He had done most of the work that had been allocated to him, most of it relating to the public relations aspect of Hartington’s relaunch, and the marketing and sales plans that went along with it. Lucas was as surprised as anyone else to discover that he had quite a knack for marketing, in addition to PR. It made a certain kind of sense, he supposed. After all, he had been involved in the guerrilla marketing of his own identity since his earliest days.
First, when he’d decided as a child that if he was going to be punished harshly no matter if he was good or bad he’d just as well make sure to be really bad. And then, of course, when he had spent his time at home diverting his father’s violent attentions away from his younger siblings by any means necessary. Better he should take the hit than the younger ones, he’d thought—and anyway, he’d taken a certain, possibly sick pleasure in behaving as if he was, in fact, his father’s worst nightmare.
Is that the worst you can do? he had taunted the usually drunken William, no matter how hard the blow or evil the insult. And no matter what his father came back with, Lucas had always laughed. And laughed. Even if it hurt. He’d always managed to enrage his father even more—and refocus the old bastard’s attention on a target who could take the abuse.
To his siblings he had been and apparently still was the smart-mouthed and charming ne’er-do-well: impossible to take seriously, perhaps, but quick to make them laugh and think of things other than the cruel master of Wolfe Manor. To his father, meanwhile, he had been the devil, taunting and disrespectful, and never, ever as afraid as he should have been.
Perhaps because of the roles he’d assumed so early on, Lucas had discovered quite young that one needed only to suggest a few key points, lay the right groundwork and the world jumped to the specific conclusions he’d intended as if of their own volition. It was all in the marketing, really, with a little PR polish to make it all sparkle.
He had only attempted sincerity once in his life, and that had not ended well. He felt his lips thin as he thought of the two-faced Amanda and how thoroughly she’d broken his young heart. He’d never made that mistake again. When she’d left him, he’d decided it was far easier to be what people expected him to be. Far safer, and far more comfortable in the long run.
Which meant, oddly enough, that he was well suited to the position he’d been given at Hartington’s. Who would have thought it? He could not help a wry smile then. Lucas Wolfe had become what had long been his own worst nightmare: an office drone. By choice. It was the most extraordinary thing.
The iconic old building was dark and quiet all around him. What few noises there were echoed slightly down the abandoned halls. Very few employees were still around this close to midnight on a Thursday, but there was something about the emptiness of the usually busy place that appealed to him. Lucas sat behind his vast, powerful desk and stared out the window, wondering if he looked as much a fraud to the casual observer as he felt. The sudden and inexplicable businessman. The nouveau tycoon. He was certain that if he sat still long enough, he’d be able to hear the howls of derision rise from the wintry London streets far below.
And yet he could not seem to summon the necessary energy that would be required to go out on the town as he normally would, wearing his overused public face and prepared to cavort in front of the cameras as expected. It was as if the Lucas Wolfe he had worked so hard to present to the world for so long no longer fit him as it should, and he did not know what to do about it. There had always been such a fine line between the way he behaved according to the low expectations of whomever he came into contact with and what he did in private, and that line had never, ever been crossed.
No one knew the truth about Lucas, and he liked it that way. Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to argue the point and find that one was suddenly expected to live up to a host of responsibilities that were completely beyond one’s capabilities. Lucas was all too familiar with that brand of failure. That was why, among other things, he kept his particular flair for money management secret and allowed the world to speculate that he lived off the kindness of certain desperate patronesses like a bloodsucking leech.
He did not want to think about why those long-defended and maintained lines seemed to be blurring these days. He had not wanted to impress someone else in so long now that it seemed almost like an elaborate practical joke he was perpetrating against himself, this brand-new compulsion to do so. But he knew it was true. He wanted Grace Carter to think well of him. He could not think of a single reason why he should, and yet there it was, stark and impossible to deny, sitting in front of him like a wall he kept butting his head against.
It was absurd. Suicidal. And yet he still could not manage to get that woman out of his head. The cutting way she spoke to him, as if she expected better from him when she should know that he quite famously had nothing to offer. The grudging respect in her chocolate eyes when it turned out he was good at this PR game or that he knew his way around a marketing plan. The way she’d looked at him that night in the hotel lobby, as if she could see into him, into the places he’d denied existed for so long that he’d almost forgotten about them himself.
He was becoming maudlin, he thought derisively, annoyed at himself. What was next? Perhaps he could rend his garments and start talking about his terrible childhood in the streets, like all the other madmen. Perhaps he could write a self-pitying memoir and hit the talk show circuit to weep crocodile tears and garner sympathy for his poor-little-rich-boy plight. He could not think of anything more pathetic.
So instead, he thought about Grace. She remained a mystery to him, and that had not happened in a very long time. A woman was not usually much more to Lucas than a pleasant diversion, especially not after he’d tasted her. He could not understand why Grace was so different. Why she resisted him, or why she should want to continue to do so. Twice now she had walked away from him. Twice. He could not imagine why anyone would deny the kind of chemistry that raged between them, so explosive he had forgotten himself completely in that party—had actually forgotten where they were. What was the point of denying something so elemental? Chemistry like theirs was hardly commonplace. Surely she knew that.
Or, he considered, rubbing a hand over his jaw, perhaps she did not. Perhaps she was as shocked by it as he had been. She did not strike him as the kind of woman who had had a battalion of lovers. Perhaps she was unaware that she should be chasing this kind of connection like the Holy Grail it was. That seemed so unlikely—she was so strong, so intriguingly self-possessed—yet what did he really know about her?
He leaned back in his decadently plush office chair and considered. He was all too aware that she took her job quite seriously—so seriously, in fact, that it had begun to rub off on him in ways he was not entirely comfortable with. The fact that he was musing over Grace while seated in his office instead of in a hot tub filled to the brim with nubile women whose names he would never learn did rather tell its own story, he reflected, wincing slightly.
He knew that she was quick, and smart, and not in the least bit intimidated by either his famous name or his admittedly formidable good looks, both of which had been known to overawe those who encountered him in the past. He knew she gave as good as she got, and could throw his own words back at him as if she was trying to best him at a game of tennis. He even knew that, on some level, she enjoyed the deliciously combative relationship they’d developed, because he found it surprisingly addictive—and he’d seen the look in her eyes that indicated she did, too.
He knew that she buttoned herself up like a latter-day Victorian maiden and reacted with the same level of overblown outrage when called on it. He suspected she did it deliberately, to hide the mouthwateringly perfect body he had now seen in clinging silk and felt with his own hands. He knew that she unfairly concealed her glorious mess of hair from view, which he felt was an offense against every aesthetic he possessed. Why would a woman allow her hair to grow like that, so wild and free and sexy, and then spend most of h
er life scraping it back and wrestling it into submission?
Grace was a mystery, and Lucas discovered that he did not much care for mysteries. Not knowing left too much to chance, and left him far too unsettled.
Before he knew it, Lucas found himself typing her name into the search engine on his computer, just to see what other tidbits he could come up with. There were pages upon pages of links to her name, most having nothing at all to do with the Grace Carter, events manager for Hartington’s, that he knew. There were images of all kinds of Grace Carters, none of whom were his Grace.
He scrolled idly through the list, trying to imagine the Grace he knew as a production assistant in Los Angeles, a concert pianist from Saskatchewan, a book-writing missionary in the Côte d’Ivoire. And then his eyes fell on one link that did not seem to go along with the others. Gracie-Belle Carter, it read. It made Lucas laugh, even as he clicked through. Gracie-Belle sounded absolutely nothing like the Grace he knew—in fact, it sounded a lot more like the kinds of women, soft and smiling and always submissive, who had helped him solidify his reputation over the years.
But then the picture loaded on the screen in front of him, and Lucas froze in his chair. Desire and curiosity combined, rushing through him like something heady and illicit.
Because it was—yet also wasn’t—the Grace he knew.
The woman before him in full-color photography was more properly a girl, all coltish limbs and ripe curves, hair flowing all around her, sexy and rumpled, wet and lush. One picture showed her in nothing but a pair of bikini bottoms, looking coquettishly over her shoulder at the camera with big eyes and sultry lips, the line of her bare back an enticing, mesmerizing curve. Another featured an even smaller bikini, and a whole lot of sand plastered in interesting places, as she knelt on a dark rock and stared moodily at the camera, holding back her wild, wet hair with both hands. A third showed her lying on her back in some kind of hammock, eyes closed, a wet T-shirt showing the full swells of her breasts while her thumbs were hooked in her bikini bottoms as if she were about to tear them from her body and bare all.
She was delectable. Shockingly sensual in ways he had not imagined she could be, and he knew how she tasted.
It took Lucas longer than it should have to realize that he was looking at an old American sports magazine with a swimsuit photo shoot. It took even longer than that for him to accept that he was, without a doubt, looking at Grace. His Grace, listed as Gracie-Belle Carter from Racine, Texas. She could not have been eighteen when these pictures were taken. She was flushed with youth, yet still somewhat unformed—beautiful in the way young girls could be, but not yet as mesmerizing as she would become with the passing of the years.
His Grace, the born-again Victorian, a swimsuit model? That went against everything he thought he knew about her—and some deep, male part of himself loved it.
Alone in his office, Lucas smiled. He’d known it, hadn’t he? He’d known that she was wild beneath that prim, severe exterior. He’d sensed it, and he’d tasted it. And now he knew for certain.
What would it take to bring the real Grace out of hiding? What would she be like if she let this part of herself free? He felt himself harden just imagining her fierce and unfettered, bold and sexy, hiding nothing.
He sent all the images he could find to the printer. His Grace, a wanton. His Grace, unrestrained and unbound by propriety. He was deeply, darkly thrilled. He couldn’t wait to get under her skin and taste the truth of her, at last.
Grace slammed open his office door without knocking, which was his first clue that he’d riled her considerably. She was halfway across the room before he had time to react at all. When he did, he found he could only watch her as she stormed toward him, the file folder he’d left on her desk gripped tight in one hand.
She was furious.
And glorious, he could not help but notice, with the flush of temper high on her cheeks and the light of battle in her eyes. She had hidden herself away in one more dreary corporate suit, a depressing gray with a long hem and a high collar, and he could not help but imagine her in nothing but her bikini instead. She stopped in front of his desk and slapped the folder of photographs down in front of him.
“I expected you to be contemptible,” she told him in a low, angry voice. “After all, you quite famously have the moral standards of an alley cat in heat, but this is over the top, even for you.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Lucas said easily, leaning back in his chair and eyeing her. She was like a high-octane narcotic, a rush and a thrill, and he could not help the fact that he enjoyed it when she fought with him. “I am excoriated daily for photographs of me, many of which are taken without my consent. You, on the other hand, posed for these, did you not?”
“I was seventeen!” she gritted out from between her teeth, her hands in fists at her sides. “And I have not courted public opinion and infamy every day since!”
“I do not have to court attention, Grace,” he replied, smiling slightly. “It finds me whether I want it or not.” He indicated her presence before him with a languid wave of his hand, and was rewarded by the sparks that flashed like lightning in her eyes.
“That might have been more believable before you proved yourself to be a master manipulator of the press, the marketing department and anyone else you come into contact with,” Grace seethed at him. She shook her head fiercely. “I don’t believe your lazy playboy act any longer.”
Lucas did not speak for a moment, watching the play of emotion across her face instead. There was fear behind her anger, fueling it. He found it fascinating—and disconcerting. Something turned over in his gut.
“What happened to you?” he asked her quietly, his eyes searching her flushed face.
He took in the inevitably sleek and perfect bun she’d wrapped her hair into, the severe and overly conservative cut of her suit. All she was missing was a pair of clunky black eyeglasses, and she could have completely embodied the stereotype. Why was she hiding? What was she hiding from?
And why was he so compelled to find out the truth about her?
“If you mean what happened to me this morning,” she snapped at him, vibrating slightly with tension and fury and that incomprehensible fear, “I came into the office to discover that the resident Don Juan spent his free time digging around in a past I leave buried for a reason!”
“I mean, in your life,” he said, shaking his head slightly. The look in her dark eyes made him feel restless, made him want to do things that were anathema to him—like try to save her, galloping in on a gleaming white horse and pretending to be someone who could. But he had stopped rescuing people a long, long time ago. “I could hardly believe these were pictures of you. Why do you hide all your joy, power, beauty? Why do you pretend that part of you never existed?”
“Because she never did!” Grace threw at him, her hands rising and then dropping against her thighs, her voice much too rough, too raw.
And then, to his horror, her dark brown eyes filled with tears.
* * *
She could not cry. She would not cry—not in front of this man, who had managed to expose her darkest secret with the same lackadaisical smirk and easy carelessness as he did everything. Not here, not now, where she was already far too vulnerable.
She had almost passed out when she’d opened that folder after the morning meeting. Shame and horror had slammed into her with too much force, too much pain, and the fact that it had been Lucas who had found the pictures, Lucas who had seen her like that … It made her want to sob. Or scream. Perhaps both.
Thank God she’d been alone in her office! Of all the things she’d expected to see in a folder from Lucas, the very worst mistake she’d ever made had not been on the list. Sometimes, eleven long years later and a world away, she even let herself forget about it for long stretches at a time. She would tell herself that everyone had things they would prefer to forget tucked away in their history, that it hardly bore thinking about any longer.
That her mother had not been right. That she had not been ruined so long ago, when she had let it all happen. That she was not beyond the pale, as she’d been treated. That her mother should have believed her—and should not have disowned her.
But she had been kidding herself, apparently.
He had presented the glossy reminder of the worst year of her life to her in bright color photographs, in her office, the one place where Gracie-Belle had never existed. Could never exist. Gracie-Belle had died the moment those pictures were published, and she’d been so young and so stupid it had taken her far longer than it should have to recognize that fact. She’d needed money desperately enough to forget everything she’d learned about the way men were, and the way the world worked—and she’d paid for that. She was still paying.
Grace’s hands curled into fists at her sides. How dare he throw those pictures in front of her as if he knew something about them—about her?
“I do not expect you to understand,” she said coldly, stiffly, desperately fighting to sound calm—no tears, no sobbing, no shouting—and not quite succeeding. “You have never needed anything in your privileged, aristocratic, yacht-hopping life, have you?”
“Grace,” he said, his green eyes growing dark as he stared at her, that confidence he wore like a second skin seeming to slip before her eyes, “you are taking this the wrong way. I only meant—”
“To humiliate me?” she interrupted him wildly. “To punish me because I refused to sleep with you?”
He looked appalled. Shocked. “What? Of course not!”
They stared at each other for a searing, tense moment. He swallowed, then shrugged, visibly uncomfortable. “I only wanted to remind you. Of who you are. Who you could be.”
“Who I am?” she asked, hearing the bitterness in her own voice. She tried to shake it off, turning away from him toward the wall of windows and the lush little seating area grouped before them. “How could you possibly know who I am?”
Bad Blood Collection Page 27
