The Platinum Collection: Surrender To The Devil: The Replacement Wife / Heiress Behind the Headlines / A Devil in Disguise. CAITLIN CREWS

And for a few moments in that dining room, she’d believed it. She’d believed that Theo was there for her, watching silently, and would have jumped in had she needed it. She’d believed.

      It made her want to collapse on the floor and cry, right here in this hushed hallway, because she knew better.

      She was alone. She had always been alone. She’d been the odd girl out in the little family her mother had made with her husband and Emily; the shameful memory of Caroline’s sordid past and reduced circumstances. Then, after Caroline had died, she’d truly been on her own, fighting with all she had to keep Emily with her—and to live up to her mother’s wishes, as the very least she owed to the woman who had lost everything for her. So why should the fact that she was alone here, in this alien place where cruelty seemed as much a part of the decor as the recognizably famous paintings on the wall, make her stomach ache, her eyes water? Why should this come as any kind of surprise?

      Why, she asked herself as she headed toward the end of the hall without knowing she meant to move, had she thought for even a moment that anything should be different? Light spilled out of a room up ahead of her, and so she made her way toward it—but her mind was far, far away.

      She thought of Theo’s dark head, bent to hers. She thought of his hot mouth, his demanding hands. Her body sang out for him as if he was beside her, and she had to bite back something she feared was much too close to a sob. She would have slapped herself if she could have, because she knew, suddenly, what she’d been denying for much too long already. She knew why she’d so foolishly expected anything at all from a man she should have viewed as nothing but her enemy.

      She loved him. A bitter sort of laugh escaped her lips then, echoing down the hall. How could this have happened? How had she let it? But there it was. The truth of it moved in her like a song, high and sweet and sure, but it was not one she was likely to let herself sing.

      She was an idiot. A fool of the highest degree. But there was no getting around the facts of it. The truth. She was not the sort of person who fell into bed with just anyone, no matter how beautiful they might be, or how unusually compelling she might find them. She’d known on some level when she’d turned to him for comfort after the paparazzi gauntlet that he’d put her through deliberately. She’d known even sooner, when she’d been so desperate to understand how he could possibly feel as he did for the shallow, seemingly spiteful Larissa. And she’d certainly known this past week or so, when she’d managed to put her reason for being here, and Emily herself, out of her mind, all to lose herself in him.

      “Congratulations, Becca,” she told herself, her voice little more than a whisper, hushed by the wealth and finery surrounding her, her high heels sinking into the plush Oriental rug that stretched toward the light. “You’ve managed to make a bad situation that much worse.”

      She loved him, she thought. She loved Theo Markou Garcia, a man who loved money and power above all things. A man who thought he was in love with a woman he’d hardly known—a fantasy, a dream. A man who would never, could never, love her back. Not even if he wanted to, and she very much doubted he did. After all, as Helen had said, he was a man who wanted the very best. Not its stand-in. Not its low-rent stunt double.

      She reached the end of the hallway, and stepped into the room that waited there, brightly lit and notably different from the rest of the house. The door was wide-open, so she moved into what looked like a sitting area, all clean lines and a brisk, contemporary sensibility. She drifted toward the windows, vaguely imagining that she’d be able to figure out where she was in the house if she could see the street, and only when she was halfway there did she catch something out of the corner of her eye.