Heiress Behind the Headlines (18 page)

“I’m not here to talk about ancient history,” she said quietly. “I can hardly recall any of it anyway.” That was not entirely true, but she couldn’t help but enjoy the flash of temper in his cold eyes. “You called me here, remember? Surely you have something other than Theo to discuss.” She lounged against the stiff back of her chair. “If not, by all means, keep ranting at me. It makes me feel so warm inside.”

Bradford stared at her for a long moment, his small, meticulous mouth thinning to a hard line.

“The annual Board of Directors meeting is next Thursday,” he said, as if intoning a pronouncement from on high. “I know your attorneys have been attempting to contact you for weeks. Months.” He sniffed. “Your presence, while un-desired, is required.”

“What a lovely invitation,” she murmured. She schooled her expression, keeping it deliberately, ruthlessly impassive. “But why? You know business bores me. Especially yours.”

She watched him closely, once again looking for something—anything—to let her know that there was a real person inside her father. That there was some hope for him. But all she could see was his habitual contempt. It was all she’d ever seen.

Was it any wonder she’d turned out the way she had?
A small, revolutionary voice inside her asked then. Wasn’t the real surprise that she
hadn’t
ended up far worse? Surely the fact that she was pulling herself together at all, that she’d survived, had to count for something. Bradford had never been anything less than a monster.

“You will formally sign over your shares to me,” Bradford told her, his stern tone brooking no argument. “I see no reason to continue this proxy nonsense, when it is perfectly clear that you have no interest in ever taking your place on the Board. Thank goodness. The sooner we dispense with the formalities, the sooner you can wash your hands of Whitney Media.” His eyes narrowed. “And the sooner I can wash my hands of you.”

“Does signing over my shares sever our blood relationship?” Larissa asked mildly. “Next Thursday will be a day of myth and wonder, indeed.”

“You will not cause a scene, Larissa,” Bradford continued, cold and implacable. “You will sign the papers, make an appropriate statement about your intentions to waste your life as you choose, and then you will leave. I don’t care where you go. Is that clear?”

Again she felt the ache inside her, the longing for things that had never been. She wished she were a stronger person. She wished she could fully, wholeheartedly believe that he was the monster, not her. She wished she could simply stop caring what Bradford thought of her, what he’d always thought of her. But he was who he was. Her mistake had long been in assuming there had to be something she could change, or fix, to make him love her. To make him tolerate her. To make him treat her with anything but his contempt.

She knew better now. She was a different person, but he was exactly the same as he’d always been. He was the reason her mother whiled away her days in a haze of opiates in Provence. He was the reason she had spent the whole of her life so desperately committed to her own destruction, wildly hoping that something might force this man to care about her. He would never see the change in her. When he
looked at her, he saw only who she’d been, who he’d made. An empty, contemptible vessel to the very core.

She knew better now.

“Don’t worry, Dad,” she said, careful to keep her voice even. Light. As if this wasn’t a goodbye. As if she hadn’t changed at all. As if he could. “I understand you perfectly.”

Jack was waiting for her in her building’s magnificent artdeco lobby when Larissa hurried inside some nights later, shivering from the relentless chill outside and another night of charity balls and rebuilding bridges. Her eyes found him immediately, as if compelled from across the polished marble expanse. He was tall and imposing in his black coat, his gorgeous face set into a scowl that she had no doubt was meant to make her quail in her high heels. And perhaps even douse the whole sweep of Central Park West and the Upper West Side with the force of his displeasure.

He was a powerful man—there was no denying it. But Larissa told herself that she was immune. That she did not feel her stomach drop. That she could not feel the crackle of the usual flames, lighting her up from inside and making her burn. She smiled at the ever-present, fully liveried doormen who prided themselves on recognizing everyone of note in Manhattan—many of whom resided in the famous two-towered Emery Roth edifice on Central Park West that Larissa had called home for years—who, she was sure, knew exactly who Jack was.

“Why are you here?” she asked as she walked toward him. He leaned up against one of the great pillars, as much a work of art as the precious canvasses that graced the gilt-edged walls. She took care to keep her expression unreadable, but wondered how successful she’d been as he seemed to look right into her. Through her. As if she were made of glass.

He looked at her for a long moment, and her heart stopped. Time screeched to a halt, and she could see nothing at all but that storm in his dark eyes. That simmering passion, that fire. Why did it still call to her? Why couldn’t she be as immune as she told herself she wanted to be?

“I don’t know,” he said. So simple. So devastating.

Larissa came to a stop a few feet away from him, and ordered herself to breathe. To swallow. To function.

“This is coming perilously close to stalking,” she managed to say, her throat far too dry. “Though I suppose when one is the great Jack Endicott Sutton, one cannot, by definition,
stalk.
One can only
persist.
Or is it
persuade?
Either way, it involves a lofty pedigree and the nation’s goodwill.” Her smile was thin. “Lucky me.”

“I thought that if I called you, you wouldn’t answer,” he admitted gruffly, those bittersweet-chocolate eyes trained on her, very nearly making her forget that she had moments before been freezing in the usual shock of December in New York City as the heat of him seemed to engulf her. He was lethal.

“You are very astute, Jack,” she said. She attempted to smile, but was not at all sure she managed it. “It’s one of the things I admire so much about you.”

She came to a stop in front of him. The heels she wore gave her height, and made her feel more powerful. Or, anyway, less likely to crumple to the ground and beg for his love, his touch, she told herself. Close to him, she felt that same pull again. That inevitable compulsion. She wanted to bury herself in his arms. She wanted to taste him again. She wanted him more than she could admit to herself, and it hurt more than she wanted to believe it could.

But she couldn’t have him, she reminded herself sharply, ignoring the desperate pounding of her heart. Because she was no longer an empty vessel, self-destructively willing
to accept whatever scraps were thrown her way, no matter how much it hurt her, because anything was better than that yawning emptiness.

She had to remind herself—forcefully—that this was a good thing. It was.

It was.

“Invite me up,” he said. She could hear the implacable command in his voice, could read the bright gleam of passion in his dark gaze. She knew exactly what he wanted. She could feel the answering thrill of it in her own body, threatening to make her shudder in anticipation. In helpless desire.

“I don’t think that would be at all wise,” she said after a long moment, unable to break away from the way he was looking at her—from the way that gaze held her, as tightly and as securely as if she was in his arms. She stuffed her hands deep into the pockets of her sleek winter coat to keep from reaching out to him, to keep from compounding the terrible mistake she’d made in Maine.

“When has anything between us been wise?” he asked, his wicked mouth curving.

But change was a full-time thing, Larissa thought, no matter how much she wanted it to be otherwise just then. It wasn’t just for the moments in which it
felt
right, or when it was convenient. If she wanted to respect herself, she had to
act
as if she respected herself. Always. Even when she wanted to pretend she didn’t care about such things and lose herself with this man she was afraid had ruined her forever.

She could feel him breaking her heart even now.

“I’m sorry,” she said as evenly as she could, and turned toward the elevators. “I can’t do this, Jack. It’s been a long week, I have a Whitney Media Board meeting to survive
tomorrow morning, without any fiancé to save me as you seem to think I need, and I’m tired.”

“Wait.” There was a short, tense pause. “Please.”

She pivoted back toward him, caught by that surprising last word, and then by the look on his beautiful face. As if he was as lost as she was. As if this was as overwhelming for him as it was for her. As if.

Wishful thinking,
she told herself.

But her treacherous heart beat harder. And worse,
hoped.

“Walk with me. Have a drink with me.” His voice was low. Urgent. If he was another man, she might have called it desperate. “Somewhere relentlessly public.” His dangerous mouth crooked slightly, and she felt it. Her toes curled inside her boots. Her stomach tightened against a flood of heat. “What could be safer than that?”

But she knew that
she
was not safe. That she would never be safe around this man, because she would always want what he could not, would not, give her.

And she couldn’t do that anymore. She wouldn’t.

She stepped closer to him, steeling herself against the rush of longing. She heard his swift intake of breath as she leaned in and pressed a kiss against his lean jaw. She let her eyes close, briefly. She let his clean, male scent tease her, ignite her. And then she forced herself to step back. To move away.

“Goodbye, Jack,” she whispered.

His hands moved, streaking across the distance she’d placed between them, holding her upper arms in his grasp. Not hard. But he wasn’t going to let her walk away, either. Not this time.

“How can I see who you are, Larissa?” he asked fiercely, his voice curling around her, through her. His gaze cutting deep. “How can anyone, if you do nothing but run and hide?”

Her eyes felt too big for her face, too bright, and he, meanwhile seemed to take over the whole world, as if nothing had ever existed but him. As if nothing ever would. How could she love this man so much when she knew, with every fiber of her being, that he would be the very thing that destroyed her? That he had already laid the ground-work—that he was nearly halfway there? Or that she was his willing accomplice?

“You could use the eyes in your head instead of your prejudices,” she managed to say, fighting to the end, because she knew no other way. “That’s a start.”

She’d meant to keep her voice light, easy. The way it normally was. But there was nothing normal about the way he looked at her, his eyes too dark, so much tension in his jaw, as if he was fighting the same demons that she was.

“Show me, then,” he whispered. “Show me.”

And she was still so weak. And she loved him. And the fact that she was sure that both of those things would contribute to her eventual doom did nothing to make her heart stop pounding, or her breath stop coming so quickly. Too quickly.

He was here, and she was in love with him, and she couldn’t help wondering why doing what was right seemed to
feel
so wrong. It was one thing to succumb accidentally to a force like Jack. It was something else to choose it, deliberately. To
decide.

Which she kept doing. Following her stupid heart, instead of her much smarter head.

“Okay,” she said, before she could think better of it. Before she could remind herself of all eight million reasons it was a terrible idea.

“Okay?” He echoed her, but his dark eyes were already blazing with a kind of hard, male triumph, and she felt his
hands close tightly against her shoulders, almost convulsively.

“You can come up,” she said, and there was no pretending that her voice was anything but raw, that she was anything but vulnerable. Somehow, in that moment, she didn’t care. Or it didn’t matter the way that she knew it should. She met his gaze, held it. “But you can’t stay.”

S
HE
couldn’t manage to convince herself that it had been a mistake, Larissa realized the next morning, as she carefully reapplied her lipstick and then eyed herself critically in the mirror of the executive washroom high in the Whitney Media tower that thrust proudly into the sky over mid-town Manhattan.

Though it was. Of course it was. How could it be anything but?

Her eyes slid shut involuntarily, as images from the night before chased through her mind, tantalizing her, arousing her all over again. They hadn’t made it more than two steps into the apartment before they’d fallen on each other, the weeks apart having whipped them both into some kind of passionate frenzy. It had been a kaleidoscopic blur of mouths meeting, hands exploring, clothes being shoved out of the way—and then, at last, the elemental bliss of his hard thrust into her.

A
shiver skated over her skin at the memory, that same old fire searing through her all over again. Jack was as lethal in her own head as he was when he was directly in front of her. Perhaps more so.

They had not spoken then, awash in ecstasy on the thick Persian rug that graced her foyer. Eventually she had led him back through the sprawling apartment to her bedroom
that looked out over Central Park. All the lights of Manhattan had sparkled before them, and she’d felt them all like licks of flame within as he’d stood behind her there and kissed and tasted his way down her neck, her back—divesting her of the remains of the gown she’d been wearing, the shoes. And then he’d turned her around, his hands so sure, so demanding, so hot against her hips, before he’d knelt down before her and licked his way into the hot, molten center of her, sending her spinning off over the edge yet again.

She’d screamed his name, wild and unrestrained as the passion crashed through her, and had been somewhat surprised that she hadn’t shattered the wall of glass behind her with the force of it.