Women didn’t turn away from Lucas King. They generally chased him down and did whatever they could to hang on to him.
“Excuse me?” he finally managed to say.
“Look, I’m sorry. I should have said something the minute I agreed to work for you.” She inhaled and rushed on before he could speak. “I noticed right away that there was an…attraction between us, but I didn’t think anything of it. It’s my own fault, I should have said something sooner. But the truth is, I’m not looking for another man in my life—”
She wasn’t—
“I don’t remember offering,” he said, his voice tightly controlled. Anger and disbelief warred in the pit of his stomach, kicking up an ugly brew as he felt the sting of rejection for the first time in his life.
She ignored that jibe. “And if I were considering getting involved with someone,” Rose continued, “it wouldn’t be with you.”
Completely shocked now, he just stared at her, too amazed to speak for a moment. This was not how he’d seen this little chat going. He’d expected to have to talk her down from their passionate kiss. To ease her gently into the seduction he had planned. What he hadn’t counted on was being insulted.
“What do you mean it wouldn’t be me? What the hell is wrong with me?” he finally shouted.
Rose winced and looked past him at the brightly lit grocery store as if checking to make sure no one else had come out and was listening.
Then she turned her gaze back to him. “Nothing’s wrong with you, Lucas. You’re just…not my type.”
“Type?” he echoed. This was not happening, he told himself sternly. No way was he standing in a grocery store parking lot looking at a beautiful woman and hearing her tell him to buzz off. This was so far out of his universe, he didn’t have a clue how to handle it. But his temper was on the rise and a sudden, pounding headache erupted behind his eyes.
Crossing his arms over his chest, he glared at her. “What type am I then?”
“Bossy.”
“Bossy isn’t a type,” he argued, because he couldn’t argue with the word itself. Sure he was bossy, but he preferred to think of that trait as confidence. All of the Kings were confident in themselves and their abilities, and they didn’t suffer fools, either. They took charge, got things done and steamrolled over whomever might be dumb enough to stand in their way.
Lucas was no different.
Yeah, he’d been called arrogant before. And unrelenting. And even, on occasion, egotistical. But it was a small price to pay for getting what he wanted when he wanted it. And he wasn’t about to apologize to Rose Clancy—or anyone else for that matter—for being the man he was.
“Just when exactly have I bossed you around?” he challenged, his eyes locked with hers.
She sighed. “You haven’t, in so many words. Not yet, anyway.”
“Oh, so you’re a fortune teller, too? You can read the future and so you know I’m going to start giving you orders?”
“I don’t need to read the future,” she told him, stiffening her spine and lifting her chin in defense against his tone. “All I have to do is look at the past.”
“That makes no sense, either,” he told her.
“It does to me,” she said simply.
Lucas shook his head and tried to rein in the million and one thoughts churning through his mind. Then he gave it up. How could he find logic in what was unreasonable to begin with? Was his plan for revenge going to end right here, beneath a flickering, ready-to-burn-out parking light?
“I can’t believe any of this,” he muttered, more to himself than to her.
“I know. You probably don’t hear it often.”
His eyes narrowed. “Try never.”
She winced. “I am sorry, but Lucas, I really need this job and I don’t want us to work together under false pretenses.”
A part of him relaxed a little. She wasn’t walking away at least. She was just trying to put him on notice. “Uh-huh.”
“That kiss notwithstanding, I really think we should just keep our relationship to teacher and student. Okay?”
Man, he thought, if Sean were here listening to this, his brother would be laughing his ass off. Hell, if it were happening to one of his brothers, Lucas would be doing the same thing. But it was damned hard to see the humor in the situation from his perspective.
On the other hand, Lucas mused as he watched her, Rose was the one to initiate that steam-inducing kiss—and she would have kept on kissing him if he hadn’t called a halt and taken a step back. Say what she wanted now, he had tasted her desire, felt her need wrapping itself around him. Rose Clancy wanted him as much as he wanted her—which would only work in his favor as he went about seducing her. Good to know that beneath her cool, prim, good-girl demeanor, she was burning with the same fire that was licking at his insides.
So…fine. He’d play along. Let her think she was in charge. Eventually, the game would shift in his favor.
Things always did.
She was watching him warily, waiting for his response, and damned if he wasn’t tempted to tell her to take her rules and get lost. He’d never before had a woman turn on him like this, especially after a kiss so hot—his lips still felt burned. And swallowing her “rules” was going to be hard to do, he knew. Yet, if he wanted his plan to work—and he really did—then he was going to have to go along with her…at least for now.
It grated, though, Lucas thought, as irritation spiked within him. He wasn’t used to sublimating his own wants to anyone else’s and if this is what it felt like, he had no interest in getting any better at it.
He looked at her and wanted her. He looked at her and wanted to turn and walk away. He looked at her and remembered her brother stabbing him and the rest of the Kings in the back and knew without a doubt that he wasn’t willing to give up on his plan. Not yet.
So he’d go along. He’d let her think she had won this round, because winning a battle didn’t mean winning the war. When this was over, it would be Lucas standing up and taking a bow. And it was that thought alone that had him nodding.
“Fine,” he growled. “We’ll do this your way.”
She blew out a breath and flashed him a grin. “That’s great. You’ll see, Lucas. This will all work much better now that we both know the rules.”
He watched her go to the passenger-side door and climb inside the already unlocked car. Alone in the flickering light of that lamp, Lucas clenched his jaw and promised himself that when this seduction ran its course and his payback had been achieved, he would be the one giving the not-my-type speech to Rose.
That realization had him smiling all the way home.
A week later, Rose was working on her home computer. This was her least favorite part of being self-employed. Well, there were also the quarterly tax reports. Frankly, anything to do with paperwork made her want to lie down on the couch until the resulting headache went away.
She loved cooking. Loved teaching others to do what she did best. But making what she loved a business demanded that she do a lot of what she hated, too.
Studying the spreadsheet across her computer screen, though, she had to smile. Thanks to Lucas King and the ridiculous amount of money he was willing to pay for cooking lessons, her bottom line was looking perceptibly better these days.
And her nerves were looking a lot worse, she acknowledged sadly. Picking up the mug in front of her, Rose took a long drink of her coffee and nearly gagged when she realized it had gone stone-cold. Grimacing at the taste, she carried the cup into the kitchen, saw the coffeepot was empty and automatically set it up to brew a fresh pot.
While the coffeemaker steamed and hissed and dripped, she leaned against her countertop and let her mind go to where, lately, it spent so much time.
Straight to Lucas.
In seconds, she was reliving that kiss again, as she had so many times over the last week. What had she been thinking? She should have edged away. Made an excuse. Laughed the tension off. But no, she’d had to
grab his jacket lapels and drag him down for a kiss that was still reverberating through her seven days later.
“God, you’re an idiot,” she muttered, slapping one hand against the cool, gleaming surface of her cream-colored granite countertop.
She could still feel the hard thump of her heartbeat and the waves of desire that had crashed over her, nearly swamping her with a sense of need more desperate than she’d ever known before. Shaking her head, Rose absently reached for a dishtowel and dried and put away the few dishes sitting in the sink drainer while her mind taunted her by playing the memory of that kiss on a nonstop loop.
When she tired of torturing herself, she moved past that kiss and on to the strained conversation that had followed. She’d had to force herself to say what she had and heaven knew he hadn’t taken it well.
“But then,” she murmured, “why would he? No woman in her right mind would be pushing Lucas King away. No wonder he looked at me like I’d lost my mind.”
Maybe she had, at that. She considered the suggestion objectively. She was single. Unattached. Clearly drawn to Lucas and his kiss had practically curled her toes and she had still turned him down. “Yep. Crazy.”
When the phone rang, she jumped, then had to slap one hand to her chest to hold her heart in place. Shaking her head, she reached across the counter, and checked the caller ID. Smiling, she answered it. “Dee, hi.”
“I hate caller ID,” her best friend said. “There are too few surprises in life anyway. Answering the phone should be like biting into a chocolate. A lottery, sort of. Will you get caramel or fruit and nuts?”
“Speaking of nuts,” Rose said, still smiling, “what’s going on?”
“Seriously?” Delilah James laughed and it was a deep, rumbling chuckle. “I’m calling for a passion update, of course.”
“There is no update, and I’m sorry I ever told you about that kiss,” Rose said, staring at the coffeemaker as if willing it to finish already. She’d need a lot more caffeine to deal with her best friend.
Delilah and Rose had met as roommates their freshman year of college and had bonded like sisters before the end of the first month of school. With similar backgrounds—each of them having been raised by wealthy, domineering fathers—they’d had a lot in common. The only difference being that at college, Dee had found the strength to stand up to her family’s demands, while Rose hadn’t.
“Of course, you’re going to tell me about a kiss that fried all of your circuits,” Dee said now. “I’m the best friend. Who else are you going to tell?”
“Nobody,” she said and gratefully poured a fresh cup of coffee. “Honestly, it didn’t mean anything.”
“Right. That’s why you were still babbling a day later. Why you said that you’d never experienced anything like that and it’s why you said Lucas King kisses like a man who was just giving a woman a preview of the big event.”
Rose closed her eyes on a sigh. “Did you take notes or something?”
“Are you kidding? I’m so jealous that description is seared into my mind.” She gave a wistful, dramatic sigh. “So, what’s the second chapter? Fondling in the kitchen? Playing touchy-feely while chopping parsley?”
“No to all of the above,” Rose told her firmly, though her body did a quick hop and skip at the thought.
“You mean to tell me you’re sticking to the rules you laid down? Strictly business?”
“I am,” she said with a sharp nod that Dee couldn’t even see. “I have to. I need the money he’s paying me.”
Dee snorted. “Oh, please.”
Rose took the phone away from her ear, frowned at it, then slapped it back into place. “That’s the reason I took the job in the first place, remember?”
“That’s what you told yourself, anyway,” Dee said. “Come on, Rose. We both know that Lucas King makes you shiver in all the right places.”
True, she thought, rolling her eyes heavenward as she took a sip of hot coffee. Rose had been shivering for a solid week. And working in the man’s house every night, in very close quarters, wasn’t helping anything. Although, ever since that one, blistering kiss, Lucas had been absolutely, rigidly, polite. He hadn’t made another move. Hadn’t even so much as given her a look that would lead her to think that he’d spent nearly as much time daydreaming about that kiss as she had.
So why was she making herself crazy over this?
“Okay, yes, he does,” she admitted, when Dee’s silence began to scream at her. “But that doesn’t mean I’m going to do anything about it.”
“Pity.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Rose, you know I love you…”
“I hear a but coming,” Rose said.
“But,” Dee continued, “you don’t know a good thing when you trip over it.”
“Oh, yes, I do,” she countered, wandering across her small kitchen to stare out the window at the winterized backyard. The trees were looking a little sad, their browning leaves clinging to the branches, refusing to drop. The grass was brown, too. In fact, the only splotches of color out there were her chrysanthemums—yellow, purple, white—in the flowerbeds that needed weeding.
She’d lived in this house since her divorce, and she’d been happy here. Her own space, just a tiny bungalow in one of the older sections of Long Beach, the house was nothing like the palatial mansion where she’d grown up and, frankly, that was Rose’s favorite part. Big houses felt cold. Empty.
Well, she amended silently, that wasn’t entirely true. Lucas’s house was gigantic, but there was an easy warmth to it, too. She had felt at home the moment she walked inside. Which probably wasn’t a good thing.
“If you did,” Dee was saying, “you’d kiss Lucas King senseless, tip him into bed and have your wicked way with him.”
“You’re writing your romance novel again, aren’t you?”
Dee laughed. “Guilty. But my point is, why are you backing away? He’s single. You’re single. Finally.”
“You know why,” Rose said and opened the back door. It was cold outside, but right now, that sharp, ocean air felt good. As if it was going to blow right through her mind, chasing away thoughts she had no business indulging in.
Stepping out onto the back porch, Rose cradled the phone in one hand, her coffee cup in the other, and slowly sank down onto one of the weathered Adirondack chairs. Easing back, she stared into the yard, but wasn’t really seeing it. Instead, she looked into her own past and didn’t like the view.
“He’s too much like Dave. And my father. And Henry,” Rose said quietly.
“Rich men aren’t all alike, sweetie,” Dee said, her voice just as quiet, letting Rose know that she understood completely.
“No, but there are enough similarities between the Clancy men and the King men to make me wary.”
“Okay, I get that,” her friend said. “But you’re not the same person you were in the past, Rose. There’s not a man alive who could walk over you now. You’re stronger than that. Not afraid to speak up for yourself.”
She was, Rose thought with not a little pride. She’d worked hard to develop her own confidence. Her own strengths. For as long as she could remember, her father and her older brother had looked at her as if she were some plaster saint. She was always the good, compliant, pretty daughter and sister.
Part of that, of course, was her own fault. Her mother died when Rose was ten, and after that, she was in a constant state of fear that she would lose the rest of her family. That somehow, something would go wrong and she would be alone. She’d even convinced herself that if she wasn’t perfect, they might not want her around at all.
So she had been better than perfect. She never made waves. Never questioned. Never argued. Never stood up for herself, not once. Even after college, she had maintained that air of perfection for her family and when her father had asked her to marry Henry Porter, she had agreed.
“Maybe Lucas King is just what you need,” Dee was saying. “You’ve been celibate way too long. That c
reep of an ex-husband of yours really messed with your head and I’m thinking a little attention from the right person could just give you a whole new outlook.”
Rose shook her head, took a sip of coffee and watched the neighbor’s cat walk with balletic precision along the top of the block wall fence that separated the yards. She smiled to herself as the rotund calico paused long enough to bat one paw at a trembling leaf.
“What is whirling around in your devious mind?” Rose asked, though she knew she probably shouldn’t. “Seduction.”
“What?”
“I’m just saying…if Lucas isn’t a long-term guy, why can’t he be a short-term one?”
“Because I work for him,” Rose argued, shifting in her seat as a sudden surge of heat shot through her.
“Uh-huh, and one has nothing to do with the other,” Dee insisted. “Live a little, sweetie. Have a fling. Enjoy. Don’t you deserve some fun?”
Rose laughed. “Lucas? Fun? He’s not an amusement park, Dee. He’s…dangerous.”
“Even better.”
“You’re hopeless.”
“Thank you.”
Rose heard the smile in her friend’s voice and knew that Dee meant well, but… “I don’t think so. I gave him the stay-away speech, remember?”
“Take it back.”
“Hah! Just like that?”
“Why not? You said it was a great kiss.”
“Practically a world record,” Rose admitted, reliving that memory of his mouth locked with hers for what had to be the millionth time.
“One word from you, and I guarantee he’ll forget all about your little hands-off speech.”
“Then what?”
“Sweetie, if you have to ask that, it has been too long,” Dee told her with a sigh. A second later, she said, “Oops, gotta run. My date’s here.”
“Right. Talk to you tomorrow.”
“Okay, and Rose…live a little. Will you at least think about it?”
Once she hung up, Rose could acknowledge, at least to herself, that she would probably think of nothing else.
Ready for King's Seduction Page 5
