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 stiffly. 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 while 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. A
ware. “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.
Lucas, meanwhile, only watched her with an undecipherable expression that made Grace distinctly uncomfortable. Wrenching her gaze from his, she returned to the business at hand, grateful that hers was a high-pressure career that had taught her years ago how to always, always appear calm and collected no matter what fires burned inside of her or around her.
No matter if she felt scorched.
This was what she had wanted, she reminded herself more stridently than should have been necessary when she was back in her office, away from his too-incisive green scrutiny. She wanted distance. She wanted him to stay away.
She did.
So there was no reason at all for her heart to skip a beat in her chest when she looked up from a frustrating email chain regarding the florist’s latest temper tantrum about the changed location to see Lucas filling up her doorway, far too broad of shoulder and smoldering of eye.
Her smile felt more forced than usual. As if that odd interlude in the rain had happened only moments ago, instead of days. As if she thought that somehow Lucas could truly see inside of her, where she still shivered for him, still wanted him, still ached for him to put his hands on her, no matter how much she wanted to deny it.
“I need a date,” he said, the corner of his mouth quirking slightly.
For a moment, one panicked beat of her heart and the next, Grace wondered if this was yet another in the succession of vivid dreams she’d been having about Lucas and this very office—all of which started innocuously enough, just like this, and then quickly became shudderingly, achingly carnal.
But he merely waited in the open door, his face particularly unreadable in the gray light from the window. Grace surreptitiously dug a fingernail into her own palm and told herself she was relieved when the sharp little pain lanced through her.
She was awake. But he was still here.
“I’m sure you can auction yourself off for charity, or some such good cause,” she said briskly, as if there had been no strained moment at all. She leaned back in her chair and eyed him warily. “Or, alternatively, step into the street and announce you have a gap in your social schedule. I imagine eligible ladies will tackle you where you stand.”
That knowing smile flirted with the curve of his mouth. There was something especially untamed about him today, Grace thought helplessly. The suit he wore had been crafted with loving attention to every long, sinewy muscle he possessed, every hard, flat surface. His roguish dark hair fell over his forehead, begging for female hands to rake it back into place. But more than that, he seemed edgy. Determined. Words she would never have thought to associate with this deliberately languid, casual man.
But she would not have thought he could act in the interests of Hartington’s, either, a small voice whispered, nor in so skillful a fashion, and he already had.
“Those are both attractive options,” he said after a moment. “But my needs are more specific. You, to be precise.”
Grace felt her stomach drop out of her body. She carefully folded her hands on her lap to keep them from betraying her by shaking. She ruthlessly tamped down on any outward sign, any reaction, because she knew, somehow, that it would be far too dangerous to show him any hint of what those words did to her. Any whisper of the clamoring inside of her, her heart thudding against her chest, all of her wanting with a force that scared her—and she would be lost.
And then what would become of her? She was afraid she already knew—and shoved aside another guilty flash of memory, resolving she would call her mother later to assuage her guilt and attempt to make amends. But that did not mean she would become her.
“I am running out of ways to tell you I am not available to you,” she said with a great calm she did not feel. She met his gaze, her own firm. “Along with the patience necessary to keep saying it.”
“I received the message, believe me,” he assured her, sounding wholly unrepentant. “Though I believe it was the laughing in my face that truly drove the point home.”
His green eyes gleamed with amusement. She found the sight a relief, and then immediately wondered why she cared whether he found her entertaining, on any level. She should not care if he hated her. She should not care if he was entirely indifferent to her. And yet …
“I apologize if I bruised your ego,” she said, with a razor-sharp pretense of sympathy. “I will confess, I thought it impossible.”
“Oh, it is,” he said easily. “Which is why you can spare me a new lecture on appropriate behavior—it bounces right off my shiny, pretty surface.” His mouth pulled into that self-mocking curve. “But I still need you to be my date tonight.” He shook his head when she started to protest. “It is work-related, of course. I may be a desperate egomaniac, but I can, on occasion, listen.”
His eyes were intent on hers, hinting at all the layers of himself he kept hidden that she could sense hovered there, just out of reach.
“Sometimes I am even capable of processing the information I hear,” he continued, deep irony laced through his voice. “It is astonishing.”
“There is no need for sarcasm,” Grace said, trying to sound firm and in control but fearing she sounded unnecessarily prim instead.
He did not answer for a moment, and then, he casually dropped the name of the current reigning pop star sensation, the young woman who had recently taken the country by surprise with her debut album—an achievement made all the sweeter because she was the daughter of one of England’s most beloved former football heroes.
Grace blinked, unable to track the change of subject. “What about her?” she asked, baffled.
“It’s her birthday party tonight,” Lucas said. “Quite the coveted invitation list. It should be one of the events of the year.”
“And, naturally, you’ve been invited,” Grace supplied for him.
He did not bother to address that absurdity, and Grace wondered why she’d bothered to say it. He was Lucas Wolfe. Of course he was invited.
“I thought you could accompany me and we could convince her to sing at the gala,” he said instead, and there was the unmistakable light of challenge in the gleam of his eyes, the set of his chin. “I suspect she’ll do it if I ask. She’s had a crush on me since she was a schoolgirl.”
Grace shook her head at him. Getting the current number-one pop star to perform at the gala would, indeed, be a coup—but for some reason, that was not the part of what he’d said that she focused on.
“She is eighteen!” she chided him, even as she was caught up in the challenge in his gaze. The dare. Even as she found herself unable to look away from him.
“I said she had a crush on me, not that I returned the favor,” Lucas replied, unperturbed. His gaze grew hotter and seemed to light Grace up from within. “Besides, everyone knows I prefer my women older, desperate and married.”
Grace wanted to discuss his sexual preferences about as much as she wanted to fling herself out the window behind her to the cold street below. But that did not keep her mouth from drying out, nor her pulse from leaping at her throat.
“So you are pathetic rather than predatory,” she found herself saying, despite her best intentions. Despite the fact she knew it was not at all wise. “My congratulations.”
But Lucas only smiled.
“Nine o’clock,” he said quietly, his voice as low as his eyes were bold. He let his eyes fall over Grace’s tightly buttoned jacket, then back up, and his lips twisted. “But you cannot wear one of those ghoulish suits you love so much, not in front of the paparazzi in my company. And, I beg you, do something with your hair.”
His smoky gaze met
hers—dared her, provoked her, made her want to throw the nearest paperweight at his inflated head—and then he smiled again.
No one should have a smile like that, Grace thought, hating herself for the flush that washed through her, the fire that licked into her—for her inability to tell him exactly what he could do with his sartorial suggestions.
“Anything else?” she asked tightly, furiously.
Because they both knew that she would do it. She would go to this party and she would dress more or less to please him. Because she had no choice, she told herself, because it was her job to do so, but still—she was surrendering, like all of her worst fears. His eyes gleamed with a hard, male triumph she could feel echo inside of her, making her soften instead of scream. Making her yearn.
“That should do it,” he said in that insinuating voice of his, the one that tickled and teased, and crept along her skin like the softest feather, the lightest touch. “And, Grace—I have a certain reputation to uphold. Don’t force me to choose an outfit for you. I guarantee that you won’t like it.”
She was the most irritating woman he had ever encountered, Lucas thought later that night, lounging on a suede settee in the middle of the celebrity-studded birthday party, under the all-glass dome of one of London’s most exclusive nightclubs. Yet for all his annoyance, he was unable to shift his attention from Grace, who was sitting beside him and yet, somehow, managing to ignore him completely.
He might have admired her fortitude had he not had this electric current of desire and temper surging through him, making him want to take out his frustrations on her very sweet flesh. All over her flesh, again and again and again.
But that was not a productive line of thought.
“No one is convinced by this act,” he told her. “The entire British press knows you are only pretending to ignore me for effect.”
“Just a minute …” she murmured, not paying any attention. Not even glancing at him.
It was lowering, to say the least. Lucas almost laughed at himself. He was brooding in public, which was not like him at all. He, who was known for his ability to make all around him laugh and fall a little bit in love with his smile. But he could not seem to shift his attention from the woman next to him, as she blithely tapped away at that damned PDA of hers. She had taken him at his word regarding her attire—which perhaps he should have expected.
Bad Blood Collection Page 24
