The Platinum Collection: Surrender To The Devil: The Replacement Wife / Heiress Behind the Headlines / A Devil in Disguise
Too wicked, too attractive to resistTheo Markou Garcia needs a wife – or someone who looks strikingly similar to his infamous fiancée. Becca would be the perfect replacement… The deal: masquerade as the Whitney heiress in exchange for a fortune – but do not fall for your husband!Larissa Whitney escapes to a small secluded island, seeking refuge from the relentless paparazzi. But she’s not alone – Larissa finds herself face to face with Jack… So now she’s trapped with a man she had a wild affair with five years earlier… A man she’s still achingly attracted to!Drusilla Bennett is ready to take her life back and walk away from the devil by saying ‘I quit!’ But a resignation from the best PA Cayo Vila’s ever had is simply unacceptable. Dru’s heard all about his legendary charm, but now it’s turned on her, she discovers why it’s so hard to say no to Cayo!
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The Platinum Collection: Surrender to the Devil
The Replacement Wife
Heiress Behind the Headlines
A Devil in Disguise
Caitlin Crews
USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award–nominated author CAITLIN CREWS loves writing romance. She teaches her favourite romance novels in creative writing classes at places like UCLA Extension’s prestigious Writers’ Programme, where she finally gets to utilise the MA and PhD in English literature she received from the University of York in England. She currently lives in California, with her very own hero and too many pets. Visit her at caitlincrews.com.
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
Caitlin Crews
To Kate Rogers for her unsung, invaluable help before, and to Megan Bassett, my editor, for making all my books so very much better.
THE HOUSE HAD not improved since she’d seen it last. It loomed over New York City’s tony Fifth Avenue like a displeased society matron, all disapproving elegance and a style that dated to the excesses of the Gilded Age. Becca Whitney sat in the vast and chilly parlor, stuffed with priceless paintings and fussy, disturbingly detailed statuary, and tried to pretend she couldn’t feel the way her two so-called relatives were glaring at her. As if her presence there, as the illegitimate daughter of their disinherited and long-disparaged late sister, polluted the very air.
Maybe it did, Becca thought. Maybe that was one reason the great hulking mansion felt like a soulless crypt.
The strained silence—that Becca refused to break, since she’d been called here this time and was thankfully no longer the supplicant—was broken suddenly, by the slight creaking sound of the ornate parlor door.
Thank God, Becca thought. She had to keep her hands tightly laced together in her lap, her teeth clenched in her jaw, to keep the bitter words she’d like to say from spilling out. Whatever this interruption was, it was a relief.
Until she looked up and saw the man who stepped inside the room. Something like warning, like anticipation, seemed to crackle over her skin, making it hum in reaction. Making her sit straighter in her chair.
“Is this the girl?” he asked, his voice a low, dark rumble, his tone brisk. Demanding.
Everything—power, focus, the strained air itself—shifted immediately. Away from the horrible aunt and uncle she’d never planned to see again and toward the man, dark and big and goose bump-raising, who moved as if he expected the world to shuffle and rearrange itself around him—and with the kind of confidence that suggested it usually did exactly that.
Becca felt her lips part slightly as their eyes met, across centuries of artifacts and the frowns of these terrible people who had tossed her mother out like so much trash twenty-six years ago. His were a rich, arresting color, an electric amber, and seared into her, making her blink. Making her wonder if she’d been scarred by the contact.
Who was he?
He was not particularly tall, not much over six feet, but he was … there. A force to be reckoned with, as if a live wire burned in him, and from him. He wore the same kind of clothes they all wore in this hermetically sealed world of wealth and privilege—expensive. Yet unlike her fussy relatives, in their suits and scarves and ostentatious accessories, everything about this man was stripped down. Lean. Powerful. Impressive. A charcoal-gray sweater that clung to his perfectly shaped torso, and dark trousers that outlined the strength of his thighs and his narrow hips. He looked elegant and elemental all at once.
He gazed at her, his head cocking slightly to one side as he considered her, and Becca knew two things with every cell in her body. The first was that he was dangerous in a way she could not quite grasp—though she could see the fierce intelligence in him, coupled with a certain ruthless intensity. And the second was that she had to get away from him. Now. Her stomach cramped and her heart pounded. Something about him just … spooked her.
“You see it, then,” Becca’s pompous uncle Bradford said in the same patronizing tone he’d used when he’d thrown Becca out of this very same house six months ago. In the very same tone he’d used to tell her that she and her sister Emily were mistakes. Embarrassments. Certainly not Whitneys. “The resemblance.”
“It is uncanny.” The man’s remarkable, disconcerting eyes narrowed, focused entirely on Becca even as he spoke to her uncle. “I thought you exaggerated.”
