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 wanted what she represented—and he had, he did—then he had to allow her to be who she was. He had to let her do as she pleased. And so he had. The end was more important than the means, he’d always thought.

      “Larissa made Theo a gift of a significant amount of her shares,” Bradford was saying. “It would give him a controlling interest in the company. It was meant to be a wedding present.”

      “I believe they call that a dowry,” Becca said, her disgust plain in her flashing eyes, the lift of her chin. “How quaint, in this day and age.”

      “It was a gift,” Theo replied, his voice more clipped than it should have been. As if this stranger’s opinion mattered. “Not a dowry.” He had never apologized for going after what he wanted, using any means necessary. He would not start now.

      “The terms were laid out explicitly in the prenuptial agreement,” Bradford continued. “The shares were to go to Theo upon their wedding day, or in the unfortunate event of her death. But we have reason to believe she altered her will.”

      “Why would she alter her will?” Becca asked. She looked from Bradford to Theo and then back again, judgment plain on her face. Because of you, obviously, her expression read.

      “My daughter has long been preyed upon by the unsavory,” Bradford said, in the first faux-fatherly tone Theo had heard from him since they’d received the call on Friday night. From anyone else, it might have been believable. “There’s a certain ne’er-do-well who would do anything to get his hands on Larissa’s shares. We think he succeeded.”

      “That’s where you come in,” Theo said then, close enough to see the angry flash in Becca’s eyes when she looked at him. Close enough to feel his own shocking, searing reaction to it. Sex, he thought. This was about sex. He simply hadn’t expected it from this woman, under these circumstances. It was the surprise that was throwing him, he told himself. That was all. The odd similarities between her and the man he’d been once upon a time were simply coincidence, nothing more.

      “I can’t imagine how,” she said, her voice cold. “What could I possibly have to do with a situation that already seems too complicated?”

      “We cannot find a copy of the new version of her will.” Theo watched the muted emotions move over her face, and wished he could read them. Wished he could simply bend her to his will as he did most people. But that would come. “We think her lover has the only existing copy.”

      “And you can’t ask him to show it to you, though the poor girl lies in a coma?” Becca sounded incredulous. And condemning, in equal measure. “Is this a soap opera?”

      “I want you to pretend to be Larissa,” Theo said, because nothing could be gained by beating around the bush. There was too much at stake. All the long years of single-minded focus, determination. The bitter acceptance that once his usefulness as Larissa’s wrong side of the tracks lover had ended, their relationship had become purely business, cold and complicated. His searing, implacable focus on the end goal no matter what. “I want you to be so good at it that you fool her lover. And I want you to get me that will.”

      There was a long, heavy silence, broken only by Helen’s delicate sniffles into her monogrammed handkerchief. Becca stared at him for a long, almost uncomfortable moment, as if her not-quite-green eyes could see into the parts of him he’d thought he’d buried long ago, and then she let out a sound that was a shade too hollow to be a laugh.

      “No,” she said, simple and to the point.

      Her refusal lay there for a moment, seeming to fill the elegant room, blocking out the late-afternoon light that poured in through the soaring windows.

      “That’s it?” Theo asked softly, not sure he could believe what he’d heard. Not sure when someone had last said no to him, for that matter. Even Larissa had always said yes, no matter what she’d then gone on to do. “That’s all you have to say?”

      “That is not, by any stretch of the imagination, all I have to say,” Becca threw back at him, her temper flaring in her that suddenly. It lit up her face, made it suddenly unlike Larissa’s—and yet remarkably, shockingly attractive. “But it is all I plan to say. You’re crazy.” She looked back at her aunt and uncle, her lips curling. “You’re all crazy. I’ve never been happier in my life that you people don’t claim me.”

      And then she turned, her spine as straight as a queen’s, her head high, and walked through the door without looking back, more elegant in her ratty clothes than some debutantes looked in their opulent ball gowns. Looking just like Larissa at her haughtiest.

      Bradford and Helen broke into a loud, angry noise, but Theo barely heard them.

      She was magnificent, and, more to the point, she could be Larissa.

      He was not about to let her get away.

      Becca knew he would be the one to follow her, so she did not have to turn to identify the speaker when she heard the quiet command from behind her.

      “Stop,” he said again.

      Once more, she found herself obeying him without meaning to do so. She scowled at the marble floor beneath her feet, as if it was the fault of the stone she had an apparent weakness for this man.

      “I do not have to follow your orders simply because you issue them,” she said, as if she had not already done so. “There is no agreement between us.”

      “Your tender sensibilities do you credit, I’m sure,” Theo said. His voice was too dark, and wove far too many complicated patterns down the back of her neck, through her stomach, and even down to the soles of her feet. She knew that keeping her back to him was a mistake, that she begged for her own destruction that way.

      But when she turned, he was right there in front of her, so dark and impossibly bright-eyed in the vast entry hall, so hopelessly compelling, and she was not sure that there was any way at all to be safe around this man. No matter what her treacherous mind whispered, as if it could discern something in him that was otherwise hidden—as if it wanted her to lay down her defenses then and there, on faith. But she had none. Not while she stood in the Whitney mansion, surrounded by enemies.

      “I doubt that you really mean to compliment me,” she said, searching the angles and planes of his fascinating, addictive face for clues. “I suspect you only do so when you are preparing to throw your weight around.”

      “The difference between me and whoever it is you think I am,” Theo said in that low, disturbingly sensual voice, his mouth crooking slightly, “is that I don’t have to throw my weight around to achieve my ends. My will is usually sufficient.”

      “I’m so sorry to ruin your winning streak,” she murmured with cloying insincerity. “But I prefer my will to yours.”

      He shrugged slightly, as if he could not bother to worry about the force of her will, so puny was it next to his own. “I’m depending on your practicality,” he said quietly. “I suspect it will win out before you make the great mistake of walking out that door.”

      She didn’t know why she stood there so tensely, braced for attack, when he stood a few feet away and looked very nearly idle. In the way that great predators allowed themselves to appear idle moments before they pounced.

      “Is this more of your sales pitch?” she asked. “I’m not interested. You and those people are СКАЧАТЬ