The Replacement Wife

by Caitlin Crews

  “What’s to understand?” she asked lightly, as if completely unaware of the darkness in his tone, his gaze. “You are engaged yet don’t live together. You have her things shipped here as you need them.” She shrugged, as if she felt at all casual. “And somehow, I don’t quite believe that Larissa, of all people, was saving herself for marriage.”

  Theo gazed at her now, his hard, devil’s face set in lines that no longer intimidated her as much as they had at first. Instead, tonight, she wanted to trace them with her hands. She wanted to taste him, learn him, know him. But not if he thought she was someone else. Not while he wanted that someone else so desperately. She still had that much pride, at least.

  For now, a treacherous voice whispered deep inside of her.

  “It was never a conventional relationship,” he said coldly. “How could it have been?”

  “Why shouldn’t it have been?” Becca asked, frowning.

  “She could have chosen anyone,” Theo said, his voice stiffening. But there was something else there, beneath his words. Something that made it sound as if he was the one who hadn’t deserved the selfish, vain girl and her careless treatment. The very idea set Becca’s teeth on edge. “But she chose me, and then, later, agreed to marry me when we decided it would be most beneficial. It was a bargaining chip in her endless war with her father, but she also knew that I understood her. I would wait for her to settle into the relationship. I would not force her into something she wasn’t ready to accept.”

  “Like fidelity?” Becca asked dryly.

  “She was not the woman I’d imagined her to be before I met her,” Theo said, ignoring her. “But she was not the monster you imagine her to be, either.” He sighed, and shook his head slightly. “Try to imagine her life.”

  Becca couldn’t help the slight laugh that escaped her then. She could see her reflection in the grand mirror that dominated the far wall, and it was shockingly similar to the many pictures she’d seen of Larissa over the years. Dressed to kill, jewels to wound, with nothing more pressing on her plate than another charity event, another art opening, another party. Did Theo really think that Becca hadn’t pored over those magazines? Hating herself for her own sick fascination with the life she might have had, the person she might have been?

  “I’ve imagined her life more times than I can count,” Becca said now, fighting to keep her voice smooth, even. To keep the years of anger at the injustice of it all at bay. “I imagined what I could do with her money, how I might appreciate the vacations and clothes and parties and opportunities that bored her so terribly. Is that what you want me to imagine?”

  “It can’t have escaped your notice that Bradford Whitney is the last person on earth anyone would want as a father,” Theo said coldly, as if he’d judged her for her callousness. She wished she didn’t care. She wanted not to care. “He drove Larissa’s poor, fragile mother to a nervous breakdown. She never leaves the house in France anymore. She’s become a complete recluse.”

  “Again,” Becca said evenly, refusing to back down from that condemning look he shot at her, “what would you like me to imagine? What it’s like to have a bad father? I have one of those. The moment my mother was thrown out of the Whitney family, my father disappeared. But my mother couldn’t swan off to a house in France to recover. She had to figure out how to be a single mother all on her own.”

  “Imagine what it must have been like for her, to grow up in that house, with those parents,” Theo replied, hammering his point even further. As if she hadn’t spoken. As if, Becca thought, he needed her to see Larissa as he wanted to see her. “She was never strong like you. She never had a chance.”

  “She had every chance,” Becca retorted. She could feel her face heating, and knew she was saying too much. Feeling too much. Was she innately, naturally strong or had she simply never been given the option to be anything but? “More chances than most people can dream of!”

  “She had money,” Theo said, shaking his head. “That’s not quite the same thing.”

  “How can you have grown up where you did, the way you did, and sympathize with a poor little rich girl like her?” Becca asked, unable to hold her emotions back. She felt it all flood into her, making her voice too loud and her eyes too bright. How could he defend a woman who had, from all accounts including his own, treated him like he was something too far beneath her to be worthy of her notice?

  “Rich doesn’t mean happy,” he began.

  “But it does mean rich,” Becca threw at him, furious. At him. At Larissa, damn her. At this situation that was spiraling out of control with every word she couldn’t seem to keep inside of her. “She had every advantage in the world. Literally.”

  “She is the saddest girl I’ve ever met,” he said, his amber gaze slamming into her, making her heart stop, then pound.

  As if he’d hit her.

  “Are you talking about her emotional pain?“ she asked, aware that her voice was no more than a whisper, barely audible, and yet it scorched her own throat. So scathing. So bitter. “Do you know who has time for emotional pain, Theo? Women like Larissa, who never have to worry about anything else. Not where her next meal is coming from. Not how she’s going to pay the rent.”

  “You don’t know her,” he said again, his voice clipped.

  “I wonder if you do,” she threw at him. “You’re so busy making excuses for her—you’ve even brought me here to pretend to be her because she betrayed you in yet one more way, and you still want to defend her.”

  “I won’t listen to this—”

  “You wanted me to study her, and I have,” Becca said, throwing her words out like blows. Wishing they were. Wanting them to land, to hurt. Wanting him to wake up and see the truth—needing him to—though she refused to examine why. She kept on. “The woman you’re carrying around in your mind doesn’t exist, Theo. She never did.”

  “You forget yourself.” His voice could have shattered steel. She felt a chill sneak along her neck, her arms, leaving goose bumps in its wake, and she knew she’d pushed him too far. His eyes bored into hers, amber turned glacial.

  “Theo.” But he was no longer listening.

  “You are the ghost in this room,” he told her, in his most lethal tone, making her grip the chair in front of her to remain upright. “You’re the one playing a part. You only exist insofar as I say you do.”

  His face was carved of stone, absent of light. It should have done her serious damage. Instead, she ached for him.

  “I suggest you remember your place,” he threw at her, and then he brushed past her and left her standing there, trembling and alone. And as pale as the ghost he’d accused her of being.

  CHAPTER SIX

  BECCA WOKE THE next morning feeling unaccountably fragile.

  She moved slowly, sitting up and pushing her hair back from her face carefully, as if suffering from some kind of emotional hangover. Gingerly, she made her way into the vast, luxurious shower that had at first seemed shockingly lush and that she was now already far too comfortable using. She stood under the hot spray for a long, long time, willing the odd tilt and whirl of her feelings away.

  Because this was Theo’s world, a carafe of hot coffee waited for her in the elegant blue-and-white bedroom when she walked back into it. She poured herself a mug of the rich, nearly decadent brew, and took several bracing sips before she completed the final step of her morning ritual in this bizarre place and allowed herself to look in the mirror.

  Where she saw only Larissa looking back.

  She blinked, and saw herself again—and then had to put her hand against her abdomen to ease the knot of panic there away.

  Things had gotten far too confused, she thought then, fighting off the odd sense of something like vertigo. It was all too messy, somehow. She was a stranger with her own face. How could that be anything but a mess? But she could change it, surely.

  Just because that arrogant man thought he got to decide if she existed or not didn’t make it true, she reminded
herself fiercely, shaking off all the echoes of her illegitimate childhood, all of Bradford’s harsh words, that Theo’s comments last night had dredged up. It meant only that he was even more full of himself than she’d previously believed.

  And if a hollow ache seemed to gape open behind her ribs and then bloom in the pit of her stomach, well, no one had to know that but her. And she was getting very, very good at burying the things she didn’t want to think about, she thought wryly. Far too good, in fact.

  She checked in with Emily quickly, making sure her sister was doing well even as she hurried off the phone—too conscious of the lies she had to tell to linger. But hearing her sister’s voice was like a much-needed wake-up call. She would pack these unwanted emotions away and concentrate on the job at hand. On her purpose for being here—which was not to figure out the mysteries of Larissa or, more to the point, of Theo Markou Garcia. It didn’t matter how intriguing he was, how her body hummed to life at the very thought of his hard mouth, his strong hands. She had to play a part, that was all. Then she would collect her mother’s inheritance—Emily’s future—and leave this empty, shiny life exactly as she’d found it. She would be happy to be rid of it.

  That was the plan. That had always been the plan. She should feel happier about it, surely.

  She dressed slowly, pulling together the kind of fashionable outfit that she imagined Larissa might wear. She chose a flirty little scarlet dress and a pair of boots, then fashioned her hair in a Larissa-esque slicked-back ponytail, low on her neck. She then sat down at the vanity table and began the laborious process of applying the kind of makeup women like Larissa, apparently, viewed as the bare essentials for everyday wear. She had to live under the expectation that she might be photographed at any moment, she reminded herself, an echo of Theo’s lecturing tone ringing in her head. She had to learn that only in her private bedroom could she drop her defenses and be something other than public property.

  Normally, Becca hated every moment of the process. She’d liked a bit of mascara and some judicious eyeliner now and then when she’d been back in her own life, but she’d always erred on the side of practical rather than pretty. Larissa’s seventeen coats of this followed by a dusting of that seemed absurdly excessive to her. But today she found that she was almost grateful for the excuse. For the ability to put on a mask, layer by layer. Coat by coat.

  Because last night had left her feeling much too raw, far too exposed. She didn’t want to feel anything even approaching vulnerable. She wanted to lock the soft parts of herself away, because she had to concentrate on her endgame—on Emily—if she was going to make it through this.

  It didn’t matter how fascinating he was. It couldn’t.

  She had to find a way to remember that.

  Theo was all business when she found him again, behind his massive desk in the office suite of the penthouse. He barely spared her a glance when she walked in, and even turned his high leather seat around toward the window to continue his phone conversation. She heard the terms market share and network overhead, and tuned out.

  She wondered if he made everyone stand there, like a supplicant, waiting for the great gift of his attention. Why wouldn’t he? Hadn’t he told her last night to remember her place? This was a naked display of power. He was too busy to deal with her the moment she arrived—though the housekeeper had told her to go to his office—and yet she was too insignificant to be kept separated from his conversation. She was meant to feel more and more uncomfortable as she stood there, ignored.

  It was shocking to think that he’d learned tricks like this, that they hadn’t been genetically bestowed upon him at birth. Everything about him shouted out his dominance, his masculine arrogance, his mastery of himself and everything around him. Becca found she couldn’t imagine him as a young boy, desperate to acquire even some small part of what was now his. In her mind, he must always have been this way. Larger than life.

  “I trust you are not as sentimental today as you were last night,” he said coldly, snapping her attention back to the present. He replaced the phone in its cradle and eyed her from across the wide expanse of his gleaming black desk.

  Becca stiffened. “Are you?” she replied. When his dangerous brows arched, she sniffed. “Or is it not my place to ask such questions?”

  She could feel the tension in the room skyrocket. It clenched a hard hand around her, like a fist, and squeezed tight, and she knew he must feel it, too, though he did not move so much as a muscle. His eyes somehow got more amber; lit up from within, temper and heat and something much darker she could not name.

  Though it took her breath.

  “I think you have Larissa’s appearance well in hand,” he said after a moment, as if she had not spoken at all. His gaze flicked over her, and she took the absence of criticism to mean approval.

  How sad you are, she told herself when she realized she actually felt a little glow go through her at the thought of his approval. As if that was the Holy Grail.

  “Is that how you play this game?” she asked quietly, clamping down on her anger—at herself most of all. “You will simply pretend not to hear me as it suits you?”

  “If you are planning to throw a childish tantrum,” he said in his dark, commanding way, making her flush too hot and feel that warmth sear the back of her eyes—was she so eager to please him? “Please let me know now, so I do not pointlessly rearrange my schedule.”

  “Heaven forfend,” she murmured. She glared at him with all the force she could manage, which, unsurprisingly, had no noticeable effect on him at all. “It’s not as if I’ve given up weeks of my life, and rearranged everything. Why should you be inconvenienced?”

  He gazed at her, and this time, even though she knew it was deliberate and that he intended for her to feel foolish and small, she had to bite down on the inside of her cheek to keep from squirming. But she could do nothing about the way she flushed yet again, or the creep of that red heat across her face and down her chest.

  And even then, , there was still that part of her that wanted nothing more than to reach out and touch him.

  Damn him.

  “If you’re finished,” he said, so calmly. So coolly. “I think it’s time for a field experiment.”

  Theo studied her in the flattering light that spilled through the floor-to-ceiling windows, bathing the trendy SoHo restaurant in afternoon sunshine. She looked radiant. Beautiful, serene.

  And she was driving him slowly insane.

  He had lost sleep over this woman, an occurrence so rare that he had not allowed himself to admit it was possible until he found himself standing at his window in the dark of night, drinking whiskey and brooding. And thinking only of the way she’d argued with him—the way she’d looked at him as if she hurt for him.

  He could not seem to wrap his head around that. He could not make sense of it.

  He no longer knew what he saw when he looked at her. It had all become tangled. Knotted and snarled beyond any possible redemption. He had shared things with her he’d never shared with anyone, and he’d tried to slap her back down when it had all become too much—and none of it had helped. And yet he found himself mesmerized by the way she held the heavy silverware in her delicate hands, the way she sneaked glances around her when she thought he wasn’t looking. And why shouldn’t she? This was the restaurant of the moment. Had Theo cared to, he could no doubt have identified most of the other patrons packing the place, as they all had to be very famous, very wealthy, or both, to get in at all.

  What was this childish part of him that wanted her to know that? Wasn’t it enough that he knew it?

  He had no idea what was happening to him.

  “Tell me about your childhood,” he heard himself ask, breaking the silence between them. He toyed with his glass, and could not seem to breathe when she licked her full lips. Was that an indication of her nerves? Or this same fire that burned in him? He decided he didn’t care. Nothing mattered but this lunch, this woman, this moment. Surely.<
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  “Is that an order?” she asked, that challenging look on her face.

  “Merely a request.” But he smiled slightly, because she never quit, this woman.

  “I hesitate to make myself more human in your eyes,” she continued crisply, cutting into her steak with a certain deliberate precision that he suspected was the only outward sign of her temper, aside from her tone of voice. “That might make me exist independent of your permission to do so, and then where would we be?”

  His smile deepened. “The futility of the fight never seems to faze you,” he murmured, as much to himself as to her. She was his very own Don Quixote, tilting wildly at any windmill that caught her attention, and he could not help but admire her passion. Her foolish courage.

  She put down her silverware with a thunk and met his gaze. Hers was that color between brown and green, and it called to him. So serious. So sincere. So unreasonably brave.