Shameless Playboy

by Caitlin Crews

  He was a master at this scene. He should have sorted it out already, made her laugh, flattered her and teased her into pleased satiation. But his happy manners, his notorious charm, seemed to have deserted him completely.

  “Grace.” He did not know why he said her name like that, why he felt it reverberate through him, why he wanted to reach for her for no reason at all but to hold her close. To stay in this moment, not to let it go. He did not know why every part of him felt that could be disastrous to move forward, to keep going.

  To admit that he was back in Wolfstone, with all that entailed.

  He was descending into melodrama, and she was not even looking at him.

  “Why don’t you order room service?” she asked lightly, her tone not fooling him at all. But what could he do when he was not even sure what held him in this odd, tight grip around his chest? “We could use some food, I think.”

  And then he watched her walk across the room to disappear into the en suite bathroom, naked and more beautiful than any woman ought to be, her head held high and regal, the culmination of fantasies he hadn’t even known he’d had.

  He was in trouble. More trouble, he understood, than he had ever been near before.

  “You accused me of hiding yesterday,” he said without turning around, not moving from where he stood in front of the big bay window. “In plain sight.”

  He had heard the water shut off, had heard the old pipes cease their chattering and clanking. He’d heard her move around in the bathroom, and then emerge. She brought a cloud of fragrance with her, something floral with a faint kick of spice. Her soap, shampoo, perfume. It teased his nose and made him harden again in the jeans he’d thrown back on to answer the porter’s knock when their food had been delivered. Lamb with buttery mashed potatoes and peas. Hearty fare befitting a cold March night—and yet he could not seem to summon up an appetite.

  “It was an observation,” she replied in an even tone, closer to him than he’d expected, though he still did not turn. “Not an accusation.”

  “It was astute, either way,” he said. “But I cannot seem to do it here.”

  He turned to find her just beyond his shoulder, her face carefully blank, her brown eyes noticeably wary, her hair piled haphazardly on the top of her head and curling at the ends. She was wrapped in a thin silk wrapper of a deep royal blue, her skin flushed pink and rosy from her ablutions. Or perhaps from what had happened between them.

  She looked like candy, sweet and damp and all too edible. And he could not understand why tasting her again, though he yearned to, was not the urge that drove him. Why something else battled to take him over instead.

  It was the ghosts again, he thought darkly. There were too many, especially in Wolfestone. Hadn’t his run-in with Jacob taught him the folly of revisiting the past? And yet here he was, back in this village, as if he’d learned nothing at all. He’d even been the one to suggest coming here, so full of himself, never considering the consequences. The story of his damned life.

  “I don’t know what this is,” he muttered. “If it is you—or this damned place. It brings back far too many memories. None of them good.”

  Her wary eyes searched his face, and he saw her swallow, as if fighting for calm. Oddly, that small sign of discomfort eased him. It made him realize that this woman—who knew something about hiding herself in plain sight just as he did—could understand. That he wanted her to understand.

  “What happened to you here?” she asked in a soft voice, as if she feared he would not like the question.

  He looked at her for a long moment, and then back out the window. The night was dark and blustery, with no hint of moon or stars. He could see only the wind-tossed branches of the trees across the lane, and the impenetrable country blackness beyond. But he still knew precisely where he was. He still knew that the Wolfe estate began just on the other side of the deceptively bucolic river that wound through the town, that the manor house hunkered out there in the dark, empty and brooding and marked, as far as he was concerned—forever marked as soulless and evil as its former owner had been.

  What had he been thinking, to return here?

  “I had the misfortune to be born William Wolfe’s son,” he said, a hollow laugh escaping him. “That is what happened to me. Do not let the tales of his fame, his great charisma and cult of personality fool you, Grace.” He shook his head. “I’ve managed to put him from my mind for vast swathes of my life—but that does not work here, apparently. The things he did and the kind of man he was hang in the air in this village like smoke.”

  She was quiet for a long moment, and Lucas felt that ache inside of him expand. As if he had never known loneliness, not really, until this moment. But then she brushed past him, and sat down on the couch just beside the window and faced him, tucking her long, bare legs beneath her. She tilted her face toward him, and he saw … nothing. No judgment. No arch, inside knowledge she might use against him. Nothing but her warm, steady gaze.

  “He was a monster,” Lucas said baldly. He felt his mouth twist and turned away, staring out the window once again, though what he saw was the past. He shrugged, as if he could will it away.

  “And …” Her voice was hesitant. “Your mother?”

  “I never knew who she was,” Lucas said, on a sigh. Funny that the truth could still sting, when he should have long since ceased caring about a relatively meaningless fact like that one. “He told me only that she could not stand the sight of me, and that was why she’d left me on his doorstep.” He smirked a little bit then, ignoring the small noise she made. “I grew up rather amazed that what people saw when they looked at me was this remarkable face I’d been awarded in the genetic lottery, when I knew the truth about how ugly I was. So ugly it repulsed my own mother, who was never heard from again. So ugly it made my father hate me. Quite a dichotomy.”

  “And you had only your father’s word on that?”

  Grace asked, and it was the lack of pity, the simple calm in her voice that made it all right, somehow, that he was telling her all of this. No matter that he still did not know why.

  Lucas remembered then, unwillingly, the night he’d confronted William in his study with the birth certificate he’d found after hours of searching. He’d been a mere teenager then, angry and bitter that all of his siblings knew their parents—even Rafael, the other bastard son who lived in the village yet out of William’s view, had the comfort of his mother’s presence to ease William’s rejection of him. But Lucas had nothing. Only William’s lifelong loathing and a birth certificate with the mother’s name blanked out.

  William had reacted predictably when Lucas had waved the document in front of him, and Lucas had still been too emotional, too small yet to fight back as he might have done later. It was only when William had him pinned to the wall that he’d relented at all—in true William Wolfe fashion.

  “Your mother is a difficult woman to forget,” he had said, in a vicious sort of tone, designed to wound, confuse.

  He had thrown a photo album at Lucas’s feet, sneered at the nose he’d bloodied with his own big fist and left Lucas to page through photographs of his uncle Richard’s wedding—to a woman who had Lucas’s own unusual green eyes. If what he had seen was true, it meant William had slept with his own sister-in-law. Lucas had been sick right there on the study floor.

  The subject of Lucas’s mother had never been raised again.

  “Yes,” Lucas said now. “I never discovered who she was. Not really.” He could not believe how much William’s behavior could still get under his skin, even all these years later. When it could not matter to anyone, not even to him. When the man had been dead for nearly twenty years. “Not for certain.”

  “My father disappeared before I was born,” Grace said matter-of-factly, wrapping her arms around her knees. “There are any number of John Benisons in the world, and none of them were interested in claiming me. I don’t even have his name.” She looked at him, her dark eyes intent on his. “There is no
shame in being an accident, Lucas. There are only parents who are not up to the challenge.”

  “William was not up to any kind of parental challenge,” Lucas said. “He was not what I would call a parent at all, aside from his biological contribution.”

  He looked at her then, taking in the way she gazed at him, his own near-overpowering urge to touch her, to hold her, to pull her close to him again and make him feel that fleeting sensation he’d felt in the bed, that he’d never felt before. He was afraid to name it.

  “I told you before that there are ghosts here, Grace,” he said quietly, but in that moment he did not know if he meant in Wolfestone or in himself.

  She smiled slightly, seemingly unperturbed by his warning.

  “Will they rattle their chains and scare the guests away with all their moaning?” she asked.

  “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 rea
d 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.