But all Lucas could see was Grace. Maddening, courageous, sharp-mouthed Grace. His.
Then, never breaking eye contact, he reached over and gently pressed his fingers against the delicate hollow of her neck. Where her skin was soft like satin and hot to the touch.
Where her pulse thumped out hard and then went wild beneath his hand.
“Liar,” he whispered. Then he closed the distance between them and took her mouth with his.
CHAPTER SIX
MOST first kisses were gentle, sweet. Lucas was neither.
He simply took her mouth with no hesitation—as if it was his, as if she was his, as if that devastating possession was his right.
It was like a bomb detonated inside of her, exploding through her limbs, white-hot fire and spiraling need combusting again and again and again, leaving her weak. Wanting. Her breasts ached. Her nipples hardened. Her core melted. And still he kissed her, taking her mouth with an easy command that made her tremble against him.
He kissed with a carnal demand, a sheer, arrogant certainty, that shook Grace almost as much as the feel of his mouth on hers.
Hot. Commanding. As if her entire life had led inexorably to this moment, to the incomparable feel of his lips against hers, sending desire swimming through her veins like alcohol and rendering her incapable of doing anything more than kissing him back.
As if she had never done anything else. As if she would die if she did not.
She raised a hand, and then forgot why as it found the rock-hard planes of his chest, the hint of stubble on his lean jaw, each new sensation igniting a flood of desire, each stronger and more thrilling than the last.
She … forgot. Where they were. Why she was angry with him. Why she should not allow him to angle his mouth over hers with such skill and talent, nor rake a hand into her hair to anchor her head in place as he tasted her again and again and again. Everything that was not Lucas was like smoke, drifting away, signifying nothing. As if only he existed.
Without lifting his mouth from hers, without giving her even a moment to breathe, to collect herself, Lucas shifted on the small settee, his powerful arms sweeping Grace up and over him, settling her sideways across his lap. He murmured something she could not understand, could hardly hear over the pounding of her heart and the wild rush in her ears, and then he claimed her mouth once more.
It was too much. He was everywhere. Hard beneath her thighs, hard against her body, and that talented, wicked mouth of his that took and took, until she could not think at all. She could only feel the heat. The fire. The slick fit and exquisite taste of him, expensive liquor mixed with that part that was purely him. Pure Lucas. Sinful and delicious and capable of making her head spin around and around while the very core of her pulsed with need.
One of his hands remained laced in her hair, and on some dim level she was aware that he was destroying her careful twist. The pins scattered at his impatient touch and the heavy, wild curtain of her blond waves cascaded down around them, shielding them, cocooning them. She could not find it in her to care. His other hand stroked a lazy path from her cheek to her neck, down the stretch of her bare arm to settle at her hip, his big hand holding her fast on one side with his arousal stark and unmistakable on the other.
Grace’s hands went to his strong, sculpted shoulders and were lost, unable to keep from testing the stark physical power he held leashed there—the fine, chiseled lines of his lean and muscular form. Once again, her hand crept to his cheek as if she could hold him, understand him, make sense of him that way. As if she could keep him there, kissing her as if he was starved for her, kissing him back as if she had never been kissed before, as if he had switched a light on inside of her and she could only glow. And glow.
She had never felt this fine desperation, this coiling, insistent need. This fire. She was lost in him. Undone by him.
And still he made love to her mouth as if he could do so forever, as if he had all the time in the world, as if nothing existed but the two of them.
At first, the flash of light made no sense to her, though she pulled back and blinked, dazed, her breath coming in pants and her eyes too glazed to see. But then it came again, and again, and she realized with dawning alarm that it was not lightning. It was no storm. It was a camera. A flashbulb.
“Ignore them,” Lucas muttered, his hands still urgent on her.
Reality came crashing back, slamming into Grace with the force of a punch to her gut. Ice and horror washed through her, and for a long moment she was frozen, incapable of movement, like a stone as she stared down at Lucas.
At that wicked mouth of his, that some treacherous part of her still longed for. At his beautiful, fallen-angel face, that she now knew the feel of beneath her hands. At his bold, unapologetic green gaze, that tore into her like knives, leaving her jagged and despairing.
She could not speak. Words flashed across her mind, harsh and accusing, desperate and pleading, and none of them came close to addressing how she felt. What it meant to be the latest in his endless parade of interchangeable females. Who she had just discovered she was, despite everything, despite all her years of sacrifice and hard work, ambition and denial.
All it took, apparently, was a red dress and the world’s most shameless playboy, and she transformed into her own worst nightmare.
She lurched to her feet, putting air and space between their too-heated bodies, letting her hair swirl around her—hoping it covered her face and concealed her identity from the cameras. She wished desperately she did not have to live through the next awkward, terrible moments, that instead she could simply disappear in a puff of smoke and avoid the consequences of her thoughtless actions altogether. But when had she ever gotten what she’d wished for?
Lucas reached out and snagged her small wrist in his big, elegant hand before she could turn away, forcing her to look down at him, sprawled there on the brushed suede settee like some kind of dissolute god. She wanted to scream, to curse. To throw things at him. To ruin that handsome face, as if that could change how easily she’d fallen for him, how quickly she’d melted all over him.
She bit back what felt like a sob—but could not be. She would not allow it. Not here. Not now. Not where too many people, too many cameras—and Lucas—could see.
“Don’t touch me,” she managed to grit out, past the lump in her throat and the tears that threatened to further disarm and expose her. “Haven’t you done enough for one night?”
“Grace,” he began, his voice low, but she could not listen to him. He was all lies and seduction, and she had to go before she lost herself completely. She had to think. How could she repair the damage? It was as if a bomb really had gone off, and she was the wreckage, all splintered and shredded and strewn haphazardly about. There was nothing left of the Grace she had been before he’d kissed her like that.
And she would die before she let him see it.
She jerked her wrist from his grasp, all too aware, from the measuring gleam in his green eyes, that he allowed it. And then she spun around on her heel, ignoring his muttered curse, and threw herself into the crowd. She shoved her way past the avid gazes of the looming cameramen and bolted for the elevator that would whisk her away from this mess.
If only she could run from herself as easily.
She heard her mother’s voice echo in her head, weathered from too many cigarettes and too many bad choices. “Someday you’ll ruin yourself on some no-account man just like the rest of us. You’ll see. Then maybe you won’t be so high and mighty.”
Grace felt a rolling swell of a multitude of things—none of them high and mighty. Maybe no one could escape her destiny. Maybe she’d been a fool to try so hard, for so long.
It was not until she’d made it down into the lobby of the exclusive luxury hotel that she realized she’d left her bag behind on the top level—behind the tight wall of high-level security that only Lucas’s famous face had managed to breach. She sighed, a noise that was dangerously close to a sob.
Her keys. Her wallet. Her PDA. How could she leave without them? Where could she go?
She came to a stop in the middle of the marble floor, her legs feeling unsteady beneath her, her breath still too quick and her heart still so loud she was afraid it echoed in the hushed space.
“Grace.”
Of course he had followed her. He was the reigning champion of this particular game, and she had just forfeited. All over him and on film.
It was not possible to hate herself more than she did at that moment, but Grace tried. Oh, how she tried.
She did not turn around, but still, she knew when he drew close. Her body reacted as if his proximity was a caress. She felt an inevitable, breathless kind of heat slide from the nape of her neck to her breasts, then down between her legs where it coiled tight and bloomed into a fire. She found she was biting her lower lip and forced herself to stop. Just as she forced herself to raise her head and meet his penetrating yet oddly shuttered gaze when he stepped around to her front to face her.
For a moment, the world fell away. The glittering, ornate lobby, with its hint of tasteful music from above and the acrobatic flower displays in large ceramic vases, faded into a gray nothingness, and there was only Lucas. Only the things she told herself she did not, could not, see in him, because he was only surface no matter how he made her ache. Only the deep, abiding desire for him that rolled inside of her, the fire banked and smoldering, but too-easily kindled by the way he tilted his head to one side as he considered her, his mouth crooking slightly in one corner.
“I would almost say that you were running away from me,” he said quietly, his gaze too perceptive for such a supposedly shallow man, “if I did not know that such a thing were impossible. Women run to me, not away from me.”
“I must not have received that memo,” she said, attempting to match the lightness in his tone, if not his eyes—but her voice betrayed her. It was too rough, too emotional. Too fragile.
Wordlessly, he held out his hand, and that was when she noticed that he held her small, glittering clutch. She swallowed and reached for it, taking care not to touch him in any way. She knew, somehow, that it would ignite that fire all over again, and she was not so foolish as to think she could walk away from this man twice. She was not even sure she could do it now.
“I never took you for the Cinderella type,” Lucas said. Still that light, easy tone, but she could see something much darker, much more intense in his face, his gaze. As if he knew, too, that they danced around the same land mines, the same quicksand. That one false step would incinerate them both.
“I loathe Cinderella,” Grace said, trying to firm her spine, to breathe. To retain control. “There is never any need to wear shoes so precarious that you might lose one should you need to run. And why was a ball so important to her, of all things? She’d have been much better off looking for a job instead of a prince.”
“I suspect you are missing the point of the fairy tale,” Lucas said in that same quiet voice. His dark brows rose. “Deliberately.”
She did not know why she stood there, simply looking at him. She did not know why the moment felt so heavy, yet so breakable, and why she could not seem to make her escape as she knew she should. As she knew she must.
“Come home with me,” he said, and it was a command, not a request. It licked through her, into her. She could not seem to breathe through the heat suffusing her, the tight, hot desire that coiled in her and pulled taut.
What terrified her was how tempted she was to simply do it. To give in to the demands of her body. To surrender to him and the pleasure she knew he could deliver. Had already delivered, little as she wanted to admit it.
But it was that terror that spurred her into action. She heard herself sigh, or perhaps she’d tried to speak, but then she stepped around him and headed for the grand entrance across the lobby. There was nothing to be gained by a discussion, because she could not be trusted around him. It was as simple as that. She had to get away from him—from this spell he’d cast that seemed to compel her to do the very thing she’d vowed she would never do.
The night outside was frigid and wet, but Grace welcomed both, gasping slightly as the cold slapped into her.
“This is absurd,” Lucas said from behind her, his voice clipped with impatience. “The weather is vile. You’ll contract pneumonia.”
“That would be preferable, at this point,” she said without thinking and heard his short laugh.
And then she was spinning around, because his hands were hot and firm on her bare shoulders, and then the world tilted again and there was nothing but the smoky green of his impossibly beautiful eyes. The ones that saw too much, however unlikely that should have been.
“You would prefer the fate of an opera heroine to one moment more in my company, is that it?” he asked with a certain grim amusement, and were he any other man, Grace might have thought she’d hurt his feelings.
But this was Lucas Wolfe. He had none, as he would be the first to announce.
“Yes,” she said, lifting her chin and wishing that alone could clear her head. “Consumption. Tuberculosis. Either is far better than being photographed as yet one more hapless female connected at the mouth to the infamous Lucas Wolfe.”
The night was dark and the rain seemed to blur the edges of things, but, even so, Grace could have sworn that she’d wounded him somehow. Far more confusing than that possibility was her reaction. She wanted to apologize, to comfort him. To make that hint of vulnerability disappear.
She had no idea what was happening to her.
“Don’t worry,” he drawled, his eyes flashing as his fingers flexed slightly against the flesh of her shoulders before letting go. “I cannot imagine anyone will recognize you as my ‘unnamed companion du jour,’ or care. I doubt that it will even make the papers.”
“I’m so glad,” she bit out, unable to process why she was suddenly so angry with him—and not wanting to examine it, just as she did not want to examine why she felt so jagged, so messy, so ruined—as her mother had spitefully predicted all those years ago. She wrapped her arms around herself, her hands moving to absently cup the places he’d just vacated.
“Grace,” he said, and her name was something between a sigh and a curse. “Come home with me,” he said again. He shook his head slightly, as if he was as unnerved by his own tone of voice as she was. “Please.”
“I …” But she could not seem to finish the sentence. She could not bring herself to break the odd spell between them, the enchantment—as if doing so would cause him pain. And, she acknowledged with great reluctance, her, too.
He looked at her for an age, a moment, a heartbeat. Cars skidded past them on the late-night street, the traditionally uniformed doorman hailed a cab with a shrill whistle and London carried on all around them, the city bright and noisy and shimmering in the winter rain.
And there was Lucas, brilliant against the night, as if nothing else had ever mattered, or could.
“Come with me,” he whispered, and held out his hand.
She could not speak, or move. She felt herself sway slightly, as if pulled to him by some invisible chain. She knew too much now—that his body was so strong, so warm, so incredibly male. That he could set her on fire with only that dark, stirring gaze even as the cold rain fell down on them both.
She felt the great gulf of the loneliness she spent her waking hours denying yawn open inside of her, reminding her of all the nights she’d spent alone, all the years she’d denied she was a woman, all the vows and promises she’d made to herself about how different she would be than her mother, than her own past. Than what had happened to her. But then Lucas had touched her, and she was nothing but a woman.
Finally, something inside of her whispered, and that word seemed to ricochet inside of her, leaving marks. Scars.
She wanted to reach over and slip her hand into his more than she could remember ever wanting anything else.
He was far too good at this, she thought i
n a kind of daze—and it was that sudden spark of reality that gave her the courage, the strength, to step back from him. To really see him again, instead of what she felt.
To remember exactly who he was, and what he did, and why he knew all the right buttons to push, and how best to tempt her. He could seduce a stone gargoyle. He probably had.
And if her heart hurt inside her chest, well, that was just another secret she would learn how to keep. And hide away, where he could never find it again to use against her.
“I can’t,” she whispered. “I won’t.” And then she turned away from him, blind but determined, and did not breathe again until she’d hurled herself into the nearest black cab and slammed the door between them.
Walking into the morning meeting the following day, with a smile on her face and exuding all the professionalism she possessed, was one of the most difficult things Grace had ever had to do.
If she could have, she would have called in sick. But she’d suspected that doing so would be far too telling—it would give Lucas far more of an advantage than he already had, and she could not live with that possibility.
I am my own heroin, he had said, and now she was terribly afraid he was hers, too. She felt very nearly strung out, and he had done nothing but kiss her. Just imagine …
But she refused to go down that road.
“Good morning,” he said, along with the rest of the team as she entered the conference room—his voice seeming to arrow straight into the center of her, kicking up echoes and vibrations.
There was no need to look at him directly, she told herself as she took her place at the head of the table and confidently addressed those gathered. There was no need for anything so foolish, and anyway, she had already blinded herself staring into that particular sun. She had already flirted with her worst fears. No need to compound her sins.
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