He thought of the heat, the fear. The thick Florida nights his family had sweated through, huddled together in the dark with the lights off to avoid the roaming gangs, the guns, the ever-present violence of the streets.
“And here I assumed that you were one of them,” she said, her hazel gaze traveling over him, from head to toe. She met his eyes and shrugged. “Prep school, summers on the Cape, rugby shirts and a golden retriever. The whole package.” He would have thought she was being flippant, had he not seen that defensive, wounded look in her eyes. She hid it almost immediately, but he saw it. He recognized it.
She was not at all unlike him, this woman, and he did not know how to handle the rush of something like pleasure he felt when he thought it. He ignored it instead.
“Not quite.” His smile felt thin. “My father dropped dead unexpectedly, leaving my mother to fend for herself in Miami, when his proud Cuban family had turned their backs on him for marrying a Greek Cypriot immigrant.” He could hear his voice in the air between them, heavy with irony, ripe with old condemnation. When had he last talked of these things? Had he ever talked of these things? “We had nothing. No money. No hope. Less than you could possibly imagine.”
He thought of his older brother Luis, gunned down on the street like garbage as payback for some imagined slight. He thought of his mother’s face, twisted in agony, and the anguished fire in her eyes when she’d looked at him. Not you, Theo, she had whispered fiercely, her fingers digging into his narrow shoulders. He had been barely eleven years old. You will not die in this place. You will get out.
And so he had, one painful step at a time.
“I saw the Whitneys many years ago, when I was young,” he said, unable to look at Becca, suddenly. He turned toward the great windows, but hardly noticed the glittering spectacle of Manhattan arrayed before him, sparkling and gleaming in the night. Instead he saw a packed street in South Beach, outside one of the area’s most exclusive restaurants, teeming with vibrant people, Latin music, the Miami high life. “Bradford and his wife were visiting Miami with their perfect little daughter. She could not have been ten. I was parking cars, and I thought they all looked like movie stars, like a fantasy. I thought she looked like a princess. And I wanted what they had, whatever they had.” He laughed shortly. “I didn’t know who they were until years later.”
“It is hard for me to imagine Bradford looking perfect,” Becca said, her voice crisp, cutting into his memories—making them seem somehow less horrific. Was that her intent? How could it be? “Or anything even approaching perfect, for that matter.”
“That is because you are predisposed to find his kind of power offensive,” Theo replied. He did not to turn to look at her—and in any case, he saw only himself as the young teenager he had been, so captivated by Bradford’s ease and confidence. It had been so very different from the kind of dead-eyed swagger that had meant power and authority in his neighborhood. It had changed his whole world. He let out a short laugh. “But I had never seen it before. It was a revelation.”
How could he describe his life to her, the way it had been back then? When he thought of it, it was almost as if it was someone else’s life altogether. A movie he’d once seen, perhaps, of a desperate young boy and all he’d done not only to escape his dead-end world, but to succeed by any measure. He had clawed his way out of that pit, inch by painful inch. How could he possibly explain what that had been like to this woman? She had never reached the heights he had, and he knew she had never been so low.
“When I was fresh out of business school I came to New York,” he continued in a low voice, skipping over the indescribably hard years in between—the sacrifices and impossible feats he had made possible, somehow, because he’d had no other choice. And it had still meant nothing, in the end, despite his best efforts. He had been unable to save his mother from the cancer that had taken her, just as he’d been unable to save his brother back in Miami. “And Larissa was everywhere.”
“Doing what?” she asked, her voice faintly dubious, as if she was imagining the kind of tabloid antics Larissa was famous for, and judging them harshly.
“Being Larissa,” he said. He turned back then, to look at her. To see the face that had haunted him for so many years, from long before he’d actually met Larissa through to now, when she was irrevocably lost to him and yet was this new, other person, too. Becca. “She was always in the papers. She was always being photographed. She was one of the most recognizable faces in New York.” He shrugged. “She was like a dream.”
Becca reached over to run her hand along the back of one of the chairs at the table, and he had the distinct impression that she was choosing her words carefully.
“What kind of dream?” she asked finally, her tone a shade too polite.
He could not help but wonder what she had not said, what she’d hidden.
“I suppose you could say she was the emblem of all I ever wanted,” Theo said after a moment. He could not help the sardonic laugh that escaped him at that little truth. What did it make him to have wanted Larissa so much and gotten so little in return? But he had made his peace with that long ago, he told himself. One did not fall in love with an emblem. Not really. One accepted her terms and displayed her in return, especially if one was far too busy with business to worry about his emotional life.
And it would have been different once they’d married. He was sure of it.
Despite everything, he still carried those first pictures of her in his head, as if he’d imprinted on them. Larissa caught in laughter on the glossy pages of a magazine, carefree and easy, so beautiful and so captivatingly, astonishingly perfect. A woman like that, he’d thought then, with her effortless beauty and her gleaming pedigree, would be the icing on the great and glorious cake he planned to make of his life, with his own hands. He had been determined to build his own empire—and a woman like that would be like a beacon to show all the world that he’d succeeded. That he, Theo Markou Garcia, who came from dirt and should never have managed to climb his way out, was the man with all the power.
“Your ultimate fantasy is a spoiled debutante?” Becca asked, her voice cool. “I can’t blame you, I suppose.” Her voice indicated that, in fact, she could. “Aren’t all men predisposed to choose vapid over interesting?”
“Is this some form of envy?” he asked, studying her face, so like and yet unlike Larissa’s. The more he looked at her, the less he saw Larissa at all. Particularly when he saw the flash of temper she hurried to conceal. “Do you think you would not be chosen?”
“Chosen for what?” she asked, laughing slightly, derisively. “To be some man’s trophy, with no thought to who I might be as I am reduced to an emblem? Or chosen to play some elaborate game of pretend to benefit some man’s lust for power?” Her mouth curved into something not quite a smile. “Thank you, but I’d pass. If I could.”
There was something almost too painful in the space between them then, pulling taut, making him long to put his hands on her almost as much as he wanted to deny her words applied to him.
He could not name the fire she stirred in him. But he burned. Oh, how he burned.
“I knew that if I was ever in a position to win a woman like that, I would be exactly where I’d always wanted to be,” he said finally. He did not understand his urge to explain himself to her. He had never spent any time at all concerned about the opinions of others. Why should he start now?
“Congratulations,” Becca said, her eyes dark though her voice was light. “You got everything you wanted, didn’t you? The woman you always wanted. And the whole company along with her.”
“When I started at Whitney Media I announced in the very first training session that I would run the company one day,” he said without meaning to speak, without knowing what he meant to say. “The HR manager laughed in my face. She was not laughing five years later.”
“Five