“They are more likely to dress in designer labels and behave as if they are normal human beings,” Lucas replied dryly. “When they are not. Not one of them.”
She searched his face for a moment, then twisted around to look out the window, as if she, too, could pierce the darkness with her gaze and see the dilapidated manor house in the distance.
“Is that why it was abandoned?” she asked, and he knew she meant the house, not him. “Too many ghosts?” She frowned slightly, as if trying to make sense of it. “Was it easier somehow to let it crumble into the ground?”
“If it were mine,” Lucas said with a quiet ferocity, “I would demolish it and salt the earth on which it stood.”
Her brows arched then, and another near-smile played over her generous mouth, drawing him like a moth to a flame. He could not bring himself to look away.
“That seems unduly dramatic,” she said. “Surely you could simply choose not to visit. Or donate the place to English Heritage. It is only a house.” When he did not speak, she shrugged. “And surely not all of your siblings share your opinion of the place?”
“We are not close,” he said. He laughed slightly, a hollow sound. “Or perhaps it is more truthful to say they are not close with me. And why should they be?”
“Because you are their brother,” Grace said quietly, as if she believed in him. As if she knew him. And he could not let her, could he? He could not let her think he was something other—something better, something less worthless—than he was. Not even if it felt as if she’d wrapped him in sunshine. This was meant to be an exercise in exorcism, not in intimacy.
He sat down next to her on the plush, bright couch, confused by the urge to be near her even when he planned only to disabuse her of any positive notions she might have of him. Then, even more confusing, he reached over and took one of her pale, slender hands in his. He did not understand himself, when he thought he had looked into every dark corner he possessed, and more than once, leaving no surprises. He had never been more of a stranger to himself than he was tonight.
“One night when I was eighteen,” he said, striving for an even tone, “William got drunk. This would not have been of interest to anyone, you understand, except that on that particular night he worked himself into a temper over my sister, Annabelle.” He smiled, though it was the barest sketch of a smile. “He brutalized her,” he said, his voice growing raspy. He indicated his face with his free hand. “Slashed her face with a riding crop.”
“Why?” Grace breathed, her eyes wide.
“He was a bully and a drunk,” Lucas said caustically. “Did he need a reason?” He shook his head slightly. “My brothers tried to stop him,” Lucas continued. “But they were too young. When my older brother, Jacob, came home, he waded right into it.” He paused and looked at her, hard. “I was not there, of course. I was chasing a set of twins through Soho.”
But she did not flinch, nor look away. So he did.
“When Jacob pulled William off Annabelle,” he said, concentrating on their linked hands, “he punched the drunken bastard as he richly deserved. Hard.”
Grace’s hand tightened around his, as if she knew. “And then?” she asked quietly.
“He died,” Lucas said matter-of-factly. “That was always the William Wolfe way.” He let out a derisive sound. “He always did get the last laugh.”
“I am so sorry,” Grace murmured. “For all of you.”
“It is my younger siblings you should feel sorry for,” Lucas said, that jittery feeling washing over him, as it always did. Muted, somehow, but still there, making him restless. Making that old self-loathing glow and expand within him. “Once Jacob was cleared of any charges, he, of course, put his life on hold to be a guardian to us all, because that was Jacob. Generous to a fault. The perfect older brother. But he could not live with himself.” Lucas shook his head. “What did that vile old bastard ever do to deserve regret? What did he do besides make us all miserable?”
He could hear the echo of his voice, raw and rough, and was glad there was no mirror nearby. He felt certain he would find himself unrecognizable. His heart was hammering against the walls of his chest and he felt unhinged, untethered, as if he might explode. But then Grace brought their linked hands to her mouth and kissed his knuckles, one by one, and Lucas let himself breathe.
“I dreamed every night for years that I’d killed William myself,” he said quietly. He turned to meet her troubled gaze. “I hated him. I would not have lost a single night’s sleep if I’d been the one to kill him, accidentally or otherwise, nor would the weight of him on my conscience, such as it is, have caused me a moment’s pause.”
“Then what does?” she asked, and he had the most uncomfortable feeling, once again, that she could read him. Much too easily, and far too closely. “Because,” she continued, “it is clear that something weighs on you, Lucas. Heavily.”
“It’s only myself,” he answered, with unflinching honesty. “When Jacob left, the role of guardian fell to me.” His smile felt like acid. “I was unfit for the position, to put it mildly. I abandoned them, too. Deserted them. That is the kind of man I am.”
The room was quiet. The enticing scents of the food set out on the room service tray perfumed the air, and the wind rattled the windowpanes.
“How old were you?” Grace asked after a moment, her gaze unreadable, her face calm.
“Eighteen.” He made a bitter sound. “A man.”
“Or, perhaps, a boy who had been brutally treated the whole of his life,” she said quietly, holding his gaze. “A boy who knew nothing at all about how a parent should act. I think you expected far too much of yourself. Unfairly.”
He looked at her for a long moment, his history shimmering between them, his failures and flaws lying out there with nothing to cover them. Not his charm, his wit, his face—none of the usual tools he’d used his whole life to prevent a moment like this from ever occurring.
And what was most unreal was that he had done all this himself. He had thrown all of this at her feet. And he still could not allow himself to think about why he had done it. He did not dare.
“This is what I was talking about earlier,” he said, reaching over to cup her jaw in his hand, his body thrilling to the feel of her soft skin, the way her lips parted slightly. “No one has ever expected anything of me, Grace. Least of all me. Why should you?” He stroked his thumb along her soft cheek. “Why do you?”
Her eyes were luminous. Deep and unwavering as she stared back at him.
She shrugged slightly, though her gaze never left his. “Perhaps it’s time you started.”
And then she turned her head, pressing her lips into the palm of his hand, and that simply ruined him.
CHAPTER TEN
GRACE felt all the blood drain from her head, fast, as she stared at the tabloid newspaper in front of her. Her stomach twisted into a complicated pretzel and she thought for a moment she might simply pass out from the shock. Her knees wanted to give way beneath her. Her mind wanted to simply succumb to the spiral of dizziness.
But she did none of that, much as she might have wished otherwise. Instead, she could do nothing but read the paper the visibly embarrassed member of her staff had handed her when she’d arrived at the team breakfast meeting prepared to go over the last-minute details before the gala—which was tonight.
“I’m so sorry,” Sophie murmured in an undertone—or perhaps she shouted. Grace could hear nothing over the kettle-drum pounding of her heart.
The headline screamed in block letters: LUCAS RELAUNCH? WOLFE UP TO USUAL TRICKS WITH AGING SWIMSUIT MODEL. The article that followed featured not just the pictures of Grace kissing Lucas at the pop princess’s birthday party—fully identifiable despite her hair swirling around her and her eyes dazed with passion, sprawled over his lap as if she were made of syrup—but also the old American sports magazine photos that Lucas had unearthed. In full, unavoidable color.
Grace stood there like a stone and stared at the
paper in her hands. This was what it felt like to have her entire life fall to pieces, she observed from an odd, stunned distance. This was how it happened, then: all of her years of hard work came to a screeching halt in a place called the Pig’s Head, while her entire body was displayed in a trashy newspaper for the whole of Great Britain to pore over. She was sure she would have some feelings about that, but for the moment she felt paralyzed, aware only of all the eyes fastened to her, waiting for her reaction.
How could this be happening?
The biggest party of her career was in a matter of hours, and her half-naked body was plastered all over the tabloids. Not exactly the classic yet modern sensibility Hartington’s wished to portray, she was certain. And even worse than the swimsuit photos, everyone in the entire world—including the entire staff, all the executives, and the board of directors of Hartington’s—would now know that she was sleeping with Lucas Wolfe.
She waited for that anguish to spill over, as it nearly had in Lucas’s office, but it did not come.
“Sorry, Grace,” Sophie muttered again, red-faced with embarrassment, as everyone else pretended to be absorbed in their morning tea and full English breakfasts. “But everyone was reading it and I thought you should know.”
A quick glance around showed Grace that there were, indeed, copies aplenty of this particular tabloid rag—seemingly one on every table in the restaurant. No doubt on every breakfast table in all the world. Her mother was no doubt reading it even now in Racine, Texas, and nodding knowingly over Grace’s behavior and patting herself on the back for stamping out the viper in her nest. Terrific.
“Thank you, Sophie,” Grace said with every stitch of poise she could dredge up from inside herself.
It was her very worst nightmare, broadcast in lurid color, in the shape of her seventeen-year-old bikini-clad body. She knew what happened next. She knew how this scene played out. She felt her gorge rise in her throat, and wondered, still as if from a distance, if she might actually get sick in full view of her entire staff and half the village of Wolfestone, all of whom were packed into the Pig’s Head to watch her with avid gazes only some tried to hide.
She simply could not allow that to happen.
Especially not when Lucas sauntered in from the lobby, looking sleepy and rumpled and as if he’d just rolled out of a decadent bed—which she happened to know that he had, as she had been in it with him. Every head in the room swiveled to track him as he wound his way through the tables toward her. Grace could hear the whispering, the muttering. She could feel the speculation heat up the room, as if gossip were an electric current and she was being slowly, surely electrocuted.
Grace watched him approach, noting that easy lope, that careless swagger that called so much attention to his inescapable masculine beauty. She’d spent a week learning every last detail of his long, lean body, and melting under the sorcery of his clever hands, and her body wanted more. Now. It readied itself for him as if on command, melting and shivering, as if he had not been thrusting deep inside her, kneeling over her with his hot mouth fastened to the nape of her neck, one wicked hand wrapped around her breast and the other at her core, not twenty minutes earlier.
She had to clench her thighs together and force her bland, professional smile. Apparently, he was irresistible, even when the worst had happened. Was happening, she amended. Right now.
But something occurred to her then, as Lucas walked toward her. This had already happened. Lucas had seen these photos, and nothing had changed. He had still wanted her. Her, not some fantasy photograph of her. He had not called her names, or looked down at her. The world had not ended—if anything, the photos had been the catalyst for a whole new world of possibility she’d never imagined.
Why do you care so much what so many ignorant people think? he had asked.
And she could not help but ask herself, why did she?
Grace watched him read the room as he moved through it. She saw the cool calculation in his green gaze as he drew close, and could now tell the difference between the real Lucas and the self-mocking, lazy and careless Lucas he produced on cue, as he did now, smirking slightly as he reached the team’s table.
She preferred the real one, but she was deeply grateful for his easy mask today.
“Has it finally happened?” he asked mildly, yet in a voice that seemed to accidentally carry throughout the room. He smoothed a hand down his chest, calling attention to his excellent physique, and the phenomenal way he’d chosen to package it today in a tight-fitting green designer T-shirt beneath a fashionable black sport coat and a pair of distressed denim jeans that transformed his delectable behind into sheer poetry. “Have I become better-looking overnight?”
A wave of laughter swept through the room. Because everyone loved Lucas, Grace thought. How could they not? He was so good at pretending to take nothing seriously, least of all himself, and it was impossible not to laugh when he did.
Their eyes met, held. Something almost painful flared between them, silently, and she felt her practiced calm sweep through her. She saw that fierce light gleam in the depths of his gaze, the one she wondered if only she could see. The one that showed her the truth of him, that she craved more than she should. But she was forced to ignore it in front of so many interested gazes. She handed him the tabloid, keeping her face expressionless.
“Not yet,” she said. “Though you are, apparently, as interesting to the press when you are shilling for Hartington’s as when you are romancing minor royalty on the Continent.”
She could see the nearly imperceptible way his body tensed. She could almost see, as well, the anger roll off him in waves. Was it the fact that they were in the tabloids, or the offhanded way she’d introduced the topic, as if she thought what had happened between them had something to do with Hartington’s? She could not tell. And either way, no one else seemed to notice anything in his body language at all. All they could see was scandal, and the bright shining light that was the presence of Lucas Wolfe.
“Unfortunately, I grew bored of me years ago,” he said in his everyday, mild and languid tone. He tossed the paper aside without so much as a glance at it, as if the article held no interest for him. He then sat down at the table with every appearance of relaxed ease, signaling the hovering waitress for hot coffee—the topic clearly closed as far as he was concerned.
Grace swept a quick look over the table as she took a seat opposite him, confident she exuded nothing but her usual competence in the face of all the averted eyes, the speculative glances. She would not give them the reaction they clearly wanted. She would not let them see her crack. She would be nothing but her usual ice queen self, ready for another day’s work with a calm smile and a no-nonsense approach to even this.
They were only pictures, and the truth was, before Travis and her mother had sullied the experience, she’d liked them. They were gorgeous pictures, and just happened to be of her. They’d paid for her college education and, one way or another, they’d made her the driven, successful woman she was today.
Why should she be ashamed of them?
And what went on between her and Lucas was nobody else’s business.
So she ignored the damned tabloid, and the too-beautiful man who watched her with hooded green eyes and a disconcerting intensity, and snapped open her event notebook instead.
“All right, then,” she said briskly, as if this was any other morning. Any morning meeting on any normal day. As if everyone at the table had not seen what she knew they’d seen. Her nearly naked body, in so many suggestive poses. Her passion-flushed face. But there was nothing she could do about that now, and she’d be damned if she’d apologize for herself, so she shoved it aside. “We’re in the final countdown, people,” she said. “Tell me where we are and what needs to happen before tonight.”
The irony, she thought as the staff member nearest her launched into his spiel, was that before she’d walked into the breakfast room this morning, she had been on track to thinking this had bee
n the most magical week of her life.
The week in Wolfestone had passed like some kind of delicious, wickedly sensual fever dream. For the first time in her life, Grace had not analyzed, plotted or planned out her every last move. Nor had she let the past keep her locked down, hidden away. Once she had accepted the fact that she would not be beating Lucas at his own game, that she wanted him as much as he wanted her, and could neither fight it nor summon the will to try, she had simply … lived.
The days were full to bursting with all the last-minute details involved in transforming the long-forsaken Wolfe Manor into the appropriate spot to celebrate the new Hartington’s. Grace traipsed over every inch of the site with the designer and various contractors, nailing down the final details of placement, construction, access and out-of-bounds areas, parking and security. She had coordinated all the reports from her staff regarding the floral arrangements, the dramatic ice sculptures and their delivery, the many food stations that would have to entice the guests yet never overpower the tented area with long queues—all stocked with delicacies available in the revered Hartington’s gourmet food hall.
She went over set lists with the DJ and the band, debated the placement of the dance floor and spent hours placating both the talent and their often far more excitable representatives. She made sure the details of transportation for all of the A-list guests, talent and executives were nailed down and agreeable to all parties. She held the caterer’s hand during a brief breakdown over the mini-Cornish pasties. She did her job, and she did it well.
And then, every night, she lost herself in Lucas’s arms.
He was the least inhibited, most adventurous lover imaginable. He knew no boundaries, had no hang-ups and always maintained his wicked sense of humor. He was as happy to have her standing up against the wall as slippery and wet in the deep tub. He was as interested in exploring her body as in having her test his hardness in her mouth. He reached for her again and again, but he also held her so tenderly, and kissed her so sweetly, that it made Grace ache in ways she knew better than to consider too closely. He was not at all the man she’d thought he was when he’d first walked into her office, and Grace hardly knew how to reconcile all the different images she had of him in her head—much less in her heart.
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