Heiress Behind the Headlines Read Free

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 familyengaged 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
    S HE 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