The Replacement Wife

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.”

CHAPTER FOUR

“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.