Heiress Behind the Headlines

He pulled her close, his lips twisting slightly into something too hard to be a smile, and then he took her mouth in a searing, impossible kiss.

CHAPTER THREE

IT WAS worse than she’d remembered, when she’d allowed herself to remember him at all. It was better.

So much better.

Hotter, sleeker, rolling through her like a tornado, tearing her apart, making her shake as the wild passion claimed her. Her hands found his narrow hips, the taut, smooth muscles of his back, and despite herself, she clung. His skin was so warm, so firm, blazing through the tight shirt he wore, making her long to reach beneath it.

She felt him everywhere.

He kissed her again and again, as if he was as swept away in this fire, this madness, as she was. As if he never meant to stop. Her toes curled against the floorboards. Her eyes fell shut, her back arched, bringing her closer to his drugging heat. She ached everywhere he touched her, and ached even more where he did not. She melted. She burned.

She was in so much trouble.

She was not drunk this time, feeling daring and careless and out of control after a long night at a chaotic party. She was not numbed and halfway to dead inside. There was nothing to dull the exquisite force of him or her own helpless, needy reaction, and however dangerous she had believed him to be before, she knew now she had greatly underestimated his power over her.

She was such a fool.

And still she kissed him back, angling her mouth for a better fit, moving closer in his arms, pressing up against the hard wall of his chest. She couldn’t seem to help herself. It was as if he’d been created just for her, carefully constructed to make her lose her mind.

But she was not the same girl he’d once known, however peripherally—not the same person at all any longer, and it was that thought that finally penetrated the delirious fog in her brain. She knew what she was doing here, with him—what she was risking. But he was still playing old games, settling old scores. She knew it, no matter how good he tasted, how perfectly they fitted. She couldn’t let that matter.

She couldn’t lie to herself—hadn’t she made herself that vow?—and pretend that letting this happen would do anything but destroy her.

For good this time. She could feel the truth of that deep inside of her, like some kind of primal feminine knowledge she’d never accessed before.

She tore her mouth from his and backed up then, as she should have done from the start. Better late than never, she told herself. Another mantra that could apply to her whole life these days. It was cold comfort.

“Well,” she said lightly, easily, pretending she couldn’t feel him still, that her whole body did not ache, yearn, need. That her heart was not still thudding, hard and insistent, her blood racing wild and excited through her veins. “Apparently you handle things quite well. But I think I’ll have to decline.”

“Why?” The single word was almost a laugh, arrogant and sure, his gaze frankly incredulous as it seared into hers, invitation and temptation. And that impossible fire that always burned between them, that seductive blaze.

Why, indeed?

But she was not the old Larissa, the heedless Larissa who thought only of a moment’s pleasure—the better to avoid thinking about anything else. She could not play games with this man and skip away unscathed. And she was very much afraid that she had already damaged herself beyond repair.

So she shrugged, pulling the familiar mantle of Larissa Whitney, heartless, careless flirt around her like the armor it was. Her favorite disguise. Because she did not dare let this man see anything more, anything deeper. She did not dare show him anything he could destroy.

“Because you want it too much,” she said airily, turning away from him and drifting toward the fireplace as if she could dismiss him that easily. She closed her eyes for a tight, brief moment—for strength—and then glanced over her shoulder at him, and smiled. Saucily. As if she wanted nothing more than to tease him. “Where’s the fun in that?”

He shouldn’t have done that. He shouldn’t have touched her, much less kissed her. Jack could see the passion in her green eyes, making them luminous. He wanted to make them glaze over with heat. Her mouth was still swollen slightly from his, and he wanted to taste her again. She was narcotic. And still she played her damned games. Lies within lies, like the Russian dolls his mother had collected.

Why was he surprised? That was the real question, and one Jack knew he should investigate. But instead, he watched her.

“I didn’t realize I scared you so much,” he drawled, injecting a note of mockery into his tone, knowing it would get her back up, refusing to question why he wanted that reaction. Any reaction. “I thought nothing could.”

“Bats,” she said immediately, that charming lilt to her voice, the one that made her so impossible to dismiss. The one that made her seem like some latter-day Holly Golightly. “And scorpions.” She gave a mock shudder. “But you? I’m afraid not, Jack. I know that must come as a grave disappointment.”

“I know why you’re here.” It grated out of him, more angrily than it should have. “You can stop all your playacting and simply admit it.”

She glanced back at him again, still standing before the fire, damp and delectable from a bath he could imagine in all-too-graphic detail, her short dark hair slightly mussed and entirely too alluring. He could not seem to reconcile himself to the dissonance—to the fragility of her delicate bones, her waiflike figure, juxtaposed with that cold, heartless core of emptiness he knew was the hidden truth of her, holding her up like a spine. She was indestructible, for all she looked like the next gust of bitter wind against the rattling windows might blow her over.

And those eyes of hers should have been hard as stones, but reminded him instead of the sea. His beloved, unknowable Atlantic, forever complicated by the storms, the island’s rocky shoreline, the towering wall of pines. Shadows chased through her mysterious gaze, then disappeared, leaving him to wonder if he’d imagined them.

“Why don’t you tell me why I’m here?” she suggested, her voice low. She turned back to the fire, dismissal and disinterest stamped along every inch of her aristocratic back, the incline of her elegant neck. “Or we can just pretend that you already did. Don’t worry, I’ll be sure to add in the necessary insults in my memory of the conversation that never was. It will be just like the real thing.”

There was a certain dryness to her tone, a certain dark humor, that he couldn’t quite take in. It spoke to a kind of self-awareness he’d never believed she could be capable of achieving. He wished he could see her expression. If she had been another woman, he might even have entertained the possibility that he’d hurt her feelings. But this was Larissa. She didn’t have any. Not the way other people did. Not unless she could use them as leverage.

He let his gaze travel over her celebrated body, admiring her despite himself. How could he not? She was one of the great beauties of the age, or so the media claimed with predictable regularity. And he had tested the theory with his own hands. He knew all of those fine, patrician lines. The curve of her spine, the swell of her hips, the delectable round thrust of her bottom. He knew that soft place just below her hairline at the nape of her neck. He knew what would happen if he pressed his mouth to it, the little gasp she would make, the way her whole body would arch and then shudder.

He found the simple black pants she wore, the small, snug T-shirt, her feet bare against the floorboards, far more erotic and captivating than any of the many elaborate costumes he’d seen her in before. Almost as if she was not as out of place here as he believed her to be. But he was not likely to share that kind of thought, not with a woman like Larissa, and not when it was no doubt proof of his own abiding insanity. She would only use it against him somehow. Everything was a weapon. Everything and everyone had a use. He knew that better than anyone.

She was some kind of witch, though he knew others preferred a different word to describe her, and he had spent years trying to figure out why he’d fallen so hard beneath her spell. Why she had haunted him when so many other women had failed to make any impression at all. He had a thousand different theories, but he still didn’t have an answer. And it hardly mattered any longer.

“I feel suitably chastised,” she said, making him aware of his own brooding silence. She turned around then, her skin flushed from the fire, her eyes darker than they should have been. But her smile was the same as it ever was. That impertinent curve of her lips—as alluring as it was concealing. He should not have this insane urge to try to figure her out. He should not find her so damned fascinating, despite his best intentions.

“See?” Again, that saucy little quirk of her lips. “No need to have the conversation at all. Feel free to let yourself out.”

“The Whitney Media Board of Directors meets next month,” Jack said before he knew he meant to speak. He watched her wince slightly, then check it, and thought he’d landed a blow. He had the impression that she forced herself to resume her usual air of disinterested bonelessness—and felt something move in him in response. He called it cynicism. Weariness. After all, he’d just exposed her little game, hadn’t he?

“You really have become the most tedious man,” she said softly, a light in those captivating eyes he couldn’t read. “I can’t think of anything I would rather discuss less while in the middle of a storm on a lonely little island than Whitney Media.”

“I’ve heard rumors,” he said. He tracked her, his eyes narrowing, as she drifted over to the armchair near the fire and folded herself into it, drawing her knees up beneath her. “Everyone has.”

“Manhattan runs on rumors, I find,” she said in the same easy tone that he found disturbed him in ways he did not care to examine. “The city that never sleeps because it is far too busy whispering salacious tales into every willing ear, stirring up as much dirt as possible before dawn.” She shrugged as if it was no matter to her, the prurient interest of others. “The veracity of said dirt is never important, of course.”

“You need to appear at that meeting, don’t you?” he countered, because he didn’t need to listen to any stories about her—he’d lived them. “You were very smart to stay out of the papers these past months. But now you need to prove to your father and his disapproving cronies that you’ve become truly respectable, or they’ll declare you unfit and appoint a proxy to vote your shares of the company.”

He wasn’t saying anything any businessman wouldn’t know, simply from reading opinion pieces in the Wall Street Journal. And yet her emerald gaze seemed to simmer with something that might have been anger, had she been someone else. But then she smiled that Mona Lisa smile at him.

“You say that as if I have been in a pitched battle for control of the company since my eighteenth birthday, like some desperate heroine on a daytime soap opera,” she murmured. One delicate hand went to her neck, as if testing the shape of her collarbone beneath her fingers. In another woman, he would call it a nervous tic, a telling gesture. But this was Larissa. She had no tells, only traps. She met his gaze without apparent distress. “I hate to disabuse you of your melodramatic notions, but I’ve had a proxy vote for me for as long as I can remember.” She made a face. “I can’t really think of anything that would bore me more deeply than a board meeting. Particularly if that board had anything to do with a company I was tired of hearing about before I reached kindergarten.” Her perfectly arched brows rose. Her stormy gaze was cool. Deceptively so, he thought. “As you already know, I really don’t like to be bored.”

“Your father and your former fiancé handled your shares,” Jack said ruthlessly, ignoring her performance. Because what else could it be? What else could bring her here but her own self-interest? He didn’t know why she thought she could hide it—or why she bothered to try. “But your fiancé, who was always your champion, has disappeared and everyone knows you are no favorite of your father’s. This meeting may be your only chance to wrest control of your own inheritance for the foreseeable future.”

That was the squalid little truth, he thought, watching her face now that he’d slapped that down on the table, out in the open, between them. He thought a faint flush rose high on her cheekbones, but it could as easily have been the heat of the crackling fire.

He wanted her to admit it. To admit that this was why she’d turned up here, like his own personal ghost. That he was only the means to an end. He knew exactly what securing him—marrying him, even—would do for Larissa, what it would mean for her reputation and prospects. He should be more sympathetic to her plight. Weren’t his grandfather’s latest decrees about Jack’s duty to marry well, and soon, much the same kind of pressure? Wasn’t he taking this time on the island to come to terms with that inevitability? He really ought to relate.

But Larissa sighed, musical and put-upon all at once, and any sympathy he might have had vanished. They were nothing alike. Jack spent every moment of his day doing his duty, making himself the worthy successor to his family’s legacy. Larissa only wanted unrestricted access to her family’s money, the better to spend her life shopping it all away. He felt his jaw tense.

“I have other sources of income,” she said, waving a hand as if such sources grew thick in the trees. But then, in their world of endless privilege, stretching back across centuries, they often did. “It was Theo who was so obsessed with Whitney Media. He and my father and their high-stakes corporate games. I begin to nod off to sleep whenever the topic comes up. I’m getting remarkably drowsy now.”

Jack laughed then, despite himself, and moved across the room in a few sure steps. He leaned down toward her, bracing himself on the arms of the chair, bringing his face far too close to hers as he trapped her in her seat.

“Let me tell you what I think,” he said, satisfaction surging through him at the faint alarm that flashed across her face. At least it was an honest reaction. Any reaction.

“If you feel you must,” she drawled, but he could see the pulse beat against the tender flesh of her neck, and he knew she was not nearly as unmoved as she pretended. He leaned closer.