Heiress Behind the Headlines (20 page)

“I don’t feel that I need a proxy any longer,” she said simply. “But thank you.”

“Then there is the small matter of your obnoxious and embarrassing notoriety,” he continued, as if she hadn’t spoken. His icy glare sharpened, became a weapon—a direct attack. She ordered herself to remain perfectly still—seemingly unaffected. “You are, quite clearly, not fit, Larissa. Not in any way. Not for anything, and certainly not to sit on this board in any capacity.”

He thought he’d won. She could see it. It gleamed there in his eyes.

“Then I suppose it’s a tragedy that there is, in fact, no morals clause,” she replied coolly. “No commentary on unrelated behavior, whether falling out of limousines or the Gramercy Park Hotel or the front door of the Whitney mansion. Not a single ‘too notorious to take her rightful place’ entry in the bylaws, I’m afraid.” She let her smile sharpen. “Of course, the entire board would be disqualified if there were any of these things, given that notoriety and bad behavior is largely in the eye of the beholder, don’t you think?” She shrugged without dropping her gaze from his. “Just think what I could make of yours.”

“Sign the goddamned papers.” He bit out the words, and
it was if the rest of the room disappeared. There was only Bradford. Only the father who had loomed over her whole life, casting his shadow far further than he should have done, and far deeper. But that was her past. This was her future, and she got to decide how it went. Starting here.

“No,” she said quietly, powerfully, enjoying this moment perhaps more than she should, but knowing that it was the first step toward a new, better life. A real life, at last. She wished that somehow Jack could have seen her turn into the person he’d suggested she could be in the middle of all that rain on Endicott Island. But that was a bittersweet kind of pain, better left for another time. She let her smile turn to something close to real. “I’m sorry, Dad, but I’m not going to do that.”

Another night, another gala.

Jack managed to keep the expression of boredom from his face as he dutifully stood with his grandfather on the splendidly lit and amply heated outdoor terrace of the Museum of the City of New York, high up on Fifth Avenue with all of Central Park spread out before them, dark and inviting, on the other side of the street. Not for esteemed hostess Madeleine Doremus Waldorf any petty concerns about the weather or the season; she was known for her outrageous society events, and this one, held out of doors when the temperature hovered around seventeen degrees, was precisely the sort of thing she adored. There were enough space heaters to make sure that the younger socialites could show off their Pilates-toned arms in their sleeveless sheaths, the older society matrons murmured about Madeleine’s “daring,” and all Jack could think about was Larissa Whitney.

More specifically, the fact that he knew she was here tonight, and yet he had not seen her at all. More specifically
than even that—the fact that it had nearly killed him to leave her the night before last, naked and soft and warm as she slept, and he still did not understand why he’d done it. He could so easily have stayed, despite what she’d said, what he’d tacitly agreed to do. He’d wanted to stay. But he’d found he could not bear to be another man like her father, who ignored what she said to suit himself.

He was in so much trouble.

“Don’t see how standing around in the December air like lunatics will raise any money for this charity of hers,” his grandfather said in his gruff voice. “It’s far more likely that we’ll all die of hypothermia first.” He muttered something else that sounded a lot like
foolish women,
which Jack diplomatically chose to ignore.

There was a lot of that going around tonight. Jack was ignoring his own highly inconvenient and terrifying feelings for the most inappropriate woman in New York. He’d been ignoring those for quite some time, if he was honest. Possibly for five long years, were he to get technical. He was studiously ignoring the ramifications of
that
line of thought. He was also ignoring the inevitable presence of his father, some thirty feet away, making an ass of himself with his child bride. Jack was taking his cues on that from his grandfather, who had been icily ignoring his son-in-law for well on forty years.

“Happy holidays, Grandfather,” Jack murmured, as close to sincere as he could manage under the circumstances, which was, perhaps, not terribly close at all. His grandfather’s canny blue eyes, so much like Jack’s mother’s, swung to meet his, the usual cool assessment in them raking Jack from head to toe.

“I’d be a lot happier if I could die in peace, knowing that the Endicott line will not end with you,” he said, his brows drawn together. “But apparently, you would prefer
to insult every heiress in Manhattan instead of living up to your responsibilities.”

Jack shook his head, feeling his mouth thin. He was weary of this conversation, as ever. But then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw her. She emerged from the great doors that led inside the building, and paused there for a moment, flanked by a veritable phalanx of Manhattan’s best-known and most philanthropically inclined young heiresses. Her peers, in other words. They were all engaged in animated conversation, and there was no denying the fact that Larissa looked at perfect ease in their company. There was a time she might deliberately have worn something shocking, something far too outrageous for a staid event like this, but if that Larissa still existed, Jack saw no sign of her tonight.

He let himself stare. This Larissa was radiant. Like a beacon that sent light spinning out from the party and into Fifth Avenue, then on into the dark of Central Park beyond. She seemed to glow in a beautifully fitted gown in a rich magenta hue that clung to her delicate shoulders, wrapped tightly around the delectable perfection of her torso like an embrace, and then flowed to the floor. She wore a magnificent necklace, all sparkle and shine, that seemed to rival the winter stars high above them. There was the demure hint of the same sparkle at her ears and on one wrist, and she held a bright little clutch in one hand.

She made his chest tight and his body hard from all the way across a crowded party.

He was in so much trouble.

This Larissa was claiming her world, Jack thought, with some mixture of pride and panic. And he couldn’t help but think that somehow, despite all the tumult of what he did not want to feel and what he could not help but feel, he had already lost her.

“That one,” his grandfather said with a disparaging snort, his penetrating glare boring into Larissa. “No, sir. That one has bad news written all over her. She’s been nothing but trouble since the day she was born.”

“You don’t know her, Grandfather,” Jack heard himself say, his tone clipped. “You don’t know what kind of trouble she was handed. Perhaps a little compassion is in order.”

“I know what kind of trouble she makes,” the old man retorted, unmoved. “And that’s more than enough, and far more than most.” He turned to look at Jack again, his blue eyes narrowed. “She’s no different than your embarrassment of a father. All the same morals and all the same actions. You’d be well advised to find someone else to be fascinated with, young man.”

And something in Jack … snapped.

He felt it like a loud crack, deafening for a moment, and then his hearing cleared. Everything cleared. He’d never felt so focused. He looked at his grandfather, at the old man’s trademark scowl and that censorious glare, and then he looked back out to find Larissa, only to discover that Chip Van Housen had cornered her yet again. He could see that her smile was fake across all of these people. All of these useless, unnecessary people who lionized him and demonized her and had never truly seen either one of them. He couldn’t stand it.

He couldn’t stand any of this.

“Enough,” he said.

His voice was not loud, but it had the hard echo of finality, and he saw his grandfather register it with some surprise. He looked at the old man, and felt something ancient and hard crumble to dust inside of him. His guilt, he thought dimly. That abiding ache for the things his mother would never know of him. His sense of regret that he had come from such a father. He’d been carrying these things
around for so long now he’d come to think of them as part of him, twisted together into some kind of phantom limb.

“I beg your pardon?” But his grandfather was looking at him closely, and Jack knew he’d heard him perfectly.

“I’m sorry, Grandfather,” he said. And he was. But he was also resolute in a way he’d never been before. “I’m sorry that I was not the grandson you hoped for when I was a younger man. I’m sorry that nothing I do can change the way you feel about me. Some part of me looks at my father and cannot even blame you.” He thought of Larissa’s words outside a different museum, and shook his head. “But I can’t pay penance any longer. I don’t want to.”

“This is about that girl?” His grandfather’s voice was incredulous. Appalled. “That trashy Whitney girl? Why would you want to align yourself with that kind of disaster?”

“What I want is my business,” Jack said evenly, with a steel edge beneath. “I have catered to you for years out of a sense of loyalty and respect, but you have accorded me none in return. And I am tired of acting the meek, cowed little schoolboy because you feel the need to put me in my place again and again and again.” He shook his head. “I’ve had enough.”

“Jack …” his grandfather began, that heavy frown beginning again.

“I’m sorry you hate me,” Jack said in a low voice, holding the older man’s gaze with his. “I truly am. But I can’t let that rule me any longer. I can’t change it and I’m tired of trying. I’m the future of the Endicott family legacy, Grandfather, whether you like it or not. You’re just going to have to trust me.”

His grandfather stared at him for an arrested moment, his blue eyes wide. From beyond them, Jack could hear the band play, the cultured voices swell in the air and his own
father’s too-intoxicated laughter drift on the night breeze. And he knew that no matter what happened here, he would not regret saying these things, much as it grieved him to hurt the old man even further. It couldn’t be helped. This was long overdue.

“I don’t hate you.” His grandfather’s voice was different when he spoke, and it took Jack long moments to realize why. He sounded old, for the first time in Jack’s memory. He sounded like the eighty-five-year-old man that he was. And, for once, he looked tired. “I don’t hate you, Jack. I miss her.”

His mother, Jack knew. Laurel Endicott Sutton, the brightest light Jack had known—until now.

“I do, too, Grandfather,” Jack said, his voice rough. “I always will.”

“I know you do,” his grandfather said in the same way, gruff and low. “I know it.”

And Jack realized a great many things then, things that should have been clear to him before. He was a colossal idiot. But then, he’d known that. Everything that had happened since he’d laid eyes on Larissa Whitney five years ago told him that. But he couldn’t even use her as an excuse. He had been as blind to what was happening in his relationship with his grandfather as he had been with her.

Maybe that was the Endicott curse, he thought then. This inability to see the glaring truth, the one that sat directly in the sun and shone the brightest. But he could choose not to look away. He could choose to stare directly into the glare, and see what happened.

How could he do anything less?

He reached over and put his arm over his grandfather’s shoulders, noticing for the first time how frail the old man was. How much smaller than in Jack’s head. He couldn’t change the past, Jack thought then—the misunderstandings,
the hurt pride, the nonchalant debauchery of his twenties, but he could change what came next.

And he would.

“We’re going to be okay, Grandfather,” he said, and he felt it ring in him like a bell. Like truth. “We’re going to be fine.”

Chip Van Housen would not take no for answer. Not that this was anything new.

Larissa kept her smile fastened to her face as if it had been chiseled there, and tried to pretend that she had never enjoyed anything more than Chip’s decidedly lewd version of the waltz.

“You can’t ignore me forever, Larissa,” he said, his insipid and bloodshot eyes glued to her face. She could feel his gaze on her skin, just as she could smell the alcohol on his breath. She wondered, not for the first time, how and why she had ever spent so much of her time with this person. She had gone out of her way to do so, once upon a time. All of those memories were so dark, so blurry. Had she really hated herself that much? That seemed so hard to imagine now.

She supposed that was some kind of progress.

It was a beautiful night, crisp and bitter cold, yet deliciously warm in the cocoon of the Georgian-style mansion’s courtyard, as if the gala event was claiming just a little bit of summer in the face of the long winter ahead. Lanterns and heat lamps bloomed with light and warmth, and if Larissa ignored who clutched at her on the dance floor, she might even have come close to enjoying herself.

But Chip was not one to listen, or to learn, and the third time he tried to kiss her with his loose, wet mouth, Larissa decided she’d had enough. She pulled back abruptly, shook off his hands, and simply walked away—headed for the outskirts
of the party where, she could only hope, there might be fewer witnesses to what was likely to be precisely the kind of scene she wanted to avoid these days.

“You can’t just walk away from me!” Chip snarled at her, catching up to her too quickly and snatching at her arm. Larissa snatched it back. She darted a look around. There was nowhere completely devoid of catty, watchful eyes—but this far corner was just cold enough, she thought, that it might provide a buffer. She could only hope.

“I just did,” she said in a calm voice, completely at odds with his. “I don’t want to dance with you, Chip. I was only doing it to be polite, but I’m not feeling polite anymore. Don’t ask me again.”

There was something handsome there in his face, in the bones, but he’d ruined it long ago. Tonight she saw only the vague suggestion of his once-boyish good looks. But a creeping meanness had taken over, and it was evident in the way his lip curled and eyes narrowed.