LITMIR.BIZ

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her worst opinion of them now?

      “You’ve made your point,” she said finally, when she could not bear the way he looked at her a moment longer—as if he knew exactly what she thought, what she felt. As if he’d manipulated this entire situation to reach this point, because it suited him. He was the most terrifying man she’d ever met—because he was so powerful, but even more because part of her thrilled to it, and wanted to melt right there in front of him. Wanted to surrender to the whispers in her own head, and pretend he might keep her safe rather than crush her.

      But she would never let that happen. Accepting a situation and using it to further her own ends was not the same thing as surrendering. She wouldn’t let it be.

      “I want Emily’s entire education assured,” she said, her voice clipped and tense to her own ears. “Freshman year through a postdoctoral degree, should she want one.”

      “You’ll get your mother’s entire inheritance,” Theo said at once, almost offhandedly. As if he spoke of a minor allowance rather than a stunning fortune. His amber gaze seemed to bore into her, into her darkest, most secret places, taking her breath. “Everything that was taken from her, plus interest, from the day she left to give birth to you.”

      Becca refused to let him see how that got to her, how the guilt still ate at her no matter how she told herself she should not feel it, that Caroline had made her own choices, and so she fought to keep her face, her voice, impassive.

      “In writing, of course,” she clarified. “You’ll understand if I don’t trust you. Anything connected to the Whitney family is tainted.”

      “My lawyers are standing by,” he replied in that deceptively easy way of his, as if this were not her soul they were discussing. “All you need to do is sign.”

      She had the sense that she had gotten lost, somehow, without seeming to stray from the path. That she was in a dark woods, and there was no hope of sunlight. He watched her, his dark face and glowing eyes like some kind of beacon, beckoning to her, and she had the sudden panicked thought that if she did this, if she crossed this line, if she spent even one more second in this man’s company, she might as well write herself off entirely.

      Because he would change her. Not just because he wanted her to pretend to be his comatose fiancée, which was morally questionable enough. But because he was … too much. Too dark. Too powerful. Too outside anything she’d ever experienced. How could she possibly handle this man? She couldn’t even handle this conversation!

      But she thought again of Emily, and knew she had no choice. She had the means to set her sister free. She would do it. She had held her mother’s hand in that hospital bed, looked into her eyes, and she had promised.

      “All right,” she said, and though her voice didn’t quite echo, it seemed to reverberate somehow, as if the world was changing all around her as she spoke. Or perhaps that was just the way his eyes gleamed, with heat and triumph, as he looked at her. As he won. “What do you want me to do?”

       CHAPTER THREE

      “I TRUST YOU were discreet,” Theo said in his intent, focused way, lounging with an indolence she could not quite believe in the back of the car that had met Becca’s flight. “As you agreed to be in the papers you signed.”

      He had given her twenty-four hours to get her affairs in order.

      Twenty-four hours to make sure Emily could stay with her best friend’s family while Becca “went away on business,” which Emily had done many times before while Becca worked on a trial—and this was certainly a kind of trial, wasn’t it? Twenty-four hours to explain to her employers that she needed the time off she’d saved up over the years—and that she needed it immediately, for “family reasons,” and no, she didn’t know when she’d be back.

      She didn’t like to lie, but what could she tell her younger sister? Or the boss who had helped her out time and again while she’d struggled to raise Emily in the years after her mother’s death? How could she explain what she was doing when she hardly understood it herself? Twenty-four hours to pack a single, small bag and wonder why she bothered—especially when Theo had smirked and told her not to worry about a wardrobe, that it would be provided. His unsaid because yours is embarrassing to people like us seemed to singe her ears, making her flush with anger every time she thought of it. Of him.

      Which she did with depressing, alarming regularity.

      Twenty-four hours and then she was back in New York. This time, to stay. To become her cousin, a woman she had always comfortably disdained from afar.

      Twenty-four hours, Becca discovered, was not very much time at all to prepare for your whole world to change.

      “No,” she said now, pretending to be calm. Pretending that she had been inside a flashy limousine a million times before, and was thus unmoved by the casual opulence evident in the plush seats, the glossy wood-paneling, the crystal decanters. “I took out several ads in the Boston Globe and appeared on CNN to discuss our little deal.”

      “Very amusing,” Theo said, in a tone that suggested he found her anything but. And yet that gleam in his amber gaze made her think he understood her, somehow. Wishful thinking, she told herself sharply. “I’m sure that kind of sarcasm serves you well in your chosen career.” Could he sound any more dismissive? Any more snide? As if paralegal was a synonym for prostitute?

      Although perhaps she was in no position to cast stones, since she was sitting here for money, wasn’t she?

      “I’m usually praised more for my work ethic than my wit,” Becca replied, clenching her hands together in her lap and forcing a tight smile. “Did you become the CEO of Whitney Media by telling silly jokes? I thought that kind of power had more to do with destroying lives and worshipping the almighty dollar above all things, including your own soul.”

      “Oh,” he said softly, “I sold my soul. Have no doubt about that. But it was too long ago to matter now.”

      “I think you’ll find that soullessness suits only those in your position,” Becca replied as if the flash in his gaze affected her not at all, as if she did not fight off a shiver. “The rest of us are preoccupied with, among other things, being human.”

      They had wanted to send the private jet; Becca had insisted on flying coach on a commercial flight. It was, she’d thought, the last chance she’d have to do something normal for some time. And it was probably her last little rebellion, too.

      But the flight had allowed her the time to think about what she was about to do, and something had solidified inside of her as the plane winged south along the eastern seaboard. She would step into this world, she told herself, the world of the Whitneys, to secure her sister’s future and to keep her promise to her mother. But it would be more than that. She would prove, once and for all, that they were all better off for being discarded and ignored. She would never again torture herself with questions about what her life might have been like had her mother stayed in New York, or whether Caroline’s great sacrifice had been in vain. She would never have to wonder again.

      It would be worth almost any indignity to walk back out of the Whitney’s glittering, poisonous world with that knowledge secure inside of her. She could almost feel the satisfaction of it, in advance. She’d felt a sense of anticipation as she’d exited the plane, closer and closer to her fate with every step.

      And still something in her had thrilled to the sight of a black-clad driver holding a sign with her name on it in the Baggage Claim. Some part of her had been more impressed than it should have been when the driver had taken her bag and escorted her to the waiting vehicle, gleaming black and expensive at the curb, in clear and arrogant violation of the strict No Parking regulations.

      She had not expected Theo to be inside, sprawled out across the backseat, dressed in a dark-colored suit, which only called attention to the lean power of his big body. He was still far too

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