Heiress Behind the Headlines (8 page)

“Put the damned thing back on or I will do it for you,” he said. “And that will not end the way you want it to end. I can promise you that.”

She searched his face for a moment. Her mouth flattened into a serious line, and she blinked.

“I can assure you that you have absolutely no idea what I want,” she said, but there was a darkness, suddenly, in those changeable eyes. She snatched the black sweater from him, taking care to keep from touching him, he noticed,
and then pulled it back over her head with as little warning or fanfare as when she’d removed it.

And then she was looking at him again, warily, that elegant face of hers more appealing, somehow, beneath her newly darkened, newly shortened hair—her cheekbones more pronounced, her mouth more lush. Her eyes more shadowed. He remembered all the things she’d said to him in her inn room earlier, everything he’d dismissed as just so much spinning of her latest tale of woe, designed to pull him in and suck him under. He reminded himself that she was like a riptide, and he had no intention of succumbing. But she looked small and weary, suddenly, swallowed up in that black turtleneck, and he found he could not bear that. He refused to wonder why.

“What happened to you?” he asked quietly.

He had not meant to ask her that. He’d had some complicated idea of revenge and humiliation tonight, hadn’t he? Some fantasy that he would show her how little her games worked on him now? He could hardly remember. The fire crackled behind them, and the room seemed smaller. Closer. She smiled, and though it was not that practiced siren’s smile, or not quite, it still did not reach her eyes.

“You already know what happened to me,” she said softly, that weariness now in her eyes, the curve of her mouth. “The whole world knows what happened to me. It is recorded for posterity, and trotted out again every week or two to sell more papers. My pain makes excellent entertainment.”

“Theo,” he guessed, and shoved aside the odd pang that he felt when he said the other man’s name. “You were with him for a long time.” Just about five years, in fact, if his math was as correct as he knew it was. He shoved that aside, too. “Losing him must have been very painful.”

“Not in the way you think,” she said, and laughed
slightly. It was a hollow sound, and she looked away. “He found someone who looked just like me but—crucially—was not me. Not surprisingly, she suits him much better. I don’t really blame him. I can’t say that I ever appreciated him at all.”

He didn’t like the way she said that—and couldn’t understand why he cared. Why her eyes seemed too big while her mouth seemed too fragile. Or why she seemed small, suddenly. Breakable.
Already broken.

“Perhaps he is the one who didn’t appreciate you,” Jack heard himself say—and he was not sure who was more surprised, Larissa or himself.

Her smile was crooked, her green eyes sad again. One shoulder moved in a kind of shrug. “If that’s true, it’s nobody’s fault but mine.”

The moment stretched out between them, and Jack found himself reaching out for her, tracing the line of her aristocratic cheekbone, the breathtaking curve of her perfect lips. Something he didn’t understand moved through him, confusing him. Heat, yes—all that riot of
need
and
want
—but something else beneath. And all the while she looked at him with eyes like the sea, as if she was only waiting for him to hurt her, too. He hated it.

“I think I’m going to go,” she said after a long moment, her voice husky. She produced her Mona Lisa smile, so enigmatic, and Jack decided he hated the very sight of it, too. “Not everyone can say that they stripped for Jack Endicott Sutton in his private Maine retreat. I’ll have to add that to my list of most—”

“Stay,” he said. He hadn’t known he meant to speak. She let her voice trail away, her eyes big and wary. How could she make him feel like the monster in this scenario? “To dinner,” he clarified, and smiled, calling on all his charm,
all his finesse. She blinked. “I did promise I would feed you, didn’t I?”

She let out a little laugh, silvery in the air around them.

“How can I refuse?” she asked lightly.

It was exactly what she’d said over five years ago, he thought as a heat flooded through him, when he’d heeded an urge he’d never had before—not with her, at any rate—and asked her to leave that party with him. He couldn’t remember, now, who had thrown that party or even if it had been for one of the many charities he supported with his presence and checkbook, as was expected of members of his social circle. All he could remember was how he’d touched her, kissed her. He remembered the feel of her skin beneath his fingers, the heat of her decadent mouth. He remembered the wild passion, the intense need that had nearly taken him out at the knees. Touching Larissa was like diving into the heart of a volcano, and he’d loved it. The rush. The danger. Adrenaline and desire.

He had known her for years. He was not one to waste his time reading trashy fiction in the gutter press, not even back then when he’d starred in so many lurid fantasies presented as fact—but even so, he would have to have been entombed underground somewhere not to recognize that Larissa Whitney was the It Girl of their time. Her every word, action, outfit and hairstyle scrutinized, criticized and then ruthlessly copied. He’d been surprised to find that she was so sharp, so funny.

She’d made him laugh when he’d been resigned to another night of desperate tedium. Then they’d danced together on a rooftop with all of Manhattan laid out at their feet, and touching her had felt like burning alive. His mother had just died, he’d been reeling from a loss he could hardly make sense of nor admit, and somehow, Larissa Whitney had seemed like a touchstone. An anchor to the
world, though not, perhaps, of it. She was the only thing that had broken through his numbness, his despair, like a bright shining lighthouse on the edge of a dangerous cliff.

“Come with me,” he’d said. Had he ordered her or pleaded with her? His memory was unreliable on that point.

She’d had her arms locked around his neck, those perfect small breasts pressed against him like twin points of flame, and her green eyes had seemed to sear right through him. He’d thought she was magical. She’d felt like some kind of spell, her body an enchantment against his, and he’d felt like his own kind of magic holding her that close, with the whole city made up of interlocking ropes of light spread out behind her and below her like a labyrinth.

She’d laughed as if every part of that moment delighted her, as if he’d delighted her even more, straight down to the soles of her expertly, expensively-shod feet. She hadn’t asked him where he wanted to go, or what he’d wanted to do. She hadn’t played any of those games. He’d thought she wasn’t playing any games at all. She’d leaned closer then, and she’d pressed her full lips to his, a cool challenge. A hint. Like a deep, consuming flame. Like destiny, he’d thought.

“How can I refuse?” she’d asked in that light, easy voice of hers, a sweet whisper in his ear.

He’d felt it like a thunderbolt.

But if she remembered that, Jack thought, searching her face, he saw no sign of it now. Her face was smooth as glass, and perhaps he only imagined that there were things to be learned still in the darkness of her unreadable eyes. Perhaps he simply wanted that to be true.

Perhaps he was a far greater fool than he had previously believed.

He led her through to the back of the house, where the original kitchen had long since been remodeled to suit more
modern tastes. He walked over to the subzero refrigerator and began pulling things out of it, setting them out on the counter.

“You cook?” He could hear the laughter in her voice, though when he looked over his shoulder at her, her eyes were veiled. She stood by the rough-hewn wood table, running her fingers over the nooks and crannies.

“I value my privacy,” he said with a shrug. “That means no staff and no deliveries, even if there was any place that delivered out here.” He waited until her eyes rose to meet his. “And as I am not feral, that means that yes, I cook.”

“The Manhattan glitterati would be so distraught if they had any idea that you were so competent,” she said, moving toward him, a smile flirting with her mouth. “It would destroy whole fantasies about how much work a man like you must be.”

“But it depends on what you consider onerous,” he said, rummaging through the well-stocked shelves of the whitewashed cupboard above him. “Having thoughts that do not revolve around parties and shopping? Having a purpose in life beyond depleting the family fortune? Is that too much work?”

“You know that it is,” Larissa said, once again with that thread of laughter woven through her voice.

She moved to stand next to him, and Jack had the strangest sensation, like some kind of déjà vu. As if she belonged there, standing close to him like this, in a kitchen of all places. In
this
kitchen. As if this was their life. As if they shared something more than that unforgettable, unquenchable fire. Where did
that
come from?

She frowned down at the items he’d laid out on the counter, wrinkling her fine nose as he pulled dry pasta from a canister in the overhead cupboard. He’d put out a few sausages.

Tomatoes and basil. A hunk of good cheese and a bulb of garlic.

She glanced at him then, and he had the oddest feeling that she’d seen it too, that almost-hallucination. That fantasy of a life he couldn’t even begin to imagine. Not really. He wanted Larissa; perhaps he always had. But that was just sex. Explosive, white-hot sex that he’d briefly mistaken for something more emotional during the darkest period of his life. It was only that she was here, he assured himself, in Scatteree Pines. In this house, where no one from his other world was ever allowed to come. That was what made him think of things he knew he shouldn’t—didn’t—want.

“I’ll chop the garlic,” she offered.

It was so incongruous. And yet … it was as if she fit. As if that odd feeling was still working its way through him. He told himself it was just the rain, just the storm. Making the very shadows seem meaningful when they were not.

“I’m not at all sure how I feel about you brandishing a knife in my kitchen,” he said. And she smiled. It wasn’t that fake smile of hers, that mysterious bit of nothing she trotted out for the masses. This smile showed the faintest hint of a dimple in her cheek, and the flash of her teeth. He even saw it in the gleam of gold that warmed the green of her eyes. That was real, he thought, dazed by the punch of it, the way it electrified him.
He’d just seen the real Larissa.

Something warm moved through him then, and that was when he was sure of it: he should never have invited this woman here. Ever. He should have pretended he hadn’t seen her in that bar, and gone about his business. But he had always had a regrettable weakness where Larissa Whitney was concerned. What was one more bit of proof?

It was like a dream.

Larissa chopped garlic and basil, then cut into the plump
tomatoes. Olive oil sizzled in a cast-iron pan on the big stove top, and the kitchen seemed to glow with warmth and laughter, as if such things shone down from the walls. As if they had been trapped there over the course of long, happy years, and blossomed at the rich scent of garlic and the leftover summer brashness of the basil.

Jack whipped things together in a selection of pans with a briskness that spoke of long practice, then finally poured the mixture of ingredients over the hot, fresh pasta. Larissa picked up the pasta bowls without being asked and took them over to the table, as if they’d choreographed it. As if they’d performed this simple, shared ritual a thousand times before. It occurred to her, with a little thump of shock, that this was the most intimate she had ever been with anyone. Much less a man.

The realization made a shiver run through her. She felt as if the floor beneath her feet was suddenly precarious.

“That’s not the first time you’ve chopped vegetables, clearly,” Jack observed, in that deceptively casual way of his that made her suspect he was looking for clues. Did he think she was some great mystery he felt called upon to solve? Or was he merely looking for confirmation of existing prejudices? In her experience, it was always one or the other. And it never ended well.

But tonight, she couldn’t let herself think of that, not in the way she should. Not while the kitchen was so bright and cheery, holding the storm and the dark at bay. Not while she could smell garlic and basil in the air, and not when she sat at a simple wooden table to eat a meal she’d helped prepare, with a man who looked the way she’d always dreamed a man—
her
man—would look, should she ever find one of those.

If she took this moment out of time—forgot what came before, what had just happened in the sitting room—maybe,
just this once, she wouldn’t have to pretend. Maybe she could simply, truly enjoy herself.

“I haven’t cooked anything in longer than I can remember,” she started to say, and then cut herself off—sure, somehow, that she had revealed too much. That he would call her
poor little rich girl
or something worse and she would deserve it, and she wasn’t sure she could handle the necessary self-recrimination just now. But he only gazed at her, his beautiful face inscrutable, his dark eyes so much more compelling than they should be. She swallowed. She should know better than to let this night, this man, get to her. She should be more realistic. She knew she should.

“My mother had a housekeeper at her home in France,” she said as she settled herself in the heavy wooden chair across from him. She pulled the coarse linen napkin onto her lap. “Her name was Hilaire and she was ferocious. More a displaced tyrant than an employee.”

She gazed at the wide bowls in front of them, the ceramic surfaces gleaming with the bright blues and joyful yellows of Provence. It almost felt as if she was tucked away in the château across the Atlantic with her silent, perpetually unwell mother, surrounded on all sides by plane trees, azure skies and fields of lavender. She could almost hear Hilaire’s ill-tempered muttering as she forced spoiled, defiant Larissa to perform any chores she deemed suitable, and the more menial, the better. They were some of her favorite memories, though Larissa knew better to admit such things aloud. People always got the wrong impression.