Heiress Behind the Headlines by Caitlin Crews Page A

made her feel so alive, so exhilarated. So scared. So unsure of everything, even the familiar tools she’d always used to hide so easily in plain sight, that she found so hard to summon now, when she needed them the most.
It’s only the cold,
she thought.
    But then Jack smiled at her, that peremptory, knowing curve of his beautiful mouth, and she knew better.
    He wanted flippancy and fakeness, his preferred version of That Shallow Larissa Whitney, and so that was what she gave him, however much it cost her. She told herself she would deal with it later. She pulled in a deep breath and then breezed up the steps toward him, keeping her face as bland as it could be, pulling that persona around her like a familiar old cloak.
    “No staff?” she asked mildly, sweeping past him as if she was dripping in couture and trailed by a red carpet entourage instead of garbed in a pair of worn jeans and a turtleneck sweater, the better to wrap her traitorous body away from his beguiling, incendiary touch. Her boots came up to her knees and she was not in the least afraid to kickhim with them, she told herself. In fact, she wanted to kick him. “I’m shocked to the core. I thought scions of such great families preferred to be waited upon, lest they forget their own greatness for even a moment.”
    “You would know more about that than I would,” Jack said dryly. But his gaze locked to hers, and it made the world seem to tilt. Larissa looked away, shaken. It had never been so difficult to keep up her act before. Not even with him.
    He had exchanged the T-shirt for a sweater in a rich burgundy cashmere that her fingers itched to touch, though his jeans remained the same, slung low on his narrow hips and clinging to his hard thighs like a pliant lover. Yet somehow, surrounded by this house, this unmistakable marker of who he really was, there was no possibility of pretending there was anything
everyday
about him. Larissa swallowed, and wordlessly handed him her heavy black peacoat and charcoal-gray scarf when he gestured for them, draping them over his arm as if he was a butler. Some part of her preferred the fantasy version of this man that she’d seen earlier in battered old jeans and work boots, as if he was just another local fisherman. As if that—or anything—could make him more palatable.
    “I watched you sit out there in your car,” he said, some kind of mockery in his voice, and something else, something darker, making his eyes gleam. “You looked …” He didn’t finish the sentence. Larissa forced herself to smile, to be mysterious and unknowable. Empty, as he would expect. “Did you change your mind?”
    “About what?” she asked idly. “Dinner?”
    “That, too,” he said. He disposed of her coat and then indicated that she should follow him, leading the way down a hallway only intermittently lit. Larissa concentrated on the house itself—far better, far safer that than the man whomoved with such easy self-assurance in front of her, who strode ahead without glancing around, arrogantly expecting her to follow.
    Which, of course, she did. Though she could not bring herself to focus on that grave personal failing—not just then. She looked at the house instead.
    It was the particular conceit of a certain kind of New Englander, she knew, to treat their own vast wealth like some kind of embarrassing, potentially contagious disease. They kept their houses cold, the rugs threadbare. They drove depressingly practical cars into states of disrepair, found the slightest displays of wealth repulsive in the extreme, and went out of their way to avoid drawing attention to themselves in any capacity. The Puritan work ethic still ran like steel in their blue-blooded veins. Unlike many of Larissa’s socialite peers, their philanthropic gestures were never empty. The Endicott family—particularly Jack’s forbidding and formidable grandfather, she knew, as everyone knew—was precisely this sort of anti-aristocrat.
    But despite