Heiress Behind the Headlines (12 page)

The thought of Bradford was unwelcome and chilling. Larissa pulled the throw closer around her body, trying to ward off the effect of him from all these hundreds of miles away, as if his very name called down the pitiless beacon of his condemnation, like a laser from on high. He’d left his usual collection of tri-weekly messages on her voice mail over the past two weeks, none of which she’d been able to force herself to listen to. What would be the point? She could recite her own flaws and sins by rote—she didn’t need to listen to her cold, vicious father launch into his favorite litany of the same. Nor did she need to hear more examples of his palpable disapproval and active dislike of her to make her feel small. She could do that all on her own, thank you.

She already spent far too much time thinking about the people she’d hurt with her own self-destructive behavior. Just as she’d spent the past days thinking about how she didn’t seem to feel that restless need here. With Jack. That she could simply … be herself. Bradford was unlikely to help with that fragile, shimmering new feeling.

She knew enough to remain silent when Jack walked into the room. He threw her an inscrutable glance, but did not stop near the couch where she’d curled herself up into a ball. He moved to stand near the fire, picking up the heavy iron poker and using it against the burning logs with more force than was strictly necessary. She didn’t know why that made her long to go to him, to wrap her arms around him and rest her face against his back. As if that might comfort him. As if she was the sort of person who was capable of comforting anyone, much less someone like Jack Sutton.

As if he would let her.

What ideas she was giving herself, the longer she stayed here! She couldn’t see any of this ending any way but badly. Horribly. And yet, even knowing that, she didn’t move. She couldn’t.
Not yet,
she told herself, ignoring the yawning pit in the depths of her stomach that warned her of what was to come.
Not just yet …

Because she’d had a taste of hope—a glimpse of something she hadn’t known she could want, something better than she’d dared imagine—and she couldn’t bear to give it up. She couldn’t bear to give
him
up.

She was already lost irrevocably, she knew then, with a certain fatalistic sense of the inevitability of it. Perhaps she had been the moment she’d seen him, and she knew she had been the moment his lips had touched hers. She was like a princess in reverse, she thought with a flash of black humor—lost at first kiss, rather than found.

Larissa let her gaze travel down the length of his strong back, marveling anew at the physical perfection he wore so easily, so carelessly, the sweep of clean, athletic lines along with the low-slung jeans he wore like a second skin on this island, where the usual designer wardrobe he was celebrated for in New York City would have seemed fussy, out of place. Here he was as much a part of the land, the
great house, as the great pines that towered all around them. He was all lean, smoothly muscled power, danger and desire wrapped in one delicious package. No wonder she could hardly bear to ask herself what his motivations might be. She didn’t want to know. She wanted to stay here, out of time and place, forever.

“I hope you gave your grandfather my respects,” she said, looking back down at her magazine when he turned toward her, careful to veil any emotion she might inadvertently show him. She risked another glance when she was sure she’d controlled it. “I haven’t seen him in years.”

Something unpleasant flashed in his eyes then. His mouth twisted, and she felt the bottom of her stomach fall away.

“Is that your endgame, Larissa?” he asked sharply, his voice like a lash. “Is this some extended, desperate attempt to get your hooks into my grandfather? I suppose I should have seen that coming.”

She felt as if he’d slapped her, and hard. She had to call on all her years of burying her reactions, her emotions, to contain herself. To keep from breathing heavily—from registering the body blow. It was so unlike her to forget herself so completely, to leave herself so wide open. To forget all the things he’d accused her of doing, of planning, of wanting. Had she really thought
he’d
forgotten all that? His bone-deep mistrust of her, his sneering belief in her ulterior motives? Just because of their sexual chemistry?

She remembered it now. In stark detail.

“I am to marry,” Jack said then, abrupt and cold. “Soon. My grandfather has selected a handful of suitable candidates, and he expects me to pick one of them to do honor to our family name. None of them are you. So I suppose he’s the next logical choice, isn’t he?”

Larissa thought her heart might tear itself into pieces. For long moments, she couldn’t move. Much less breathe.

He had called her a whore, and then she had slept with him. Repeatedly. What did that make her? Why was she surprised that he thought exactly that? She’d practically ensured that he would think nothing else, so carried away was she with these intense
feelings;
she’d lost her mind completely. Her stomach knotted hard, then twisted ruthlessly, and for a beat of her heart, then the next, she thought she might be sick. But somehow, she managed to swallow it down, lock it away. Somehow she kept the angry, appalled tears from spilling out and shaming her even further.

If this was what it was like to
feel,
she thought bitterly, she’d been much better off keeping herself completely and totally numb. For years.

And still she raised her brows at him, and forced herself to lounge back against the sofa’s cushions, as if she was the very personification of
languid.
As if she was some kind of ancient, reclining empress. She told herself she was furious with him, but she knew better. Jack thought exactly what she’d wanted him—and the entire rest of the world—to think. She’d gone out of her way to make sure they all believed in the Larissa Whitney myth. Hell, she’d believed in it herself for far too long, hadn’t she? And with good reason. It was no one’s fault but her own that everyone—absolutely everyone, from paparazzo to random person on the street to her own father to this man right in front of her—believed what she’d wanted them to believe.

That she enjoyed that out-of-control, dripping-with-excess life she was famous for. That she was exactly as shallow, greedy, lazy and disappointing as she’d acted. That she never wanted anything from her life but a long, extended party, forever and ever without end. She’d made that bed, no one else. Now she had to lie in it. Over and over again.

It wasn’t Jack she was furious with—it was herself.

“Is your grandfather single?” she asked, as if mildly intrigued by the idea—instead of deeply appalled by it and by the fact Jack could suggest such a thing at all. Charles Talbot Endicott was eighty-five years old if he was a day. What did Jack think of her? But she knew what he thought. She forced herself to shrug airily. “I’ve always liked older men. And I certainly wouldn’t have to worry that he was after me for my money, would I?” She aimed her smile at him, mysterious and sharp, burying her feelings beneath it as she always did. As she always would. “I think I’d be an excellent May to his December, don’t you?”

The look he sent her then was brutal, but she preferred it to the other part of him she’d thought she’d seen—the part that made her want to cuddle with him as if they were both other people, safer and less complicated people, and thereby opened her up to sucker punches like the one he’d just landed. The one that still had her head spinning.

He likes to have sex with you,
she told herself coldly. Harshly.
He doesn’t like you. No one likes you. Don’t forget that again.

“Let me hasten to assure you that my grandfather would not touch the likes of you with a ten-foot pole,” Jack told her, almost scoffing, though there was something much darker in him. She could feel it even if she could not quite see it. It occurred to her that Jack was just as good at hiding as she’d learned to be. She shook the thought aside.

“By that I assume you mean the likes of me are
pretty,
” she murmured, indulgently, as if she was incapable of feeling his insults. As if they bounced right off of her bright plastic surface. Maybe if she pretended to be bulletproof, she would finally feel that way. Maybe. “And you might be surprised who finds their way to a ten-foot pole when I’m at the other end of it.”

Jack shook his head, letting out one of those hollow laughs that usually meant she was getting to the person laughing like that. That she was in the act of disappointing them in some profound way. She congratulated herself on yet another successful round of selling her own myth to the world. Maybe it was time to accept that it would define her no matter what, no matter what epiphanies she reached on her own or how much she knew she’d changed inside. Somehow, right at this moment, with this man, of all men, looking at her as if she was despicable down into her very bones, she couldn’t face that with any measure of equanimity.

Not for the first time in her life, she wished she could just disappear.

“My grandfather has been seized with an unusual—and highly suspicious—desire to deepen the family bonds this holiday season,” Jack said matter-of-factly, surprising her. But she held herself still, waiting for the next blow. It was coming as surely as the next day’s sun. She had no doubt. “We haven’t celebrated Thanksgiving together since before my mother got sick. But this year, apparently, my grandfather wants to change all that.”

“Will there be a convenient photo opportunity?” Larissa asked. She lifted a shoulder and then dropped it when he frowned at her, as if astounded anew by her shallowness. “That’s how we express our familial bond, such as it is, in the Whitney family. We fake it for the cameras.”

Jack’s gaze seemed to penetrate even harder and further than usual, but then he shook his head. “My grandfather prefers to keep any family gatherings private,” he said with a shrug. “The better to vent his spleen without tarnishing the Endicott legacy.”

“Surely he can’t have anything to vent at you about.” Larissa wondered why it was starting to grate on her, this
endless pretense that she cared about nothing, no one, not even herself and especially not him. But she kept on, as if she could not feel the chill in the room, or hear the bite in his voice. “You’re a paragon of virtue. A veritable saint of our times, dedicated to your acts of philanthropy and other mind-numbingly good deeds. What can he have to complain about?”

Jack fixed himself a drink with tense, controlled movements, and then threw himself on the sofa opposite hers, stretching his long legs out in the space between them. His eyes glittered, and the look in them made her want to squirm.

Larissa wanted to go to him, to reach out to him, but she knew better than to move. He would never accept her as anything but a sexual conquest. A thoughtless, careless whore. One whom he might be able to talk to now and then, given the similarities of their upbringing and stations in life—but only, she thought with a sudden flash of unwelcome insight, because he didn’t think she mattered enough to bother dissembling in front of her. Not like the worthy, decent heiresses that were no doubt lined up for him back in Manhattan, all good enough to marry. She wanted to wilt, or possibly die, but instead she raised her chin as if to ward off a blow. She’d do better to keep all of this in mind, wouldn’t she?

Jack took a long pull from his crystal tumbler, then stared at the drink in his hand for a moment before turning that icy, assessing glare back on her.

“My grandfather loathed my father from the moment he met him,” he said, just as Larissa had begun to think he wouldn’t speak after all, that he planned to simply freeze her to death with that frigid stare. “He begged my mother not to marry him. Pleaded with her. But she was young
and foolish, and from what I understand, my father was so good at it back then.”

“Good at what?” Larissa asked softly, afraid that her voice would break what seemed like a fragile, momentary peace—that he would stop talking to her like this and return to decimating her with all his consummate skill. She preferred the dangerous pretense of this intimacy, she decided, to the bitter reality of his opinion of her.

“At pretending he had depth,” Jack said, his mouth twisting. “At pretending he was something other than a complete waste of space. But he was handsome and charming. My mother said he seemed to light up rooms when he walked into them. How could she resist?” He laughed, but it was not a pleasant sound. “She didn’t realize until later that that was only his great ego. If he was not a Sutton, and did not have so much wealth and privilege at his disposal—none of which he earned, of course—he would have been known as what he really is.” His eyes met hers. “A con man.”

When Larissa did not react, when she only looked back at him, forcing herself not to move a single muscle lest he assume she had not gotten his clear inference that she was like his obviously much-despised father, he blinked. He dropped his gaze then, scowling at the drink in his hand.

“As far as my grandfather is concerned, I was fruit of the poisoned tree from the moment of my birth.” A mocking sort of smile, ripe with self-knowledge, carved itself into his lean jaw. “And I spent the first thirty-odd years of my life proving him right. I did my father proud. I was, if possible,
more
useless than he had ever been. More full of myself. More of a degenerate. I wasted everything that was handed to me as if that was my job. I was such a prize.”

“Why are you telling me this?” she asked—carefully, because she was certain she would not much care for any of his reasons.

His dark eyes met hers. Held. His gaze was stormy, cold and gave no quarter. She felt it like his hands on her body. Like the slap of the words he’d thrown at her earlier, without any warning.

“Because I want you to be clear about what’s going on here,” he said, his words like bullets, inflicting as much damage. “My mother was the only one who ever believed in me, for absolutely no good reason, and she died before I could prove to her that she wasn’t as much of a fool to believe that as she was to marry my father in the first place. My grandfather has never forgiven me for any of it.” He leaned forward, his dark eyes intent on hers, bright with condemnation and a kind of fury. “For being born to such a father, for being such a vast and public disappointment to them both. For breaking my mother’s heart, again and again, with my antics. My marriage—to a woman from a good family, of good character—is the only possible way I can begin to redeem myself in his eyes.”