“That is easy to say now, and harder to remember when your filthy, depressing little life becomes too much to bear,” Bradford replied, his voice smooth. And so certain that he knew how Becca would behave once she left here—so certain that she would come back, hands outstretched. Theo rather thought she would sooner cut them off than give Bradford the satisfaction.
“You speak from what position of authority, exactly?” Becca asked. “Your fevered fantasies about what the lives of those you look down on must be like? Because it certainly can’t be experience.”
How had he lived so long without her? Theo wondered. And how on earth could he do so again, knowing, now, that she existed?
“The Whitney name has always attracted a bad element,” Bradford replied. He indicated Becca with a flick of a finger. “Your father, for example.”
Becca did not so much as flinch. Theo winced for her, while she only smirked at Bradford and looked something akin to amused.
“Whereas you, my dear uncle, are such a model for us all,” Becca said, strong until the end, though Theo could hear her temper in her voice, the way it made it that much huskier, that much lower.
She cut her eyes to him then, skewering him with that brilliant, unexpected green, nearly emerald with the contact lenses. He preferred the hazel. The hint of forests. Their gazes clashed across the table, igniting memories, catching fire, hers demanding. Condemning, he thought. Because he was not helping her. He was not defending her. He was simply sitting there, watching, doing nothing at all, while Bradford savaged her.
This was who he was. This shadow of a man. Worthy of nothing and no one, no matter how much wealth he accumulated and power he attained.
Yet even thinking that, knowing it, Theo remained silent. He raised his brows at her, encouraging her to carry on, because he knew she could. She was more than capable. She did not even need him. Fight, he thought. Win. Her eyes darkened as she read his expression, and her mouth flattened into a hard line. But he knew she’d understood him when she swallowed, nodded slightly and turned away “You,” Bradford said quietly, in that deadly way of his that meant he would raze anything in his path, “would have been better off never born at all. You ruined my sister’s life.”
Helen gasped from her place down the table. Becca stared at him for a moment, only the faintest whitening of her cheeks any sign that she’d heard Bradford at all, that she’d absorbed that deliberate body blow. Theo saw the pain in her gaze, the betrayal, and a certain flash of resignation that hurt him most of all.
His hands became fists beneath the table.
But this was still her battle.
“You understand this is not my opinion,” Bradford said, almost softly. “It is a fact.”
Becca pushed back from the table and stood, tossing her napkin onto the glossy surface, every inch of her a study in elegance. Theo understood in that moment that she was not only the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, but the most precious to him. And, further, that he would lose her. That perhaps he already had.
“I always thought my mother was exaggerating,” Becca said after a moment, her voice somehow even, her gaze steady on Bradford as if his cold glare did not bother her at all. “But, in fact, you are even more disgusting than she was willing to admit. I used to look at pictures of Larissa in magazines and wonder how anyone who had so much handed to her could do so little with it—could, in fact, fail so spectacularly.” Her lips pursed. “But now I can only wonder how she made it as long as she did. She really never did have a chance, did she?”
“You know nothing about my daughter,” Bradford said dismissively. “How could you?”
“As a matter of fact,” Becca replied, “I imagine I know more about your daughter than anyone in this room. And one thing is absolutely certain—she deserved more than you. Much more.”
She turned and started toward the door, and Theo could not decide if he should applaud her strength or mourn the necessity of her having to display it here, against such cruelty.
“This temper tantrum doesn’t matter,” Bradford called after her. “You still have to complete your assignment here, or the contract is void.”
“Why do you care so much?” Becca asked, looking back over her shoulder, her eyes dark. “You think so little of Larissa—that much is clear.” And her gaze lasered through the room, condemning them all anew. Perhaps even Theo. “So why does she have so much power?”
“Power!” Bradford laughed. “She has about as much power as you do.”
“And yet you are willing to go to these lengths to fix what you think she broke,” Becca said derisively. Incisively, Theo thought. “Maybe this was the only way she knew to hit you where it might actually hurt. If she could wake up, I’d congratulate her—she clearly succeeded.”
Her mouth twisted, and her gaze swept over all of them: Bradford with his shark’s glare directed straight back at her, Helen sitting so straight and silent, and Theo. Who felt things he could not allow himself to feel and still had not protected her from this. Or even from himself.
“Becca,” he said, and though her eyes were Larissa-green, he saw her there, her pride and her determination, her scrappy strength, looking back at him. He would know her anywhere, he thought, no matter who she looked like. And she knew him, too. He could see the recognition, no matter how battered, fill her face for the scant instant before she hid it. When she looked back at her relatives, she had hidden herself away again. She was unassailable. Impermeable. Perfectly Becca.
“I’m tempted to walk right out of here and let her win,” Becca said softly. Her chin lifted, and she very nearly smiled. “I still might.”
And Theo found it was difficult to do anything but admire her, yearn for her and wonder once more how he could survive losing her, as she pivoted back around and walked from the room.
Becca was so upset that she could hardly see—something that she only noticed when her breath began to slow again and she realized that rather than walk toward the grand front entrance as she’d intended, she’d managed to completely lose herself in the great mansion.
She came to a stop, pressing her palm into her chest as if that could stop the way her heart pounded, and forced herself to take deep breaths. She looked around, taking in the elegant grandfather clock before her, and a collection of intricately painted blue-and-white vases on a series of narrow tables. She’d never been in this particular hallway before. That in itself was hardly surprising. This place was so big she wouldn’t have been at all surprised to discover whole other cities shut away inside of it. Whole other lives. None of them hers.
The riot of confusion and betrayal inside of her threatened to take her out at the knees again, and she had to close her eyes for a moment.
The person she was really angry at, she acknowledged, was herself.
What had she expected? She had told herself that she wanted one thing and one thing only: money to help Emily. And she had believed that, too. Theo had been an unforeseen complication, but she’d honestly imagined that she could handle that, handle him. She’d believed that no matter what might have happened, she was still focused on her goal.
Oh, what a liar she was. Even to herself. And she hadn’t even known it until tonight. Until now, when it seemed everything lay about her in ruins, though she stood in such august surroundings, and she wondered how broken she was after all. Because suddenly, there was no escape from the truth.
It was sick, she thought now, and sad, and any number of other things she felt too raw to face, that there had been that part of her that had wondered if maybe, once these vile, cruel people had seen her all dressed up like Larissa—the one, some still-hurt part of her reminded her, they’d loved enough to keep—they might have had second thoughts about Becca. About how they’d treated her all these years. About how easily, how happily, they’d forgotten about her.
The reality of that lay on her like a great, wet blanket, miserable and awful, and hating herself for her own naïveté only made it worse.
She’d thought she was so tough, so prepared for this world and what it could do. She’d thought she was immune. But instead, she was still the little girl who didn’t understand why the rest of her family didn’t love her. The little girl who believed, damn Bradford, that she truly had ruined her mother’s life. It didn’t matter how many times she argued that little girl into submission—the truth was in how hollowed out she felt right now, how scraped raw, by the things that awful man had said to her.
And worse, from the grim knowledge that he believed those things to be true. Worst of all—there was a huge part of her that believed it, too.
She was the beggar at the feast and always had been, no matter how many times she told herself she didn’t want what they had. That didn’t mean she could understand, even now, how easily they could deny her.
She hated that it hurt her. That Bradford had hurt her. That Helen’s moment of near tenderness had fooled her, even momentarily, into believing these people could be anything less than monstrous.
And more than that, she hated that Theo had gotten so far under her skin, had come to matter so much, that she had actually believed the way he looked at her. She had actually believed that she could handle Bradford herself, that it would not leave this deep wound. That she could be the person Theo seemed to believe she was. Strong enough to fight that battle without his help. Strong enough not to need him. Strong enough to walk right out of that door as if she was perfectly fine on her own. And for a few moments in that dining room, she’d believed it. She’d believed that Theo was there for her, watching silently, and would have jumped in had she needed it. She’d believed.
It made her want to collapse on the floor and cry, right here in this hushed hallway, because she knew better.
She was alone. She had always been alone. She’d been the odd girl out in the little family her mother had made with her husband and Emily; the shameful memory of Caroline’s sordid past and reduced circumstances. Then, after Caroline had died, she’d truly been on her own, fighting with all she had to keep Emily with her—and to live up to her mother’s wishes, as the very least she owed to the woman who had lost everything for her. So why should the fact that she was alone here, in this alien place where cruelty seemed as much a part of the decor as the recognizably famous paintings on the wall, make her stomach ache, her eyes water? Why should this come as any kind of surprise?
Why, she asked herself as she headed toward the end of the hall without knowing she meant to move, had she thought for even a moment that anything should be different? Light spilled out of a room up ahead of her, and so she made her way toward it—but her mind was far, far away.
She thought of Theo’s dark head, bent to hers. She thought of his hot mouth, his demanding hands. Her body sang out for him as if he was beside her, and she had to bite back something she feared was much too close to a sob. She would have slapped herself if she could have, because she knew, suddenly, what she’d been denying for much too long already. She knew why she’d so foolishly expected anything at all from a man she should have viewed as nothing but her enemy.
She loved him. A bitter sort of laugh escaped her lips then, echoing down the hall. How could this have happened? How had she let it? But there it was. The truth of it moved in her like a song, high and sweet and sure, but it was not one she was likely to let herself sing.
She was an idiot. A fool of the highest degree. But there was no getting around the facts of it. The truth. She was not the sort of person who fell into bed with just anyone, no matter how beautiful they might be, or how unusually compelling she might find them. She’d known on some level when she’d turned to him for comfort after the paparazzi gauntlet that he’d put her through deliberately. She’d known even sooner, when she’d been so desperate to understand how he could possibly feel as he did for the shallow, seemingly spiteful Larissa. And she’d certainly known this past week or so, when she’d managed to put her reason for being here, and Emily herself, out of her mind, all to lose herself in him.
“Congratulations, Becca,” she told herself, her voice little more than a whisper, hushed by the wealth and finery surrounding her, her high heels sinking into the plush Oriental rug that stretched toward the light. “You’ve managed to make a bad situation that much worse.”
She loved him, she thought. She loved Theo Markou Garcia, a man who loved money and power above all things. A man who thought he was in love with a woman he’d hardly known—a fantasy, a dream. A man who would never, could never, love her back. Not even if he wanted to, and she very much doubted he did. After all, as Helen had said, he was a man who wanted the very best. Not its stand-in. Not its low-rent stunt double.
She reached the end of the hallway, and stepped into the room that waited there, brightly lit and notably different from the rest of the house. The door was wide-open, so she moved into what looked like a sitting area, all clean lines and a brisk, contemporary sensibility. She drifted toward the windows, vaguely imagining that she’d be able to figure out where she was in the house if she could see the street, and only when she was halfway there did she catch something out of the corner of her eye.
There was another room, leading off this one. Becca stopped, as her heart seemed to drop to her stomach with the force of a blow. She sucked in a breath and turned, not believing what she could see right there, right in front of her.
The adjoining room was cool and blue and dominated by the hospital bed in its center. There were machines and IV trees clustered around it, but Becca didn’t notice them. She hadn’t even heard the gentle beeping until now, when she was much too close. She saw only the slight figure on the bed, unmoving beneath the blankets, her pale hair spread out around her like a halo. So fragile. So small. So incapable, it would seem, of causing the commotion she had—both in this world of hers and, Becca thought in no little shame, inside of her.
Larissa.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
MINUTES COULD HAVE passed, or hours, and still Becca stood there in the doorway, watching the woman she looked like—yet who was still a stranger to her—fade away into nothing on that bed.
Not that Larissa was fading, necessarily. Becca wasn’t a doctor. What she knew about comas came largely—and presumably inaccurately—from the soap operas she’d watched when home from school as a child. But it seemed impossible to reconcile the person she knew—the Larissa of the diaries she’d read, the photographs she’d studied, the vast and varied tabloid appearances she knew so well—with this wan creature, so silent and still.
It felt as if the ground shook beneath her feet, though she knew on a more rational level that nothing moved. Nothing external. Becca shot out a hand and held on to the doorjamb, unable to fully take in what she was seeing—much less the howling emotional reaction that charged through her like a tidal wave.
We are the same, she thought, and she shook her head slightly to clear it, because thinking such a thing made her feel dazed. There was a faint ringing in her ears then, and her heart seemed to thud hard against her chest.
She had had so many opinions about Larissa over the years, opinions that had solidified over the past weeks. She had been so sure she knew her, that she understood her, and that Larissa had been nothing more than a spoiled, arrogant little princess. She’d thrown those words at Bradford, but she hadn’t truly meant them. How could she have? She hadn’t, even then, understood.
But for some reason, she thought she did now.
It had something to do with how frail Larissa seemed. It made Becca see her as … someone else, someone hurt and helpless, someone who was more or less the same age that she was and did not deserve this kind of end. Or any of the rest of this madness. It seemed to erase all those tabloid pictures from her head, made her reassess all the conclusions she’d reached about her cousin’s character in these weeks of poring over her every move. It made Becca realize that Larissa was … not so different from Becca, when all was said and done.
It felt very nearly revolutiona
ry to think such a thing.
But they were the same. Chess pieces, as expendable as pawns. Staring at the cousin who looked so much like her, enough that she could pass for her, Becca had a flash of unpleasant and searing insight. They were the same. They were both of them formed by the monolith of the Whitney fortune, the Whitney legacy, the Whitney name. Larissa by being thrown headfirst into all of it since birth, Becca by being denied access to it by virtue of her illegitimacy.
Had either one of them ever had a chance?
Who might they each have been—if they hadn’t been Whitneys?
“Becca.”
Her eyes slipped closed at the sound of his voice, but not because she did not want to hear it. She suspected that no matter what, no matter where, her whole being would leap with joy at the sound of Theo’s dark tones. Even now. Even here.
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