Bad Blood Collection

by Various Authors

  That was what men like this did. Simply because they could.

  Grace knew that better than anyone.

  “He’s more than a bit of all right, isn’t he?” the fashion buyer from Hartington’s had cooed to Grace last night, when she’d first seen Lucas—much drunker and far more disreputable than he appeared now, if that was possible—at an extraordinarily glamorous fashion show thrown by Samantha Cartwright, one of London’s most beloved and avant-garde designers.

  Mona had sighed lustily, gazing at Lucas from across the trendy bar as he’d flirted with Samantha Cartwright herself, oblivious to all the watching, judging eyes around them, Grace’s among them. “And, of course, we’re to treat him like a king should he so much as glance our way. Boss’s orders.”

  Grace had nodded, as if she’d had the slightest expectation of interacting with the famous playboy, known as much for his devil-may-care attitude as for his long and illustrious string of lovers. Not to mention his much-discussed allergy to anything resembling work, particularly for Hartington’s, who had been after him for years to take a figurehead position with the company as his equally disreputable late father had once done.

  She’d felt a potent mix of awareness and disgust as she’d watched him. How could a man like Lucas, who was unabashedly making a play for the much older, and very much married, Samantha Cartwright right there in full view of half the city, also manage to seem so … alive and vibrant, in the midst of London’s crème de la crème, as if he were the real thing and they were nothing but fluff and misdirection?

  However, all his sexiness and charm had not prevented Samantha Cartwright’s husband from expressing his displeasure at finding Lucas secluded with his wife sometime later—all over Lucas’s pretty face.

  The fact that she, personally, had had a strange moment, a near-interaction with this man, did not signify. He clearly could not recall it and she—well, if her sleep had been disrupted last night, what did that matter? It could as easily have been the espresso she should have known better than to order after dinner. It had to have been.

  “I believe I saw you last night at the Cartwright show,” she said now, and felt gratified when he blinked, as if not expecting that response. Grace smiled, razor sharp, and let her dislike for him—for all men like him, so careless and callous—flood through her. “Though I cannot imagine you remember it.”

  “I have an excellent memory,” Lucas replied, his voice silky, and she had to admit that it got to her. It should not have affected her at all, the lazy caress of it, like bourbon and sin, but it did. The man was lethal, and she wanted nothing to do with him.

  “As do I, Mr. Wolfe,” she said crisply. “Which is how I know that we do not have an appointment today. Perhaps I can direct you …?”

  She let her words trail off, and waved her hand in the general direction of the door and the offices beyond. But Lucas Wolfe did not move. He only watched her for a moment. His battered, sexy mouth curved slightly.

  “You knew who I was the moment you saw me.” He looked amused. Triumphant. She could not have said why that seemed to claw at her.

  “I imagine every single person in England knows who you are,” she replied briskly. She let her brows arch, hinting at disdain. “One assumes that must be your intention, after so many scandals, all of which are dutifully reported in the papers.”

  “And yet, you are not English,” he said, shifting his body, making Grace suddenly, foolishly glad that her desk stood between them.

  She was abruptly aware of how powerful he was, how well-tuned and whipcord tough his body was, for all he kept it concealed behind a lazy smile, calculating eyes and sophisticated clothes. Leashed and hidden, though the truth of it lurked beneath the surface. As if his playboy persona was a mask he wore … but that was ridiculous.

  “You are American, are you not?” His head tilted slightly to one side, though his gaze never left hers. “Southern, if I am not mistaken.”

  “I cannot imagine why it should be relevant, but I am originally from Texas,” Grace said, in quelling tones. She did not speak about her past. She did not speak about her private life at all, come to that—never at work, and certainly not with perfect strangers. The origin of the accent she’d worked so hard to minimize was about as far as she was willing to take this conversation. “But if you will tell me why you are here, I can find a more appropriate—”

  “Exactly what did you see me doing last night?” he asked, interrupting her again, his gaze amused, his grin widening. “Did I do it to you?” His gaze warmed, became more suggestive. “Do you wish that I had?”

  “I hardly think you would have had the time,” Grace said with a short laugh, but then his eyes gleamed and she recollected herself.

  She had not worked as hard as she had, nor overcome so much, to ruin it all over someone like this. She didn’t know why Lucas Wolfe, of all people, should get under her skin in the first place. Grace had been working in events management since college, and she had seen her fair share of huge personalities, the very rich and the wished-to-be-famous, and everything in between. Why was this man the first to threaten her renowned calm?

  Lucas only gazed at her, his green eyes mild, though Grace could not quite believe what she saw there. She had the sense, again, that it was all a mask—the shocking masculine beauty, the roguish appeal, the sexy swagger—and that beneath it lurked something far shrewder. But where did such an idea come from? She dismissed it, impatient with herself.

  “If you will excuse me,” she said, her voice perfectly calm, betraying none of her strange internal struggle, “I really must return to my work.”

  “But that’s why I’m here,” he said, an unholy glee lighting up those marvelous green eyes. His mouth pulled into a smirk, and he shifted again, as if bracing himself for a blow—a blow he was fully prepared to handle, his body language assured her.

  A prickle ran through the fine hairs at the back of her neck, making her hands itch to smooth her sleek, understated chignon and make sure it continued to tame her wild blond hair into something appropriate for her position. Making her want to remove herself until she had reverted to the ice queen norm that had saved her time and again, and until she’d gotten the best of this baffling heat he seemed to generate in her.

  “What do you mean?” she asked, hoping she sounded cold instead of anxious. Stern instead of thrown.

  She was resolved to fire whichever member of her staff had let this man in here to unsettle her like this when all of her focus needed to be on the relaunch. Yet even as she thought it, she knew that no one who worked at Hartington’s could possibly deny this man anything—he was a Wolfe. More than that, he was Lucas Wolfe, the most irresistible of his whole compelling, colorful family.

  Even she could feel that pull, that attraction—she who had long considered herself terminally allergic to men of his ilk.

  “I am the new public face of Hartington’s, like my dearly departed father before me,” he drawled, his green eyes sharp and mocking, as if he knew exactly what she was thinking. “Just in time for the centenary relaunch.”

  He smiled then, that famous, devastating smile that Grace discovered could light a fire within her even when she knew he must practice it in his own mirror.

  “I beg your pardon?” she asked, desperately, though she already knew. She could not seem to believe it, to accept it, and her stomach twisted in protest, but she knew.

  That smile of his deepened, showing off the indentation in his jaw that had been known to cause hysteria when he flashed it about like the deadly weapon it was. The smile that had catapulted him into the hearts and fantasies of so many people the world over. The smile that drove so many women to distraction and regrettable decisions.

  But not me, she told herself desperately. Never me!

  “I believe we’ll be working together,” he confirmed, smiling as if he knew better. As if he knew her better than she could ever hope to know herself. As if he had that power already, had claimed it and who
knew what else along with it. “I do so hope you’re the hands-on sort of colleague,” he continued, in a voice that should have infuriated her and instead made her feel weak. Susceptible. His smile deepened like he knew that, too. “I know I am.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  SHE looked appalled, which was not a reaction Lucas often inspired in women. Not even in starchy, standoffish females like this one, not that he met a great many of that breed in the course of his usual pursuits.

  “Working together?” she echoed, sounding as if he’d suggested something unduly perverse. “Here?”

  “That’s the idea,” he said, smiling wider. “Unless, of course, you can think of a better way to pass the time in this dreary office.”

  Normally, even the most constitutionally unimpressed—librarians and nuns and the like—melted at the very hint of his smile. He had been wielding it as the foremost weapon in his arsenal since he was still a child. It had felled entire battalions of females across the globe. It was, in his practiced opinion, even more devastating than that of his younger brother Nathaniel, who was currently up for a Best Actor Sapphire Screen Award and whose inferior smile could be seen via every press outlet on the planet. Lucas was not entirely certain why Grace Carter, prim events manager for bloody Hartington’s, should be immune when legions before her had dissolved at the merest sight of it.

  In point of fact, she scowled.

  “I certainly cannot,” she said, judgmental and starched stiff and horrified. “And I’ll thank you to keep your suggestive comments to yourself, Mr. Wolfe.”

  “How?” he asked with idle curiosity, shifting toward her and watching her tense in reaction.

  “How …?” she repeated icily. “By exercising restraint, assuming you are capable of such a thing.”

  “How will you thank me?” he asked, enjoying the flash of something darker than temper in her eyes, despite himself. “I am quite easily bored, you understand, and therefore only accept the most shocking and ingenious displays of gratitude these days. It’s my personal policy. One must have standards.”

  “How interesting,” she said smoothly. Too politely. “I was under the distinct impression that your standards were significantly more lax.”

  “A common misconception,” Lucas replied easily. “I am not so much lax as laissez-faire.”

  “If by that you mean licentious,” she retorted.

  Her gaze flicked over his battered face. Her distracting Southern drawl went suspiciously sweet. “I certainly hope you won’t be left with any unsightly scars.”

  “On my famously beautiful face?” Lucas asked, affecting astonishment with a small tinge of horror. “Certainly not. And there are always surgeons should nature prove unequal to the task.”

  Not that a surgeon would be much help with his other, less visible scars, he thought darkly. Lucas had not been particularly bothered by the appearance of Samantha Cartwright’s movie-producer husband at a delicate moment the night before. It took more than a few punches to impress him, and in any case, it was only sporting to let a wronged husband express his ill will. There was nothing about the situation that should have distinguished the night from any other night, bruises included.

  Except that, upon leaving the hotel, Lucas had not ordered the waiting car to take him to his soulless flat high above the Thames in South Bank. Instead, responding to an urge he had no interest at all in naming, he had ordered it to take him out into the wilds of Buckinghamshire to Wolfe Manor, the abandoned familial pile of stone and bad memories he had assiduously avoided since he’d left the place at eighteen.

  He’d heard a rumor that his prodigal older brother, Jacob, had returned after disappearing some twenty years before and Lucas, with the typical measure of cockiness brought on by the liberal application of too many spirits, had decided this particular drunken dawn was high time to test the truth of that story.

  But Lucas did not want to think about that. Not about Jacob himself, not about why Jacob had disappeared, nor why he had returned and certainly not about what Jacob had said to him that had spurred Lucas into a series of unlikely actions culminating in his arrival in this office. And so, as he had done with great determination and skill since he was young, he focused on the woman in front of him instead.

  The one who was still scowling at him.

  “If I was someone else,” he said, letting his gaze drift to that expressive mouth she held so tightly, “I might begin to think that scowl meant you disliked me. Which is, of course, impossible.”

  “Never say never,” she replied, so very sweetly.

  “I rarely do,” he assured her in a low voice, lifting his gaze to hers and letting them both feel the heat of it. “As I’d be happy to demonstrate.”

  There was a brief, searing pause.

  “Did you just suggest what I think you suggested?” she demanded, her dark eyes promising fire and brimstone and other such irritants. Her full mouth firmed into a disapproving line.

  He couldn’t have said why he was so entertained.

  “I can’t say that I remember what I suggested,” he replied, smiling again. “But one gathers you’re opposed.”

  “The word is insulted, Mr. Wolfe,” she retorted. “Not opposed.”

  But he knew what that spark in her gaze meant, and it wasn’t insult. “If you say so,” he said, and let his gaze move over her body.

  She was tall and slim, with rich curves in all the right places, bright blond hair and soulfully deep brown eyes, making her the perfect, long-legged distraction. Unfortunately, she was also wearing entirely too many severely cut articles of clothing, all of them designed to force a man’s eye from the very places it was naturally drawn.

  Add to that her scraped-back, no-nonsense hairstyle and it was abundantly clear that this woman was one of those stuffy, deeply boring career women who Lucas found tedious in the extreme. The only kind of distraction this woman would be likely to provide, he knew from painful experience, would come in the form of a blistering lecture concerning his many moral failings rather than a few hot moments with her long legs wrapped around his hips while he thrust deep and true.

  A great pity, Lucas thought, grudgingly.

  “I beg your pardon?” It was not the first time she had said it, he realized. She was still staring at him in a horror he found overdone and on the verge of insulting, her honey-and-cream voice laced with shock. “I don’t mean to be rude, Mr. Wolfe, but are you by any chance still drunk?”

  She might have gone out of her way to hide her many charms, but he happened to be a connoisseur of women. He could see exactly what her full lower lip promised and could imagine the precise, delicious weight of her full breasts in his palms. Why a woman would hide her own beauty so deliberately was a mystery to Lucas—and one he had no interest at all in solving.

  Not today, when there were mysteries to go around. Not ever.

  He moved to one of the chairs in front of her desk and lowered himself into it, watching the way her huge brown eyes tracked his every movement as he sprawled into a much more comfortable position. Not with the shell-shocked, often lascivious awe to which he was accustomed, but with a certain, unexpected wariness instead. He was interested despite himself.

  “Not at all,” he said, smiling at her, knowing that one of his legendary dimples was even now appearing in his lean jaw. “Though a drink would certainly not go amiss. Thank you. I find I am partial to bourbon this week.”

  “I am not offering you a drink, or anything else,” she said, a snap in her voice, though her smile remained nailed in place. “From what I observed last night, I can’t imagine you would ever require another one.”

  “I’m sorry,” he replied easily, still smiling, propping up his jaw with one hand. “Did we meet last night—or were you simply one of the many onlookers? Part of the inevitable crowd? Perfect strangers do so love to watch my every move and make up stories to suit their own opinions of my character.”

  It was meant to embarrass her, as Lucas knew well tha
t even the most prurient gossipmonger hated to be called out as such, but she did not balk. Instead, she waved a hand at his black eye, his split lip, her eyes steady on his. Bold, even.

  “Is a story required?” she asked from behind that veneer of politeness that he noted and knew better than to believe. “The truth seems sordid enough, surely.”

  He forced himself to sink even farther into the chair, every inch of him decadent and debauched, exactly as vile as she believed him to be. He knew more about veneers, about masks and misdirection, than anyone ought to know. It had always been his first and best defense. He thrust aside the dark cloud of memory that hovered far too close today, another offense to lay at Jacob’s prodigal feet, and forced a smile.

  “The wages of sin,” he murmured, his voice suggestive, smoky.

  She would see what he wanted her to see, he knew. The useless parasite, the indolent playboy. They always did.

  “Sin is your area of expertise, Mr. Wolfe,” she said briskly. “Mine is events management.”

  “And never the twain shall meet,” Lucas said with an exaggerated, theatrical sigh. “My heart breaks.”

  “I rather think you operate from a different part of your anatomy,” she said, those dark eyes gleaming.

  “I’m delighted you think about that part of my anatomy,” he replied smoothly. “Feel free to indulge yourself. At length.” He smiled. “No pun intended.”

  He was fascinated by the color that showed against her high cheekbones, the way her full mouth firmed. She was dressed to exude a particular message—competence and elegance—and Lucas could see she hit those notes perfectly. But only a blind man could miss the fact that she was perfectly formed—which made him wonder about the rest of her, the trim body buttoned up tight beneath her layers of black and gray.

  She held herself under such tight control. How could he not imagine what she would be like without it?

  “I should tell you,” he said idly, flicking an imaginary piece of dust from his lapel as if he was not watching her closely, “I have never laid eyes upon something buttoned-up that I was not drawn to unbutton, whether I choose to indulge that urge or not.” He smiled as her hand crept toward the buttons on her suit jacket and then dropped sharply to her side as if she’d reprimanded herself. “It is one among my great many personal failings.”