The Shameless Playboy

by Caitlin Crews

  “But it will make the perfect backdrop for your gala, I imagine,” he continued after a moment. “The only thing people like more than glamour is glamour gone wrong, left to crumble into dust and disrepair and salacious old stories.”

  “You are so optimistic about human nature,” she said, her voice as tart as ever despite the sweet honey of it, and completely devoid of any cloying compassion—or, worse, pity. She did not quite roll her eyes at him, and he felt something fierce and hot expand in him. “It is no wonder your company is so sought after.”

  “I am sought after because I am me,” he said, arrogant and deliberate, daring her to look away, to deny him. “And because anyone seen in my company is certain to be photographed and speculated about in the next day’s gossip rags. I am sought after because I am rich, sickeningly handsome and rumored to be excellent in bed.” He raised his brows at her, challenging her.

  “And here I thought it was for your remarkable modesty,” she replied, as quickly and as sharply as he’d known she would. As he realized he’d hoped she would.

  “I don’t require modesty,” he assured her. “I have a mirror—and, barring that, the great and glorious British press. I am more than aware of my charms.”

  “Clearly.” She did not look remotely impressed. Or even interested. Which, in turn, he found uncommonly fascinating. “But to return to a slightly less important topic than your vast and staggering ego, I think that we can pull this off.”

  She turned from him once more, to peer out across his history as if it was no more than a piece of property she was expected to transform.

  As if it was merely a venue.

  Lucas wondered what she saw. What anyone who had not been abandoned here as a child—in his case, quite literally as well as emotionally—saw. None of it could ever be anything simple to him—never just a house, a great lawn, an old estate. His few happy memories involved his siblings, especially Jacob, and the mischief they’d gotten into with their decided lack of parental supervision over the years, but there had never been enough of those moments to tip the balance.

  Wolfe Manor was where he had been discarded on the doorstep as an infant, his mother’s identity ever after hinted at, but never confirmed. It was where he had come to understand as a very young boy that while William Wolfe had viewed all of his children with a certain caustic disinterest, it was Lucas who he had actively hated. It was where he had learned to be the person he was today—ever merry on the surface, ever concealed beneath, ever the disappointment to all who expected anything from him.

  But Grace could see none of that. No ghosts, no uncomfortable memories, no absentee mothers and vicious, cruel fathers. For her, perhaps, this was no more than an abandoned great house on a vast property—one more British eccentricity for her to work around. In the pouring rain, no less. He watched as she worried her lower lip with her teeth, and then pulled out her PDA and began typing into it.

  “We’ll put lights on the house to play up its mysterious past,” she murmured. “A haunted house theme, but elegant.”

  He realized with some astonishment that she was no longer speaking to him. She was entirely focused on her PDA, and thus the job at hand. As if he, Lucas Wolfe, the greatest temptation on two feet according to the tabloids and any number of his former lovers, was … no more than a business associate.

  He found it surprisingly arousing.

  “We’ll have the design capitalize on the Wolfe saga at every opportunity,” she continued in that same distracted tone. “The Wolfe touch on the Hartington’s brand in the eighties is widely considered to be the glory days— we’ll use that. Expand it into the new era.”

  She continued on like that for a few minutes more, while Lucas stood idly by, holding an umbrella over her head and waiting patiently.

  Like one more toothless member of her intimidated staff. Like her lackey.

  He was sure it spoke to the deficiencies in his character that he’d been hearing of all his life that he did not mind it as he should. That he found her deep concentration and ability to block out even him deeply, sensually intriguing. Would she be like that in bed? Would she gaze at her lover with that kind of rapt focus?

  He certainly hoped so.

  “What is it?” she asked, looking back at him as she slid her PDA back in her pocket, her brown eyes narrowing as they caught his expression “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  The rain had picked up again, thudding hard against the umbrella and rebounding from the stones beneath their feet. They were both wet, cocooned together amid the noise of the storm. Lucas found it exhilarating. Or perhaps that was simply her presence—and the fact she was standing so close to him. Finally. She smelled like soap and rosemary and something fresher, more feminine, in the close embrace beneath the umbrella.

  He could tell the very moment she realized that the pounding rain had trapped them even closer together, that she was near enough to be wrapped around him if she wished—that the only reason besides the downpour that would bring two people together like this had everything to do with the carnal heat that flared between them and nothing to do with the weather. He watched her chocolate eyes widen in alarm—and unmistakable awareness.

  He reached across the scant space between them, and slid his hand along the side of her face, filling his palm with the soft skin of her tender cheek, letting his thumb scrape across her full lower lip, wishing he could test it against his teeth as she had. He was so unused to waiting. He could not recall the last time he’d had to wait for anything.

  Soon, he promised himself.

  “I want you,” he said quietly. It echoed between them as more than a statement of intent. It was a promise. A vow.

  He could read her so well, though he did not wish to analyze that unexpected ability.

  He heard her breath catch in her throat, saw her eyes heat with desire. He knew she wanted him. He could feel it in the fire that scorched the humid air between them, see it in the way her lips parted and the faint tremor that shook through her.

  “I am afraid that I do not want you, Mr. Wolfe,” she said in that brisk, professional tone, making him blink—though he did not drop his hand. The heat of her skin beneath his palm did not match the coolness in her voice.

  “You are such a liar,” he said, his voice low, intent on her heat, her passion. “I thought we covered this already.”

  He could already see them together, entwined, entangled. Her long legs wrapped around his waist, her breasts in his hands. Her lush mouth wrapped around his hardness. He wanted to take her where she stood, pull her skirt to her waist, and feel her soft heat with his hands, his mouth.

  “Please do not touch me again, Mr. Wolfe,” she replied. Her brown eyes were direct.

  Serious. She reached up and took his larger hand in hers, and pulled it away from her face. “It is completely inappropriate.”

  “Grace …” He let her move his hand, but he curled his fingers around hers, holding her fast. Something urgent was overtaking him, almost shaking him. He had never felt anything like it. “Do you really think I don’t know you want me, too?”

  They were so close, the rain pounding down all around them, stranding them beneath a noisy umbrella—the only two people in the world. Wolfe Manor, with all of its howling ghosts and terrible memories, faded away until there was nothing but the weather, this umbrella and this overly polite, overdressed woman who had somehow wedged herself under his skin.

  And she was dismissing him.

  She even smiled, a studiously polite, faintly pitying smile. Lucas had never seen anything quite like it—and certainly not directed at him.

  She tugged her fingers from his grip, and he let her do it.

  “I want a great many things that are no good for me,” she told him. Not unkindly, but with an undercurrent of intensity. “I want to live on nothing but red velvet cake and dark chocolate. I want to spend my days lolling about on white sand beaches, reading romance novels and basking in the sun. Who doesn’t?
” She tilted her head slightly, still holding his gaze.

  “But instead I eat healthily and I work hard. No one should get everything they want. What kind of person would they be?”

  “Me,” Lucas said. But there was an odd note in his own voice, and it seemed as if the rain roared in his ears. His mouth crooked to the side. “They would be me.”

  “Well,” she said after a long, searing moment. Her voice seemed thicker—or did he only imagine that? “Life is not about want, Mr. Wolfe.”

  Something passed between them, electric and alive, dancing in the breath of space between their bodies and jolting into him. He did not know what to make of it. He only knew he could not look away.

  “You mean your life,” he amended quietly, as if they stood in the presence of something bigger—something important.

  “And in any event,” she continued, squaring her shoulders as if he had not spoken, “I have a very strict policy against becoming personally involved with coworkers. I understand you’ve never really worked in an office before —”

  “If I kissed you right now,” he said, his eyes trained on hers and the truth he could see there—the truth that resonated in him no matter what words she threw out to deny it, “I could make you forget your policies. I could make you forget your own name.”

  That hung there like smoke for a heartbeat, then another, and then, impossibly, she laughed.

  At him.

  Chapter Five

  Grace thought she sounded on the verge of hysteria—and that was certainly how she felt, her chest too tight and her skin on fire—but Lucas merely stared down at her, his beautiful face looking nonplussed and not a little disconcerted. His hand tightened around the handle of the umbrella he still held above them. She could still feel the places where he’d touched her face, her hand—as if he’d burned the imprint of his hand into her flesh.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, biting back the laughter before it gave her away, before he saw the truth. Before he realized she was putting on a desperate act to divert his attention. “I have no doubt you could do all of those things. You are Lucas Wolfe, are you not? You’re famous for doing all of that and more to the better part of Europe.”

  “Never fear,” he said stiffy. His green eyes burned like smoky emeralds in the wet, gray air. “I am reckless with the feelings of others, perhaps, but never my own health.”

  “I’m sure you’re all you claim to be,” she said, injecting a placating note into her voice, which made his eyes narrow and his full lips thin.

  But he was no longer touching her, which meant he was no longer turning her brain and body to smoke and need, and Grace felt she had to count her blessings where she could.

  “You have no idea,” he murmured.

  I have more of an idea than I should, she thought ruefully, pushing aside a host of dangerously vivid images that taunted her, teased her, made her yearn to throw herself headlong into the very thing she knew would destroy her. It was as if Lucas Wolfe had been created with every one of Grace’s preferences and secret desires in mind. The aristocratic drawl.

  The quick, smart wit that suggested an agile mind he chose to hide behind his famed laziness. The lean, arrogant swagger. The narrow, beautiful face that made Grace think of fallen angels and other impossible creatures, all seduction and compulsion, magic and wonder, wrapped up in a package that was unmistakably, devastatingly male.

  “And that is yet one more reason I can’t possibly allow anything to happen between us,” Grace said as politely as she could, speaking more to herself than to him. She forced herself to meet his gaze fully and blandly. She forced herself to smile serenely, despite the wild tumult that raged inside of her, nearly knocking her from her feet.

  “Grace …” he began, but she had one more card to play. She splayed one hand over her chest, and let her smile take on just the slightest hint of something in the neighborhood of pity.

  “I am, of course, very flattered,” she said. Distinctly. Sweetly. Sympathetically.

  She knew she’d hit the right note when he stiffened, his eyes narrowing to outraged green slits. She almost opened her mouth then to take it back, to tell the truth, compelled by a force she could not begin to understand. Why should she have the insane urge to protect him? To shield him—even from herself, at her own expense? What was happening to her?

  It was the rain, she told herself with some desperation. The rain and a man she should never have met, who she could never allow herself to know in any way other than the superficial. Just the wet and the peculiarly British dampness that crept into the bones and stayed there, squatting, like a kind of grief.

  It was the rain, she thought, and nothing more.

  “I think we’re done here,” she said, when he only stared at her, affront and something else she was afraid to consider too closely written plainly across his face.

  “Are you certain?” he asked coolly. “Surely you are only now warming to the subject. Just think, with some more time and energy you could flay my flesh entirely from my bones using only that sharp tongue of yours.”

  “Tempting,” she could not help but reply, not wanting to think about her tongue near any part of him, not wanting to feel how much of a temptation he truly was, how completely he could ruin her if she let him. “But I think I’ll pass.” A kind of shadow passed across his face, darkening those fascinating eyes, and she felt an answering twinge in the vicinity of her chest. She cleared her throat. “I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings—”

  “Please contain yourself, Ms. Carter,” he interrupted her smoothly, with a touch of hauteur, all hint of shadows gone from his perfect features as if she’d imagined them. “I am Lucas Wolfe. I don’t have feelings, I have sycophants. I think, somehow, I will manage to survive the disappointment.”

  She was surprised she was still standing, that they were still huddled together beneath the same umbrella—that she was not lying in pieces scattered at his feet after that lacerating tone of voice.

  But this was a good thing, she reminded herself when she was tempted to let that affect her as it should not. When it came to this man, antagonism was the better part of valor. It was the hint of tenderness, the suspicion of emotion, that would be her downfall. But this—this she could handle.

  She smiled her frostiest smile at him, the one that had helped earn her the title of ice queen from everyone who’d been unlucky enough to receive it.

  “If you say so, Mr. Wolfe,” she replied in a tone as sharp as his had been, his formal name feeling bitter against her teeth.

  Then she strode toward the car, grateful for the rain against her face because it was cold. Grateful for the cold because it snapped her out of the strange spell she’d been in since she’d gotten in the car with him in London.

  Grateful because finally—finally, she told herself—she felt like herself again.

  Grace would have preferred it if Lucas had reverted to his expected type over the next few days—rolling into work at odd hours, drunk and disreputable and incapable of doing more than ogling the secretaries, which was just as everyone expected him to behave—but he did not.

  Instead, he turned out to be good at his job.

  He threw a press conference to announce his own new position at Hartington’s, deliberately starting the kind of media frenzy that would have taken anyone else a great deal of time and money to attempt to duplicate. And then he simply … went out on the town, as he normally did. He attended all the usual parties, with all the usual people. Pop stars and models, actors and Sloane Rangers. Up-and-coming artists across all mediums, and brash rockers known as much for their prodigious use of recreational substances as their music. And wherever he went, whoever he was with and whatever the event, when he was photographed—and he was always, always photographed—he talked about Hartington’s.

  He knew the very fact that he’d taken a job would be considered noteworthy, and so he milked the public’s fascination with the idea of him at work for all it was worth. All the wh
ile talking so much about the Hartington’s gala at Wolfe Manor that Grace was soon reading breathless reports on celebrity gossip sites about who was and who wasn’t on the guest list, which artists were jockeying for a chance to perform—the kind of exposure and excitement she normally only fantasized about.

  With the centenary gala approaching so quickly, there simply could not be enough publicity—and certainly not of this kind and caliber.

  Lucas Wolfe, it turned out, was a publicity machine, completely adept at using the press to his own ends.

  “Your ability to manipulate the press is really very impressive,” Grace told him at the morning meeting, the paper in front of her spread open to yet another story about the perennially shiftless Wolfe brother and his shocking newfound interest in corporate life.

  Though she could not help but wonder—if he was this good at making the press do his bidding, had he been doing precisely this all along, creating the very image that even she now reacted to as if it was the gospel truth about him? Perhaps he really was as clever as she’d now and again imagined him to be, Grace thought, and could not have said why that revelation made her shiver slightly. Nor why he would have deliberately chosen to spend his life this way, to be known far and wide as this … dismissible.

  “Not at all,” Lucas replied with a careless shrug, though there was a measuring sort of look in his eyes when he met Grace’s gaze across the conference table. Something much too commanding for a lifelong layabout.

  Something dark. Aware. “Paparazzi have followed me around for the whole of my life. It’s long past time they made themselves useful.”

  “Usefulness is apparently going around,” Grace said, unnerved by the way he looked at her and determined not to show it in front of her team members, all of whom still gazed raptly at Lucas as if he descended to work each morning from Mount Olympus itself, complete with a thunderbolt and a golden chariot.