Heiress Behind the Headlines by Caitlin Crews Page A

vulnerable. He felt something move through him, and told himself he had no idea what it was. None at all.
    He didn’t question his actions then, he just swept her up and into his arms. He was halfway up the stairs before her eyes opened, fixing on him in that solemn, disarming way of hers.
    “Don’t argue,” he told her gruffly, feeling something too close to emotional, something much too raw. Explosive. Did he expect her to argue with him? Did he want her to argue? Did he fear it? “You’re staying.”
    She pulled her lower lip between her teeth and her green eyes looked guarded, suddenly, but she didn’t say a word.
    He carried her into the sprawling suite at the top of the stairs, his favorite in the house. It took over the front of the second story and looked out over the vastness of the sea from three side-by-side bay windows that stood at proud attention on the outside wall. Inside, he moved to the big, wrought-iron four-poster bed that sat in the center of the room, piled high with snowy white linens, and deposited her in the middle of it.
    Because she was Larissa Whitney, she showed no evidence of any second thoughts or regrets, or even any acknowledgment that it was far chillier upstairs than it had been in the kitchen. Instead, she closed her eyes again and stretched out like a cat, her lithe body so smooth, so endlessly fascinating, spread out on the soft, old quilt.
    Mine,
he thought. It rang in him like the low toll of the island’s old church bells, deep and true, but he didn’t let himself worry about what that might mean. It didn’t matter. It couldn’t.
    He didn’t hesitate. He didn’t think it through. He moved to sit next to her, opening a drawer in the chest that stood next to the bed, the repository of some thirty summers, including the long-ago summers when he’d put on plays to amuse his mother. Larissa was warm next to him, vanilla and musk, and he could not bring himself to regret what he was about to do. Or even question it. He pulled out the pair of heavy steel handcuffs he’d once used as part of a costume, clicked one circle tight around her wrist, and attached the other to the scrolled-iron headboard.
    Her eyes opened slowly. Perhaps too slowly, too deliberately. She blinked, though she showed no particular sign of alarm, and then she tested the handcuff against the iron scrollwork, pulling on it slightly before letting her arm rest back against the pillows.
    “Kinky,” she said mildly. Her gaze moved to his, clear and faintly amused. “And me without my safe word.”
    “I don’t want you to get any ideas,” Jack said, his voice rough in the stillness of the room.
    “Says the man who just cuffed me to his four-poster bed.” Her voice was dry.
    “About leaving without telling me.” His gaze drilled into hers. “Like the last time.”
    Her expression didn’t change, but he felt the air aroundthem shimmer slightly with the tension that never quite disappeared. She moved her arm, letting the steel clank against iron. Her chin lifted.
    “Some men might simply have asked,” she said quietly.
    “I’m not ‘some men,’” he said in the same tone. He moved to sprawl next to her, tracing a line down between those pert breasts with his index finger, pleased to feel that telltale shiver move through her. “And you are certainly not ‘some women,’ Larissa.”
    She only looked at him for a moment, that gaze of hers so serious, and still so sad, despite the glaze of passion that deepened whenever he moved his hand against her.
    “What kind of woman am I?” she asked, her voice hardly more than a whisper, and he had the strangest sensation that despite the way she lounged there without an apparent care in the world, as if she routinely found herself almost entirely naked and restrained to various items of furniture, that question cost her. That the answer meant something to her.
    He couldn’t let himself think about that, either.
    He would marry the kind of woman his