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 moderately attractive face. Yet her natural expression, Becca had no doubt, was this very glare she was delivering now, from down the length of her patrician nose.

      “A pity Theo couldn’t have improved your manners,” Helen said. Her smile was razor sharp, and utterly fake. “Although perhaps this is as much as someone like you was capable of improving.”

      Becca felt frozen and furious all at once—a terrible combination. She forced herself to move with all of Larissa’s boneless nonchalance toward the only piece of furniture that did not look as if it would like to judge its occupant—a splendid couch, all bright reds and whites. She sank into it, and schooled her features into blandness when she met Helen’s gaze once more.

      “It can be so difficult to train up the peasants,” she said, pretending to commiserate, her voice heavy with irony. “They find it so hard to project the kind of snobbery that comes so naturally to their betters.”

      “Whatever her faults,” Helen said then, raising her brows, and looking as if it was a heroic act to ignore Becca’s last words, “Larissa was at least capable of conducting herself like a Whitney when it mattered.”

      Becca shook her head. “I know this must wound you as deeply as it does me,” she said, almost as if she pitied this woman. “But I am, in fact, a Whitney. That you turned your back on your only sister, the better to hoard your treasures in this morgue you call a house, only makes you sad. It doesn’t make me any less your niece.”

      She expected Helen to gasp, clutch at her ubiquitous pearls, perhaps even swoon. But the other woman was no longer the fluttering, gasping creature Becca recalled from their first meeting in this house. Helen surprised her. She actually smiled slightly, with a hint of something like nostalgia, which made her whole face change. Unexpectedly, it made her look … more like Becca’s mother than Becca would have thought possible. She had to swallow hard against the rush of emotion that threatened to swamp her.

      “You look nothing like your mother,” Helen said after a long, strange little moment, maybe two. “She took after our father’s side, like the rest of us. But you sound just like her.” She blinked. “It’s extraordinary.”

      This time, the quiet that took over was less tense, if no less fraught with the weight of the past. Becca dropped her gaze to her wine, peering at the golden liquid as if it could solve all of her problems, banish all her ghosts. This was, she thought, perhaps as close as she was likely to come to the happy family reunion she’d imagined so feverishly—and secretly—when she was a girl. There would be no clutching of the lost child to her aunt’s breast, clearly—but it was something. Something more than had been there before.

      It shouldn’t have comforted her. It shouldn’t have felt like balm to an old wound.

      “You truly do look remarkably like Larissa,” Helen said after a moment. She shifted in her chair. “Theo did a wonderful job, as he always does.”

      “He’s a talented man,” Becca said dryly, and then regretted it when her aunt’s gaze caught hers. There was a certain recognition there—a certain knowledge—that set off alarms all over her body.

      “Theo is the most driven, most ruthless man I know,”

      Helen said. Purposefully. Deliberately. “He allows nothing to distract him from his goal. Nothing.”

      Becca felt horribly exposed—as caught out as she’d been in the glare of all those paparazzi flashbulbs. How could Helen know what had transpired between them? Was it imprinted on her face somehow? But she knew it couldn’t be. She had worked too hard over the past weeks to make sure her face showed only what she wanted it to. In this case, the ghost of a girl who never got upset about anything, not where anyone could see.

      “That sounds like an excellent quality to have in the family company’s CEO,” Becca said briskly. “Congratulations.”

      “Nor is he the kind of man to settle for substitutions,” her aunt continued, in that same arch, superficially polite tone with the bite beneath. Any tenderness that might have connected them, however briefly, was gone as surely as if Becca had imagined it. Perhaps she had. “You’ve seen how he lives. Theo demands, and receives, the very best. Nothing else will do.”

      Becca couldn’t help the little laugh that came out of her then. Was it amazement? Or just a kind of horror that this woman was articulating all the fears she had refused to put into words herself?

      “I’m sorry,” she said. She made herself look Helen in the eye, made herself sit there calmly, her face blank. “Are you warning me about something? Is that what this is?”

      “You’re out of your depth,” Helen said in a voice that was arguably meant to be kind, but sounded like nothing more than the worst kind of condescension to Becca’s ears. Helen shrugged delicately. “That’s not a judgment, merely a statement of fact. It would be easy to misunderstand things, I’d think. Easy to misinterpret.” She took a sip of her wine, her narrowed gaze much too shrewd. “Far too easy to forget oneself.”

      Becca could have pretended she didn’t understand. But even if Helen didn’t know the particulars, it was the casual assumptions that made Becca’s blood heat, her temper rise. Because of course the poor relative, caught up in these high-stakes games, so wide-eyed and naive, would fall for a man like Theo and fail to see that he was using her as a substitute. Of course Helen thought she was that stupid. Helen thought anyone who did not come from her world was that stupid, by definition.

      The fact that she was right was not something Becca intended to confront. Not now. Not while Helen looked on.

      “You’re operating under the assumption that I want what you have,” Becca bit out. “What Larissa had. I don’t.” She laughed again, though it was slightly more wild this time, slightly more bitter. “I want nothing to do with this fake, glittering, poisonous little world of yours, I assure you.”

      “If you say so,” Helen said, gliding to her feet, poised and cool. Her gaze was pitying. “But that does not change the facts of things, does it?”

       CHAPTER TEN

      IT WAS TIME.

      Theo sat at the long, formal dining room table and found himself brooding as he watched his perfect creation, his Becca, shine. She embodied Larissa, just as he’d taught her to do. He thought she was more than Larissa—she had more life in her, more sparkle, than her cousin had ever had. But no one would see her and think anything was amiss; they were far more likely, he reflected, to assume that rehabilitation had finally worked its magic on poor, lost Larissa.

      Which meant that he had succeeded. He should have been jubilant. This mad plan that should never have worked seemed set to succeed beyond his wildest dreams. He had created his own little ghost, and now it was time to let her do what she’d been made to do. Haunt. Confuse. And win him back the shares that had been meant to be his in the first place.

      It was too bad that he felt as if he was the one already haunted.

      “I hope you read your contract carefully,” Bradford was saying to Becca, his attention on his elegant plate and the perfect duck that graced it. Other than a sweeping head-to-toe glance when she’d walked into the room, Theo didn’t think Bradford had looked at her directly.

      “No, I prefer to sign intimidating-looking documents without СКАЧАТЬ