She stood in yet another interchangeably elegant room of this offensively spacious palace, holding a glass of perfectly chilled wine from some unspeakably expensive vintage in one hand, and holding on to her temper with everything else she possessed.
“Well,” her aunt Helen said with a sniff, breaking the long and far-from-comfortable silence that had lasted since the moment Becca had been ushered into the room. “The likeness is truly astonishing. There’s no debating that.”
There was no one else in the large, faintly chilly room. Theo and Bradford, Becca imagined grimly, were closeted off somewhere, no doubt comparing their bank balances and ruining lives. That left only the censorious Helen to serve as the welcoming committee. She sat on one of the fussy, stiff and uninviting-looking chairs near the cold stone fireplace, the face that so greatly resembled her mother’s—had Caroline been as coddled and as bitter as this woman—screwed into a disapproving frown.
“One couldn’t really imagine how it was possible,” Helen continued, her voice the precise cadence and pitch to suggest that she was being scrupulously courteous, when in fact, she was not. “After all, when you appeared here last you were in such a wild, unmanageable state.”
“I think by that you mean I looked poor,” Becca said smoothly, smiling hard enough to draw blood. Her fingers tightened around the stem of her wineglass, so tight she thought she might snap the glass in two. She loosened her grip. Slightly. “Which I understand, to you, is anyone not in possession of their own private jet and selection of secondary residences. The rest of us simply call that normal.”
The older woman stared at her, affront written all over her face. She was like all the other women of her particular station, all the other upper-class East Coast women with their lustrous pedigrees and their Seven Sisters degrees, their carefully selected yet never ostentatious jewelry, and their quiet, pervasive aura of superiority. Her clothes were all understated elegance, her hair carefully bobbed and smooth on either side of her narrow, moderately attractive face. Yet her natural expression, Becca had no doubt, was this very glare she was delivering now, from down the length of her patrician nose.
“A pity Theo couldn’t have improved your manners,” Helen said. Her smile was razor sharp, and utterly fake. “Although perhaps this is as much as someone like you was capable of improving.”
Becca felt frozen and furious all at once—a terrible combination. She forced herself to move with all of Larissa’s boneless nonchalance toward the only piece of furniture that did not look as if it would like to judge its occupant—a splendid couch, all bright reds and whites. She sank into it, and schooled her features into blandness when she met Helen’s gaze once more.
“It can be so difficult to train up the peasants,” she said, pretending to commiserate, her voice heavy with irony. “They find it so hard to project the kind of snobbery that comes so naturally to their betters.”
“Whatever her faults,” Helen said then, raising her brows, and looking as if it was a heroic act to ignore Becca’s last words, “Larissa was at least capable of conducting herself like a Whitney when it mattered.”
Becca shook her head. “I know this must wound you as deeply as it does me,” she said, almost as if she pitied this woman. “But I am, in fact, a Whitney. That you turned your back on your only sister, the better to hoard your treasures in this morgue you call a house, only makes you sad. It doesn’t make me any less your niece.”
She expected Helen to gasp, clutch at her ubiquitous pearls, perhaps even swoon. But the other woman was no longer the fluttering, gasping creature Becca recalled from their first meeting in this house. Helen surprised her. She actually smiled slightly, with a hint of something like nostalgia, which made her whole face change. Unexpectedly, it made her look … more like Becca’s mother than Becca would have thought possible. She had to swallow hard against the rush of emotion that threatened to swamp her.
“You look nothing like your mother,” Helen said after a long, strange little moment, maybe two. “She took after our father’s side, like the rest of us. But you sound just like her.” She blinked. “It’s extraordinary.”
This time, the quiet that took over was less tense, if no less fraught with the weight of the past. Becca dropped her gaze to her wine, peering at the golden liquid as if it could solve all of her problems, banish all her ghosts. This was, she thought, perhaps as close as she was likely to come to the happy family reunion she’d imagined so feverishly—and secretly—when she was a girl. There would be no clutching of the lost child to her aunt’s breast, clearly—but it was something. Something more than had been there before.
It shouldn’t have comforted her. It shouldn’t have felt like balm to an old wound.
“You truly do look remarkably like Larissa,” Helen said after a moment. She shifted in her chair. “Theo did a wonderful job, as he always does.”
“He’s a talented man,” Becca said dryly, and then regretted it when her aunt’s gaze caught hers. There was a certain recognition there—a certain knowledge—that set off alarms all over her body.
“Theo is the most driven, most ruthless man I know,”
Helen said. Purposefully. Deliberately. “He allows nothing to distract him from his goal. Nothing.”
Becca felt horribly exposed—as caught out as she’d been in the glare of all those paparazzi flashbulbs. How could Helen know what had transpired between them? Was it imprinted on her face somehow? But she knew it couldn’t be. She had worked too hard over the past weeks to make sure her face showed only what she wanted it to. In this case, the ghost of a girl who never got upset about anything, not where anyone could see.
“That sounds like an excellent quality to have in the family company’s CEO,” Becca said briskly. “Congratulations.”
“Nor is he the kind of man to settle for substitutions,” her aunt continued, in that same arch, superficially polite tone with the bite beneath. Any tenderness that might have connected them, however briefly, was gone as surely as if Becca had imagined it. Perhaps she had. “You’ve seen how he lives. Theo demands, and receives, the very best. Nothing else will do.”
Becca couldn’t help the little laugh that came out of her then. Was it amazement? Or just a kind of horror that this woman was articulating all the fears she had refused to put into words herself?
“I’m sorry,” she said. She made herself look Helen in the eye, made herself sit there calmly, her face blank. “Are you warning me about something? Is that what this is?”
“You’re out of your depth,” Helen said in a voice that was arguably meant to be kind, but sounded like nothing more than the worst kind of condescension to Becca’s ears. Helen shrugged delicately. “That’s not a judgment, merely a statement of fact. It would be easy to misunderstand things, I’d think. Easy to misinterpret.” She took a sip of her wine, her narrowed gaze much too shrewd. “Far too easy to forget oneself.”
Becca could have pretended she didn’t understand. But even if Helen didn’t know the particulars, it was the casual assumptions that made Becca’s blood heat, her temper rise. Because of course the poor relative, caught up in these high-stakes games, so wide-eyed and naive, would fall for a man like Theo and fail to see that he was using her as a substitute. Of course Helen thought she was that stupid. Helen thought anyone who did not come from her world was that stupid, by definition.
The fact that she was right was not something Becca intended to confront. Not now. Not while Helen looked on.
“You’re operating under the assumption that I want what you have,” Becca bit out. “What Larissa had. I don’t.” She laughed again, though it was slightly more wild this time, slightly more bitter. “I want nothing to do with this fake, glittering, poisonous little world of yours, I assure you.”
“If you say so,” Helen said, gliding to her feet, poised and cool. Her gaze was pitying. “But that does not change the