The Replacement Wife

by Caitlin Crews

  It was the way he looked at her. When she knew he saw only her, and it stole her breath and filled her heart. She didn’t have it in her to withstand that look. She didn’t even want to try.

  The car came to a stop, snapping her out of her reverie. She climbed out of the car when the driver opened the door, and paused for a moment as she gazed up at the house. It was not an icon of a bygone era by accident. The mansion rose up from Fifth Avenue, a proud ghost of a bygone age, all flamboyant grace and style. Becca eyed the curved bay windows that opened up over the avenue, the balustraded balconies and the dramatic roof that soared high above in a nod to a French château. The house sprawled the length of the block, self-assured and deeply self-satisfied. It looked different at night, more sinister, or perhaps more impressed with itself as the security lights shone up on its elegant facade, each light carefully placed to highlight and dramatize the house’s Gothic appeal.

  It was impossible not to feel like the doomed ingenue marching to her certain end, Becca thought as she made her way up the grand stairs. No matter how very far removed from an ingenue she might have been. Or perhaps it was simply an echo of the last time she’d been in this precise spot. She could hardly remember herself back then, and that was what made her pause in her tracks, right there on the threshold. She looked down at herself, at the elegant dress and the high, fanciful shoes. The luxurious, deep red wrap she’d worn to keep off the night air and the jeweled bag she held in one hand.

  A far cry from her ripped-up jeans and battered old hooded sweatshirt, she thought. She had a sudden premonition then—a perfect vision of herself in her old boots, wearing her old clothes, but still with Larissa’s hair and this new way of carrying herself, headed back up to Boston, all alone. Some strange hybrid of her cousin and herself, but all, still, in this same body. She should have rolled her eyes at the image, or smirked it away as she would have done, once. But instead, she felt something like sadness well up from deep within. And she couldn’t allow herself the time or space to figure out why. This was the den of the enemy. This night was going to hurt, one way or another.

  There was no time for sadness.

  She reached out before she could think better of it and rang the heavy bell.

  Anger, she found not ten minutes later, served her far better. It was a weapon. It could be wielded.

  She stood in yet another interchangeably elegant room of this offensively spacious palace, holding a glass of perfectly chilled wine from some unspeakably expensive vintage in one hand, and holding on to her temper with everything else she possessed.

  “Well,” her aunt Helen said with a sniff, breaking the long and far-from-comfortable silence that had lasted since the moment Becca had been ushered into the room. “The likeness is truly astonishing. There’s no debating that.”

  There was no one else in the large, faintly chilly room. Theo and Bradford, Becca imagined grimly, were closeted off somewhere, no doubt comparing their bank balances and ruining lives. That left only the censorious Helen to serve as the welcoming committee. She sat on one of the fussy, stiff and uninviting-looking chairs near the cold stone fireplace, the face that so greatly resembled her mother’s—had Caroline been as coddled and as bitter as this woman—screwed into a disapproving frown.

  “One couldn’t really imagine how it was possible,” Helen continued, her voice the precise cadence and pitch to suggest that she was being scrupulously courteous, when in fact, she was not. “After all, when you appeared here last you were in such a wild, unmanageable state.”

  “I think by that you mean I looked poor,” Becca said smoothly, smiling hard enough to draw blood. Her fingers tightened around the stem of her wineglass, so tight she thought she might snap the glass in two. She loosened her grip. Slightly. “Which I understand, to you, is anyone not in possession of their own private jet and selection of secondary residences. The rest of us simply call that normal.”

  The older woman stared at her, affront written all over her face. She was like all the other women of her particular station, all the other upper-class East Coast women with their lustrous pedigrees and their Seven Sisters degrees, their carefully selected yet never ostentatious jewelry, and their quiet, pervasive aura of superiority. Her clothes were all understated elegance, her hair carefully bobbed and smooth on either side of her narrow, moderately attractive face. Yet her natural expression, Becca had no doubt, was this very glare she was delivering now, from down the length of her patrician nose.

  “A pity Theo couldn’t have improved your manners,” Helen said. Her smile was razor sharp, and utterly fake. “Although perhaps this is as much as someone like you was capable of improving.”

  Becca felt frozen and furious all at once—a terrible combination. She forced herself to move with all of Larissa’s boneless nonchalance toward the only piece of furniture that did not look as if it would like to judge its occupant—a splendid couch, all bright reds and whites. She sank into it, and schooled her features into blandness when she met Helen’s gaze once more.

  “It can be so difficult to train up the peasants,” she said, pretending to commiserate, her voice heavy with irony. “They find it so hard to project the kind of snobbery that comes so naturally to their betters.”

  “Whatever her faults,” Helen said then, raising her brows, and looking as if it was a heroic act to ignore Becca’s last words, “Larissa was at least capable of conducting herself like a Whitney when it mattered.”

  Becca shook her head. “I know this must wound you as deeply as it does me,” she said, almost as if she pitied this woman. “But I am, in fact, a Whitney. That you turned your back on your only sister, the better to hoard your treasures in this morgue you call a house, only makes you sad. It doesn’t make me any less your niece.”

  She expected Helen to gasp, clutch at her ubiquitous pearls, perhaps even swoon. But the other woman was no longer the fluttering, gasping creature Becca recalled from their first meeting in this house. Helen surprised her. She actually smiled slightly, with a hint of something like nostalgia, which made her whole face change. Unexpectedly, it made her look … more like Becca’s mother than Becca would have thought possible. She had to swallow hard against the rush of emotion that threatened to swamp her.

  “You look nothing like your mother,” Helen said after a long, strange little moment, maybe two. “She took after our father’s side, like the rest of us. But you sound just like her.” She blinked. “It’s extraordinary.”

  This time, the quiet that took over was less tense, if no less fraught with the weight of the past. Becca dropped her gaze to her wine, peering at the golden liquid as if it could solve all of her problems, banish all her ghosts. This was, she thought, perhaps as close as she was likely to come to the happy family reunion she’d imagined so feverishly—and secretly—when she was a girl. There would be no clutching of the lost child to her aunt’s breast, clearly—but it was something. Something more than had been there before.

  It shouldn’t have comforted her. It shouldn’t have felt like balm to an old wound.

  “You truly do look remarkably like Larissa,” Helen said after a moment. She shifted in her chair. “Theo did a wonderful job, as he always does.”

  “He’s a talented man,” Becca said dryly, and then regretted it when her aunt’s gaze caught hers. There was a certain recognition there—a certain knowledge—that set off alarms all over her body.

  “Theo is the most driven, most ruthless man I know,”

  Helen said. Purposefully. Deliberately. “He allows nothing to distract him from his goal. Nothing.”

  Becca felt horribly exposed—as caught out as she’d been in the glare of all those paparazzi flashbulbs. How could Helen know what had transpired between them? Was it imprinted on her face somehow? But she knew it couldn’t be. She had worked too hard over the past weeks to make sure her face showed only what she wanted it to. In this case, the ghost of a girl who never got upset about anything, not where anyone could see.
/>   “That sounds like an excellent quality to have in the family company’s CEO,” Becca said briskly. “Congratulations.”

  “Nor is he the kind of man to settle for substitutions,” her aunt continued, in that same arch, superficially polite tone with the bite beneath. Any tenderness that might have connected them, however briefly, was gone as surely as if Becca had imagined it. Perhaps she had. “You’ve seen how he lives. Theo demands, and receives, the very best. Nothing else will do.”

  Becca couldn’t help the little laugh that came out of her then. Was it amazement? Or just a kind of horror that this woman was articulating all the fears she had refused to put into words herself?

  “I’m sorry,” she said. She made herself look Helen in the eye, made herself sit there calmly, her face blank. “Are you warning me about something? Is that what this is?”

  “You’re out of your depth,” Helen said in a voice that was arguably meant to be kind, but sounded like nothing more than the worst kind of condescension to Becca’s ears. Helen shrugged delicately. “That’s not a judgment, merely a statement of fact. It would be easy to misunderstand things, I’d think. Easy to misinterpret.” She took a sip of her wine, her narrowed gaze much too shrewd. “Far too easy to forget oneself.”

  Becca could have pretended she didn’t understand. But even if Helen didn’t know the particulars, it was the casual assumptions that made Becca’s blood heat, her temper rise. Because of course the poor relative, caught up in these high-stakes games, so wide-eyed and naive, would fall for a man like Theo and fail to see that he was using her as a substitute. Of course Helen thought she was that stupid. Helen thought anyone who did not come from her world was that stupid, by definition.

  The fact that she was right was not something Becca intended to confront. Not now. Not while Helen looked on.

  “You’re operating under the assumption that I want what you have,” Becca bit out. “What Larissa had. I don’t.” She laughed again, though it was slightly more wild this time, slightly more bitter. “I want nothing to do with this fake, glittering, poisonous little world of yours, I assure you.”

  “If you say so,” Helen said, gliding to her feet, poised and cool. Her gaze was pitying. “But that does not change the facts of things, does it?”

  CHAPTER TEN

  IT WAS TIME.

  Theo sat at the long, formal dining room table and found himself brooding as he watched his perfect creation, his Becca, shine. She embodied Larissa, just as he’d taught her to do. He thought she was more than Larissa—she had more life in her, more sparkle, than her cousin had ever had. But no one would see her and think anything was amiss; they were far more likely, he reflected, to assume that rehabilitation had finally worked its magic on poor, lost Larissa.

  Which meant that he had succeeded. He should have been jubilant. This mad plan that should never have worked seemed set to succeed beyond his wildest dreams. He had created his own little ghost, and now it was time to let her do what she’d been made to do. Haunt. Confuse. And win him back the shares that had been meant to be his in the first place.

  It was too bad that he felt as if he was the one already haunted.

  “I hope you read your contract carefully,” Bradford was saying to Becca, his attention on his elegant plate and the perfect duck that graced it. Other than a sweeping head-to-toe glance when she’d walked into the room, Theo didn’t think Bradford had looked at her directly.

  “No, I prefer to sign intimidating-looking documents without so much as glancing at them,” Becca said mildly, lounging against the back of her chair, her narrowed gaze on Bradford. Her duck lay before her, untouched. “I find it’s so much more fun to be disappointed and taken by surprise down the road.”

  Theo should not have found her as entertaining as he did.

  Bradford sniffed. “You’re making a good show in the tabloids,” he said, in quelling tones. “But your flippant attitude hardly does you credit.”

  “Funny,” Becca said with apparent unconcern, though Theo saw the tension she fought to hide, “but I did read the contract. I especially read all the parts that outlined what I had to do, and what I would receive in return for that.” Her brows rose in that challenging way that sent heat spiraling through Theo, even here, even now. “But at no point did it mention that I had to impress you with my attitude.”

  Bradford very carefully placed his silverware against his plate, and meticulously touched his linen napkin to his lips. The room fell hushed—the only sound was Helen, drinking deep from her wineglass. Becca, of course, his Quixote, only gazed at Bradford expectantly. Finally, Bradford leveled his cold glare across the table at his niece, who must have seemed to him like his own daughter, brought back from the brink.

  Or did Theo ascribe to the man qualities and feelings he did not possess? Theo studied his face, but was not surprised to see no hint at all of anything resembling emotion. Bradford was cold and calculating. He had been that way as long as Theo had known him—interested only in expanding his profit margin, his power base, his investment portfolio. He had hardly paid his wife attention when she had still lived with him, and he had never so much as mentioned her name since she’d taken herself off to France. He had never, as far as Theo knew, given his daughter, his only child, the slightest hint of anything approaching fatherly affection. Theo doubted he was capable of such a thing.

  And if he was any kind of man, Theo knew, he would stop this scene before it played out. Because he did not have to be a mind reader to know that Bradford would be cruel to Becca. He knew it was inevitable. But he also knew that any sign of protection on his part would only make Bradford worse. And the manipulative part of him—which was, perhaps, a far larger part of him than he was comfortable admitting these days—knew that in order to truly act like Larissa, Becca really ought to live through one of the defining experiences of Larissa’s life: dealing with her father.

  He also knew that Becca was stronger than Larissa had ever been. Tougher. More fierce. Half Quixote, half warrior. She could handle herself.

  So he said nothing at all. And hated himself all the more.

  “Blood will tell,” Bradford said. His lip curled as he looked at Becca. “And there can be no doubt that yours is certainly a stain upon the Whitney name.”

  Theo wanted to wring his neck. But instead, he did nothing. This was her battle, however little she might have wished to fight it. He merely sat and watched.

  “My blood is Whitney blood,” Becca replied, with that underlying sting in her voice. She smiled. “Or do you lack a basic understanding of genetics?”

  “You are the bastard child of my sister, the whore,” Bradford said, in his calm, polite, vicious way.

  Theo saw Becca stiffen, saw the faint color that appeared on her cheeks, but she made no other outward sign that those nasty words had hurt her. Just as he knew he gave no hint that he wanted to put his fist through Bradford’s pompous face for speaking to her that way. What a great hero he was, he taunted himself with a wealth of derision. What a man he’d become. And was he any different from Bradford, in the end? Did they not want the same things? It made him sick to consider it in those terms.

  “And I want to make sure that you don’t have any ideas above your station.” Bradford’s voice droned on, patronizing and dismissive all at once. “The contracts are ironclad. You will receive your money, and then you will disappear. You will never return. You will never ask for more. You cannot approach the media to sell your story years down the line, when you are desperate yet again.” He looked almost kindly as he looked at her. Almost the way an uncle should. “You will sink back into the hole you crawled out of, and stay there.”

  Helen eyed Theo across the table, her gaze uncomfortably shrewd.

  “Surely you don’t plan to sit idly by while Bradford eviscerates your … protégé,” she said in her insinuating way, the perfect arches of her plucked brows high on her elegant forehead.

  Theo didn’t much care for the way she looked
at him then, nor for the malicious gleam in her eyes.

  “Becca can take care of herself,” he murmured, as if bored, and did not permit himself to look at Becca directly, no matter how much he wanted to.

  And Becca, being Becca, did not cower. She did not cry, as Larissa might have, nor scream out her frustrations. Just as he knew she would not. Instead, she reached out and tapped a finger against the stem of her wineglass, looking as unruffled as if she’d just had a spa treatment. Theo had seen hardened businessmen quail before Bradford’s brand of cruelty, before his deliberate and pointed disinterest, but not this woman.

  Not his Becca.

  “Am I missing something?” she asked after a moment. Her voice was calm. Relaxed, even. Quite as if she was, too—though Theo knew her now, and knew better. “Is there some reason that you think I would want to come rushing back to this horrible place? To you?” She laughed slightly. “To the bosom of my family, such as it is? You’ll understand, I think, that I would rather be fed alive to a pit of snakes.”