It was easier, somehow, when they were both naked, and her body hummed with an overload of pleasure after another demonstration of his boundless enthusiasm for all things carnal in general and Grace’s body in particular.
“I may require a stiff drink,” she had said one night as they lay on the thick, soft rug before the fire, smiling as he toyed with the ends of her hair, curling the waves around his finger as she lay sprawled across his chest. “Perhaps several.”
“To dull the pain?” he had asked in his mocking way, but she’d known him better by then and had known that he was teasing her—and more, that the mockery he used so skillfully was perhaps the only form of affection he knew how to give. It made her feel warm.
“To see which is more potent,” she had said softly, propping her chin on her stacked hands and looking at him, as if she could memorize the artistic dream that was his beautiful face, so close to hers. “Hard liquor or you.”
There had been a moment then, a heartbeat or two too long, when he had gazed back at her with an almost arrested look in his smoky green eyes, as if he could not quite work her out. She loved such moments—when she knew she was looking at the true, unadulterated Lucas. The real man, not the act.
“I imagine it very much depends on the bartender,” he had said, but she had the sense he had wanted to say something else entirely. His smile sharpened. “I did used to be one, as it happens. In a former existence.”
“What?” She had wrinkled up her nose as she gazed at him. “Yet another job? You continue to destroy my faith in your terrible reputation.”
“Keep your faith,” he’d suggested dryly. “I had no choice but to get a job—any job. I’d already blown through the first part of my inheritance with a group of disreputable malcontents all over London, and I was all of twenty-three.”
“Only the first part of your inheritance?” she’d asked in the same dry tone. “Not the whole of it? That seems to lack commitment.” She had not wanted to think about the amount of money that might have been, nor how he had managed to throw it all away. It might have sent her fiscally conservative heart into cardiac arrest.
“My father perhaps anticipated that his children might take his profligate, hard-partying example to heart,” he’d said, with that challenging gleam in his eyes, daring her to swallow yet another example of how terrible he believed he was. “Or that I might, anyway. My inheritance was split in two. Half on his death, and half again should I survive to my thirtieth birthday. He expressed his doubts about the latter in his will.”
“And you lost the first half by the age of twenty-three,” she had said, forced to shield her gaze from his at that point. She’d looked at the hard muscles of his chest instead, the tempting valley between his pectorals, the steel-hewn strength of his shoulders.
At twenty-three, she had used her carefully chosen, prestigious summer internship as a springboard into her first events management firm, and had been working on her first parties. She had never wasted a single penny in all her days. Her modeling money had paid for what her scholarship had not and then some, because she had always been obsessed with savings accounts, a retirement fund and the careful stewardship of conservative investments. She could not allow herself to imagine the kind of money Lucas had frittered away.
But then, she could not imagine the childhood he had had to live, either.
“I managed to charm my way behind a bar in one of the casinos in Monte Carlo,” he’d said then, holding her to him as he’d shifted slightly beneath her.
“Monte Carlo,” she’d echoed, shaking her head at him. She thought of the famous sweep of tall buildings cascading toward the yacht-studded marina, all of it huddled there between the craggy French mountains and the sparkling Mediterranean. “Of course. Where all the paupers naturally congregate.”
He’d ignored her, though his eyes gleamed and he ran a possessive hand along the length of her spine, making her arch against him, feeling like a fat and satisfied cat.
“It was my first job, and I was shockingly good at it,” he’d said with his usual modesty. “I was showered in fantastic tips, no doubt in enthusiastic recognition of my keen knowledge concerning all things alcoholic.”
Grace had laughed, and had pulled herself up to sitting position, pulling her mess of hair over one shoulder to rake her fingers through it like a makeshift comb.
“No doubt,” she’d agreed. But when she’d looked down at him he had a strange expression on his face. “What is it?” she’d asked.
“Do you remember the first time you fell in love?” he’d asked then, his expression unreadable. But she’d had no doubt it was not an idle question. Or, at least, it had not felt in the least bit idle to her.
Grace had felt the fine hairs on the back of her neck stand at attention, and had had to look away, to focus on the flames dancing merrily in the fireplace, crackling and popping. She’d told herself she was tired from all their lovemaking and the insanely busy days—that there was no other reason her face should feel warm, or there should be that worrying wet heat behind her eyes.
“Of course,” she’d said quietly. “I was a teenager, and I was mistaken.”
But his hand on her bare thigh was kind, and somehow she had found herself telling him the rest of the story about Roger Dambrot. How she had thought giving him her virginity was the same as giving him her heart, and how devastated she had been when he had been so contemptuous of both. How utterly destroyed. How her mother had spoken to her, and what she’d said. And then, so soon afterward, the scene with Travis. All those predictions, those curses. And worst of all, how Grace had always believed them—how she’d always thought falling in love and sex and emotion were inextricably linked with shame, loss, pain.
“I thought if I could keep myself apart, removed, I could escape the future she’d always predicted for me,” she’d told Lucas. “Blood will tell, she said. Carter women were fated for heartbreak and misery.” She’d bit at her lip. “And then, later, she said I was fated for far worse.”
“Perhaps you were simply seventeen,” he’d said gently. “Gorgeous and new, while she was simply jealous.”
“Jealous?” It wasn’t that Grace had never considered that possibility before; it was the way he’d said it. So matter-of-fact. As if, contrary to everything Grace had always believed, there had never been anything wrong inside of her. As if she’d never had any reason to be ashamed.
“Jealous,” he’d said again. “And you were too young to know better.” He’d met her gaze. “I was no better, let me hasten to assure you. The bar manager’s name was Amanda, and I fell madly in love with her. She had the most adorable little girl.” He’d smiled the kind of smile that made Grace want to weep, without even knowing why. “Her name was Charlotte, and I worshipped every angelic curl on her head with all the weight and gravity of my twenty-three-year-old heart.”
“Why do I sense this does not have a happy ending?” Grace had asked.
“Because love stories never do,” he had replied, his eyes crinkling in the corners as if he meant his words lightly. Grace had not been fooled. “Amanda started working all night shifts, but I hardly minded. I took care of Charlotte. I was dependable, stable. Good.”
His voice had taken on that self-mocking lash again, harsher this time, deeper. Grace did not say a word; she merely laid back down beside him and pressed her lips to the place where his shoulder met his arm. And then against his lean, hard jaw, not sure he would speak again.
“It turned out she was having an affair with a wealthy older man,” Lucas had said eventually, with a derisive smirk. “It was such a cliché. I believe I was no more to her than convenient child care. Poetically, I had been planning to tell her my true identity the very night she confessed.”
He had not gone into details, but the bleak look on his face told Grace all she needed to know about Lucas and love. It was not necessary for him to draw her a picture. He had never had love, nor security, nor family, not really. He had felt responsib
le to his siblings when he could be the punching bag in their stead, but he was so convinced that there was nothing good in him, nothing worthwhile, that he had gone out of his way to prove it, again and again—even when his siblings could actually have used him as something other than the most convenient target. And then he’d found a brand-new family, and had dared to hope—only to have that hope cruelly crushed. Again.
She would have cried for him, had she not suspected he would hate her for it.
“Things did not end well for Amanda,” he’d said, with evident satisfaction. “This may come as a great shock to you, as it did to me, but her marriage did not work out. Neither did any of her subsequent ones. I confess that I take greater pleasure in that than I should.”
“And Charlotte?” Grace had asked, running her hand along his chest, letting her palm rest over the hard plane of muscle that covered his heart, broken though she knew it must be beneath.
“She was far luckier,” he had said after a moment. His mouth curved. “It turned out she had a very generous and anonymous benefactor, who made certain that her mother’s many reversals of fortune over the years never affected her. She is currently at a Swiss boarding school, where, by all reports, she is thriving.”
“Lucky Charlotte,” Grace had said, hiding her smile against his warm skin. “But I thought you had lost all your money?”
“I made back my squandered inheritance, and then some,” Lucas had said, eyeing her with that air of challenge again. “By the time I was twenty-five. I found being discarded for a wealthier and far less attractive man exceedingly unpleasant. I much prefer to be cast aside for the defects in my personality, thank you.”
“As do we all,” she’d agreed, humoring him.
He’d smiled then, showing her that beloved dent in his lean jaw, that irresistible sparkle in his eyes. The sheen of vulnerability behind them. “But these are all deep, dark secrets, Grace. Can you be trusted to keep them?”
“You will just have to wait and see,” she’d said lightly, her heart aching for this man, who would have argued if she’d suggested he was a hero to the little girl he’d loved and still protected. Who could not allow himself even the smallest shred of compassion. Who was so convinced he was damned.
Who had, she’d understood that night with a deep, searing certainty that might have frightened her if she hadn’t felt the rightness of it, stolen her heart without her even having been aware of it.
“If I must wait,” he’d murmured, pulling her closer and twisting so that he came over her on the rug, settling in between her legs with his arousal jutting hard and proud against her, “then we really ought to while away the time more amusingly.”
“I can’t think of anything to do,” she’d whispered, caught by the emotion darkening his eyes, so at odds with the smile on his face, the lightness of his words.
“Neither can I,” he’d replied, and thrust into her, riding them both into oblivion.
Grace finished the morning meeting with her trademark minimum of fuss, and sent her staff off to attend to their duties. Her temples ached from the effort of maintaining her usual serenity, and she had an extremely unpleasant phone call to make to Charles Winthrop before she could head out to the manor house and oversee the final preparations for tonight. She gathered up her things as the team left and strode from the restaurant as if she could not see the patrons still looking at the tabloid and then measuring her against it—and as if she was unaware of Lucas’s golden, impossibly beautiful presence at her side.
“We should talk about this,” he said in a low voice as Grace headed up the inn’s stairs toward her room two floors above.
“There is nothing to say,” she replied, clutching her mobile in her hand as it vibrated yet again—announcing, she knew, one more no doubt increasingly tense message from Charles Winthrop’s secretary, ordering Grace to call in. “What’s done is done,” she continued. “The only thing to do now is minimize the damage—”
“Grace.” It was the snap of command in his voice, or perhaps the darkness beneath it, the edge in it, that had her slow her steps and turn to face him.
They had rounded the corner of the stairwell, and stood in the no-man’s-land between the floors. Though the bustle of the inn below them floated up the stairs, they were for all intents and purposes hidden away from all the eyes that had watched them so closely in the restaurant. Grace felt that same sweet, hot cocoon close around her, the way it always seemed to do when she was near him, as if there was some kind of bubble that they could disappear into when they were together. She did not know why she should feel it now, when she knew in the worst possible way that it was not true at all. That there was no bubble, there was nothing safe—there never had been. His world involved spies with cameras and was always monitored. She should have expected it.
“I have to call Mr. Winthrop,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper.
She was too caught in his troubled green gaze, too afraid that if she stepped any closer to him she would melt against him as she always did, and if she melted, she would let out all the emotions that she knew must swirl around inside of her somewhere. And she could not let that happen. Not with this phone call to handle somehow, and the gala to pull off—assuming she was not summarily fired for indecency.
“I did not do this,” he said, his voice fierce, his hands clenched into fists at his sides. “I did not hand those pictures over. I am capable of many things, Grace, but not that.”
She was stunned. She blinked, and swayed toward him, putting a hand out to grasp his arm before she knew what she was doing. Before she remembered that she could not touch him without causing the very melting she was trying to avoid.
“That never even occurred to me,” she said, emotion beginning to flood in from wherever she’d been keeping it. Perhaps she should have suspected him—perhaps she should have imagined that Lucas might betray her, but she had not. It had not even crossed her mind. What did that say about what had happened to her in the past week? Since she’d met him? Did she really trust him? Should she? Or was this precisely the same path she’d watched her mother tread a hundred times—leading straight to Travis, the biggest liar of all? Was this the ruin that had always been her destiny?
The mad part was, she was not at all sure she cared.
“This is my fault,” he said in the same low, angry voice. “I will take full responsibility. I’ll ring Charlie myself—”
“I appreciate the offer,” she said, cutting him off. She shook her head, more at herself than at him. More at the panic she did not feel, the terror that was not dragging at her. Her lack of shame and despair. When had she stopped fearing what he could do to her? When had she decided to enjoy him instead? “But this is my mess, Lucas. I’ll handle it.”
“I am a great seducer of women,” Lucas said, the self-loathing crackling in his voice, turning his eyes nearly black. “I am sure he will have no trouble at all believing that I led you astray. That is what I do, after all.”
His pain, his toxic hatred of himself, was like a live thing pressed between them, electric and dangerous. It pushed against Grace, crowding her, making her want to fight back. To fight him. To show him the truth.
“You did not seduce me,” she reminded him, her hand tightening on his arm. “It was the other way around, if you remember—and anyway, it is none of Charlie Winthrop’s business, which I intend to make clear to him. I notice your mobile is not ringing off the hook. Why should mine be?”
“I am a pollutant,” he said bitterly, his eyes grim and focused on her, as if he was desperate for her to understand. As if his world hung in the balance. “I destroy everything that crosses my path, sooner or later. None of this would have happened to you were it not for me. This is what happens to the people I care about, Grace—and heaven help you if you care about me. Then I’ll rip your heart out and make you regret you ever met me.” He let out a hollow bark of laughter. “You need only ask my family.”
“Nothing has h
appened,” she said very distinctly, searching his face for the Lucas she knew, the Lucas who could be tender, gentle. Funny. Wry. Not this dark, angry man who she well believed could destroy himself and anything else in his path if he chose. “They are pictures, Lucas. Just pictures and nasty speculation. Who cares?”
“You do,” he gritted out. “Charlie Winthrop does.”
Grace considered him for a moment, and let her hand drop from his arm.
“I should care,” she said, focusing once again on what was happening within her—and what was not. “I should care deeply. I keep waiting for it—I’m anticipating a tsunami of shame, anger, fear. All the things I felt when you left that folder on my desk.”
“Because I am a prince among men,” he said acidly. “And still you allowed me in your bed. Do you not understand this yet, Grace? The only thing pretty about me is this godforsaken face. Everything else is rotted and ugly. Putrid. Corrosive.”
“That is ridiculous,” she snapped at him. “The point is, the wave has yet to crash. I am worried about an embarrassing conversation with my boss, but that’s about it.” She shrugged, her eyes locked to his. “Those pictures were taken of me when I was very young. And I was, in fact, kissing you at that party. I never claimed I did not do those things. I never lied. I won’t apologize for any of it.”
“You should.” It was stark, brutal. It hung between them.
Grace felt something move through her then, akin to the wave she’d been expecting, but so much different, somehow. It was as if something had been ripped away from her, exposing her to a truth she’d been bending over backward to avoid.
She did not want to hide anymore. Not from herself. Not from life. Not from anything. She had been wearing a mask for years, but no more. The tabloids had made certain her past and her present were exposed, laid open before the world, and why had she been so convinced there was something wrong with that? Why did she feel she had to hide who she was, what she felt, what she’d done? Why was she so ashamed? Why couldn’t she simply show her true face to the world, at last?
Bad Blood Collection Page 32
