The Replacement Wife

“I am Theo Markou Garcia,” he said, in the way men did when they expected to be known, recognized. Celebrated.

“I’m Becca—the bastard daughter of the sister no one dares mention out loud.”

“I know who you are.” This time it was his low, insinuating voice that seemed to reverberate behind her ribs and spread out through her bones. “As for what I want—I don’t think that’s the right question.”

“It’s the right question if you want me to whirl around in front of you,” Becca countered, some recklessness charging through her, making her courageous. “Though I doubt you’ll give me the right answer.”

“The right question is this: what do you want, and how can I give it to you? And the only other question is, how far are you willing to go to get what you want?”

CAITLIN CREWS discovered her first romance novel at the age of twelve. It involved swashbuckling pirates, grand adventures, a heroine with rustling skirts and a mind of her own, and a seriously mouthwatering and masterful hero. The book (the title of which remains lost in the mists of time) made a serious impression. Caitlin was immediately smitten with romances and romance heroes, to the detriment of her middle school social life. And so began her life-long love affair with romance novels, many of which she insists on keeping near her at all times.

Caitlin has made her home in places as far-flung as York, England, and Atlanta, Georgia. She was raised near New York City, and fell in love with London on her first visit when she was a teenager. She has backpacked in Zimbabwe, been on safari in Botswana, and visited tiny villages in Namibia. She has, while visiting the place in question, declared her intention to live in Prague, Dublin, Paris, Athens, Nice, the Greek Islands, Rome, Venice, and/or any of the Hawaiian islands. Writing about exotic places seems like the next best thing to moving there.

She currently lives in California, with her animator/comic book artist husband and their menagerie of ridiculous animals.

The Replacement Wife

Caitlin Crews

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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.