The Platinum Collection: Surrender To The Devil: The Replacement Wife / Heiress Behind the Headlines / A Devil in Disguise. CAITLIN CREWS
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green, nearly emerald with the contact lenses. He preferred the hazel. The hint of forests. Their gazes clashed across the table, igniting memories, catching fire, hers demanding. Condemning, he thought. Because he was not helping her. He was not defending her. He was simply sitting there, watching, doing nothing at all, while Bradford savaged her.
This was who he was. This shadow of a man. Worthy of nothing and no one, no matter how much wealth he accumulated and power he attained.
Yet even thinking that, knowing it, Theo remained silent. He raised his brows at her, encouraging her to carry on, because he knew she could. She was more than capable. She did not even need him. Fight, he thought. Win. Her eyes darkened as she read his expression, and her mouth flattened into a hard line. But he knew she’d understood him when she swallowed, nodded slightly and turned away “You,” Bradford said quietly, in that deadly way of his that meant he would raze anything in his path, “would have been better off never born at all. You ruined my sister’s life.”
Helen gasped from her place down the table. Becca stared at him for a moment, only the faintest whitening of her cheeks any sign that she’d heard Bradford at all, that she’d absorbed that deliberate body blow. Theo saw the pain in her gaze, the betrayal, and a certain flash of resignation that hurt him most of all.
His hands became fists beneath the table.
But this was still her battle.
“You understand this is not my opinion,” Bradford said, almost softly. “It is a fact.”
Becca pushed back from the table and stood, tossing her napkin onto the glossy surface, every inch of her a study in elegance. Theo understood in that moment that she was not only the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, but the most precious to him. And, further, that he would lose her. That perhaps he already had.
“I always thought my mother was exaggerating,” Becca said after a moment, her voice somehow even, her gaze steady on Bradford as if his cold glare did not bother her at all. “But, in fact, you are even more disgusting than she was willing to admit. I used to look at pictures of Larissa in magazines and wonder how anyone who had so much handed to her could do so little with it—could, in fact, fail so spectacularly.” Her lips pursed. “But now I can only wonder how she made it as long as she did. She really never did have a chance, did she?”
“You know nothing about my daughter,” Bradford said dismissively. “How could you?”
“As a matter of fact,” Becca replied, “I imagine I know more about your daughter than anyone in this room. And one thing is absolutely certain—she deserved more than you. Much more.”
She turned and started toward the door, and Theo could not decide if he should applaud her strength or mourn the necessity of her having to display it here, against such cruelty.
“This temper tantrum doesn’t matter,” Bradford called after her. “You still have to complete your assignment here, or the contract is void.”
“Why do you care so much?” Becca asked, looking back over her shoulder, her eyes dark. “You think so little of Larissa—that much is clear.” And her gaze lasered through the room, condemning them all anew. Perhaps even Theo. “So why does she have so much power?”
“Power!” Bradford laughed. “She has about as much power as you do.”
“And yet you are willing to go to these lengths to fix what you think she broke,” Becca said derisively. Incisively, Theo thought. “Maybe this was the only way she knew to hit you where it might actually hurt. If she could wake up, I’d congratulate her—she clearly succeeded.”
Her mouth twisted, and her gaze swept over all of them: Bradford with his shark’s glare directed straight back at her, Helen sitting so straight and silent, and Theo. Who felt things he could not allow himself to feel and still had not protected her from this. Or even from himself.
“Becca,” he said, and though her eyes were Larissa-green, he saw her there, her pride and her determination, her scrappy strength, looking back at him. He would know her anywhere, he thought, no matter who she looked like. And she knew him, too. He could see the recognition, no matter how battered, fill her face for the scant instant before she hid it. When she looked back at her relatives, she had hidden herself away again. She was unassailable. Impermeable. Perfectly Becca.
“I’m tempted to walk right out of here and let her win,” Becca said softly. Her chin lifted, and she very nearly smiled. “I still might.”
And Theo found it was difficult to do anything but admire her, yearn for her and wonder once more how he could survive losing her, as she pivoted back around and walked from the room.
Becca was so upset that she could hardly see—something that she only noticed when her breath began to slow again and she realized that rather than walk toward the grand front entrance as she’d intended, she’d managed to completely lose herself in the great mansion.
She came to a stop, pressing her palm into her chest as if that could stop the way her heart pounded, and forced herself to take deep breaths. She looked around, taking in the elegant grandfather clock before her, and a collection of intricately painted blue-and-white vases on a series of narrow tables. She’d never been in this particular hallway before. That in itself was hardly surprising. This place was so big she wouldn’t have been at all surprised to discover whole other cities shut away inside of it. Whole other lives. None of them hers.
The riot of confusion and betrayal inside of her threatened to take her out at the knees again, and she had to close her eyes for a moment.
The person she was really angry at, she acknowledged, was herself.
What had she expected? She had told herself that she wanted one thing and one thing only: money to help Emily. And she had believed that, too. Theo had been an unforeseen complication, but she’d honestly imagined that she could handle that, handle him. She’d believed that no matter what might have happened, she was still focused on her goal.
Oh, what a liar she was. Even to herself. And she hadn’t even known it until tonight. Until now, when it seemed everything lay about her in ruins, though she stood in such august surroundings, and she wondered how broken she was after all. Because suddenly, there was no escape from the truth.
It was sick, she thought now, and sad, and any number of other things she felt too raw to face, that there had been that part of her that had wondered if maybe, once these vile, cruel people had seen her all dressed up like Larissa—the one, some still-hurt part of her reminded her, they’d loved enough to keep—they might have had second thoughts about Becca. About how they’d treated her all these years. About how easily, how happily, they’d forgotten about her.
The reality of that lay on her like a great, wet blanket, miserable and awful, and hating herself for her own naïveté only made it worse.
She’d thought she was so tough, so prepared for this world and what it could do. She’d thought she was immune. But instead, she was still the little girl who didn’t understand why the rest of her family didn’t love her. The little girl who believed, damn Bradford, that she truly had ruined her mother’s life. It didn’t matter how many times she argued that little girl into submission—the truth was in how hollowed out she felt right now, how scraped raw, by the things that awful man had said to her.
And worse, from the grim knowledge that he believed those things to be true. Worst of all—there was a huge part of her that believed it, too.
She was the beggar at the feast and always had been, no matter how many times she told herself she didn’t want what they had. That didn’t mean she could understand, even now, how easily they could deny her.
She hated that it hurt her. That Bradford had hurt her. That Helen’s moment of near tenderness had fooled her, even momentarily, into believing these people could be anything less than monstrous.
And more than that, she hated that Theo had gotten so far under her skin, had come to matter so much, that she had actually believed the way he looked