But you haven’t experienced the true joy of being the focus of so many evil New York City gossips in some time, have you?”
“Then we’d better give them something to talk about,” he said. He took her in his arms again, dipped her to hear a delighted peal of laughter pour from her like the sweetest, purest bell, and then, at last, in full view of Manhattan’s finest and wealthiest, he kissed her.
The new year was still in its infancy and they moved together in the wide bed, tucked u
p on the second floor of Scatteree Pines while a snowstorm swirled against the bay windows outside. Inside, they were safe and warm. Hot, as they teased each other with their mouths, hands, bodies.
Larissa had never felt like this—so much, so bright, nothing hidden. Jack moved inside her, around her, and she clung to him and found herself made new with every thrust, every slide of skin against skin, every time they fell over the edge of the world together.
“I love you,” she murmured drowsily against his perfect chest much later, while the snow still spiraled down from the dark sky and the wind howled over the lonely hill, cocooning them on this desolate island together. Just where she wanted to stay. She smiled against his skin, his heartbeat beneath her cheek.
His hand moved lazily down her back, and she arched slightly against it, boneless and replete.
“You’ll have to marry me,” he said, as if he’d given the matter a great deal of thought. As if there had been some debate.
Perhaps there had been—but not, Larissa thought, recently. They were too much the same. From the very same world, even possessed of the same kind of pasts. So there was only the future for them, clear and golden. She had no doubt.
“Only if you promise me one thing,” she said, shifting against him so she could look up at him, his dark brown eyes still bright with passion as he gazed back at her.
“Anything,” he said, his voice a rasp in the shadowed room, a rumble beneath her. Oh, this man. This impossible, maddening, perfect man. She’d had no idea it was even possible to love this much. And she’d never had another person love her so absolutely. So wholly. As if she had never been ruined at all. As if she was brand-new and squeaky clean, inside and out.
The longer he loved her, the more she thought she might just believe it, after all.
“I want only the most deadly dull society affair,” she said, smiling at him. “The full, traditional spectacle. Every recognizable name in New York. Rockefellers and Roosevelts. A five-mile train and six dozen handpicked bridesmaids with perfect pedigrees.”
Jack laughed. “Why would you want such a thing?” he asked. “It sounds like a nightmare. Your nightmare, to be precise. And, let me assure you, mine.”
“I don’t want there to be any doubt,” she said, tracing a finger over his delicious mouth. “I don’t want anyone to think that this is a mistake, or that I somehow tricked you into this with my evil wiles.”
“But you did,” he said, pulling her finger into his mouth to suck at it for a searingly hot moment, and then bringing her face to his, and kissing her. “You did it years ago, and I’ve been at a loss ever since.”
Larissa smiled against his mouth. “I want to treat it the way the rest of them do, the way your grandfather always wanted you to do. A great and financially sound merger of two storied American families, as expected since our births.”
“That doesn’t sound like you at all,” he said, framing her face with his hands, his eyes searching hers. “I want to marry you, Larissa. Not some fantasy version of you, tidied up for wider consumption.”
He meant that, she thought, with a wonder that only grew, and never seemed to dull. He truly meant that.
“It will be our wedding gift to our families,” she told him. She leaned over the side of the bed, and rummaged around until she found what she was looking for. Holding the handcuffs in her hand, she rolled back to Jack, and smiled.
A real smile. Wicked, but real.
“But the marriage …” she whispered. She crawled over him to clip one strong wrist to the iron headboard. She let her hands smooth their way back down his chest, and straddled him, making him groan as he hardened against her once more. “The marriage is just for us,” she said, and rolled her hips to take him deep inside herself.
She set an easy, unhurried pace, and he met it, his eyes bright on hers. And that electric kick of heat burst into flame again, immolation and celebration, all of it theirs. Jack pulled against the handcuff, letting it clank loudly against the iron. He laughed when she stopped moving, her hands braced on his abdomen as she stared down at him, as if she expected him to complain.
“I told you,” he said. “There’s nothing you’ve done that I haven’t done first. You can’t shock me, Larissa, no matter what you do.” His smile was crooked and sweet, golden like the sun, and all hers. She believed him. His dark brows rose in challenge. Daring her. His eyes loved her—all of her. “But you can always try.”
And so she did.
* * * * *
All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author, and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all the incidents are pure invention.
All Rights Reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Enterprises II BV/S.à.r.l. The text of this publication or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, storage in an information retrieval system, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the prior consent of the publisher in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
® and TM are trademarks owned and used by the trademark owner and/or its licensee. Trademarks marked with ® are registered with the United Kingdom Patent Office and/or the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market and in other countries.
First published in Great Britain 2011
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of Harlequin (UK) Limited,
Eton House, 18-24 Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey TW9 1SR
© Caitlin Crews 2011
ISBN: 978-1-408-92616-1
Table of Contents
Cover
Excerpt
About the Author
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Copyright
Heiress Behind the Headlines Page 17