Bad Blood Collection

by Various Authors

  “It’s funny, isn’t it?” His voice was deceptively mild in the quiet office. “We all think we know someone because we’ve seen them in pictures. Isn’t that how you knew I was so contemptible?”

  She did not want to admit that he had a point, throwing that word back at her, and she told herself it didn’t matter, anyway. Rich men acting badly made the world go around. They could, like Lucas himself, wake up one morning wishing for a change, and just like that, executive positions were doled out like candy.

  It was different if one happened to be born dirt poor. And a woman.

  “Let me tell you a story,” she managed to say past the lump in her throat and the tight ball of anxiety in her gut. “You’ll have to use your imagination because it takes place far, far away from a sprawling estate in the English countryside or the glamorous Christmas windows of Hartington’s.”

  She shot a look at him over her shoulder, not sure how she felt when she saw how he watched her, as if he really did know her—something almost tender in his expression. But what did that really mean? He thought the pictures he’d unearthed were a good memory, that they were something other than desperate. He did not, could not, know her at all.

  “I grew up poor, Lucas,” she said as evenly as she could. “Not ‘Daddy refuses to pay my bills this month’ poor, but real poor. ‘Having to choose between rent and food’ poor. A trailer park in a dirty little Texas town that nobody’s heard of and nobody ever leaves, because there’s no money for dreams in Racine.”

  “Grace …” he said, but she was too far gone to stop. She could hear the emotion in her voice, could feel it pumping through her. She did not know why she was telling him this, only that she had to.

  “Mama didn’t understand why I couldn’t just settle down with whatever boy would have me and live the same kind of life that everyone we knew lived, that she lived, but I couldn’t.” She shook her head, as if that would help ward off the accent that returned when she talked about Texas, her words sprawling, her drawl thickening. “I read too much. I dreamed too hard. And even though there was a part of me that loved Racine more than words, because it was home, I knew I had to leave.”

  She swallowed, as if she was still standing in that dusty trailer park, so blisteringly hot in the summer, and the wheezy old air-conditioning forever being turned off to save pennies—even though she could see London in front of her, sparkling and cosmopolitan through the windows.

  “So while the other girls my age were making out in backseats and getting ready to marry their high school sweethearts,” she said quietly, as if remembered dust and despair were not choking her even now, “I was banking everything on a college scholarship.”

  She could hardly bear look at him then, so beautiful and impossible, high-class and expensive, like a male fantasy made flesh. Her fantasy. The only man who had gotten under her skin in eleven long years. She didn’t know why it made her ache to see him as he sat there behind his big desk, as far away from her now as he had ever been. She told herself she wanted it that way. That the kisses they had shared, the odd moments of communion, were no more than an elaborate game to him, and she was not at all the worthy player he seemed to think. That he simply hadn’t known it, but he would now.

  She told herself she was glad.

  “It was one thing to be bookish,” she said, looking at the folder of the photographs that had damned her. “And something else to be pretty.” Her mouth twisted in remembered shame and trembled slightly. “And I was much too pretty. Mama’s new boyfriends were always quick to comment on it. Some of them tried to get too friendly when they were drunk. I kept my head down, hid in the library and studied. I was the top of my class—the top of the state, even. I knew I’d get some kind of scholarship—but I also knew it very likely wouldn’t be enough to cover my expenses. I’d have to do work/study, at the very least. Maybe more than one job, if I wanted textbooks. Or food. But I was destined for better things. That’s what I thought.”

  “You were clearly correct.” Lucas’s voice was cool, crisp. His aristocratic accent seemed to cut through her memories of those hot Texas days like a knife through butter. But it only served to remind her how vast the gulf between them was, and how little he could ever understand her.

  She did not want to think about why she wanted him to understand her in the first place.

  “That fall my class took a field trip to San Antonio to see the Alamo,” Grace said, forcing herself to continue, however little she wanted to keep talking. “And that was where Roger discovered me.”

  She didn’t want these memories. She wished she could excise them from her head and throw them away as easily as she’d gotten rid of all the other things that had held her back from the future she’d so desired. Like her accent. Her roots. Even her mother, who hadn’t wanted her enough, in the end. And it had all started with Roger Dambrot.

  “He was a photographer,” she said. She could feel Lucas looking at her, and she had no one to blame but herself. She had started this, hadn’t she? “Quite a famous one, actually.”

  She had decided to share this story of her past, but that didn’t mean she had to share all of it. Like her doomed, childish love for Roger, who had been as happy to sleep with her as he had been to disappear the moment she veered toward any emotion. She thrust the memory of that first, last heartbreak aside. She had been a colossal idiot, but wasn’t every teenage girl? She’d been so pleased with the attention. So delighted that he could make her look like that with his camera. She’d thought she’d found her calling—her ticket out of Racine and into the bright future she’d always believed she’d deserved.

  “Thanks to him,” she said, fighting to stay calm, “I was offered a lot of money for a modeling contract, and it never even crossed my mind to refuse it.” She smiled, unhappily. “I was proud of it! I thought it proved that I was different—that I was special.”

  “Grace …” Lucas’s voice was a caress. She shook it away.

  “What I did not expect,” she said tightly, “was that appearing in a bathing suit in a national magazine meant that every one in Racine would consider me a whore. The teachers at school. The other kids. My mother’s boyfriend.”

  She could remember it all so clearly, no matter how hard she’d tried to forget it over the years. Travis, her mother’s latest boyfriend, with his copy of an American sports magazine in his hands and that knowing, lustful look in his mean black eyes. The tiny bedroom in the trailer that Grace had always considered her refuge. Travis’s hands, touching her. His big body, reeking of stale beer and old cigarette smoke, pressing her back, pushing her down, making her freeze in panic and confusion.

  And then her mother’s appearance in the doorway—to save her, Grace had thought. Thank God, she’d thought. It had taken so long, too long, for her brain to accept that her mother’s rage and fury was directed at her, not Travis.

  “I should have known you would pull something like this!” Mary-Lynn had screamed at her. “This is how you repay me? After all these years?”

  And the names she’d called Grace. Oh, the names. They were still lodged like bullets beneath Grace’s heart. She could still feel them when she breathed.

  “Once they think you’re a whore,” she said quietly,

  “that’s how they treat you. Even my own mother. And more to the point, her boyfriend.”

  All the things she did not say hung there between them, and Lucas only looked at her, as if she was not more naked, more vulnerable, than she had ever allowed herself to be before. Grace felt a deep trembling move through her, climbing from her feet to her neck, and fought to breathe.

  “I’m sorry,” Lucas said, his voice too soft, so soft it made her eyes heat with the tears she refused to shed. “As it happens, I understand completely what it is like to be judged on photographs, and the conclusions about one’s character that so many people draw from them.”

  “So one would imagine,” she said. She turned around and met his gaze fully, not sure when he�
��d climbed to his feet and not certain she liked the reminder of his height, his surprising grace.

  “Why do you care so much what so many ignorant people think?” he asked, still in that soft voice.

  “Because they were my people!” Grace blinked to keep the wet heat from sliding down her cheeks. “Racine was the only thing I ever knew, and I can never go back. Do you understand what that feels like?”

  “I cannot understand why you would wish to return to a place that scorned you,” Lucas said, his voice low.

  “Those pictures are the reason my mother threw me out of the house when I was seventeen,” she said, as evenly as she could. “I hate them and every thing they stand for. I wanted to make some money for college, and instead I lost my family, my hometown and, for a long time, my self-respect. That’s all you need to understand.”

  “But that was then,” Lucas said, smiling slightly, encouragingly. “Now they are an acknowledgment that you were always, as you are now, a beautiful woman.”

  “I don’t want to be a beautiful woman, whatever that is!” Grace cried, old and new emotions boiling too hot, too wild, inside of her. Why couldn’t he understand? Her looks had never done anything but cause her trouble. She would have removed them if she could. The life she’d built had nothing to do with her body, her face. It had everything to do with how well she did her job, and she couldn’t let go of the panicked notion that if everyone knew what she looked like half-naked that would be all they knew about her, ever after. Again. What would she lose this time?

  “Why should you hide yourself away?” Lucas asked, in the same light tone, because what wasn’t light to this man?

  And it was just too much. Over a decade of anguish seemed to well up within her, threatening to spill over and drown her. She had already been down this road—she knew what happened. Let a man see her as a piece of meat and he would treat her that way, too. This was the truth about men. This was what Grace inspired in them. Hadn’t she spent all these years completely immersed in her job, her career, to keep from having to face the uncomfortable truth? The loneliness? Why had she wanted so desperately to believe that Lucas was any different?

  “Did you really believe I would be delighted to see these pictures?” she countered. Her eyes narrowed. How had she tricked herself into believing there was more to him than this shiny surface? When would she learn that she knew nothing of men—especially not men like Lucas, who wielded sex as just one more weapon? “Or was this one more of the sick little games you play that mean nothing to you, because you are completely heedless of the damage you cause to the people around you?” She was unable to hide the hurt from her voice. “Because you can be?”

  He stood there against his desk, an arrested look on his face, his smoky green eyes changing to something much darker, much grimmer. It was as if she watched him alter before her eyes. Gone was the sly, insinuating good-time guy, made of sin and rumor and utter carelessness. And in his place was this … man. Different. Darker.

  Tortured, she thought, her heart pounding like a drum, too fast and too hard. But how could that be? How could he be hurt?

  And why should she care?

  He is like all the rest! that old voice inside of her cried, still nursing the wounds her mother and Travis had inflicted so long ago. Don’t listen to a word he says—don’t believe the things you think you read on his face!

  But she could not bring herself to move.

  “You have no idea of the damage I can do,” he said, his voice thick with what could only be self-loathing, the lash of it making her blink and sway slightly on her feet. “And ferreting out a few perfectly tasteful pictures from a decade ago hardly match up to the destruction I can wreak. You should count yourself lucky, Grace.”

  She did not want to care about this man. She did not want to feel that unwelcome tug in the vicinity of her heart, or want to soothe away the darkness that had overtaken him. She wished she did not know that he could feel pain, that he could react at all to the things she’d said. She wished he was no more and no less than the flighty playboy she’d believed him to be.

  But if she’d truly believed that, why, the relentlessly logical part of her brain asked, had she told him the story she’d never told another living soul?

  “Do not show those pictures to anyone,” she said, her voice shaking slightly, trying hard not to notice the way his mouth twisted, as if she’d wounded him again.

  “They are only pictures,” he said softly, with a bitterness she could not understand. He swept the folder into his hand, and then pitched it into the wire trash bin that stood next to his desk. “And now they are gone. No lives ruined. But I am Lucas Wolfe, after all. I’m sure there are six or seven other lives I can destroy before the evening news.”

  Grace knew she should have walked away then. She should have turned on her heel and left the offensively luxurious top-floor office he’d done nothing to earn. She should have considered the matter finished, and comforted herself with the knowledge that he was the person she’d believed him to be from the start—shallow, conscienceless, empty.

  But she did none of those things.

  “Why do you want me—the world—to think the worst of you?” she asked before she knew she meant to speak. That odd tension that had gripped her in the lobby of the hotel and out on the street the other night returned, hovering between them, making the air feel heavy with portent and meaning. Regret and fear. Secrets. Hope. Or perhaps that was no more than the way he looked at her.

  “It saves time,” he replied, his voice strained, almost harsh. “There is nothing here, Grace. Nothing beneath the pretty face. Isn’t that what you think? What everyone thinks? Congratulations. You are correct.”

  His pain has nothing to do with you! she cried at herself, but it was as if another person inhabited her body. Another person who swayed closer to him, whose hands itched to reach over and touch him—a person who could not let that much raw pain go unacknowledged. Especially when it was his. A person who could not believe he was who he said he was. Who would not believe it.

  God help her.

  “I think,” she said, very quietly, unable to look away from him, unable to hide herself as she should, as she’d meant to do, because something about the way he was talking made her think he was grieving and she could not ignore that, she simply could not, “that your looks are quite probably the least interesting thing about you.”

  “Grace—”

  He bit out her name, but she could not stop. She lifted her chin and did not so much as blink as she gazed at him. As she saw him.

  “I think that you could teach lessons on how to hide in plain sight,” she said. “That you do it all the time. That you are doing it even now.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE following afternoon, Grace forced herself to unpack her things from her suitcase and put them away in the wardrobe of her cozy room at the Pig’s Head, the only inn and tavern in the quaint little village of Wolfestone—just down the road from Wolfe Manor. The honey-colored beams above her head and the cheerful fireplace in the corner should have made her feel relaxed, as if she was on holiday, but she could not seem to keep the wild tension swirling inside of her at bay.

  In fact, she was not sure she’d breathed fully since that stark, upsetting scene in Lucas’s office. She did not know what might have happened had they not been interrupted by Charles Winthrop’s pursed-mouthed secretary, who had taken no notice at all of the crackling tension in the room and had invited Lucas to visit Mr. Winthrop at once.

  It was only after he’d left that she had retrieved the photographs from his waste basket, because she could not leave them lying around, and certainly not in his office. She had shredded them with great relish in her own office, shoved the past back down into the vault where it belonged and told herself she’d had a lucky escape.

  But somehow, she did not feel lucky at all.

  She should be jubilant, she told herself now and not for the first time, that they had been stop
ped before they could go any further along that road of personal revelation. She had a feeling that they had hovered perilously close to a great disaster, and disaster was something she could not afford with the gala so close. It had been a relief to depart for Wolfestone this morning, knowing that this last stretch of time before the party was crucial—and that living immersed in the venue and on hand to deal with the inevitable issues that would crop up was necessary.

  Necessary and convenient, Grace acknowledged ruefully. There would be little time to deal with the mysteries of Lucas Wolfe. Much less her own confusion regarding her reaction to him. So far she had discovered that she could neither keep her hands off Lucas nor her mouth shut around him. Even his own behavior failed to give her pause. What was next? She shuddered to think.

  There was a sharp knock at her door, and she walked over to wrench it open. A jolt of awareness shot through her when she found Lucas himself standing there, as if she’d summoned him.

  Were they both thinking about those photographs? Grace wet, wild, debauched? She swallowed with some difficulty and felt herself flush.

  Lucas smiled.

  Up close, all hints of the tortured, wrecked man she’d seen the day before were gone. He lounged in the doorway as if he was the local gentry—which, of course, she reminded herself, he was. His wicked mouth crooked invitingly, making his lean and clever face seem positively sinful. One arm was propped up over his head against the doorjamb. His dark hair was artfully tousled, as if he’d just woken from a nap or had raked his fingers through the mess of it. Repeatedly. He was wearing a soft-looking shirt in bright blue that clung like a lover to the planes of his hard chest, thrown carelessly over a pair of denim trousers that fit him like paint, and Grace could not pretend to herself that he was anything but the most gorgeous man she’d ever beheld. He made her mouth run dry.