She didn’t know why she found that statement, so simple and so matter-of-factly delivered, heartbreaking. Wasn’t this his story of success? His rise to unimaginable heights? Shouldn’t a story like this be accompanied by swelling music and a cheering section? Why, then, did she want to cry? To try to reach across the space between them and touch him somehow?
“But what exactly have you won?” she said softly. “The CEO, but without the shares you need to truly be an owner. Engaged to Larissa, but still alone.”
His gaze hardened, and she thought she saw temper flex his jaw before he hid it behind that dark, arrogant mask.
“Careful,” he suggested, in that deadly voice—the one that had ruined her so completely the day she’d met him. The one that made her tremble slightly even now. “It is one thing to share information that might help you in your portrayal. It is another to shoot your mouth off about things you can’t possibly understand.”
“What’s to understand?” she asked lightly, as if completely unaware of the darkness in his tone, his gaze. “You are engaged yet don’t live together. You have her things shipped here as you need them.” She shrugged, as if she felt at all casual. “And somehow, I don’t quite believe that Larissa, of all people, was saving herself for marriage.”
Theo gazed at her now, his hard, devil’s face set in lines that no longer intimidated her as much as they had at first. Instead, tonight, she wanted to trace them with her hands. She wanted to taste him, learn him, know him. But not if he thought she was someone else. Not while he wanted that someone else so desperately. She still had that much pride, at least.
For now, a treacherous voice whispered deep inside of her.
“It was never a conventional relationship,” he said coldly. “How could it have been?”
“Why shouldn’t it have been?” Becca asked, frowning.
“She could have chosen anyone,” Theo said, his voice stiffening. But there was something else there, beneath his words. Something that made it sound as if he was the one who hadn’t deserved the selfish, vain girl and her careless treatment. The very idea set Becca’s teeth on edge. “But she chose me, and then, later, agreed to marry me when we decided it would be most beneficial. It was a bargaining chip in her endless war with her father, but she also knew that I understood her. I would wait for her to settle into the relationship. I would not force her into something she wasn’t ready to accept.”
“Like fidelity?” Becca asked dryly.
“She was not the woman I’d imagined her to be before I met her,” Theo said, ignoring her. “But she was not the monster you imagine her to be, either.” He sighed, and shook his head slightly. “Try to imagine her life.”
Becca couldn’t help the slight laugh that escaped her then. She could see her reflection in the grand mirror that dominated the far wall, and it was shockingly similar to the many pictures she’d seen of Larissa over the years. Dressed to kill, jewels to wound, with nothing more pressing on her plate than another charity event, another art opening, another party. Did Theo really think that Becca hadn’t pored over those magazines? Hating herself for her own sick fascination with the life she might have had, the person she might have been?
“I’ve imagined her life more times than I can count,” Becca said now, fighting to keep her voice smooth, even. To keep the years of anger at the injustice of it all at bay. “I imagined what I could do with her money, how I might appreciate the vacations and clothes and parties and opportunities that bored her so terribly. Is that what you want me to imagine?”
“It can’t have escaped your notice that Bradford Whitney is the last person on earth anyone would want as a father,” Theo said coldly, as if he’d judged her for her callousness. She wished she didn’t care. She wanted not to care. “He drove Larissa’s poor, fragile mother to a nervous breakdown. She never leaves the house in France anymore. She’s become a complete recluse.”
“Again,” Becca said evenly, refusing to back down from that condemning look he shot at her, “what would you like me to imagine? What it’s like to have a bad father? I have one of those. The moment my mother was thrown out of the Whitney family, my father disappeared. But my mother couldn’t swan off to a house in France to recover. She had to figure out how to be a single mother all on her own.”
“Imagine what it must have been like for her, to grow up in that house, with those parents,” Theo replied, hammering his point even further. As if she hadn’t spoken. As if, Becca thought, he needed her to see Larissa as he wanted to see her. “She was never strong like you. She never had a chance.”
“She had every chance,” Becca retorted. She could feel her face heating, and knew she was saying too much. Feeling too much. Was she innately, naturally strong or had she simply never been given the option to be anything but? “More chances than most people can dream of!”
“She had money,” Theo said, shaking his head. “That’s not quite the same thing.”
“How can you have grown up where you did, the way you did, and sympathize with a poor little rich girl like her?” Becca asked, unable to hold her emotions back. She felt it all flood into her, making her voice too loud and her eyes too bright. How could he defend a woman who had, from all accounts including his own, treated him like he was something too far beneath her to be worthy of her notice?
“Rich doesn’t mean happy,” he began.
“But it does mean rich,” Becca threw at him, furious. At him. At Larissa, damn her. At this situation that was spiraling out of control with every word she couldn’t seem to keep inside of her. “She had every advantage in the world. Literally.”
“She is the saddest girl I’ve ever met,” he said, his amber gaze slamming into her, making her heart stop, then pound.
As if he’d hit her.
“Are you talking about her emotional pain?“ she asked, aware that her voice was no more than a whisper, barely audible, and yet it scorched her own throat. So scathing. So bitter. “Do you know who has time for emotional pain, Theo? Women like Larissa, who never have to worry about anything else. Not where her next meal is coming from. Not how she’s going to pay the rent.”
“You don’t know her,” he said again, his voice clipped.
“I wonder if you do,” she threw at him. “You’re so busy making excuses for her—you’ve even brought me here to pretend to be her because she betrayed you in yet one more way, and you still want to defend her.”
“I won’t listen to this—”
“You wanted me to study her, and I have,” Becca said, throwing her words out like blows. Wishing they were. Wanting them to land, to hurt. Wanting him to wake up and see the truth—needing him to—though she refused to examine why. She kept on. “The woman you’re carrying around in your mind doesn’t exist, Theo. She never did.”
“You forget yourself.” His voice could have shattered steel. She felt a chill sneak along her neck, her arms, leaving goose bumps in its wake, and she knew she’d pushed him too far. His eyes bored into hers, amber turned glacial.
“Theo.” But he was no longer listening.
“You are the ghost in this room,” he told her, in his most lethal tone, making her grip the chair in front of her to remain upright. “You’re the one playing a part. You only exist insofar as I say you do.”
His face was carved of stone, absent of light. It should have done her serious damage. Instead, she ached for him.
“I suggest you remember your place,” he threw at her, and then he brushed past her and left her standing there, trembling and alone. And as pale as the ghost he’d accused her of being.