The Platinum Collection: Surrender To The Devil: The Replacement Wife / Heiress Behind the Headlines / A Devil in Disguise. CAITLIN CREWS

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СКАЧАТЬ feel the heat of it, scorching her, leaving marks on her skin. “You are prickly and full of pride. Qualities I recognize and even admire. You’ve sacrificed yourself for your sister, no doubt your mother, too.”

      “My mother—” she began fiercely.

      “Made her own choices,” he interrupted smoothly. With perfect confidence that she would fall silent, and she did, not even hating herself for that acquiescence as she thought she should. As she knew she would later. “But still, you feel guilty. And so you are here, an angry hen set down amongst the foxes, to get what should have been yours by birth.”

      “You are a randy dog and I am a chicken,” she said dryly. “What other residents of the barnyard will we be before this is over, I wonder?”

      “You use this attitude and your wit as a shield,” he continued as if she had not spoken. “And sometimes as a weapon. You attack before you can be attacked. And you do not back down, even when you must know you should. Sometimes retreat is a strategy, Becca.”

      “Then feel free to employ it,” she snapped at him. She wanted to squirm in her seat. She wanted to yank back her hand, leap to her feet and bolt for the door. She could lose herself in the city within moments. She could be back in Boston by evening. She and Emily would figure something out. They always did.

      But she didn’t move.

      “And you are as fascinated by me as I am by you,” he said then, his fingers tracing patterns against hers, his amber eyes pinning her, paralyzing her—reading into her, seeing truths that she knew she’d never be able to take back.

      “Don’t flatter yourself,” she whispered, but she didn’t pull her hand from his. She didn’t look away. And she thought her heart was beating so loud that it might drown out the restaurant all around them. The city beyond. The planet.

      “I don’t have to flatter myself,” he said softly. Intently. “I have only to look at you.”

      And see who? that cold, suspicious, rational part of her brain hissed. And that easily, it broke the spell. Becca yanked her hand from his as if she’d suddenly found it on a red-hot burner. She sat as far back in her chair as she could, though it was not nearly enough space. He seemed so big. As if he was the whole world.

      “My mother had no idea how to take care of herself, much less a baby,” she said abruptly, throwing her words out like a lifeline. Theo only watched her. Waiting, that small voice warned her. Lying in wait. But she could not stop talking. There was that reckless part of her that thought she saw more in him—that thought she saw him. “She found men who helped, in one form or another. Though how helpful any of them were is really open to interpretation.” She sucked in a breath. “Eventually we settled in Boston, where she actually married Emily’s father. He was nice enough. Unless he was drinking.”

      Theo shifted in his chair, and Becca found her gaze drawn, inexorably, to the hard muscles in his chest, his toned torso. He was too beautiful. Too lethal. She should not play with fire, not with him. That way lay only ash and regret.

      “So eventually she kicked him out and it was just the three of us. We did the best we could.” She shrugged, feeling panicked and resentful suddenly—as if he had forced her to say those things, as if she had not simply offered them up because of the emotional currents between them that she was afraid to examine more closely. “Is that what you wanted to hear? My idyllic, illegitimate youth?”

      “So defensive,” he observed. Was that sympathy she saw move through his hypnotic eyes? Or worse—pity? She found the thought unbearable. “You have nothing to be ashamed of.”

      “I know that!” Her temper flared, and all those old wounds, scarred over with years of guilt, seemed to hurt all over again. Like they were new. “But my mother was ashamed anyway. She’d had bigger, better plans for herself. And for her daughters. I think that if she’d lived, she would have come to Bradford herself.” She shook her head, and then glared at him. “And she didn’t happen to conveniently resemble anyone. So she would have humiliated herself in front of that little toad of a man, her brother, and he would have sneered at her and sent her away. Just because he could.”

      That lay there between them for a moment, as heavy as the centerpiece. Becca couldn’t understand why she’d said that in the first place and why, having said it and knowing it all to be true, she felt as if she’d gone too far. As if she’d blamed Theo unfairly for Bradford’s theoretical behavior. What was the matter with her? If Theo wasn’t guilty of this particular thing, that didn’t mean he was blameless. After all, she was only here because of his Machiavellian little plan, wasn’t she?

      “You’re probably right,” Theo said after a moment, in that relentlessly unsentimental way of his. She should have found it brutal. Instead, oddly, she found his honesty far more soothing than any platitudes might have been. “But the fact that Bradford is not much of a human being should hardly matter to you,” he continued. “Why should you care?”

      “It doesn’t,” she said, though it did. “I don’t.”

      But she had said too much, she realized, as a new silence fell between them, and Theo gestured imperiously for the check. She had said too much, revealed too much, and now she was in exactly the position she had resolved to avoid. He didn’t deserve to know a damned thing about her. He didn’t deserve anything save what he’d paid for.

      So why, knowing that, had she opened herself up anyway?

      Becca still hadn’t answered that question to her own satisfaction when they arrived back at Theo’s private Manhattan castle. They’d spent the ride back from the restaurant in silence; Theo stretched out in the limo’s expansive backseat tapping away on his BlackBerry while Becca pretended to gaze out the window at the frenetic crowds on the city streets. In truth, she was obsessively going over every detail of their lunch in her head. She couldn’t help but feel that everything had shifted between them, beneath her feet. That between last night’s series of revelations and today’s unbearable heat, the geography of their arrangement had remade itself. She just couldn’t seem to figure out the map. Or if she’d ceded too much ground without realizing it.

      The car glided to a smooth stop at the curb, and Becca jolted in her seat when Theo laid his big, warm hand on her arm.

      When she raised her gaze to his, there was amusement in those amber depths. And the same electricity she felt in a white-hot current just beneath her skin. Yet when he spoke, his voice was cool.

      “The paparazzi are here,” he said. He inclined his head toward the sidewalk outside the car window, though his eyes never left hers. “Are you ready?”

      “How can I possibly know if I’m ready?” she asked with perfect, baffled honesty, blinking. Could anyone be ready for that kind of intrusion? She looked out the thankfully tinted window, swallowing nervously when she saw the scrum of shady-looking men already jostling for position outside the car—already snapping pictures and shouting. One even slapped his hand against the car itself.

      “They want a reaction,” Theo said, his voice even. Calm. She jerked her attention away from the chaos in the street and back to him. “The more emotional you are, the better. They will say anything to goad you into the reaction they want. Anything. Do you understand?”

      He was so at ease. So unperturbed that there were jackals baying out his name, separated from them by only a flimsy bit of steel and tinted glass. Becca felt the panicked fluttering of her heart slow as she looked at him. He was so. solid. СКАЧАТЬ