The Platinum Collection: Surrender To The Devil: The Replacement Wife / Heiress Behind the Headlines / A Devil in Disguise

“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 facts of things, does it?”

CHAPTER TEN (#ulink_3569b17e-9a89-5090-a5d8-ee0a1d32543d)

IT WAS TIME.

Theo sat at the long, formal dining room table and found himself brooding as he watched his perfect creation, his Becca, shine. She embodied Larissa, just as he’d taught her to do. He thought she was more than Larissa—she had more life in her, more sparkle, than her cousin had ever had. But no one would see her and think anything was amiss; they were far more likely, he reflected, to assume that rehabilitation had finally worked its magic on poor, lost Larissa.

Which meant that he had succeeded. He should have been jubilant. This mad plan that should never have worked seemed set to succeed beyond his wildest dreams. He had created his own little ghost, and now it was time to let her do what she’d been made to do. Haunt. Confuse. And win him back the shares that had been meant to be his in the first place.

It was too bad that he felt as if he was the one already haunted.

“I hope you read your contract carefully,” Bradford was saying to Becca, his attention on his elegant plate and the perfect duck that graced it. Other than a sweeping head-to-toe glance when she’d walked into the room, Theo didn’t think Bradford had looked at her directly.

“No, I prefer to sign intimidating-looking documents without so much as glancing at them,” Becca said mildly, lounging against the back of her chair, her narrowed gaze on Bradford. Her duck lay before her, untouched. “I find it’s so much more fun to be disappointed and taken by surprise down the road.”

Theo should not have found her as entertaining as he did.

Bradford sniffed. “You’re making a good show in the tabloids,” he said, in quelling tones. “But your flippant attitude hardly does you credit.”

“Funny,” Becca said with apparent unconcern, though Theo saw the tension she fought to hide, “but I did read the contract. I especially read all the parts that outlined what I had to do, and what I would receive in return for that.” Her brows rose in that challenging way that sent heat spiraling through Theo, even here, even now. “But at no point did it mention that I had to impress you with my attitude.”

Bradford very carefully placed his silverware against his plate, and meticulously touched his linen napkin to his lips. The room fell hushed—the only sound was Helen, drinking deep from her wineglass. Becca, of course, his Quixote, only gazed at Bradford expectantly. Finally, Bradford leveled his cold glare across the table at his niece, who must have seemed to him like his own daughter, brought back from the brink.

Or did Theo ascribe to the man qualities and feelings he did not possess? Theo studied his face, but was not surprised to see no hint at all of anything resembling emotion. Bradford was cold and calculating. He had been that way as long as Theo had known him—interested only in expanding his profit margin, his power base, his investment portfolio. He had hardly paid his wife attention when she had still lived with him, and he had never so much as mentioned her name since she’d taken herself off to France. He had never, as far as Theo knew, given his daughter, his only child, the slightest hint of anything approaching fatherly affection. Theo doubted he was capable of such a thing.

And if he was any kind of man, Theo knew, he would stop this scene before it played out. Because he did not have to be a mind reader to know that Bradford would be cruel to Becca. He knew it was inevitable. But he also knew that any sign of protection on his part would only make Bradford worse. And the manipulative part of him—which was, perhaps, a far larger part of him than he was comfortable admitting these days—knew that in order to truly act like Larissa, Becca really ought to live through one of the defining experiences of Larissa’s life: dealing with her father.

He also knew that Becca was stronger than Larissa had ever been. Tougher. More fierce. Half Quixote, half warrior. She could handle herself.

So he said nothing at all. And hated himself all the more.

“Blood will tell,” Bradford said. His lip curled as he looked at Becca. “And there can be no doubt that yours is certainly a stain upon the Whitney name.”

Theo wanted to wring his neck. But instead, he did nothing. This was her battle, however little she might have wished to fight it. He merely sat and watched.

“My blood is Whitney blood,” Becca replied, with that underlying sting in her voice. She smiled. “Or do you lack a basic understanding of genetics?”

“You are the bastard child of my sister, the whore,” Bradford said, in his calm, polite, vicious way.

Theo saw Becca stiffen, saw the faint color that appeared on her cheeks, but she made no other outward sign that those nasty words had hurt her. Just as he knew he gave no hint that he wanted to put his fist through Bradford’s pompous face for speaking to her that way. What a great hero he was, he taunted himself with a wealth of derision. What a man he’d become. And was he any different from Bradford, in the end? Did they not want the same things? It made him sick to consider it in those terms.

“And I want to make sure that you don’t have any ideas above your station.” Bradford’s voice droned on, patronizing and dismissive all at once. “The contracts are ironclad. You will receive your money, and then you will disappear. You will never return. You will never ask for more. You cannot approach the media to sell your story years down the line, when you are desperate yet again.” He looked almost kindly as he looked at her. Almost the way an uncle should. “You will sink back into the hole you crawled out of, and stay there.”

Helen eyed Theo across the table, her gaze uncomfortably shrewd.

“Surely you don’t plan to sit idly by while Bradford eviscerates your … protégé,” she said in her insinuating way, the perfect arches of her plucked brows high on her elegant forehead.

Theo didn’t much care for the way she looked at him then, nor for the malicious gleam in her eyes.

“Becca can take care of herself,” he murmured, as if bored, and did not permit himself to look at Becca directly, no matter how much he wanted to.

And Becca, being Becca, did not cower. She did not cry, as Larissa might have, nor scream out her frustrations. Just as he knew she would not. Instead, she reached out and tapped a finger against the stem of her wineglass, looking as unruffled as if she’d just had a spa treatment. Theo had seen hardened businessmen quail before Bradford’s brand of cruelty, before his deliberate and pointed disinterest, but not this woman.

Not his Becca.

“Am I missing something?” she asked after a moment. Her voice was calm. Relaxed, even. Quite as if she was, too—though Theo knew her now, and knew better. “Is there some reason that you think I would want to come rushing back to this horrible place? To you?” She laughed slightly. “To the bosom of my family, such as it is? You’ll understand, I think, that I would rather be fed alive to a pit of snakes.”

“That is easy to say now, and harder to remember when your filthy, depressing little life becomes too much to bear,” Bradford replied, his voice smooth. And so certain that he knew how Becca would behave once she left here—so certain that she would come back, hands outstretched. Theo rather thought she would sooner cut them off than give Bradford the satisfaction.

“You speak from what position of authority, exactly?” Becca asked. “Your fevered fantasies about what the lives of those you look down on must be like? Because it certainly can’t be experience.”

How had he lived so long without her? Theo wondered. And how on earth could he do so again, knowing, now, that she existed?

“The Whitney name has always attracted a bad element,” Bradford replied. He indicated Becca with a flick of a finger. “Your father, for example.”

Becca did not so much as flinch. Theo winced for her, while she only smirked at Bradford and looked something akin to amused.