Heiress Behind the Headlines

“Can’t a girl take a little vacation?” she asked idly. Playfully. As if she felt either. But she knew better than to show him anything else.

“Not here.” His cool eyes narrowed slightly as he watched her, and she pretended she couldn’t feel her own reaction to him, unfolding inside of her. Wariness, she told herself—that’s all it was. But she knew better. “There’s nothing here for you. One general store. This inn. Less than fifty families. That’s it. There are only two ferries to the mainland a week—and that’s weather permitting.” His perfect mouth firmed into a grim line. “There’s absolutely no reason in the world someone like you should be here.”

“It’s the hospitality,” she said dryly, nodding at him as if he’d welcomed her with a song and open arms. “It’s addictive.”

She leaned back in her chair, not sure why her stomach knotted, why her limbs felt weak and traitorous. She’d known Jack all her life. They’d been raised in the same glittering, claustrophobic circles of New York City’s very, very wealthy. The same elite private schools, the same Ivy League expectations. The same attractive and well-maintained faces at all the same parties, in places like Aspen, the Hamptons, Miami and Martha’s Vineyard.

She remembered being a teenager and running into Jack, then in his resplendent twenties, at some desperately chic party one summer. She could still imagine him as he’d been then, golden and gleaming on a private beach in the Hamptons, seeming to outshine the very sun above him. He’d been loose-limbed and easygoing, with a killer smile and that devastating intellect beneath. Everyone she’d known had been desperately in love with him. When she thought of Jack Sutton, that was always how she remembered him. Bright. Inescapably beautiful. All summer in his smile.

But there was no sign of that young man here, now. And she had other memories she’d rather not excavate. The ones from that one weekend she preferred to block out. The ones that featured him a little bit older, and a whole lot more shattering than she cared to remember in any detail. The ones that made it clear that whatever else he was, he was distinctly dangerous to her, personally. All that heat. All that fire. And eyes like bittersweet, decadent chocolate that saw too much, too deep.

The truth was that this man had fascinated her and then terrified her. And all of that was before. Before. Before she’d had her own little resurrection, her own second chance. At what, she might not know. But she did know that the arrival of Jack Sutton was like throwing a bomb into the middle of it. He was uncontrollable. Impossible. And those were two of his better qualities.

She settled back in her chair, assuming the careless, languid sort of position that came to her so easily, like a second skin. The usual Larissa Whitney insouciance she could summon at will, automatically adjusting to his assumptions, to what he no doubt already saw when he looked at her. She was so good at living down to the world’s expectations. She sometimes wondered if it was her only true skill.

“Are you in disguise?” he continued, in that same lethally soft voice that made the fine hairs on the back of her neck rise. His cool brown gaze flicked over her, made her want to squirm. But she only lounged, making herself look like the very essence of boredom. “Or on the run? Do I even want to know what fantasy you’re playing at here?”

“Why are you so interested?” she asked, letting out a light sort of laugh. “Are you afraid it doesn’t include you?”

“Quite the opposite.” His tone was curt, his eyes hard. As if she’d done something to him, personally. She blinked, taken aback. She certainly could have, of course. She just thought she’d remember it. Jack Sutton wasn’t the sort of man anyone forgot. Repressed, yes. Forgot? Never.

“I heard Maine is lovely this time of year,” she said, forestalling whatever character assassination he might be about to unleash on her. She wasn’t certain she could survive it—not from him. It made her stomach ache just to look at him. “How could I resist?”

She nodded toward the window, inviting him to do the same. The sky had darkened, the clouds moving fast against the swollen pewter clouds. Rain beat at the glass, while below, the rocks withstood the angry assault of the waves. She felt like those rocks, battered and beleaguered, yet somehow still standing—with her own past the tragic, inescapable crash of the sea. Jack, she thought, was just the rain. A cold, depressing insult on top of a far greater injury.

“You’ve had a banner year already, haven’t you,” Jack said, in that way. That knowing way. “Or so I hear.”

It made her feel horribly exposed, naked and vulnerable—things she strove to avoid at all costs, especially around this man, after the last time—and the worst part was that she couldn’t even tell him the real story. She couldn’t defend herself. She had to accept the fiction—and worse, the fact that everyone so easily believed that the fiction was truth. Why did it hurt so much this time? It was no different than any other scandal, was it? It was only that this time around, the fiction wasn’t of her own making.

“Oh, yes,” Larissa agreed, hating him. Hating herself more. “A little tour of duty in rehab, a silly little broken engagement. Thanks so much for reminding me.” What could she say? That wasn’t me. I was in a coma, and there was a woman who masqueraded as me, who ended up with my fiancé … Hardly. Her life was enough of a soap opera without all the gory, patently unbelievable details.

After all, the entire world knew that Larissa Whitney, famous for being nothing more than a worthless party girl and a great embarrassment to her storied family, had collapsed outside of an elite Manhattan club one night some eight months ago. Thanks to the endless scrutiny of the tabloids—and the usual manipulations her media-savvy family was so well versed in—the world also knew what had happened next. Larissa had been packed away to a private rehabilitation center for a while, then paraded around Manhattan on the arm of her long-suffering fiancé, Theo, the CEO of her family’s company. Until Theo had left Larissa and—more shocking by far, given his well-documented ambitions—Whitney Media behind. Everyone blamed faithless, heartless Larissa. And why not? She’d gone out of her way to hurt Theo as publicly and as repeatedly as possible. For years. She was the obvious villain.

The fact that she had never been in rehab—and that she’d been hidden away for two months in a hospital bed in the family mansion, expected to die while her family engaged in their usual cruel machinations over her comatose body—well, that wasn’t nearly as interesting a story, was it? Not nearly as familiar, as expected.

But he wouldn’t believe her anyway. No one would. And she had no one to blame for that but herself, as usual.

“Haven’t you caused enough trouble?” Jack asked then, as if he’d read her mind. She believed that if anyone could, it was Jack, and the thought made that shiver roll through her again. He shook his head slightly, as if she wearied him unto his soul. “Do you think you’re going to drag me into one of your messes? You might want to think again, Larissa. I stopped playing your kind of games a long time ago.”

“If you say so,” she said, as if she was bored. As if she was not even now struggling to keep herself from jumping to her feet and bolting for the door. Anything to get away from that awful, judgmental look in his eyes—eyes that seemed to look deep into her and see nothing but her darkest secrets. Her shame.

God, she hated him.

But she’d rather die than show him that he’d hurt her. She certainly couldn’t tell him why she was really here, on a pine-studded scrap of land eight miles out from Bar Harbor, in the middle of the lashing wind with only the desolate sea in every direction. She couldn’t tell him she’d ended up on the ferry because she’d been trying so hard to disappear for months now, to really be as invisible as she felt—she wouldn’t even know how to say those things. Or to explain how she felt about this miraculous second chance she’d been given at a life she’d ruined so thoroughly, treated so carelessly, the first go-round. And certainly not to Jack, whom she still thought of as bright and shining and untouchable, no matter the dark, hard look he was training on her now. No matter the power and command he seemed to wear like a second skin.

She had promised herself that she would never lie to herself, not ever again, and she meant to keep that promise. But that didn’t mean she owed him the same courtesy. And there was so little of her left, so little of her she could even identify as her own, and she knew, somehow, that if she gave him even a tiny bit of that he could crush her forever. She just knew.

So she gave him what he wanted. What he already saw. She smiled at him, the mysterious, closemouthed smile she’d learned to give the press a long time ago—the smile that made men crazy, that exuded sex, that made everyone project all their fantasies and wishes and dreams onto her while she simply stood there and was empty. Nothing. Just a screen.

She was good at that, too.

She cocked her head to the side, and met his gaze as if his words had rolled right off her, as if they were nothing at all. As if this was nothing but a flirtation, some delicious kind of foreplay they were both engaging in. She let her brows rise, let her lips part suggestively. She made her voice low, sexy. The expected fantasy. She could produce it by rote, and no one ever suspected a thing.

“Tell me more, Jack,” she purred. “What kind of games do you like to play?”

CHAPTER TWO

SHE looked so fragile. Those delicate, perfect cheekbones that had announced her identity from across the room, even when he’d been unable to imagine what a creature like her, better used to lounging about in Manhattan’s most elite circles surrounded by sycophants and other fashionably bored and useless socialites, could possibly be doing in a place as remote as this island. Those mysterious, always-sad eyes of a haunted, storm-tossed green that hinted at depths she would never, could never, possess.

That was the great lie of Larissa Whitney, he thought with no little distaste—almost aimed more at himself for his susceptibility to that lie than at her for perpetuating it. Almost.

Because he could still feel that maddening electricity crackle through him, though he’d spent a long time denying it had ever existed. Yet it had jolted through him anyway, unmistakable and unwelcome, when he’d looked across the bar and seen her sitting there, looking … oddly bereft.

It roared back through him now, as she flirted with him, her lush lips parting slightly as she ran a deliberate finger along the lower one. Tempting him. Luring him. Making him think back to the sweet perfection of her legs wrapped tightly around his hips. The taste of that perfect, wicked mouth. But he was no longer the kind of man who bowed down to his appetites, especially when they were as self-destructive as this one. Especially when he knew exactly how little a woman like Larissa had to offer to a man in his position, a man who preferred to think about his reputation before his pleasure these days. And her reputation was about as black and dire as they came.

“Nice try,” he said dismissively, as if his body wasn’t hard and ready just looking at her. Not that he would let that matter. “But one taste of that was more than enough.”

He thought he saw something move through her green eyes then, but it was gone with a blink, and she only smiled at him. That dangerous, mysterious smile of hers, like a siren’s song, that tempted him to forget all he knew. That tempted him to simply lean forward, put his hands on her lush little body, yank her mouth to his, and taste her.

“Oh, Jack,” she murmured, her voice little more than a purr, the timbre of it seeming to pool in his groin, then light a path of fire across his skin. “That’s what they all say. At first.”

He wished she wasn’t so good at this. He wished he wasn’t so affected. He wished he could look at her and see what he knew to be the truth of her—instead of that elegant, vulnerable line of her neck, the exposed turn of her delicate jaw, that made him want to comfort her, however insane that urge was. He wished that the short, inky-black hair did not suit her so much more than it should have. It made her seem more serious, more substantial.

But he knew better. He knew what she was. What she’d done. Every dirty detail. He knew everything there was to know about her, and it didn’t matter how small or helpless she might appear on the surface. He knew that she was soulless beneath. Like all the rest of them in that world he’d left behind. Just like he had been, before he’d grown up.

Looking at her was like looking into a mirror he’d deliberately broken five years ago, and he disliked what he saw. He always would. And she’d been the one to hold that mirror up to him in the first place. How could he ever forget that?

“There will be a ferry leaving at dawn on Friday,” he said coldly, abruptly, his voice showing none of the roughness within. “I want you on it.”

She laughed. It was a silvery sound, magical. It made him wish for things that he knew better than to believe in, and he blamed her for that, too.

“Are you ordering me off this island?” she asked, looking delighted at the prospect. And not in the least bit intimidated by him, which, it hurt him to admit, he found more attractive than he should. “How dictatorial. I might swoon.”

Jack eyed her. This was his refuge. His escape. He hid here in the dark, grim winter months when none of the well-heeled tourists and summer residents were around—New England’s and Manhattan’s oldest money in their ancient family homes and compounds, cluttering up the island and hoarding all the summer sunshine for themselves as if it was their rightful due. He preferred it here now, in these forgotten months, when he didn’t have to be Jack Endicott Sutton, too-eligible heir to two magnificent American fortunes, and yet still the bane of his grandfather’s august existence. Here, he did not have to think about his duty. Here, he could breathe without worrying how each exhalation reflected on his suitability to manage the Endicott Foundation, his family’s prominent charitable foundation. Here, tucked away in the worst of the unforgiving Maine weather, shoulder to shoulder with lobstermen and fishermen who respected only the sea—and only sometimes at that—he was just Jack.

He couldn’t have Larissa Whitney polluting this place, playing God only knew what kind of games in the closest thing he had to a sanctuary. It was unthinkable. And he suspected he could guess what she was doing so far from her preferred glittering, high-end stomping grounds. Down east Maine in the off-season, subject to the treacherous weather and notably bereft of breathless page-six gossip, was no place for a spoiled, pampered, overly indulged party girl. There were no parties here. No press. No screaming, adoring masses on every corner, ready to copy her clothes and sell her secrets to the highest bidder. None of the things someone like Larissa considered basics for survival. He was afraid he could guess what had brought her here, and he didn’t like it at all.

“You haven’t bothered to ask what I’m doing here,” he pointed out, searching the smooth mask of her beautiful face, so adored by so many, for clues, but of course, there was nothing there. There never was. Nothing she didn’t want him to see. Nothing to see at all, he thought. He was annoyed that he even looked for anything more. “Is that your usual self-absorption, or did you expect to see me when you got here?”

“You tossed open the door like a modern-day Heathcliff,” she murmured, as if transported into rapturous daydreams by the very idea. He didn’t believe her for a moment. Like all of her peers, all saddled with names that dated back to the origin of the country, and to the lauded coal, steel and robber-baron fortunes that had built it, she could be a fantastic actress when it suited her. But could she be anything else? And why did he still want to know?

“It’s all very romantic,” she said when he only gazed at her. She shrugged. “I’d hate all the gritty little travel details—your itinerary, my schedule, so boring—to ruin such a delicious moment.”

“I think I know why you’re here,” he said, ignoring her flirtatious little performance. Her games might have worked on him once, he told himself, but they wouldn’t again. His voice lowered. “Did you really think this would work, Larissa? Have you forgotten that I know how you operate?”

She blinked, and he had the impression that for that moment, she truly had no idea what he meant. But then he reminded himself that this—precisely this—was what she was best at.

She leaned forward then, putting her hand high on his thigh and letting her body sway toward his and, no, Jack thought. He’d been wrong. This was what she was best at. This effortless seduction. With just a touch, using only her proximity. She was irresistible and she knew it. Lethal.