“We’ll see, won’t we?”
And with that, Theo Markou Garcia was gone, leaving Becca feeling overwhelmed—and something else, something she refused to call bereft—in the middle of the vast, beautiful room.
“Come,” Muriel said, and led Becca off to her doom.
Blonde, she was even more of a threat, Theo thought with a mixture of temper and resignation.
And then wondered why he’d used that word, as feelings he did not care to identify coursed through him. Threat. How could she possibly be a threat? He was Theo Markou Garcia and she … she was whatever he made her. He stared at the girl as she sat before the mirror in the guest suite he’d allocated her. She was looking at herself with her cloudy-green eyes dark. She looked fragile and a little unnerved, as if she did not know what she’d gotten herself into.
But most of all, she looked like Larissa.
Françoise was a hairdressing genius—known for her discretion even without the giant sum Theo had paid her to ensure her silence—and had created a true masterpiece. The hair was a symphony of blondes, from a sun-kissed pale shade to the lightest honey, cascading around her like an effortless blonde wave and framing the face that was undeniably Larissa’s.
Larissa, but with fire and emotion in her eyes. Larissa, but so much more alive. So much more aware. Not anesthetized and dull-eyed.
She was like a ghost in reverse, this girl, with her raggedy clothes and her off-color eyes, eyes that should have been green and were instead that mossy, changeable hazel, like a version of Larissa that had never been. Her nose, perhaps, was more narrow. Her chin was a touch stronger, her lips fuller. But he had to search out the differences. He had to look hard to see them. If he didn’t know better, he would have assumed this was Larissa Whitney herself.
No one would look at this woman and think she was anything but the real thing. Because no one saw what they did not expect to see. Theo knew this better than anyone. He had fought against the markers of his humble beginnings most of his life, until he’d met Larissa and had used that very roughness to hide behind. She’d thought she was taking home the kind of man her parents would hate, yet one more of her rebellions. She’d had no idea how ambitious Theo was. Not at first.
“It is an extraordinary likeness,” he said, because he had stared too long, and he could see the nerves Becca struggled to hide. He even sympathized. He remembered how nervous he’d been when Larissa had first noticed him, when she’d chosen him—and how cold he’d gone inside when he finally understood that she wanted only to use him to infuriate and appall Bradford. Just as he remembered what it had taken to turn instead into Bradford’s favorite. She’d never forgiven him.
He could see himself in the mirror, hovering behind her like some great Gothic brute—but he shook himself. That was the way Larissa had made him feel. Like the hulking, ill-mannered swine before whom her pearls were unfairly cast. Yet this was not Larissa. This was only a facsimile of her, and this woman had no greater claim to gentility than he did. Less, perhaps, since this was Manhattan and money made its own friends, especially when it was coupled with so much power and the blue-blooded Whitney stamp of authenticity, heritage and rank.
But oh, how he wished this woman were the real thing. And that she was his.
“I never really noticed it before,” Becca said quietly, turning her head from side to side. He might have thought she was calm, had he not been able to see the way her knee bounced in agitation. A nervous tic he would have to work on, he thought. Larissa had never been nervous. She had redefined languid.
He hated that she lay so helpless, and he was reduced to the past tense. It seemed suddenly terribly unfair that this woman—this pretender—should be so vibrant, sparkle with so much energy, when Larissa could not and would not, ever again. That Becca could be free of all that had weighted Larissa down, ruined her. That she should be so much like Larissa had been so long ago, when he’d first seen her—or in any case, as he’d thought Larissa had been back then, before he’d known her.
“I find that difficult to believe,” he said, dismissively. He reminded himself to be patient, to tamp down the mess of his emotions as was his way; that this was a process, not a race. “Larissa is a world-renowned beauty. Therefore, with your bone structure and likeness to her, you are, too.”
Her gaze met his in the mirror’s reflection. Held. “As it happens, I am a whole, entire person in my own right.” Her brows rose, challenging him, as far from Larissa’s deflecting smiles and easy laughter as it was possible to get. And despite himself, he wanted her. He felt her in his sex, his blood. “I have a life that has never, and will never, have anything to do with my resemblance to Larissa Whitney. In fact,” she said, turning around on the vanity bench to face him, her eyes wild with temper, “I’ll let you in on a little secret. In most places, Larissa Whitney is the punch line to a joke.”
“I suggest you do not tell that joke here,” Theo said, mildly enough, but he saw the color bloom in her cheeks. It seemed to echo in him, seemed to pound through him like need, like want—because Larissa had never responded to him. She had tolerated him, waved him away, pretended to be polite if there were witnesses nearby—but she’d never reacted to him. Not as a woman should respond to a man. Not like this.
But he could not let himself think of that truth.
He should not want this ghost. It was the worst betrayal, surely. Hadn’t he vowed to Larissa that he would never treat her that way, no matter what she did? No matter how she treated him in return? What kind of man was he to ignore that now? He should only want Becca for what her face could bring him, what he deserved after all these years of Larissa’s games and broken promises. But his body was not paying attention to him. At all.
“There’s no going back now, is there?” Becca asked. Or perhaps it was not really a question. “You’ve made me into her. Congratulations.”
Theo smiled slightly. “I’ve had your hair done like hers,” he corrected her. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There is the matter of your wardrobe—and, of course, your entire personal history.”
“It hurts me to say this,” she said, temper crackling in her voice, “but I am, genetically, just as much of a Whitney as she is. I simply wasn’t waited on hand and foot my entire life.”
“But she was,” he said brusquely, as much to curtail the decidedly carnal turn of his thoughts as to reprimand her. “And therein lies one of the major differences we must smooth over if you are to pass as her. Larissa went to Spence and Choate, and then Brown. She spent her summers sailing in Newport, when she wasn’t traveling the world. You did none of these things.” He shrugged. “This is not a value judgment, you understand—this is a statement of fact.”
“It’s true,” Becca said. Her knee began jumping again, and as if she could not bear to let him see it, she moved to her feet, tossing her gleaming blonde hair back from her face in a move that was so much like Larissa’s that it made Theo suck in a sharp breath, past and present colliding too suddenly, and not pleasantly. But the arch of her brows, the tilt of her head—so challenging, so fierce—that was all Becca.
“My mother died three days after my eighteenth birthday,” she said with no trace at all of emotion, just that blaze of green in her eyes and that scathing heat beneath her words. “My sister and I think of that as lucky—because if I hadn’t been eighteen, they would have taken her from me. I had to scrape and save and figure out a way to take care of myself and Emily, because no one else was going to. Certainly not Larissa or her family, who could have saved us a thousand times over, but chose not to, even though they were notified. Maybe they were too busy sailing in Newport.”
Her words hung in the air, condemnation and curse, and Theo wanted things he couldn’t have.