A Perfect Storm (26 page)

Lucien’s jaw did drop. But nothing clever came out.

Chapter Twelve

Sophie dropped her bombshell revelation on Lucien and then zipped her lips.
It’s your move now.

It only took a moment for Lucien to snap his mouth shut. He climbed off the table and then looked Sophie all up and down, now wearing a devil-may-care smile and nothing else. He whistled long and low as he slipped back into his prowling mode, and he wagged his finger her way. “You’re good,” he told her, his tone smooth and easy. “I could immediately tell you were smart as hell. I knew you’d figure out my history eventually, but I have to give you credit, you did it a hell of a lot faster than I thought you would. So what was it that gave me away? Or do you have an outside investigator who is as good as the pair on my payroll?”

Itching to shake his cool demeanor, Sophie instead very deliberately sat up and clasped her hands in her lap. “You know I can’t afford anything so fancy as my own investigator, and I would never use the station’s resources for personal gain.”

With a sideways glance, he asked, “So then how?”

Lucien continued to move around his room, nude, with a pantherlike grace. His streamlined yet muscular frame in motion was a thing of beauty to watch. The sight of him made Sophie’s mouth dry, as it always did. She ached to touch him, to put a stop to his pacing and get him to look at her for more than a flicker of eye contact, but her gut clenched with the certainty that if she ran to him right now and tried to crowd his space, he would turn inward and shut her out.

Just breathe
. Sophie listened to herself and purposefully exhaled.
Take him on one step at a time
. “I found out about the sex clubs by putting a little something you said a few days ago alongside a couple of other small bits of information from other people. An Internet search produced a club in DC. I have a friend who works that town, and she knew something of some rumors about this nightclub really making its money as a private sex club.” Lucien passed by her right then and raised one of those brows at her that somehow reeked of arrogance. Sophie raised one right back at him. “Once I heard the rumor,” she went on, “I knew it was true. Ultimately it doesn’t really matter how I figured it out.” Treading carefully, she kept her voice gentle. “What I want to know is why you felt the need to hide it from me.”

Lucien shot her a quick glare. “It’s an easy instinct, Miss Emerson.” His tone dripped with impatience. “You’re a television producer, and breaking a choice story like that would be very good for your career.”

In a snap, Sophie shot back, “I don’t buy that.”

He whirled on her, but she did not wither to the other side of the table under his suddenly hot stare.

“You said you contacted me specifically because you knew I would handle William and Jude’s story with respect and dignity. It doesn’t jive that you would also think me capable of blowing all those clubs you used to own out of the water by exposing what they really are.”

“Still own,” Lucien corrected. He planted his hands on the table on either side of her, taking over her personal space. “I own minor shares in each one of those clubs.” The hard line of his lips barely moved as he spoke. “Any harm done to them will adversely affect me.”

Bad move or not, Sophie reached up and smoothed her fingers over that unforgiving mouth, knowing in her heart it wanted to lift in laughter more than cut in a frown. “All the more reason you should have known I’d never do it.” Unable to fight the need, Sophie leaned in and grazed a soft kiss against his lips, then soared inside when he clung and kissed her back with exquisite gentleness. “You’re not a fool, Lucien.” She brushed kisses against his jaw and cheek, her desire to know more about him growing with every minute she spent in his presence. “No matter how much you like to pretend you’re above everything and see the world through a cynical eye, you can also sense when warmth is surrounding you.” She pulled back and let him look into the truth in her eyes. “I have cared about you from almost the beginning. And because you watch people closely, you knew I already did—don’t tell me you didn’t—so you also knew I would never do anything to hurt you, and by virtue of that hurt, harm your nephew and the others here at Ravenstoke. You didn’t keep the sex clubs hidden from me for fear of exposure. Heck, if you feared my spilling your secrets and destroying you, you never would have let me see all that I have at Ravenstoke, all that you’ve encouraged me to witness.” She studied him closely, and asked, “So what’s the real deal?”

Lucien pushed away from the table and began his methodical walk again. “The desire for privacy doesn’t require an explanation,” he replied, a growl lacing his tone.

Sophie snarled, and her fingers itched to strangle something. Someone.
Him
. “What about the concept of exchanging some conversation with a woman you just invited into an extremely intense part of that private world?” she said to his back. “How does that rank on your personal scale of courtesy?”

From across the room, Lucien laughed, and the sound grated across the air. “You’re assuming I have one.”

Whether he knew it or not, the way he couldn’t stand still and face her told her volumes about his internal struggle. “I think you have more integrity that you’d like anyone to know.” He whirled on her at that, but she just added, “I think you’re more moral than you want me to know too.”

Chips of ice crystallized his stare. “I’ve already told you once that it’s dangerous to assume anything about me.”

In a shot, Sophie jumped off the table and rushed to confront Lucien, the fire in her belly growing too strong to ignore. “I think that’s bull crap.” She rose up on her tiptoes and got in his face as best she could. “I think you want me to believe that you’re some kind of disengaged loner who has lost any interest in his soul and who likes to sink into the depravity of voyeuristic sex, and—”

With one step, Lucien backed her against his dresser. “You and your hot little body tempted me right into full-on exhibitionism tonight too, sweetheart.” He slowly grazed two fingers from her throat down a straight line to her stomach, where she still wore the smeared mixture of his seed and her arousal. Dipping his fingertip into her belly button, he turned his lips up in that cheeky grin. “That’s a whole new world for me, honey, and it happened because of you.”

As much as his touch sparked a coil that twisted down into her sex, she snorted and pushed his hand away. “You won’t flatter me out of my point.”

“Which is?” As he asked, Lucien leaned against the dresser and crossed his arms and ankles.

He wanted clever, meaningless banter, and she refused to give it to him. “My point is that for someone who is so very alone and claims to desire sex without attachments, you have surrounded yourself with people who love you desperately and would do anything for you. I know you care about them just as much.” Right in front of him,
she
looked
him
up and down this time, her hands on her hips. “From where I stand, whether you can accept it or not, that’s not a man who is truly cynical, disengaged, or alone in this world.”

That too-confident light still owned his gaze. “So then maybe I’m manipulating you.”

This time it was Sophie’s turn to laugh. “Oh, I’m fairly certain you are.”

She watched him, and so she noticed when he didn’t quite hide the stiffening in his spine. “Then why are you still here?”

For the first time since crawling off that table, Sophie had Lucien’s complete attention. She could feel it, and she would not give him a pandering, simpering answer about the weather. “I’m still here because I think there’s a genuine, generous, kind person who lives alongside that bastard you want everyone to see.” He went terribly still, and Sophie took courage, stepping even closer to him, until only a handful of inches separated their bodies. “And I think no matter what the other part of you is doing, the good, caring man has shown himself to me in small pieces more than once—even though I’m sure a bigger part of you has tried to repress him—and that sincere man wants me to be here.”

His voice dropped to lethally soft. “You would do well to seriously consider which one is almost always in control, Miss Emerson.”

She didn’t step back to give him even an inch of breathing room. “Why don’t you want to tell me about your sex clubs?” she asked again.

Lucien—the son-of-a-bitch half—freaking tapped her nose. “You are a determined one,” he said with a shake of his head. “I will give you that.”

Jerk. This time, his arrogance doesn’t get to win out
. This was it. Putting steel in her spine, Sophie took a precarious step onto a tight wire. “I think you’re terrified to tell me about the clubs because in doing so it will tear the bandage off a scar you don’t want me to see.”

“This ought to be good.” His tone was that of a bored parent. “And why is that?”

Breathing, Sophie maintained eye contact with that indifferent stare and said, “I think you won’t talk about the sex clubs because they are connected to your brother’s death.”

With a flare of his nostrils and pupils, Lucien jerked out from under her scrutiny. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” He was already on the move again.

Staying in place, Sophie turned as Lucien walked, always keeping him in her sights. “Josh is the only thing you’re not blasé about showing me. Yet you are working extremely hard to deflect my questions about the sex clubs. That makes me certain they are somehow connected. Otherwise, you’re so arrogant that I don’t think you’d care if I knew about them. Heck, I think you’d even brag about them.”

Flint sparked volatile light in Lucien’s eyes. “You are treading on dangerous waters, Miss Emerson.” Sandpaper coated his warning. “I am warning you to cease right now.”

The more Sophie looked and listened to this complex, hurting man, the deeper the slice he cut into her heart. “I wish I could,” she admitted, opening that wound for him to see, “but there’s something about you that makes me care.” He jerked and shook his head, but Sophie didn’t stop. “Something in you that I don’t fully comprehend makes me dream about being with you in ways that are even more carnal than what we just did on that table.” Her confession scratched up her throat too. “It makes my chest ache when I see you hurting, and it pushes me to learn everything I can about you to ease that pain. In the beginning, I wanted to chock it up to infatuation with an enigmatic man, but I know myself well enough to understand it’s more than that.”

Lucien swung his hard stare up from the floor, locking in on her, and made somersaults churn in her stomach. Swallowing down the jitters, fighting through a fisting fear of rejection, Sophie went on. “You are compelling, and there’s a part of me that wants to figure out all of your secrets, but there’s an already bigger piece of me that would let go of that and let you keep them forever if the tradeoff was seeing peace and ease in your eyes.” He shook his head again. Something that looked hunted flashed in his stare, but Sophie couldn’t give him running room. Not right now. “You aren’t a story to me, Lucien. You’re a person, one I began to care about from the moment you opened a little bit of your soul to me the night I walked in on you having that nightmare, and then later, when you told me about losing your father. The more time I spend with you, the more I like you, and the more I hope there’s something equally interesting and compelling in me that might make you feel the same in return.” She shrugged, and her smile felt as tight as her throat. “It’s the truth. Do with it what you will.”

His hand trembling visibly, Lucien wiped at the deep brackets surrounding his mouth. “Jesus fucking Christ, honey.”

Uncertainty burned through Sophie, heating her skin. “It makes me sound kind of pathetic, I know.”

“No,” he quickly denied, his tone gruff. “Never that.”

“Thank you.” Relief swamped Sophie. Some of the adrenaline washed out of her, and she slumped against the dresser. She went to wrap her fingers around the edge, and her knuckles knocked something over with a clatter. Muttering an apology, Sophie turned to straighten her mess, and looked into the eyes of two smiling boys bundled to the gills in snow gear; one raven haired, and one sandy blond. “Is this Josh?” she asked, lifting the framed photo. She fingered the likeness of the boys and then looked up at Lucien. “Is this the two of you when you were kids on that hill you told Owen about?”

“Yeah.” Rust still held Lucien’s tone, and new brightness burned in his stare. Moving as if on automatic, he came to Sophie’s side and touched Josh’s image too. “Everything was good then.”

She handed the photo into Lucien’s safekeeping. He seemed to need it. “Before your father died?” she asked.

“Yes.” He nodded, glanced at the image of him and Josh once more, and then set the frame to rights. “Before I made choices that weren’t the best ones for my family,” he said, his focus still on the dresser and the cluster of pictures. “For Josh.”

Right then, Sophie couldn’t move her attention away from Lucien and the terrible ticking in his jaw. “You can’t mean the clubs. You were still a kid then.”

“No.” She didn’t know how it was possible, but Lucien’s voice went raspier. “Other things.”

“Like what?” she asked and then held her breath.

Still not looking at her, Lucien wrapped his hands around either side of the dresser, bracing himself on the furniture. “My mother remarried within a year of my father’s passing. It surprised me, because I’d always thought she was a strong person, but it turned out she wasn’t good at being alone. After remarrying, she seemed to completely lose herself in this new life with her new husband. Hell, I don’t know, maybe he fucked with her head and made her that way. All I know is that I could not stand the man, and he did not have a single kind word for me. He was such an asshole.”

Lucien clenched his fingers around the wood, and all the muscles in his arms and back flexed tauter than a drum. After a savage curse under his breath first, he said, “I was fucking thirteen and packing my backpack to run away when my mother found me. For just a few minutes, when she looked at me, it felt like I was looking at the mom I used to know, the person she was before my dad died. But rather than listen to my complaints about Donald and that I was going to run away if he stayed—Donald was the bastard’s name—my mother convinced me that going away to school was a smarter choice than running. I was crushed that she didn’t want to hear what I had to say about her new husband. Fuck, at that point, I didn’t even care about trying anymore, and I agreed to go away. I honestly didn’t want to be around my mother the way she was by then, as much as I just wanted to get the hell away from Donald. So I did. I got away. I didn’t come home much. Hardly ever. Not even for vacations.” He spared her a glance then, and the darkness radiating from him made her shiver. “That was a mistake.”