Theo shifted in his chair, and Becca found her gaze drawn, inexorably, to the hard muscles in his chest, his toned torso. He was too beautiful. Too lethal. She should not play with fire, not with him. That way lay only ash and regret.
“So eventually she kicked him out and it was just the three of us. We did the best we could.” She shrugged, feeling panicked and resentful suddenly—as if he had forced her to say those things, as if she had not simply offered them up because of the emotional currents between them that she was afraid to examine more closely. “Is that what you wanted to hear? My idyllic, illegitimate youth?”
“So defensive,” he observed. Was that sympathy she saw move through his hypnotic eyes? Or worse—pity? She found the thought unbearable. “You have nothing to be ashamed of.”
“I know that!” Her temper flared, and all those old wounds, scarred over with years of guilt, seemed to hurt all over again. Like they were new. “But my mother was ashamed anyway. She’d had bigger, better plans for herself. And for her daughters. I think that if she’d lived, she would have come to Bradford herself.” She shook her head, and then glared at him. “And she didn’t happen to conveniently resemble anyone. So she would have humiliated herself in front of that little toad of a man, her brother, and he would have sneered at her and sent her away. Just because he could.”
That lay there between them for a moment, as heavy as the centerpiece. Becca couldn’t understand why she’d said that in the first place and why, having said it and knowing it all to be true, she felt as if she’d gone too far. As if she’d blamed Theo unfairly for Bradford’s theoretical behavior. What was the matter with her? If Theo wasn’t guilty of this particular thing, that didn’t mean he was blameless. After all, she was only here because of his Machiavellian little plan, wasn’t she?
“You’re probably right,” Theo said after a moment, in that relentlessly unsentimental way of his. She should have found it brutal. Instead, oddly, she found his honesty far more soothing than any platitudes might have been. “But the fact that Bradford is not much of a human being should hardly matter to you,” he continued. “Why should you care?”
“It doesn’t,” she said, though it did. “I don’t.”
But she had said too much, she realized, as a new silence fell between them, and Theo gestured imperiously for the check. She had said too much, revealed too much, and now she was in exactly the position she had resolved to avoid. He didn’t deserve to know a damned thing about her. He didn’t deserve anything save what he’d paid for.
So why, knowing that, had she opened herself up anyway?
Becca still hadn’t answered that question to her own satisfaction when they arrived back at Theo’s private Manhattan castle. They’d spent the ride back from the restaurant in silence; Theo stretched out in the limo’s expansive backseat tapping away on his BlackBerry while Becca pretended to gaze out the window at the frenetic crowds on the city streets. In truth, she was obsessively going over every detail of their lunch in her head. She couldn’t help but feel that everything had shifted between them, beneath her feet. That between last night’s series of revelations and today’s unbearable heat, the geography of their arrangement had remade itself. She just couldn’t seem to figure out the map. Or if she’d ceded too much ground without realizing it.
The car glided to a smooth stop at the curb, and Becca jolted in her seat when Theo laid his big, warm hand on her arm.
When she raised her gaze to his, there was amusement in those amber depths. And the same electricity she felt in a white-hot current just beneath her skin. Yet when he spoke, his voice was cool.
“The paparazzi are here,” he said. He inclined his head toward the sidewalk outside the car window, though his eyes never left hers. “Are you ready?”
“How can I possibly know if I’m ready?” she asked with perfect, baffled honesty, blinking. Could anyone be ready for that kind of intrusion? She looked out the thankfully tinted window, swallowing nervously when she saw the scrum of shady-looking men already jostling for position outside the car—already snapping pictures and shouting. One even slapped his hand against the car itself.
“They want a reaction,” Theo said, his voice even. Calm. She jerked her attention away from the chaos in the street and back to him. “The more emotional you are, the better. They will say anything to goad you into the reaction they want. Anything. Do you understand?”
He was so at ease. So unperturbed that there were jackals baying out his name, separated from them by only a flimsy bit of steel and tinted glass. Becca felt the panicked fluttering of her heart slow as she looked at him. He was so. solid. So sure. As if he could save them both, by the sheer force of his will. As if he were the anchor in rough seas, and she needed only to hold on to him.
He wants this particular storm, she reminded herself. He probably called these awful men himself!
But that knowledge didn’t change the fact that when he looked at her like that, as if he knew she was capable of whatever lay before her, she felt as strong as he believed her to be. As if she could do anything at all. Even run this gauntlet.
For him, a different, treacherous voice whispered, and she was so far gone she did not even shudder in horror. She only ignored it. And forced herself to smile.
“How bad can it be?” she asked lightly. She shook her ponytail back over her shoulder. “No matter what they say, they won’t be talking about me, will they?”
How many times had he watched Larissa navigate these baying hounds? How many times had he marveled—sometimes with more cynicism than admiration, it was true—at her seemingly innate ability to use this kind of attention to serve her purposes, to send the messages she wanted to send or cause the exact sort of commotion she wanted to cause? How many times had he dealt with them himself, and regretted only that dealing with them meant giving them some kind of legitimacy?
The Whitneys lived in an endless media glare. The great American celebrity fishbowl. Theo had never questioned that. He had only learned what he could about it, and used that knowledge to his advantage. Larissa had never had to learn it—she had been brought up in it. She had courted the attention she received, and, he’d eventually realized, used the narratives the press spun about her as shorthand for her own life, until it was sometimes uncertain where the press ended and Larissa began. He had known this, and still, he had merely watched his fiancée perform the intricate steps of this peculiar dance. He had never interfered, not even when they turned on her. Not even when they turned on him, too.
And yet this time, with this woman, he nearly lost his cool. This time he wanted to rend them apart, these squalid little men with their sordid insinuations. He wanted to break the arm of the man who dared shove against Becca as she moved past him, ducking against the driver’s burly frame and outstretched arm, her face concealed behind big, dark sunglasses.
Theo was used to them—hell, he expected them, and even on occasion utilized them, like today. And yet he wanted to have them all thrown in jail for trespassing, for assault, for something—because he could see how difficult an ordeal the short walk from the car was for Becca. How her breath caught in her throat in panicked little gasps, how her body swayed every time they shouted Larissa’s name. How she looked as if they were physically attacking her. But they were immune to any reprisals, these cockroaches, and Becca was stronger than she should have been. More warrior than woman, he thought. Quixote to the end. She simply kept walking. And the scum were forced to stop at the door to the apartment building, where the staff of doormen stood ready to do battle to keep them from the premises.
Theo found that he was holding on to his temper by the barest thread.
“I would have saved you from that if