Free Heiress Behind the Headlines by Caitlin Crews

on or I will do it for you,” he said. “And that will not end the way you want it to end. I can promise you that.”
    She searched his face for a moment. Her mouth flattened into a serious line, and she blinked.
    “I can assure you that you have absolutely no idea what I want,” she said, but there was a darkness, suddenly, in those changeable eyes. She snatched the black sweater from him, taking care to keep from touching him, he noticed,and then pulled it back over her head with as little warning or fanfare as when she’d removed it.
    And then she was looking at him again, warily, that elegant face of hers more appealing, somehow, beneath her newly darkened, newly shortened hair—her cheekbones more pronounced, her mouth more lush. Her eyes more shadowed. He remembered all the things she’d said to him in her inn room earlier, everything he’d dismissed as just so much spinning of her latest tale of woe, designed to pull him in and suck him under. He reminded himself that she was like a riptide, and he had no intention of succumbing. But she looked small and weary, suddenly, swallowed up in that black turtleneck, and he found he could not bear that. He refused to wonder why.
    “What happened to you?” he asked quietly.
    He had not meant to ask her that. He’d had some complicated idea of revenge and humiliation tonight, hadn’t he? Some fantasy that he would show her how little her games worked on him now? He could hardly remember. The fire crackled behind them, and the room seemed smaller. Closer. She smiled, and though it was not that practiced siren’s smile, or not quite, it still did not reach her eyes.
    “You already know what happened to me,” she said softly, that weariness now in her eyes, the curve of her mouth. “The whole world knows what happened to me. It is recorded for posterity, and trotted out again every week or two to sell more papers. My pain makes excellent entertainment.”
    “Theo,” he guessed, and shoved aside the odd pang that he felt when he said the other man’s name. “You were with him for a long time.” Just about five years, in fact, if his math was as correct as he knew it was. He shoved that aside, too. “Losing him must have been very painful.”
    “Not in the way you think,” she said, and laughedslightly. It was a hollow sound, and she looked away. “He found someone who looked just like me but—crucially—was not me. Not surprisingly, she suits him much better. I don’t really blame him. I can’t say that I ever appreciated him at all.”
    He didn’t like the way she said that—and couldn’t understand why he cared. Why her eyes seemed too big while her mouth seemed too fragile. Or why she seemed small, suddenly. Breakable.
Already broken.
    “Perhaps he is the one who didn’t appreciate you,” Jack heard himself say—and he was not sure who was more surprised, Larissa or himself.
    Her smile was crooked, her green eyes sad again. One shoulder moved in a kind of shrug. “If that’s true, it’s nobody’s fault but mine.”
    The moment stretched out between them, and Jack found himself reaching out for her, tracing the line of her aristocratic cheekbone, the breathtaking curve of her perfect lips. Something he didn’t understand moved through him, confusing him. Heat, yes—all that riot of
need
and
want
—but something else beneath. And all the while she looked at him with eyes like the sea, as if she was only waiting for him to hurt her, too. He hated it.
    “I think I’m going to go,” she said after a long moment, her voice husky. She produced her Mona Lisa smile, so enigmatic, and Jack decided he hated the very sight of it, too. “Not everyone can say that they stripped for Jack Endicott Sutton in his private Maine retreat. I’ll have to add that to my list of most—”
    “Stay,” he said. He hadn’t known he meant to speak. She let her voice trail away, her eyes big and wary. How could she make him feel like the monster in this