Heiress Behind the Headlines

by Caitlin Crews

  She hooked her fingers beneath the soft wool of her sweater, and then pulled it up and over her head.

  She heard a quiet curse. And then the sweater was off. She tossed it to the side and then she stood naked to the waist before him, without so much as a bra between them. She’d never needed one, and so her breasts jutted out, proud and full as the cooler air caressed them, and she felt more powerful in that moment than she had in years. Like some kind of avenging goddess, the kind men like Jack Sutton should know better than to toy with.

  “Put on your clothes,” he rasped at her, a harsh command.

  But she could see the bright, hard desire that glittered fierce and wild in his dark eyes. She could see the way his body tightened, the long, corded muscles in his neck and the long lines of his powerful body pulling taut. The way he clenched his hands. He tossed back the rest of his drink with a quick jerk and then slapped the tumbler down on the nearest table—but he didn’t move away from her.

  “Poor Jack,” she taunted him, glorying in his weakness, thrilled that she could use it as a weapon against him—that she had any weapon at all. “There are so few things you want that you can’t have, aren’t there? Too bad for you I’m one of them.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “YOU’VE lost your mind,” Jack bit out icily, ordering himself to step away from her—though he did not move so much as an inch. He made his voice even colder, even crueler. She should have frozen where she stood—but instead she seemed to shimmer with more heat than the fire in the fireplace. “I’ve already had everything you’re offering. You’re embarrassing yourself.”

  But she was Larissa Whitney, and he should have remembered that she could not be embarrassed. That she was incapable of feeling such a thing. There was a hard look in her emerald eyes, more like precious stones tonight than he remembered them being before. She only smirked at him, and leaned back against the arm of the sofa, putting that lithe, lush little body of hers on display.

  And he, God help him, could not look away. She was as perfect as he remembered. Her skin looked like spun sugar, peaches and cream, and the warm vanilla scent of her rose in the air, making him uncomfortably hard. Ready. He wanted to pull her into his arms. He wanted to suck those pert, dark nipples into his mouth, and lick them until she writhed against him. He wanted to make her climax, screaming his name.

  But he wouldn’t allow himself to do anything like that, no matter how hard he was. No matter how much he wanted her. She was toxic.

  “I’m not embarrassed,” she said, her voice so disarmingly, distractingly sweet. Just one more of her lies, he told himself. Harshly. “Isn’t this what you wanted? Me—naked and prostrate before you? Begging for your help so you can piously, self-righteously turn me away?” That crook of her lips twisted further, and something seemed to twist in him, too. “Or maybe you don’t like to do things halfway,” she murmured suggestively, and her delicate hands went to the low-slung fly of her jeans.

  “Stop!” The word was out before Jack knew he meant to speak, ringing in the air between them. Her eyes narrowed, and he realized with an uncomfortable start that she was very, very angry.

  “I don’t understand,” she said, her voice too crisp. Too pointed. It made something hard and uncomfortable move through him. “How am I supposed to trap you with my wiles and complete lack of self-respect if my clothes stay on?”

  That sat there for a moment between them, ugly and unobscured. Jack felt his teeth grind against the mounting tension, against his own urge to close the distance between them and finish this conversation in a far more direct manner.

  “What do you want, Larissa?” he demanded. Because he could not have what he wanted from her, and if he was the kind of man he was supposed to be, he wouldn’t want it. Her.

  “I thought you already knew,” she threw at him. “I thought you just took great pleasure in telling me. You, on your high horse, because you decided to change your life and everyone played along. Lucky you. It must be nice to breathe such rarified air.” She straightened from the couch, all elegant lines and tempting flesh, and made everything worse by stepping even closer, her hands wide at her sides. “Well, here I am, Jack. Prostituting myself. Just as you predicted.” Her head tilted to one side. “But if I’m a prostitute, what, I wonder, does that make you?”

  “You said I couldn’t have you,” he reminded her, trying to keep himself from reaching over and putting his hands on her. “And yet now you’re half-naked and prostituting yourself? Which is it?”

  “You all but called me a whore,” she snapped at him. “Yet you’re the one who kissed me. You’re the one who can’t keep his hands to himself. At the end of the day, I’m still the one who walked away from you.”

  “It would be smarter not to keep reminding me of that,” he told her, too softly, denying the kick of temper in his gut. “It’s not one of my favorite memories of you.” He could pretend as well as she could, he told himself. That he was angry simply about her presence here, in his one sacred space in all the world. That he would feel the same about any other specter of the New York social scene.

  “Isn’t that what this is all about?” she demanded. Again, that hard, glittering look in her usually sad eyes. “Isn’t that what makes you so bound and determined to lord yourself over me? I had the temerity to walk out on the great Jack Endicott Sutton. A dirty, shameless whore like me.”

  He hated those words. That she would use them, that she meant them. That she believed he thought them. More than that, he had the strangest urge to protect her from them, as if they were blows. He wanted to make her take them back. He didn’t know what the source of that feeling was, but it washed over him like another kick of temper.

  “I never called you a whore—” he began.

  “Didn’t you?” Her eyes flashed at him, green fire. And still she stood there so nonchalantly, gloriously half-naked, and he wanted her so badly he ached with it. He found himself drifting closer. She only watched him, a certain sharp amusement and a deeper anger clashing in her gaze. It should not have felt like an aphrodisiac.

  “Larissa.” His hands bunched into fists at his sides—when he knew he could simply reach over now and cup those small, delectable breasts in his palms. “Put that sweater back on.”

  “I’ve worn less than this on the covers of magazines,” she said with a sniff, moving her hips in a way that made her whole body sway—and made his mouth run dry. “When did you become such a prude?”

  When you walked onto my island, he thought grimly. When you walked back into my life. I don’t even care why you’re here, I just—

  But he could not allow himself to finish that thought.

  He reached down and scooped up her sweater, holding it out toward her, more or less ordering her to take it from him. The back of his hand brushed the silky skin just south of her collarbone, sending sensation rioting through him. She inhaled, sharply, and he felt it as if she’d used that mouth directly on him.

  They stared at each other, the air itself erotic all around them, the tension unbearable.

  “Put the damned thing back on or I will do it for you,” he said. “And that will not end the way you want it to end. I can promise you that.”

  She searched his face for a moment. Her mouth flattened into a serious line, and she blinked.

  “I can assure you that you have absolutely no idea what I want,” she said, but there was a darkness, suddenly, in those changeable eyes. She snatched the black sweater from him, taking care to keep from touching him, he noticed, and then pulled it back over her head with as little warning or fanfare as when she’d removed it.

  And then she was looking at him again, warily, that elegant face of hers more appealing, somehow, beneath her newly darkened, newly shortened hair—her cheekbones more pronounced, her mouth more lush. Her eyes more shadowed. He remembered all the things she’d said to him in her inn room earlier, everything he’d dismissed as just so much spinning of her latest tale of woe, designed to pull him in and
suck him under. He reminded himself that she was like a riptide, and he had no intention of succumbing. But she looked small and weary, suddenly, swallowed up in that black turtleneck, and he found he could not bear that. He refused to wonder why.

  “What happened to you?” he asked quietly.

  He had not meant to ask her that. He’d had some complicated idea of revenge and humiliation tonight, hadn’t he? Some fantasy that he would show her how little her games worked on him now? He could hardly remember. The fire crackled behind them, and the room seemed smaller. Closer. She smiled, and though it was not that practiced siren’s smile, or not quite, it still did not reach her eyes.

  “You already know what happened to me,” she said softly, that weariness now in her eyes, the curve of her mouth. “The whole world knows what happened to me. It is recorded for posterity, and trotted out again every week or two to sell more papers. My pain makes excellent entertainment.”

  “Theo,” he guessed, and shoved aside the odd pang that he felt when he said the other man’s name. “You were with him for a long time.” Just about five years, in fact, if his math was as correct as he knew it was. He shoved that aside, too. “Losing him must have been very painful.”

  “Not in the way you think,” she said, and laughed slightly. It was a hollow sound, and she looked away. “He found someone who looked just like me but—crucially—was not me. Not surprisingly, she suits him much better. I don’t really blame him. I can’t say that I ever appreciated him at all.”

  He didn’t like the way she said that—and couldn’t understand why he cared. Why her eyes seemed too big while her mouth seemed too fragile. Or why she seemed small, suddenly. Breakable. Already broken.

  “Perhaps he is the one who didn’t appreciate you,” Jack heard himself say—and he was not sure who was more surprised, Larissa or himself.

  Her smile was crooked, her green eyes sad again. One shoulder moved in a kind of shrug. “If that’s true, it’s nobody’s fault but mine.”

  The moment stretched out between them, and Jack found himself reaching out for her, tracing the line of her aristocratic cheekbone, the breathtaking curve of her perfect lips. Something he didn’t understand moved through him, confusing him. Heat, yes—all that riot of need and want—but something else beneath. And all the while she looked at him with eyes like the sea, as if she was only waiting for him to hurt her, too. He hated it.

  “I think I’m going to go,” she said after a long moment, her voice husky. She produced her Mona Lisa smile, so enigmatic, and Jack decided he hated the very sight of it, too. “Not everyone can say that they stripped for Jack Endicott Sutton in his private Maine retreat. I’ll have to add that to my list of most—”

  “Stay,” he said. He hadn’t known he meant to speak. She let her voice trail away, her eyes big and wary. How could she make him feel like the monster in this scenario? “To dinner,” he clarified, and smiled, calling on all his charm, all his finesse. She blinked. “I did promise I would feed you, didn’t I?”

  She let out a little laugh, silvery in the air around them.

  “How can I refuse?” she asked lightly.

  It was exactly what she’d said over five years ago, he thought as a heat flooded through him, when he’d heeded an urge he’d never had before—not with her, at any rate—and asked her to leave that party with him. He couldn’t remember, now, who had thrown that party or even if it had been for one of the many charities he supported with his presence and checkbook, as was expected of members of his social circle. All he could remember was how he’d touched her, kissed her. He remembered the feel of her skin beneath his fingers, the heat of her decadent mouth. He remembered the wild passion, the intense need that had nearly taken him out at the knees. Touching Larissa was like diving into the heart of a volcano, and he’d loved it. The rush. The danger. Adrenaline and desire.

  He had known her for years. He was not one to waste his time reading trashy fiction in the gutter press, not even back then when he’d starred in so many lurid fantasies presented as fact—but even so, he would have to have been entombed underground somewhere not to recognize that Larissa Whitney was the It Girl of their time. Her every word, action, outfit and hairstyle scrutinized, criticized and then ruthlessly copied. He’d been surprised to find that she was so sharp, so funny.

  She’d made him laugh when he’d been resigned to another night of desperate tedium. Then they’d danced together on a rooftop with all of Manhattan laid out at their feet, and touching her had felt like burning alive. His mother had just died, he’d been reeling from a loss he could hardly make sense of nor admit, and somehow, Larissa Whitney had seemed like a touchstone. An anchor to the world, though not, perhaps, of it. She was the only thing that had broken through his numbness, his despair, like a bright shining lighthouse on the edge of a dangerous cliff.

  “Come with me,” he’d said. Had he ordered her or pleaded with her? His memory was unreliable on that point.

  She’d had her arms locked around his neck, those perfect small breasts pressed against him like twin points of flame, and her green eyes had seemed to sear right through him. He’d thought she was magical. She’d felt like some kind of spell, her body an enchantment against his, and he’d felt like his own kind of magic holding her that close, with the whole city made up of interlocking ropes of light spread out behind her and below her like a labyrinth.

  She’d laughed as if every part of that moment delighted her, as if he’d delighted her even more, straight down to the soles of her expertly, expensively-shod feet. She hadn’t asked him where he wanted to go, or what he’d wanted to do. She hadn’t played any of those games. He’d thought she wasn’t playing any games at all. She’d leaned closer then, and she’d pressed her full lips to his, a cool challenge. A hint. Like a deep, consuming flame. Like destiny, he’d thought.

  “How can I refuse?” she’d asked in that light, easy voice of hers, a sweet whisper in his ear.

  He’d felt it like a thunderbolt.

  But if she remembered that, Jack thought, searching her face, he saw no sign of it now. Her face was smooth as glass, and perhaps he only imagined that there were things to be learned still in the darkness of her unreadable eyes. Perhaps he simply wanted that to be true.

  Perhaps he was a far greater fool than he had previously believed.

  He led her through to the back of the house, where the original kitchen had long since been remodeled to suit more modern tastes. He walked over to the subzero refrigerator and began pulling things out of it, setting them out on the counter.

  “You cook?” He could hear the laughter in her voice, though when he looked over his shoulder at her, her eyes were veiled. She stood by the rough-hewn wood table, running her fingers over the nooks and crannies.

  “I value my privacy,” he said with a shrug. “That means no staff and no deliveries, even if there was any place that delivered out here.” He waited until her eyes rose to meet his. “And as I am not feral, that means that yes, I cook.”

  “The Manhattan glitterati would be so distraught if they had any idea that you were so competent,” she said, moving toward him, a smile flirting with her mouth. “It would destroy whole fantasies about how much work a man like you must be.”

  “But it depends on what you consider onerous,” he said, rummaging through the well-stocked shelves of the whitewashed cupboard above him. “Having thoughts that do not revolve around parties and shopping? Having a purpose in life beyond depleting the family fortune? Is that too much work?”

  “You know that it is,” Larissa said, once again with that thread of laughter woven through her voice.

  She moved to stand next to him, and Jack had the strangest sensation, like some kind of déjà vu. As if she belonged there, standing close to him like this, in a kitchen of all places. In this kitchen. As if this was their life. As if they shared something more than that unforgettable, unquenchable fire. Where did that come from?

  She frowned down at the ite
ms he’d laid out on the counter, wrinkling her fine nose as he pulled dry pasta from a canister in the overhead cupboard. He’d put out a few sausages.

  Tomatoes and basil. A hunk of good cheese and a bulb of garlic.

  She glanced at him then, and he had the oddest feeling that she’d seen it too, that almost-hallucination. That fantasy of a life he couldn’t even begin to imagine. Not really. He wanted Larissa; perhaps he always had. But that was just sex. Explosive, white-hot sex that he’d briefly mistaken for something more emotional during the darkest period of his life. It was only that she was here, he assured himself, in Scatteree Pines. In this house, where no one from his other world was ever allowed to come. That was what made him think of things he knew he shouldn’t—didn’t—want.

  “I’ll chop the garlic,” she offered.

  It was so incongruous. And yet … it was as if she fit. As if that odd feeling was still working its way through him. He told himself it was just the rain, just the storm. Making the very shadows seem meaningful when they were not.

  “I’m not at all sure how I feel about you brandishing a knife in my kitchen,” he said. And she smiled. It wasn’t that fake smile of hers, that mysterious bit of nothing she trotted out for the masses. This smile showed the faintest hint of a dimple in her cheek, and the flash of her teeth. He even saw it in the gleam of gold that warmed the green of her eyes. That was real, he thought, dazed by the punch of it, the way it electrified him. He’d just seen the real Larissa.

  Something warm moved through him then, and that was when he was sure of it: he should never have invited this woman here. Ever. He should have pretended he hadn’t seen her in that bar, and gone about his business. But he had always had a regrettable weakness where Larissa Whitney was concerned. What was one more bit of proof?

  It was like a dream.

  Larissa chopped garlic and basil, then cut into the plump tomatoes. Olive oil sizzled in a cast-iron pan on the big stove top, and the kitchen seemed to glow with warmth and laughter, as if such things shone down from the walls. As if they had been trapped there over the course of long, happy years, and blossomed at the rich scent of garlic and the leftover summer brashness of the basil.