The Replacement Wife

by Caitlin Crews

  Becca looked at his hand on her arm for a long moment, then slowly raised her hazel gaze to his.

  “I know more about Larissa Page Whitney than I do about myself,” she said. Her brows rose, challenging him. Beckoning him. “But nothing at all about you.”

  “I am sure you can read endless articles about me online,” he said, letting his fingers test the smooth, bare flesh of her upper arm. Testing his limits. Testing her response. He angled himself closer, mesmerized by the way her lips parted, by the way her eyes gleamed with heat. “If you find yourself horribly bored and in need of some slight entertainment.”

  “I don’t want to know about the CEO of Whitney Media,” she whispered. “I want to know about you.”

  He was so close. He needed only to bend his head and he could taste her, finally. He could not remember a time he had not wanted her, desperately. Her, he thought. Not Larissa. But how could that be, when Larissa had been the only thing he’d ever wanted, ever allowed himself to consider wanting—for ages now? When she had so long been the brass ring, just out of reach? Yet he could not seem to stop himself as he knew he should.

  He pressed his lips against her cheek, tasting the silken softness of her skin. She was vanilla and cream, and the taste went straight to his sex. He ached. He forgot any woman but this one.

  “Ask me anything,” he said, his mouth so close to hers he thought he could already taste the drugging heat of her.

  “Who are you kissing?” she asked, her voice a thread of sound, but seeming to pound through him like a drumbeat, loud and sure. As the words penetrated, he lifted his head, and her hazel eyes were too bright as they met his, but brave. “Her or me?”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  HE LOOKED AS IF SHE’D slapped him. She felt as if she had.

  He stepped back, letting his hand drop from her arm. The stark contrast between his warm palm and the cool air of the dining room around them felt like a sudden punishment. Her cheek burned where he’d kissed her, and she felt that searing heat deep in her core. But she could not take back her question. She was not even sure she wanted to. She still could not figure out which sick part of her had asked it.

  Or why she wanted so desperately to hear his answer.

  He moved instead to the long table and picked up his wineglass, taking a long pull of the rich red liquid before setting it down, and Becca could not help but notice how easily he moved, how gracefully, even when she suspected he was as off balance as she was.

  She was in deep trouble with this man. There was no use denying it. He had just tried to kiss a ghost and she.

  It did not bear thinking about. She was not even sure what had come over her in the first place. They had been having dinner. It had been … far too easy. Fine wine, interesting conversation. She had been involved in what he was saying, even relaxing as she’d gazed at him in the gentle glow of the candelabra and the sparkling chandelier above. Maybe that very easiness was what had tipped her over the edge. The dizzy feeling that if she only squinted, if she only let go of herself completely, she could disappear completely into this fantasy world. She could really be the woman who had been meant to sit at this table, with this man. After all, she already looked just like her.

  Maybe what had scared her was how little she thought she’d mind.

  “I wanted only to use you because you look like her,” he said finally. If he was another man, she might have thought him awkward. Unsure. But he was Theo, and he straightened and faced her, proud and unyielding. “I did not expect anything further than that—an elaborate ruse, perhaps, but just a ruse. I did not anticipate that I would want you.”

  “I don’t think you do.” It was so hard to say—but she shrugged when his flashing amber gaze slammed into hers. All that heat made her throb, then ache, then melt. She forced herself to breathe. To continue to say what must be said, or it might explode inside of her. “I think you want her. The more I look like her, the more you look at me. The more you long for her.” She even smiled then, though it hurt more than it should. Far more than she was willing to admit to herself. “It makes sense. She’s your fiancée and she’s lost to you. It would be odd if you did not feel these things.”

  His jaw worked for a moment, and then he let out a small, mirthless laugh. It rang hollow through the vast room, like a kind of chill in the air itself.

  “You don’t know her,” he said shortly. “You are talking about fantasies and feelings. Games. My relationship with Larissa was nothing like you imagine it to be.”

  “Why did you want to marry her?” she asked, shaking her head slightly. Why did she want—so desperately—to see things in him that weren’t there, depths he did not possess? Why did it hurt her to imagine he was exactly who he claimed to be—and why did she want to convince him otherwise? Why did she imagine that she could see a different man inside of him? Her mouth felt dry. “Was it just a merger? A business transaction?”

  It wasn’t that she found it hard to believe, in theory. After all, she was nothing more than a business transaction herself. She certainly had no trouble envisioning her loathsome uncle championing exactly that kind of thing—it was Theo she couldn’t imagine succumbing. Why should he marry anyone, for any reason aside from his own desire to do so?

  His hard mouth crooked, and he thrust his hands into the pockets of his devastatingly elegant suit. It was the first time she had ever seen him anything even remotely approaching disheveled, and she found she was holding her breath.

  “It was clear very early in my career at Whitney Media that I was headed for the top,” he said with a certain matter-of-factness, completely devoid of ego and all the more powerful for its unvarnished honesty. “It was no secret that I wanted nothing less, and soon enough, I came to Bradford’s attention. But Bradford prefers to keep the control of his family’s company within the family.” He gave her a cool look.

  “So she was merely your bargaining chip.” Becca tried to keep the disappointment from her voice, her expression. How had she convinced herself that a man like this had fallen in love? That he could? That he was different, somehow, from her uncle? How had she let herself believe it? He, like Bradford, wanted what he could conquer. He wanted what he viewed as his. How had she forgotten for even a moment the circumstances that had brought her here?

  This was the man who had ordered her to spin around in front of him for his perusal. This was the man who had kept her from walking out of the Whitney mansion.

  What wasn’t this man capable of? And when had she lost sight of that?

  “You mistake me yet again,” Theo said in that deadly way of his, that made her shiver deep inside. She called it fear—though something in her knew better, even now. Even after all she’d learned. “She was never my bargaining chip. I was hers.”

  “I did not end up at Whitney Media by accident,” Theo heard himself say, somewhat bemused by the fact he was speaking of this at all—of his past. It was something about the way Becca looked at him—as if she thought he owed her this explanation. But why did he seem to agree? “It did not simply happen. I fought to get here, every step of the way.”

  “So you did not, in fact, rise to power on the backs of the downtrodden?” Becca asked, those marvelous eyebrows arching high. “I thought that was the first step of any would-be mogul.”

  “I understand your anger,” Theo said, eyeing her as if that would help him understand this uncharacteristic urge to unburden himself. “But my childhood was far more desperate than yours could ever have been.”

  “Should we compare notes?” she asked, a sting in her tone. “Should we see who suffered more?” She looked pointedly around her. “It seems pretty clear to me that one of us came out with a whole lot more.”

  “It is not a competition,” he said in a low voice. He inclined his head. “But if it was, I would win.”

  He thought of the heat, the fear. The thick Florida nights his family had sweated through, huddled together in the dark with the lights off to avoid the roaming gangs,
the guns, the ever-present violence of the streets.

  “And here I assumed that you were one of them,” she said, her hazel gaze traveling over him, from head to toe. She met his eyes and shrugged. “Prep school, summers on the Cape, rugby shirts and a golden retriever. The whole package.” He would have thought she was being flippant, had he not seen that defensive, wounded look in her eyes. She hid it almost immediately, but he saw it. He recognized it.

  She was not at all unlike him, this woman, and he did not know how to handle the rush of something like pleasure he felt when he thought it. He ignored it instead.

  “Not quite.” His smile felt thin. “My father dropped dead unexpectedly, leaving my mother to fend for herself in Miami, when his proud Cuban family had turned their backs on him for marrying a Greek Cypriot immigrant.” He could hear his voice in the air between them, heavy with irony, ripe with old condemnation. When had he last talked of these things? Had he ever talked of these things? “We had nothing. No money. No hope. Less than you could possibly imagine.”

  He thought of his older brother Luis, gunned down on the street like garbage as payback for some imagined slight. He thought of his mother’s face, twisted in agony, and the anguished fire in her eyes when she’d looked at him. Not you, Theo, she had whispered fiercely, her fingers digging into his narrow shoulders. He had been barely eleven years old. You will not die in this place. You will get out.

  And so he had, one painful step at a time.

  “I saw the Whitneys many years ago, when I was young,” he said, unable to look at Becca, suddenly. He turned toward the great windows, but hardly noticed the glittering spectacle of Manhattan arrayed before him, sparkling and gleaming in the night. Instead he saw a packed street in South Beach, outside one of the area’s most exclusive restaurants, teeming with vibrant people, Latin music, the Miami high life. “Bradford and his wife were visiting Miami with their perfect little daughter. She could not have been ten. I was parking cars, and I thought they all looked like movie stars, like a fantasy. I thought she looked like a princess. And I wanted what they had, whatever they had.” He laughed shortly. “I didn’t know who they were until years later.”

  “It is hard for me to imagine Bradford looking perfect,” Becca said, her voice crisp, cutting into his memories—making them seem somehow less horrific. Was that her intent? How could it be? “Or anything even approaching perfect, for that matter.”

  “That is because you are predisposed to find his kind of power offensive,” Theo replied. He did not to turn to look at her—and in any case, he saw only himself as the young teenager he had been, so captivated by Bradford’s ease and confidence. It had been so very different from the kind of dead-eyed swagger that had meant power and authority in his neighborhood. It had changed his whole world. He let out a short laugh. “But I had never seen it before. It was a revelation.”

  How could he describe his life to her, the way it had been back then? When he thought of it, it was almost as if it was someone else’s life altogether. A movie he’d once seen, perhaps, of a desperate young boy and all he’d done not only to escape his dead-end world, but to succeed by any measure. He had clawed his way out of that pit, inch by painful inch. How could he possibly explain what that had been like to this woman? She had never reached the heights he had, and he knew she had never been so low.

  “When I was fresh out of business school I came to New York,” he continued in a low voice, skipping over the indescribably hard years in between—the sacrifices and impossible feats he had made possible, somehow, because he’d had no other choice. And it had still meant nothing, in the end, despite his best efforts. He had been unable to save his mother from the cancer that had taken her, just as he’d been unable to save his brother back in Miami. “And Larissa was everywhere.”

  “Doing what?” she asked, her voice faintly dubious, as if she was imagining the kind of tabloid antics Larissa was famous for, and judging them harshly.

  “Being Larissa,” he said. He turned back then, to look at her. To see the face that had haunted him for so many years, from long before he’d actually met Larissa through to now, when she was irrevocably lost to him and yet was this new, other person, too. Becca. “She was always in the papers. She was always being photographed. She was one of the most recognizable faces in New York.” He shrugged. “She was like a dream.”

  Becca reached over to run her hand along the back of one of the chairs at the table, and he had the distinct impression that she was choosing her words carefully.

  “What kind of dream?” she asked finally, her tone a shade too polite.

  He could not help but wonder what she had not said, what she’d hidden.

  “I suppose you could say she was the emblem of all I ever wanted,” Theo said after a moment. He could not help the sardonic laugh that escaped him at that little truth. What did it make him to have wanted Larissa so much and gotten so little in return? But he had made his peace with that long ago, he told himself. One did not fall in love with an emblem. Not really. One accepted her terms and displayed her in return, especially if one was far too busy with business to worry about his emotional life.

  And it would have been different once they’d married. He was sure of it.

  Despite everything, he still carried those first pictures of her in his head, as if he’d imprinted on them. Larissa caught in laughter on the glossy pages of a magazine, carefree and easy, so beautiful and so captivatingly, astonishingly perfect. A woman like that, he’d thought then, with her effortless beauty and her gleaming pedigree, would be the icing on the great and glorious cake he planned to make of his life, with his own hands. He had been determined to build his own empire—and a woman like that would be like a beacon to show all the world that he’d succeeded. That he, Theo Markou Garcia, who came from dirt and should never have managed to climb his way out, was the man with all the power.

  “Your ultimate fantasy is a spoiled debutante?” Becca asked, her voice cool. “I can’t blame you, I suppose.” Her voice indicated that, in fact, she could. “Aren’t all men predisposed to choose vapid over interesting?”

  “Is this some form of envy?” he asked, studying her face, so like and yet unlike Larissa’s. The more he looked at her, the less he saw Larissa at all. Particularly when he saw the flash of temper she hurried to conceal. “Do you think you would not be chosen?”

  “Chosen for what?” she asked, laughing slightly, derisively. “To be some man’s trophy, with no thought to who I might be as I am reduced to an emblem? Or chosen to play some elaborate game of pretend to benefit some man’s lust for power?” Her mouth curved into something not quite a smile. “Thank you, but I’d pass. If I could.”

  There was something almost too painful in the space between them then, pulling taut, making him long to put his hands on her almost as much as he wanted to deny her words applied to him.

  He could not name the fire she stirred in him. But he burned. Oh, how he burned.

  “I knew that if I was ever in a position to win a woman like that, I would be exactly where I’d always wanted to be,” he said finally. He did not understand his urge to explain himself to her. He had never spent any time at all concerned about the opinions of others. Why should he start now?

  “Congratulations,” Becca said, her eyes dark though her voice was light. “You got everything you wanted, didn’t you? The woman you always wanted. And the whole company along with her.”

  “When I started at Whitney Media I announced in the very first training session that I would run the company one day,” he said without meaning to speak, without knowing what he meant to say. “The HR manager laughed in my face. She was not laughing five years later.”

  “Five years?” Becca asked. “That’s all it took?”

  “I don’t know how to lose,” he said, because that was the salient point. He wasn’t bragging. He had never bragged. He didn’t have to. “I have no other choice.”

  She didn’t know why she found that
statement, so simple and so matter-of-factly delivered, heartbreaking. Wasn’t this his story of success? His rise to unimaginable heights? Shouldn’t a story like this be accompanied by swelling music and a cheering section? Why, then, did she want to cry? To try to reach across the space between them and touch him somehow?

  “But what exactly have you won?” she said softly. “The CEO, but without the shares you need to truly be an owner. Engaged to Larissa, but still alone.”

  His gaze hardened, and she thought she saw temper flex his jaw before he hid it behind that dark, arrogant mask.

  “Careful,” he suggested, in that deadly voice—the one that had ruined her so completely the day she’d met him. The one that made her tremble slightly even now. “It is one thing to share information that might help you in your portrayal. It is another to shoot your mouth off about things you can’t possibly understand.”