Heiress Behind the Headlines Read Online Free PDF

mind.
    But she was not the same girl he’d once known, however peripherally—not the same person at all any longer, and it was that thought that finally penetrated the delirious fog in her brain. She knew what she was doing here, with him—what she was risking. But he was still playing old games, settling old scores. She knew it, no matter how good he tasted, how perfectly they fitted. She couldn’t let that matter.
    She couldn’t lie to herself—hadn’t she made herself that vow?—and pretend that letting this happen would do anything but destroy her.
    For good this time. She could feel the truth of that deep inside of her, like some kind of primal feminine knowledge she’d never accessed before.
    She tore her mouth from his and backed up then, as she should have done from the start.
Better late than never,
she told herself. Another mantra that could apply to her whole life these days. It was cold comfort.
    “Well,” she said lightly, easily, pretending she couldn’t feel him still, that her whole body did not ache, yearn,
need.
That her heart was not still thudding, hard and insistent, her blood racing wild and excited through her veins. “Apparently you handle things quite well. But I think I’ll have to decline.”
    “Why?” The single word was almost a laugh, arrogant and sure, his gaze frankly incredulous as it seared into hers, invitation and temptation. And that impossible fire that always burned between them, that seductive blaze.
    Why, indeed?
    But she was not the old Larissa, the heedless Larissa who thought only of a moment’s pleasure—the better to avoid thinking about anything else. She could not play games with this man and skip away unscathed. And she was very much afraid that she had already damaged herself beyond repair.
    So she shrugged, pulling the familiar mantle of
Larissa Whitney, heartless, careless flirt
around her like the armor it was. Her favorite disguise. Because she did not dare let this man see anything more, anything deeper. She did not dare show him anything he could destroy.
    “Because you want it too much,” she said airily, turning away from him and drifting toward the fireplace as if she could dismiss him that easily. She closed her eyes for a tight, brief moment—for strength—and then glanced over her shoulder at him, and smiled. Saucily. As if she wanted nothing more than to tease him. “Where’s the fun in that?”
    He shouldn’t have done that. He shouldn’t have touched her, much less kissed her. Jack could see the passion in her green eyes, making them luminous. He wanted to make them glaze over with heat. Her mouth was still swollen slightly from his, and he wanted to taste her again. She was narcotic. And still she played her damned games. Lies within lies, like the Russian dolls his mother had collected.
    Why was he surprised? That was the real question, and one Jack knew he should investigate. But instead, he watched her.
    “I didn’t realize I scared you so much,” he drawled, injecting a note of mockery into his tone, knowing it would get her back up, refusing to question why he wanted that reaction. Any reaction. “I thought nothing could.”
    “Bats,” she said immediately, that charming lilt to hervoice, the one that made her so impossible to dismiss. The one that made her seem like some latter-day Holly Golightly. “And scorpions.” She gave a mock shudder. “But you? I’m afraid not, Jack. I know that must come as a grave disappointment.”
    “I know why you’re here.” It grated out of him, more angrily than it should have. “You can stop all your playacting and simply admit it.”
    She glanced back at him again, still standing before the fire, damp and delectable from a bath he could imagine in all-too-graphic detail, her short dark hair slightly mussed and entirely too alluring. He could not seem to reconcile himself to the dissonance—to the fragility of her delicate bones, her waiflike figure, juxtaposed with that cold,