The Replacement Wife

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Except Theo seemed perfectly at home. He had his cell phone to his ear and was murmuring something in an undertone as he sauntered through the elegant room, seemingly unmoved by the sheer luxury all around him. And yet Becca knew without a single doubt that it was all of his design—from the richly colored Oriental rugs at her feet, stretching across hardwood floors polished to a gleam, to the furniture she did not have to be told was incredibly expensive, all of it seeming to belong exactly where it was, as if it had grown there, mahoganies and blacks and scarlets, and all of it inviting, not stuffy. Her gaze rested for a moment on the set of deep, lush-looking sofas in one corner, set to take advantage of the fireplace and the dizzying view. There was interesting art on the walls and the shelves were lined with important-looking books and more intriguing objects—vases, small boxes, statues. A wrought iron spiral stair wound up to the floor above, that boasted an open gallery to take advantage of the great room’s vastness. Opulence and invitation, everywhere she turned.

Was she really expected to stay here? With a man who walked through this room as if it were commonplace, unworthy of his notice? A cold shiver worked its way down her spine, making goose bumps rise up in response. Who would she be when all of this was over? Because she knew, once again, on some deep, incontrovertible level, that what she’d put into motion by agreeing to be here would change her forever. What would be left? a small voice asked inside of her. Who would she be when she’d finished playing Larissa?

You will be yourself,she reminded herself sternly.Finally free of the notion that these people are important to you in any way—that they matter at all.

“Muriel will show you to your rooms,” he said, startling her when he stopped and turned. She was suddenly afraid that her mouth really had dropped open and that she’d been gaping at the things he owned like a country bumpkin. Like the poor relation to his wealthy employers that she, in fact, was.

As for the other things she’d been thinking, well—she shrugged them off. It was too late now, anyway. She was here. The papers were signed. And Emily needed this. More than that, she needed to do this for Emily, so Emily would never have to do anything like this, with these horrible people, herself.

She needed to make her mother proud, in whatever way she could, even all these years later. She owed her mother’s memory at least that much. At least.

And she would walk out of here with her head high, knowing exactly who she was. With all of the Whitney legacy firmly behind her. Finally.

Swallowing hard, she turned to the woman she hadn’t even seen enter the room from somewhere off to the left. The kitchen? Servants’ quarters? Narnia? Nothing would surprise her, at this point.

“I need to take a few calls, but I will come find you in about forty-five minutes,” Theo said, his voice all business, matter-of-fact. It made her realize that he had not been using that voice before, in the car. Or at the Whitney mansion. She frowned.

“Fine,” she said, her thoughts too muddled to say anything else. Why would this situation be anything but business to him? Why should his voice alter at all? Had she not imagined that softer look after all?

His amber eyes flicked over her, making clench her fists in unconscious response as her heart thumped painfully hard in her chest, an answer to her silently asked questions that she refused to acknowledge.

“Our first order of business will be your hair,” he said, those captivating, intriguing eyes narrowing slightly as he looked at her.

She reached up to touch the end of her chestnut-colored ponytail automatically, but she wasn’t surprised. Larissa was as famous for her peroxide-blond mane as she was for her questionable behavior and pointless existence. Becca hadn’t really thought through the specific details of this charade, but dying her hair made sense.

“Will you be making me a blonde yourself?” she asked, meaning to sound dry and arch, but her voice came out much softer, much more uncertain, than she’d intended, as she found herself imagining those strong hands in her hair, against her scalp.

His gaze seemed to darken, and it was worse than the usual kick of amber—it seemed to creep inside of her and turn her into something knotted and raw. She had to remind herself to breathe.

“I will make you exactly what you have to be,” he said. As if he’d heard her worst fears. As if she’d spoken them aloud. His dark head tilted slightly to one side. “The question is whether or not you can handle it.”

“I can handle anything,” she threw at him, feeling goaded beyond her endurance—and yet he only stood there, so calmly powerful, and watched her. It made panic—and something much hotter, much darker—roar through her, blistering everything in its path.

“We’ll see, won’t we?”

And with that, Theo Markou Garcia was gone, leaving Becca feeling overwhelmed—and something else, something she refused to call bereft—in the middle of the vast, beautiful room.

“Come,” Muriel said, and led Becca off to her doom.

Blonde, she was even more of a threat, Theo thought with a mixture of temper and resignation.

And then wondered why he’d used that word, as feelings he did not care to identify coursed through him. Threat. How could she possibly be a threat? He was Theo Markou Garcia and she … she was whatever he made her. He stared at the girl as she sat before the mirror in the guest suite he’d allocated her. She was looking at herself with her cloudy-green eyes dark. She looked fragile and a little unnerved, as if she did not know what she’d gotten herself into.

But most of all, she looked like Larissa.

Françoise was a hairdressing genius—known for her discretion even without the giant sum Theo had paid her to ensure her silence—and had created a true masterpiece. The hair was a symphony of blondes, from a sun-kissed pale shade to the lightest honey, cascading around her like an effortless blonde wave and framing the face that was undeniably Larissa’s.

Larissa, but with fire and emotion in her eyes. Larissa, but so much more alive. So much more aware. Not anesthetized and dull-eyed.

She was like a ghost in reverse, this girl, with her raggedy clothes and her off-color eyes, eyes that should have been green and were instead that mossy, changeable hazel, like a version of Larissa that had never been. Her nose, perhaps, was more narrow. Her chin was a touch stronger, her lips fuller. But he had to search out the differences. He had to look hard to see them. If he didn’t know better, he would have assumed this was Larissa Whitney herself.

No one would look at this woman and think she was anything but the real thing. Because no one saw what they did not expect to see. Theo knew this better than anyone. He had fought against the markers of his humble beginnings most of his life, until he’d met Larissa and had used that very roughness to hide behind. She’d thought she was taking home the kind of man her parents would hate, yet one more of her rebellions. She’d had no idea how ambitious Theo was. Not at first.

“It is an extraordinary likeness,” he said, because he had stared too long, and he could see the nerves Becca struggled to hide. He even sympathized. He remembered how nervous he’d been when Larissa had first noticed him, when she’d chosen him—and how cold he’d gone inside when he finally understood that she wanted only to use him to infuriate and appall Bradford. Just as he remembered what it had taken to turn instead into Bradford’s favorite. She’d never forgiven him.

He could see himself in the mirror, hovering behind her like some great Gothic brute—but he shook himself. That was the way Larissa had made him feel. Like the hulking, ill-mannered swine before whom her pearls were unfairly cast. Yet this was not Larissa. This was only a facsimile of her, and this woman had no greater claim to gentility than he did. Less, perhaps, since this was Manhattan and money made its own friends, especially when it was coupled with so much power and the blue-blooded Whitney stamp of authenticity, heritage and rank.

But oh, how he wished this woman were the real thing. And that she was his.

“I never really noticed it before,” Becca said quietly, turning her head from side to side. He might have thought she was calm, had he not been able to see the way her knee bounced in agitation. A nervous tic he would have to work on, he thought. Larissa had never been nervous. She had redefined languid.

He hated that she lay so helpless, and he was reduced to the past tense. It seemed suddenly terribly unfair that this woman—this pretender—should be so vibrant, sparkle with so much energy, when Larissa could not and would not, ever again. That Becca could be free of all that had weighted Larissa down, ruined her. That she should be so much like Larissa had been so long ago, when he’d first seen her—or in any case, as he’d thought Larissa had been back then, before he’d known her.

“I find that difficult to believe,” he said, dismissively. He reminded himself to be patient, to tamp down the mess of his emotions as was his way; that this was a process, not a race. “Larissa is a world-renowned beauty. Therefore, with your bone structure and likeness to her, you are, too.”

Her gaze met his in the mirror’s reflection. Held. “As it happens, I am a whole, entire person in my own right.” Her brows rose, challenging him, as far from Larissa’s deflecting smiles and easy laughter as it was possible to get. And despite himself, he wanted her. He felt her in his sex, his blood. “I have a life that has never, and will never, have anything to do with my resemblance to Larissa Whitney. In fact,” she said, turning around on the vanity bench to face him, her eyes wild with temper, “I’ll let you in on a little secret. In most places, Larissa Whitney is the punch line to a joke.”

“I suggest you do not tell that joke here,” Theo said, mildly enough, but he saw the color bloom in her cheeks. It seemed to echo in him, seemed to pound through him like need, like want—because Larissa had never responded to him. She had tolerated him, waved him away, pretended to be polite if there were witnesses nearby—but she’d never reacted to him. Not as a woman should respond to a man. Not like this.

But he could not let himself think of that truth.

He should not want this ghost. It was the worst betrayal, surely. Hadn’t he vowed to Larissa that he would never treat her that way, no matter what she did? No matter how she treated him in return? What kind of man was he to ignore that now? He should only want Becca for what her face could bring him, what he deserved after all these years of Larissa’s games and broken promises. But his body was not paying attention to him. At all.

“There’s no going back now, is there?” Becca asked. Or perhaps it was not really a question. “You’ve made me into her. Congratulations.”

Theo smiled slightly. “I’ve had your hair done like hers,” he corrected her. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There is the matter of your wardrobe—and, of course, your entire personal history.”

“It hurts me to say this,” she said, temper crackling in her voice, “but I am, genetically, just as much of a Whitney as she is. I simply wasn’t waited on hand and foot my entire life.”

“But she was,” he said brusquely, as much to curtail the decidedly carnal turn of his thoughts as to reprimand her. “And therein lies one of the major differences we must smooth over if you are to pass as her. Larissa went to Spence and Choate, and then Brown. She spent her summers sailing in Newport, when she wasn’t traveling the world. You did none of these things.” He shrugged. “This is not a value judgment, you understand—this is a statement of fact.”

“It’s true,” Becca said. Her knee began jumping again, and as if she could not bear to let him see it, she moved to her feet, tossing her gleaming blonde hair back from her face in a move that was so much like Larissa’s that it made Theo suck in a sharp breath, past and present colliding too suddenly, and not pleasantly. But the arch of her brows, the tilt of her head—so challenging, so fierce—that was all Becca.

“My mother died three days after my eighteenth birthday,” she said with no trace at all of emotion, just that blaze of green in her eyes and that scathing heat beneath her words. “My sister and I think of that as lucky—because if I hadn’t been eighteen, they would have taken her from me. I had to scrape and save and figure out a way to take care of myself and Emily, because no one else was going to. Certainly not Larissa or her family, who could have saved us a thousand times over, but chose not to, even though they were notified. Maybe they were too busy sailing in Newport.”

Her words hung in the air, condemnation and curse, and Theo wanted things he couldn’t have. Just as he always had, though he had gone to such lengths to make sure that nothing—and no one—would ever be out of his reach again. He told himself it was simply his knee-jerk reaction to a woman who looked like this, telling him what hurt her. He wanted to take away her pain. He wanted to rescue her. From the Whitneys. From the past. And it didn’t matter, because she was not Larissa, and Larissa had never allowed that, anyway. She would have scoffed at the thought.

“They probably didn’t care,” Theo said coldly, brutally, as much to snap himself back to reality as to slap her down.

He watched her pale, and sway very slightly on her feet—and for a moment he hated himself, because if anyone could understand the contours and complexity of her bitterness, it was him. And he did. But there were bigger things at play here. He could not lose sight of his goals. He never had, not since his desperate boyhood in the worst Miami neighborhoods. Not even when it might have saved his relationship with Larissa. Once he got those shares, he would be an owner. He would be one of them. He would be more than the hired help. Finally. He would do anything—had done anything—to make that a reality.

“Just as I do not care,” he continued in the same way, though he did not care for how it made him feel. “This is not a forum for your grievances against the Whitney family. This is not a therapy session.”

“You are a pig.” She spat out the words and in that sentiment, he thought with some trace of black humor, she was exactly like Larissa.

“I don’t care what you think of your cousin’s privileges, or her pampered existence, or her family,” he said, forcing himself to continue in that same heavy-handed way, making sure there was no doubt about how things stood. Start as you mean to go on, he told himself—and he could not let this woman get to him, manipulate him. Make him care. Just like Larissa had done, and look how that had ended up. “I’m sure their wealth and carelessness offends you. It doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is turning you into her, and I can’t do that if you waste our time telling me how much more meaningful your life is than hers, and how much harder you’ve struggled. I don’t care. Do you understand?”

“Perfectly.” Her voice was clipped. Her face was pale, though a hectic color shone in her dark hazel eyes. Hatred, he thought. It was nothing new.

What was new was that he wanted so much to change it.

“Wonderful,” he said. He let himself smile slightly, as if she did not get to him already, no matter what rules he’d tried to institute. As if he did not have the highly unusual urge to apologize to her, to make it better—or to make her understand. As if he really was the dark, forbidding monster he had no doubt at all she believed him to be. Hadn’t he gone to great lengths to make it so? “Let’s get started.”

CHAPTER FOUR

“YOU MUST LOVE HER very much,” Becca said at breakfast a week later, without knowing she meant to speak. But it was done, and her words hung there, seeming to fill up the space between them out on the terrace, rebounding back from the skyscrapers that towered all around them. But her words had as little effect on Theo Markou Garcia as the blazing heat lamps that kept off the March chill, as this man acknowledged no weather that did not suit him. She stabbed her grapefruit with the strange, serrated-edged spoon that had been provided for that singular purpose and continued grimly on. “If you are willing to go to such lengths to recreate her. Like Frankenstein’s bride.”

“Am I patching you together from bits and pieces? A carcass here, a limb or two there?” Theo asked without looking up from the sleek laptop computer he carried everywhere with him, and which Becca suspected was his real, true love. “I think my final product, at the very least, will be a bit smoother and more attractive in appearance than Frankenstein’s.”

There it was again—that hint that somewhere beneath his dark, impenetrable male beauty lurked a man with a sense of humor. Becca sometimes thought she was more likely to wake up one morning and believe herself to be Larissa Whitney in the flesh than Theo was to actually … be funny. Crack a real smile. Relax. Despite the evidence now and again to the contrary.