“They probably didn’t care,” Theo said coldly, brutally, as much to snap himself back to reality as to slap her down.
He watched her pale, and sway very slightly on her feet—and for a moment he hated himself, because if anyone could understand the contours and complexity of her bitterness, it was him. And he did. But there were bigger things at play here. He could not lose sight of his goals. He never had, not since his desperate boyhood in the worst Miami neighborhoods. Not even when it might have saved his relationship with Larissa. Once he got those shares, he would be an owner. He would be one of them. He would be more than the hired help. Finally. He would do anything—had done anything—to make that a reality.
“Just as I do not care,” he continued in the same way, though he did not care for how it made him feel. “This is not a forum for your grievances against the Whitney family. This is not a therapy session.”
“You are a pig.” She spat out the words and in that sentiment, he thought with some trace of black humor, she was exactly like Larissa.
“I don’t care what you think of your cousin’s privileges, or her pampered existence, or her family,” he said, forcing himself to continue in that same heavy-handed way, making sure there was no doubt about how things stood. Start as you mean to go on, he told himself—and he could not let this woman get to him, manipulate him. Make him care. Just like Larissa had done, and look how that had ended up. “I’m sure their wealth and carelessness offends you. It doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is turning you into her, and I can’t do that if you waste our time telling me how much more meaningful your life is than hers, and how much harder you’ve struggled. I don’t care. Do you understand?”
“Perfectly.” Her voice was clipped. Her face was pale, though a hectic color shone in her dark hazel eyes. Hatred, he thought. It was nothing new.
What was new was that he wanted so much to change it.
“Wonderful,” he said. He let himself smile slightly, as if she did not get to him already, no matter what rules he’d tried to institute. As if he did not have the highly unusual urge to apologize to her, to make it better—or to make her understand. As if he really was the dark, forbidding monster he had no doubt at all she believed him to be. Hadn’t he gone to great lengths to make it so? “Let’s get started.”
“YOU MUST LOVE HER very much,” Becca said at breakfast a week later, without knowing she meant to speak. But it was done, and her words hung there, seeming to fill up the space between them out on the terrace, rebounding back from the skyscrapers that towered all around them. But her words had as little effect on Theo Markou Garcia as the blazing heat lamps that kept off the March chill, as this man acknowledged no weather that did not suit him. She stabbed her grapefruit with the strange, serrated-edged spoon that had been provided for that singular purpose and continued grimly on. “If you are willing to go to such lengths to recreate her. Like Frankenstein’s bride.”
“Am I patching you together from bits and pieces? A carcass here, a limb or two there?” Theo asked without looking up from the sleek laptop computer he carried everywhere with him, and which Becca suspected was his real, true love. “I think my final product, at the very least, will be a bit smoother and more attractive in appearance than Frankenstein’s.”
There it was again—that hint that somewhere beneath his dark, impenetrable male beauty lurked a man with a sense of humor. Becca sometimes thought she was more likely to wake up one morning and believe herself to be Larissa Whitney in the flesh than Theo was to actually … be funny. Crack a real smile. Relax. Despite the evidence now and again to the contrary.
But then again, she told herself, not for the first time, the man was undoubtedly grieving in some distinctly wealthy male way that was lost on her. He obviously had strong feelings about Larissa. At the very least, he’d studied her so completely that, as he’d demonstrated over the past seven days, he could dissect the ways Becca was not her in excruciating detail.
“Slouch more,” he said now, barely sparing her a glance as he kept tapping away at his keyboard, no doubt buying and selling whole countries at a keystroke. “Larissa did not sit so straight in her chair, like an overly enthusiastic high school student. She was jaded. Bored. She reclined, and waited to be served.”
Becca curved her spine back into the wrought iron chair, and lounged like a dissolute pasha. Like him.
“She sounds delightful,” she said dryly. “As ever.”
It had been a long week.
Becca was not an actor and had never tried to be one, so perhaps this was simply a part of the actor’s job that she had never considered before—but she had been taken aback to discover that Theo wanted her to research every aspect of Larissa’s life as if she could expect to be quizzed upon it at any moment, from any quarter.
“I don’t remember who I was friends with in the sixth grade,” she’d protested, while sitting before the stacks of notes and photographs, papers and yearbooks that Theo had compiled for her review—all of it spread across the polished mahogany table in the book-studded library, almost covering it completely. She’d looked over at Theo, who sat with that merciless expression on his hard face in one of the deep leather chairs near the stone fireplace, playing idly with the globe in a brass stand next to him, his big frame deceptively relaxed-looking.
“I suspect that you would,” he’d replied, entirely unperturbed, “if those friends included Rockefellers, movie stars and minor European royalty.”
And what argument was there to that? Becca had gritted her teeth, and started to read what he’d put in front of her—uncovering the facts of Larissa Whitney’s life, page by page. She’d tried not to notice that said facts seemed like little more than a dream of the high life to someone like Becca. European tours, stints in Hawaii and exclusive ranches near the Rocky Mountains. The Maldives for Easter, the Hamptons for weekend parties. New Year’s parties in old Cape Cod mansions and more low-key vacations at the family beachside estate in Newport. Horseback riding, ballroom dancing classes, French and Italian lessons at the hands of private tutors; name the luxury, and Larissa had been handed it on the proverbial silver platter. Over and over again.
The more Becca read about the way Larissa, only a year or so older than she was, had been raised, the harder it was to soldier on. But she did.
The days had fallen into a certain routine. Up early for breakfast with Theo, and his latest round of casual personal insults couched as constructive advice on bettering her Larissa impression. Then an hour in the private, state-of-the-art gym—located near Theo’s office on the first floor of the penthouse—with the most sadistic personal trainer imaginable: Theo himself.
“I am already in perfectly fine shape,” she’d gritted out at him, when he’d decreed she should lift a heavier set of weights before running another set of intervals on his treadmill. Becca had come to loathe that treadmill.
“No one is debating that,” he’d said. The way his gaze had flicked over her then seemed to leave scorch marks, making her wish she’d had on a head-to-toe cloak instead of a skimpy tank top over running shorts—even as the body he seemed to view so dispassionately had reacted to him against her will. Her core had softened, her skin had begun tingling. “But we are not talking about the reality before us here, we are talking about the accepted aesthetic in the circles Larissa ran in.”
“You mean the kinds of circles that don’t eat food of any kind and have wildly expensive recreational drug hobbies?” she’d thrown back at him.
“Larissa used to model in her spare time, Rebecca,” he’d