The Platinum Collection: Surrender To The Devil. Caitlin Crews
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lighting her up from the inside out.
She’d rather die than show him her reaction to his nearness—her reaction to being alone with him in an enclosed space. She thought she might die anyway, from the wild pounding of her heart, the shiver in her limbs and the trembling in her core. She wanted to believe her reaction came from trepidation, from fear of the world she was now going to have to learn how to live in, at least for a little while. The world that had chewed her mother up and spit her out. She might know deep inside that she would conquer it, but she still first had to survive it. She told herself it was nothing more than that.
He watched her for a moment, something not quite a smile flirting with his hard mouth, something too close to soft in his gaze. “I cannot imagine how you’ve come by your dire opinion of me,” he said after a long moment. “We’ve only just met.”
“You make quite an impression,” Becca said honestly, wishing that were not true. Wishing she was not so aware of him, that every cell in her body did not seem to sing out that awareness.
“You are supposed to be impressed,” he said, with a sardonic inflection she had to fight to ignore. “If not wholly overawed.”
“Oh, I am,” Becca replied at once, forcing herself to remember who she was. Why she was here. What she had to do. She squared her shoulders. “Though in contrast to your usual minions, I imagine, I’m a bit more awed by your conceit and arrogance than I am by your supposed magnificence.”
The curve of his mouth became a smile. “So noted,” he said.
His gaze warmed, and she warmed, too, and then wondered from one beat of her heart to the next what it would be like if he weren’t one of them. If he weren’t the enemy. If that look she’d glimpsed in his gaze now and again truly meant something. But that was ridiculous.
He shifted slightly in his seat. He was much too close.
“It’s too bad you’ve chosen to hate everyone you meet on this adventure so indiscriminately, Rebecca.”
“It’s Becca,” she said, ignoring the slight catch in her throat, the wild fluttering of her pulse. “And I would hardly call my feelings on the Whitney family and anyone tainted by a close association with them indiscriminate. It’s a reasonable response to who they are, I think. It’s also common sense.”
There was a slight, tense pause. The air seemed to contract around them.
“Everyone is more complicated than they appear on the surface,” Theo said finally in a soft voice. “You’d do well to remember that.”
“I’m not complicated at all,” Becca retorted, leaning back in the seat and crossing her legs, taking a perverse sort of pride in the look of distaste Theo fixed on her old jeans and battered boots. “What you see is exactly what you get.”
“Good lord,” Theo said, sweeping that same look over her whole body, from her feet to her hair. “I certainly hope not.”
Becca bristled, but tried to hide it behind a smile. “Is that how you go about winning people over?” she demanded. “Because I have to tell you, your approach needs work.”
“I don’t have to win you over,” he said, his own smile sharpening, those impossible eyes boring into her, making her fight against the urge to squirm in her seat. “I’ve already bought you.”
Theo lived in a vast two-story penthouse in Tribeca. He led Becca out of the most luxuriously appointed elevator she’d ever seen and into a wide, private marble lobby that opened into another entryway, accented with white-painted brick walls and graceful shelves holding art, books and various artifacts that struck Becca as decidedly Mediterranean. The entryway opened up into a great room with a ceiling two stories above, stretching out before her toward high, arching windows that led out to a wide brick terrace and beyond that, Manhattan itself in all its high-thrusting, slick glory.
She had never felt farther away from her tiny apartment in its not-so-great part of Boston.
The Whitney mansion had been easier to accept, somehow. Her mother had told stories of what it had been like to grow up in that house, and summer in another equally extravagant home in Newport, Rhode Island, so perhaps Becca had expected mythical modern castles on Fifth Avenue. It was just one more part of the Whitney mystique. But all that was inherited opulence, handed down from one Whitney to the next ever since the glory days of their Gilded Age friends and contemporaries, American royalty like the Carnegies, Rockefellers, and Vanderbilts.
But this … this was something else. Real people, Becca thought almost numbly, still looking around in awe, didn’t actually live like this.
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