Heiress Behind the Headlines

by Caitlin Crews

  “Here you are, running away from a gala after you went to so much trouble to convince everyone there that you’d left your old ways behind you,” he said, his gaze trained on hers, on that pretty mask she wore. “What a surprise. Is there anything you won’t run away from?”

  But she was different from the woman he’d thought he’d known, however shallowly, in Maine. He saw no particular expression in her gaze, no reaction there at all. She only smirked, and he hated it.

  “It seems that my interest in unsolicited character assassinations has dimmed somewhat since I last saw you,” she said, her voice like a blade. The smile she showed him then cut as deep. “It’s delightful to see you again, of course, especially when you are not pretending to be one of the locals in your fisherman’s costume but are back to your usual splendor.” She waved a dismissive hand at him, over the exquisitely cut coat that hid the beautiful tuxedo beneath. “But I have somewhere to be.”

  “What’s his name?” Jack meant his voice to be soft, easy, and yet somehow he felt as if the menace in it echoed out into the depths of Central Park and rebounded off the avenues. Larissa went very still. He saw the pulse pound in her throat. But she did not look away.

  “Do you mean my date?” she asked. Her tone became scathing. “I came alone, Jack. Grown women can do that, you know. All by themselves. Even me.”

  “I mean the man you’re running off to meet,” Jack said, and his tone was nothing short of lethal, though she did not seem to notice. “The man you crawled out of my bed for.”

  She let out a soundless breath, betrayed by the cold air that turned it into a cloud. Jack smiled. Not nicely. He hardly knew himself, and yet he could not seem to stop.

  “Was it that idiot who danced with you four times tonight?” he asked, picturing the dissipated, mean-eyed creature who, he’d felt, had held her far too tightly for far too long. “He looks like a fine choice. I believe he mistook my grandfather for a waiter.”

  “Chip Van Housen?” Her voice was dry. “Hardly.” She made a scoffing sound, as if the very idea were insulting.

  “Then who?”

  She studied him for a moment, that beautiful mouth flattening. “Because there must, of course, be a man,” she said, as if she was coming to a conclusion for both of them, and not a pleasant one. “Given my proclivities. Or is it my profession? I can’t keep it straight.” She threw up a hand when he moved to speak. “Damn you, Jack,” she hissed at him. And then her eyes slammed into his, hard and green. “It’s none of your business either way.”

  Horns complained down in the street. Buses squealed to a stop at the lights along Fifth Avenue, and all around them Manhattan sparkled with light and energy, thousands of lives rushing past them at top speed. And all he could see were her sea-green eyes and the faintest hint of trembling in her lower lip, almost indiscernible. Almost. All he wanted to do was sweep her into his arms and carry her off, and he wasn’t even sure if he wanted to throw her onto his bed or, far more dangerous and confusing, simply hold her for a while. Apologize—for always seeming to hurt her, when that wasn’t at all what he wanted.

  But he didn’t know how to say that—and he refused to think about what it might mean. He just concentrated on the woman who haunted him even now, even when she was standing right in front of him.

  “Do you really believe that, Larissa?” He moved closer, fiercely glad that she wore those absurdly high heels that let her look him right in the eye, and let him get that much closer to her gorgeous mouth. Close enough to inhale that intoxicating kick of vanilla and her. His hands twitched with the urge to touch her. “Do you really think it’s over just because you walk away? Again? Do you think it’s going to be that easy this time?”

  “What do you want, Jack?” She wasn’t playing any longer. He could see it—could see the woman he recognized again in her stormy green eyes, so much like the sea. He could hear it in her voice. He could feel it in his chest.

  “I don’t know.” His own voice felt as if it was torn from him, as if he could no more control it than he could her.

  “Do you really want to know about Chip Van Housen, of all people?” she asked, her voice hoarse with an emotion he couldn’t name. “I used to enjoy him because being with him hurt Theo. That meant I got to do something to Theo and indulge my self-destructive streak—two birds with one stone.” Her mouth twisted and her eyes flashed. “He thinks I owe him something, but then, he’s nothing but an overprivileged bully. He thinks the world owes him something, too.”

  “And you don’t?” He eased even closer to her, then indulged himself—and an urge he couldn’t quite explain—by reaching over and brushing one of the slightly longer strands of her hair away from the sweet slope of her forehead. He did not imagine the way she shuddered. He did not fantasize the way her lips parted.

  Just as he did not imagine the perfect silk of her skin, or how it felt beneath his fingers.

  “What do you think I owe you, or the world, or anything else?” she asked, a hitch in her voice. “What price do you think I ought to pay? Because clearly, you think I have reparations to make. Why don’t you tell me what you think they are?”

  “That’s not what I meant,” he began.

  “You’re not the only person in the world who gets to decide they want a better image,” she threw at him, her voice fierce. “It’s just that when you do it, you’re greeted with a ticker-tape parade. Some of us have to reinvent ourselves in the absence of accolades and fawning sycophants.”

  “Still with this story of reinvention,” he said, shaking his head, furious with her suddenly. Furious and something else, something raw, that moved through him and left only scars behind. “Why do you play these games, Larissa? What do you hope to gain?”

  For a moment she looked as if he’d hauled off and slugged her, hard in the belly. He saw her breathe, as if it hurt her to try, and then her mask slid back into place. But he couldn’t seem to reconcile that bruised look in her eyes with the master manipulator he kept telling himself that she was. That she had to be, or nothing made sense.

  “Your date looks lovely,” she said quietly. Viciously—or that was how it felt to him. Like a hard, deliberate slap. “Speaking of things we have to gain. I’m sure she’ll make the perfect, dutiful little wife for you, just as your grandfather decrees.”

  He didn’t care for the way she said that, with that light in her eyes.

  “Because you think that you, of all people, know who the perfect wife for me might be?” he asked. He dared her. “Based on what, exactly?”

  “She looks sufficiently overawed,” Larissa bit out. “I doubt she’ll even notice when you start having your inevitable affairs, like all the rest of these people do—she’ll no doubt be relieved. She doesn’t strike me as the adventurous type.”

  “Not like you,” he said, deliberately. He tilted his head slightly to one side, as if studying her. “Are you offering yourself as my first mistress?”

  “No,” she said. “It won’t be me.” Some emotion shone in her eyes, terrible and big, but she didn’t look away. “I’m sure it will be someone, but it won’t ever be me.”

  “You’re a liar,” he told her, only aware that he was all but whispering after the words were out. And still that ferocious anger moved through him, and he worried it was not anger at all. “And a coward. Do you really think you can keep running? Do you think that pretending to be respectable will save you?”

  “I’ve had enough—” she began, furiously.

  But he couldn’t pretend any more. He stopped her the only way he knew. With his mouth. With all the passion and rage and longing he’d been carrying around for weeks.

  He kissed her until he forgot everything, and there was only her. Her taste, her scent. The fit of her. He held her face between his palms and kissed her again and again, each taste soothing the wild itch inside of him, even as the fire that always flared between them grew hotter. Higher.

  He kissed her until he forgot everything. Where they
were, who they were. Who they were supposed to be tonight, here. Who could be watching.

  He only wanted to be inside her. Above her, below her, beside her, just so long as he was so deep within her he couldn’t tell where he ended and she began. God, what he would give to be inside her again!

  But she made a small noise in the back of her throat, and, impossibly, she pulled away.

  “Larissa …”

  “You don’t want me, Jack,” she said, her voice ragged. “You want what you think I am. What you see when you look at me. But you don’t want me.”

  “You don’t know what I want,” he threw at her. And he worried that he didn’t, either.

  “I don’t care what you want,” she retorted, her eyes dark. And he knew, with a kind of lurching sensation, as if the world had just been bumped—hard—that this was the real Larissa. This, right here. Just as he’d always wanted. But dark and angry and in pain. “I care what I want, and it’s not this. Kissing a man who hates me, in secret, in the dark, while the girl he might marry sits waiting for him somewhere brightly lit and appropriate.”

  “I do want you,” he argued, trying to move closer, but she stepped away, and the way she looked at him seemed to tear into him. Like knives.

  “You don’t know me at all,” she said dismissively. “You want a fantasy. They all do. It has nothing to do with me and it never will.”

  “I know you better than you think I do,” he said, his heart pounding at his chest, his hands aching from not touching her, not holding her, not changing her mind the only way he knew how.

  “No,” she said matter-of-factly. “You don’t. But I know you.” Her green eyes seemed to glow then, lasering into him. “You feel perfectly comfortable tearing me to shreds for my every perceived flaw when all you do is dance to your grandfather’s tune. You can never do enough penance, can you, Jack? And yet you can never bring your mother back, or make your grandfather treat you better.”

  “Shut up.” It was a cold order, as cold as he suddenly felt, as if the December night had taken over his soul.

  “You would rather live the rest of your life in misery than stand up to one old man,” she said, as if she was unaware of the danger. “You would even marry at his command, as if this was 1882, and yet you go to such pains to tell me how I am the nightmare in this scenario. I’m the weak one, the embarrassment. Of the two of us, at least I don’t pretend to be anything but what I am.” Her chin rose. “Flaws and all.”

  “Says the woman who has made her whole life a monument to shirking her own birthright!” Jack threw back at her, unable to process the riot of emotion inside of him. The shock, the fury. And something else he couldn’t quite identify. Recognition? But she couldn’t be right about him, could she?

  “You don’t even see me, Jack,” she said sadly. “You never will.”

  Her eyes seared into him, and he knew, somehow, that he had lost her. Failed her. That she might be the one leaving—again—but he was the one who had made this happen. He couldn’t quite grasp it. Her mouth trembled, but she stepped away, and he knew she wasn’t coming back to him. Not tonight. Perhaps not ever.

  “Larissa …” he said, but it was too late. She had already turned, and was making her way down the steps toward the street.

  Leaving Jack to stand there, alone, trying to figure out what the hell had just happened and what he planned to do about it.

  CHAPTER TEN

  LARISSA waited for her father in the same chilly salon in the Whitney mansion where she had spent many an unpleasant moment in her youth. The room was tucked away on the second level, toward the back of the grand house that sprawled over a whole Manhattan city block and still inspired passing tourists to stop and take photographs of its famous facade. This particular salon was Bradford’s favorite. It was small enough and unused enough to allow Bradford to give voice to the full breadth and width of his eternal displeasure without fear of being overheard by the staff.

  If she closed her eyes, she was sure she would be able to see herself at all ages, sitting in the exact same position on the exact same uncomfortable chair, staring at the exact same Mary Cassatt painting that had always hung on the wall, casting a false impression of familial harmony over the small, tastefully blue-and-pale-yellow room. But she did not close her eyes; she was much too afraid that she would see Jack if she did, and she had already spent too long this morning tending to the damage a long, sleepless night during which he had taken over her head had done. She blew out a breath, her lips tingling anew at the memory of that kiss outside the Met last night. His beautiful face, his mesmerizing chocolate eyes …

  The December light shone crisp and cold through the windows, making Larissa wish she had not surrendered her winter coat and warm scarf to the butler when she’d arrived. The door snapped open then and her father strode inside, dropping the temperature another twenty degrees with his forbidding expression. Bradford Whitney looked as he always did: gray with displeasure despite his exquisite yet understated wardrobe and the great care she knew he took with his skin. Even tyrants could be vain, she reminded herself.

  “I am not fooled by this latest display, Larissa,” Bradford said, his form of a greeting.

  He sniffed disdainfully as his gaze raked over her. Larissa did not let herself react. He sank into the chair opposite hers, across the fussy little coffee table that had sat in that precise spot since the 1800s. They had both assumed their traditional positions, Larissa thought, checking a sigh. Bradford would now unleash his usual bile and Larissa would attempt to survive it intact. There had been years when she’d wept. Screamed. Stared out the window and pretended he wasn’t there. Acted as if she were asleep. Made sure she was as comfortably numb as possible. None of it mattered. The entire charade made Larissa feel arthritic, gnarled and knotted with a kind of grief for the life they’d never had, the father and daughter they had never been, and the sort of family the Whitneys could never become.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she said, though she did. She wanted him to say it out loud, as if she thought the echo of his own ugliness might shame him. It never did. That was yet one more example of her own perversity at play, she thought—something she’d been indulging far too much of late. But she shoved thoughts of Jack aside. She was already battered enough, thank you. Just being back in this house, this monument to her family’s long history of delicately gilded and extensively funded dysfunction, made her feel raw. Bruised. There were too many ghosts, too many could have beens, crowded in the elegant rooms, stalking the hushed, grand halls.

  “I mean all your suspiciously demure charity event attendances of late,” Bradford said, a sneer in his voice though he was too well-bred to actually sneer at her. This early in the conversation, anyway. “Your sad little gestures toward decent behavior, for all of New York to comment on. Your new wardrobe, as if anyone can forget your outrageous attempts to be shocking in the past. A few weeks of playing dress-up hardly erases a lifetime of embarrassing behavior.”

  Larissa ran her hand along her perfectly tailored charcoal trousers, and resisted the urge to tug at her fitted black cashmere turtleneck, or to adjust her tasteful diamond earrings. She knew she looked chic, if conservative, and that her impractically heeled boots gave the outfit a little bit of punch. He could not possibly see the shame, the humiliation, that coiled inside of her, that he’d helped put there. He saw only what she showed him. So she showed him absolutely nothing.

  “I assume that’s your version of ‘welcome home,’ Dad,” she said dryly. Almost serenely. “Thank you.”

  “The doorman at your apartment building informed me you reappeared several weeks ago,” Bradford snapped, as if he hadn’t heard her. It occurred to Larissa that, quite possibly, he never had. “I then had to track your escapades through the society pages, waiting for the other shoe to drop, as it always does. Whatever you think you’re doing, Larissa, it is having the usual effect. I am not amused.”

  “I’m fine, thank you,” Larissa replied
lightly, as if he’d asked. As if it would ever occur to him to ask. “The months away—especially after such a terrible ordeal—really helped me figure a few things out. I appreciate your asking after me. The abundance of paternal concern is touching.”

  “I’d advise you to be careful, Larissa.” He spat out her name as if it was a curse.

  “Or what?” Her tone wasn’t even challenging. Why bother? She knew that he viewed her very presence as the challenge. She raised her brows at him, more inquiry than attack. “Could my reputation or circumstances be any worse? I think you’ve run out of effective threats.”

  “I’m not interested in another scene in your never-ending melodrama,” he said, his voice cold. Bored. And quiet, as it always was when he was being the most cruel. “The next time you try to kill yourself in one of those clubs, or at one of your parties, make sure to complete the task. The clean-up is expensive, tedious and reflects poorly on this family and on Whitney Media.” His gaze cut into her, arrowing directly into that throbbing core of shame—of hurt, of desperate self-loathing—that she still carried around with her no matter how much she might have otherwise changed. “And I cannot afford to lose another CEO thanks to your games. Do you understand me? Am I making myself clear?”

  She had to sit there for a moment and breathe, just as the doctors had ordered her to do eight months ago, when Bradford had sent her into a panic attack in this very same house while addressing a topic similar to this one, and she’d thought it was heart failure. She refused to give him the satisfaction of seeing her react like that again.

  “Perfectly clear,” she said. She forced herself to produce that damned smile of hers again, the one that hid everything and that she knew infuriated him. “My next coma will be terminal, I promise.” She met his gaze, bold and unafraid, no matter how she felt inside. “Are you happy now?”

  “You are the greatest disappointment of my life,” Bradford told her, almost conversationally, though his cold eyes never left her face.