She could have him, she knew, if she could just find a way to overlook the way he felt about her. If she could simply close her eyes and tolerate it. If she could pretend it didn’t matter, that it didn’t hurt. If she could resign herself to living as the creature he saw when he looked at her instead of who she really was—whoever that might be.
It scared her that she was tempted. So terribly, seductively tempted. There was far too much of her that wanted to just climb back in the bed, curl up into his heat, and let him treat her any way he liked. Anything, if she could stay with him a little bit longer. Anything, if she could just hold on to him for a while.
But she couldn’t do it. Because she might not believe in herself either, but the difference was that she knew she should. And she wanted to.
For long moments she sat there, paralyzed. Panicked. But she knew what she had to do, however little she wanted to do it. This time, he did not reach for her. This time, there was no confusion. He stayed fast asleep. She had to decide on her own, with no interference.
And so, eventually, though it took more courage than it should have and far more than she’d imagined she possessed, she stood. She couldn’t let herself look at him. Her mind played out scenes for her instead. Jack’s cool brown eyes, searing into hers. His flashes of tenderness, here and there, over these past long days. His careful, gentle hands juxtaposed with his wicked, delicious mouth. His cruelty. His kindness.
How could she leave him? Again?
She remembered that long-ago weekend then, with a thud of recognition in the vicinity of her heart. She might not have had the clarity she did now, but even then, she’d known that Jack Sutton posed a much greater threat to her than all the other issues in her life combined. She could not even have said why. She’d only known that she’d had to go, though her body had longed for him and the intensity of it had dizzied her. She’d sneaked out of his apartment while he’d been in the shower, as if she’d had something to be guilty about, and she’d jumped on the first plane to Europe. Then to the Maldives. By the time she’d returned some weeks later, Jack had stopped looking for her. She had told herself, repeatedly, that it was just what she’d wanted. And then she had told herself that she might as well accept Theo’s latest proposal. She had told herself it didn’t matter anyway, that she had simply gotten carried away that weekend with Jack … but on some level she’d always known the truth.
He was too much. He was too dangerous. He was the only man she could ever imagine falling in love with, she was terrified that she already had, and she could never, ever have him. Not really. Not the way she knew she’d end up wanting him, with all of her heart and her soul. She’d known that then, and it had made her panic.
She knew it now, and it was worse—because she’d glimpsed what things could be like between them. All the things she’d never known. This house, filled with life and family, so much so that it clung to the very walls. This private sanctuary of an island, where there were no cameras, no expectations. The two of them, alone here, being exactly who they were instead of who they were supposed to be. She’d allowed herself the fantasy, the what if. That little slice of hope. If her life were not so complicated. If he were not so determined to be above reproach in his grandfather’s particularly Puritan way, and marry appropriately—do his duty. If she could be someone else, someone he could be proud of, or at any rate not ashamed of.
If he did not think she was, in fact, some kind of whore.
Her chest hurt when she pulled in a breath, and when she let it out it was more like a sob. She stifled it with her hands. This time, she was not numb. Not at all. This time, she knew exactly what she was giving up. And she couldn’t believe how deep the hurt of it went, how it made her legs feel hollow and her stomach twist into knots. Part of her would have done anything, put up with anything, pretended anything at all, to make that go away.
But Jack had inadvertently taught her—simply by existing, by causing this very riot of feelings in her—that she deserved more. Not because he offered anything like it, she thought bitterly, or thought the likes of her deserved it, but because she was no longer willing to settle for less. Eight months ago she wouldn’t have cared if she was with someone who hated her, but she wasn’t that person any longer. She might not know who she was, really, but for the first time since she’d woken up from her coma, she had an inkling of who she wanted to be. And she didn’t hate herself. Not anymore. So how could she stay with someone who did? It would mean going back to that numb, paralyzed place, and she couldn’t do it. Not again. Not knowingly.
She dressed quickly and quietly in the pale light of the November moon, then piled her few things haphazardly into the small bag she’d been living out of these past months. She let herself look at him one last time, held her breath to keep from sobbing, and ached. Oh, how she ached. For everything they would never be, and for all the things she knew he would think of her when he woke to find her gone.
But it was better this way.
It had to be.
There was a ferry leaving at dawn, just as he’d told her in the beginning, and she would be on it.
CHAPTER NINE
JACK was deeply bored. Possibly terminally bored.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art was splendid, as ever—and he knew all about its many charms in exhaustive detail, having had several ancestors involved in its founding. Jack had spent so much time in the famous and much-beloved landmark that he was fairly certain that he could blindfold himself, wander away from the tuxedos and lavish gowns that dotted the Charles Engelhard Court in the American Wing for tonight’s charity event, which was indistinguishable from all other charity events as far as he could tell, and find his way by memory alone to the Medieval Sculpture Hall where, he knew because it was December and thus tradition, he would find an eighteenth-century Neapolitan Nativity scene and the famous candlelit tree.
The fact that he had any such urge at all, despite his longheld dislike of all holidays and any decorations thereof, only confirmed what he had already suspected the moment he’d picked up his date for this predictably ostentatious evening to benefit the good cause du jour: he was not going to marry Miss Elizabeth Shipley Young despite his grandfather’s fervent desire that he do so. Not when he could not imagine how he was going to get through the night without expiring of acute disinterest right there in the center of the grand party, tucked up at a banquet table lavishly decorated with holly and mistletoe, with his grandfather on one side and the entirely too beige and uninteresting Elizabeth on the other.
“Are you all right?” his date asked, her voice trilling as she laughed—no doubt nervously, Jack told himself, and why not? He had been nothing but grim and humorless since the moment he’d arrived at her apartment building earlier in the evening. Restless, preoccupied. Able only to mouth the expected pleasantries. Not quite the debonair Jack Sutton she’d been expecting, he was sure. No charm, no grace. It was as if he’d left that part of himself back on Endicott Island, awash in all the rain.
But he knew she wouldn’t see all that. They never did. She would see Jack Endicott Sutton no matter how he behaved.
“I couldn’t be better,” he lied, forcing a smile. It felt stiff. Strained.
He did not have to look to his left to know that his grandfather was sitting there, with perfect posture and a beetled brow, watching Jack’s every move as if the force of his will would lead to the wedding he wanted that very evening. But the smile dropped from Jack’s face the moment his date excused herself to find the ladies’ room, and despite the fact he was surrounded on all sides by the gossipy piranhas who made up New York’s highest society and his own deeply censorious relative, he couldn’t seem to force it back into place.
“You’re about as charming as a pallbearer tonight,” came the inevitable gruff voice from beside him. Jack checked his impatience. Barely.
“I’m here, aren’t I?” He raised his brows at the old man, daring him to comment further. “As commanded.”
&nbs
p; “I shouldn’t have to command you to do your duty to this family,” his grandfather began, his august forehead crumpling into a scowl as he began the familiar complaint. But Jack was too out of sorts tonight, too irritable. He couldn’t take it the way he usually did.
“You don’t have to worry over my dedication to my duty at all,” Jack said from between his teeth, his tone still technically polite, still respectful, if only barely. “You choose to. I have long presumed it is one of the great joys of your life.”
His grandfather eyed him for a long, tense moment, and Jack braced himself for the inevitable storm. He wondered idly when he’d become so reckless—when he’d stopped walking around on the eggshells he’d always felt littered the ground between his grandfather and himself. But his grandfather only sniffed before turning away and engaging the person on his other side in conversation.
Jack lounged back in his chair and stared up at the looming old bank facade that dominated the far wall of the great courtyard. But he hardly saw it. He admitted the fact that he had not quite been himself for several weeks now, however little he wanted to admit anything of the sort. And he knew why. He had been this way since he had woken up to find that Larissa Whitney had run away from him.
Again.
He just couldn’t seem to get past that.
He’d carried on, of course, as if he hadn’t cared one way or the other. He’d told himself that he hadn’t. He’d closed up the house and headed for the mainland. He’d suffered through the indignity of a long, drawn-out Thanksgiving dinner at his grandfather’s old townhome in Boston’s elite Louisburg Square, as ordered. But while he’d calmly assured the old man that he had every intention of settling down and carrying on the family name as expected, while studiously ignoring his father and his father’s latest wife, he’d been unable to think of anything but Larissa.
His grandfather had listed the pros and cons of every supposedly appropriate heiress under the age of forty on the East Coast, but Jack had only seen one pair of stormy green eyes, one decadent mouth and that sharp intelligence she went to such great lengths to hide. His grandfather had pontificated about the merging of great families and the responsibilities visited upon those with legacies to protect and nurture throughout the march of time—and he had thought only of her defiance in the Scatteree Pines sitting room, half-naked like a goddess and far more powerful, far more compelling. How, he had wondered while picking dispiritedly as course after course of traditional plates were laid in front of him, was he ever going to settle for someone appropriate when he could still taste Larissa? Still feel her? Still want her with every cell in his body?
Not that he had mentioned that to his grandfather.
It was as if he’d been enchanted, bewitched. As if he still was. Jack could think of no other explanation. She was just as addictive as he’d feared, and he was just as susceptible as he’d always been. Why had he thought he could control that? Her? And he wanted her. God help him, even now, weeks after and in the midst of Manhattan’s finest, even though she’d left without so much as a word, he still wanted her. He could think of nothing else, like a man obsessed.
If he was honest with himself, he thought darkly as he rose to pull out his date’s chair with all due chivalry and seat her once again at their table, he didn’t particularly care to think of anything else. He had come back to New York and back to his daily work overseeing the Endicott Foundation and all that entailed, but all he thought about was her. He even dreamed about her.
She was his own personal ghost, and he was well and truly haunted.
So he was not particularly surprised, when he heard a low murmur run through the crowd, to turn and see Larissa herself striding into the gala, as if he’d conjured her into being with his wanting alone. He felt her presence jolt through him, electric and low, and for the first time that night—in weeks—his smile was not forced at all. Though it felt hard, fierce and entirely focused on her. Much like the rest of him.
She was stunning, but then, he should have expected that. She was not an icon of her generation by accident, and he should have remembered that the Larissa he’d seen in Maine was the unusual version. Hadn’t he thought it was a fake? An attempt to manipulate him? And yet it still took a moment for him to reconcile the image of her he had in his head—heartbreaking face scrubbed clean of cosmetics, faded jeans, his old sweaters—with the incomparable beauty that stood before the assembled throng, smiling her Mona Lisa smile for the photographers as if she had never been more at ease, more delighted to be out in public and once more the focus of all of Manhattan’s salacious attention.
And she had it, as Jack expected she’d known she would.
“Larissa Whitney has nerve, all right,” Elizabeth Shipley Young murmured, in that snippy way that indicated that was no compliment. She let out a catty little giggle that set Jack’s teeth on edge. “You’d never know the truth about her from the way she walks around, would you? Like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.”
Jack eyed his date for a long moment, fighting the urge to reach over and throttle her. He doubted his grandfather would approve. And besides, he was supposedly a gentleman. He tried to remind himself of that.
“I didn’t realize you knew Larissa,” he said finally. Icily. Elizabeth flushed at his tone, or perhaps it was the way he was looking at her.
“I don’t,” she said, edging away from him in her chair, as if he had slapped her. “Not personally.”
“Then perhaps you don’t know the truth about her at all,” Jack said with barely contained ferocity, the kind that Larissa had routinely laughed at. This woman cringed. “And should therefore think twice before discussing matters that make you look like little more than a small-minded gossip.”
Elizabeth gasped, and turned a bright shade of red. Jack could feel his grandfather’s hard glare on him, but he couldn’t seem to bring himself to care too much about that—or about the date and the wedding plans he had just ruined. He was too busy trying to understand why he’d reacted that way to Elizabeth’s comment. Hadn’t he said far worse about Larissa to Larissa herself? Why should it bother him so much when someone else concurred?
His eyes found her again as she moved through the crowd, smiling as if she had every expectation of being bathed in adulation, as if she had descended from some great light to grace this party with her presence. She was poured into a spectacular midnight-blue dress that defied gravity, clinging as it did to her perfectly lithe form and making it clear to all that she required no undergarments. Its many glittering beads sparkled in the lights from above, making her seem to glow and shimmer with every breath, every movement. God, she was even more beautiful than he’d remembered. Jack found that he loved the way she’d made herself up, the better to emphasize those unusual eyes and the shocking glory of that short black hair, somehow styled tonight to make her look far more elegant and sophisticated than her old blond locks would have. She exuded mystery, sensuality, and something else—something new.
And then it clicked. It was her pedigree. Her heritage. All those centuries of the Whitney legacy that she’d never really seemed to accept as her own before, funneled into a certain bedrock confidence. You might whisper about me, her very walk seemed to say, but you will recognize me.
She was who she was. There was only the one of her, and no matter how notorious she might be, she was still a Whitney. Seeing it in this woman—his woman, that insane part of his brain insisted—made his body hum with that same, familiar electric charge.
Larissa Whitney had come home.
And Jack couldn’t wait to get his hands on her.
Much later, he caught up to her on the iconic steps outside the Museum, high above Fifth Avenue. She was wrapped up against the bitter December cold, but he was still overheated from the long evening spent watching her as she danced with whoever asked her, smiled prettily for whoever approached her, and acted the perfect little heiress, a credit to her family at long last.
He didn’t believe it for a
moment. He told himself that disbelief was what fueled him, what made anticipation flood his veins.
“Slow down, Cinderella,” he said when he was close enough to reach out and touch her—but somehow he restrained himself at the last moment. If he touched any part of her, he knew, he would touch all of her. Here, now, the frigid weather be damned.
She whirled around, and he had the very great pleasure of seeing the Larissa he knew peek out from behind this exotic creature with the perfect Society mask. He could see her in the eyes, the faint tremble of her courtesan’s mouth, before she ruthlessly hid it away.
“Jack,” she said, in a flat sort of greeting. She produced a smile, but he believed it cost her, and he liked the idea of that more than he should have. “Do you make it a habit to sneak up on women walking alone in the night in large cities?”
“Where are you going?” He sounded dangerous. He felt dangerous, as though something prowled in him and might leap out at any moment and run wild down the city streets. Or simply pounce on her and devour her. He shifted, feeling edgy and restless. He watched her swallow—watched the elegant line of her throat and he wanted to put his mouth there, against the soft sweet skin—
“I didn’t realize my itinerary was your business,” she said, her voice nearly as icy as the air around them. Her eyes were cool too, her face that perfect mask, that presentation that he hated nearly as much as her ubiquitous smile, which she aimed at him now. “Do you really want to be seen talking to me? On the steps of the Met for all of Manhattan to see? You don’t want to risk contagion, surely.”
Her voice was sweet, her gaze sharp. He felt each like the slap it was, when his last memory of her was of her head thrown back, crying out her pleasure as she sat astride him and rode them both over the edge. Then she’d fallen against his chest, still making those small, sweet moans, the very recollection of which made him harden. He shoved the memories aside. They were unhelpful, to say the least.
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