Shameless Playboy (15 page)

 
          
“What
are you afraid of?” he asked, almost conversationally.

 
          
But
it was not a light question at all, and he knew it.

 
          
She
stared at him for a long moment, until he felt something not unlike shame twist
through his gut—though he knew it could not be that. He was immune, surely.

 
          
“Do
not bring this up again,” she said, her voice soft yet firm, her gaze direct.
Grace, in control. Grace, in charge. Grace, locked up and put on ice. Hidden.
He hated it. “It is not something I am ever going to wish to discuss.”

 
          
She
was lying. He knew it as well as he knew his own lies. It was as obvious to
him.

 
          
But
the walls all around them were made of glass, with too many eyes watching them
from all sides, and so he had no choice but to watch her turn and walk away
from him as if it were easy to do.

 
          
Again.

 
          
THERE
were any number of flashy, spectacular parties that Lucas could have attended,
from club openings to birthdays to opening-night film screenings. All of them
would, inevitably, be packed with scantily clad women who would smile
invitingly at him and offer him anything he might possibly want. Their
attention. Their interest. Their bodies. Themselves, on any available silver
platter. And yet, for some reason he could not quite fathom, he’d chosen to
spend his Thursday night sitting alone in his office instead, staring out over
the cold March streets rather than enjoying himself down on the pavement.

 
          
He
pushed back from his desk and raked his hands through his hair, irritated with
himself. That might not have been a particularly new feeling for someone as
committed to his own self-destruction as Lucas had always been, but he rather
thought the cause of it was.

 
          
He
had done most of the work that had been allocated to him, most of it relating
to the public relations aspect of Hartington’s relaunch, and the marketing and
sales plans that went along with it. Lucas was as surprised as anyone else to
discover that he had quite a knack for marketing, in addition to PR. It made a
certain kind of sense, he supposed. After all, he had been involved in the
guerrilla marketing of his own identity since his earliest days.

 
          
First,
when he’d decided as a child that if he was going to be punished harshly no
matter if he was good or bad he’d just as well make sure to be
really
bad. And then, of course, when he
had spent his time at home diverting his father’s violent attentions away from
his younger siblings by any means necessary. Better he should take the hit than
the younger ones, he’d thought—and anyway, he’d taken a certain, possibly sick
pleasure in behaving as if he was, in fact, his father’s worst nightmare.

 
          
Is that the worst you can do?
he had
taunted the usually drunken William, no matter how hard the blow or evil the
insult. And no matter what his father came back with, Lucas had always laughed.
And laughed. Even if it hurt. He’d always managed to enrage his father even
more—and refocus the old bastard’s attention on a target who could take the
abuse.

 
          
To
his siblings he had been and apparently still was the smart-mouthed and
charming ne’er-do-well: impossible to take seriously, perhaps, but quick to
make them laugh and think of things other than the cruel master of Wolfe Manor.
To his father, meanwhile, he had been the devil, taunting and disrespectful,
and never, ever as afraid as he should have been.

 
          
Perhaps
because of the roles he’d assumed so early on, Lucas had discovered quite young
that one needed only to suggest a few key points, lay the right groundwork and
the world jumped to the specific conclusions he’d intended as if of their own
volition. It was all in the marketing, really, with a little PR polish to make
it all sparkle.

 
          
He
had only attempted sincerity once in his life, and that had not ended well. He
felt his lips thin as he thought of the two-faced Amanda and how thoroughly she’d
broken his young heart. He’d never made that mistake again. When she’d left
him, he’d decided it was far easier to be what people expected him to be. Far
safer, and far more comfortable in the long run.

 
          
Which
meant, oddly enough, that he was well suited to the position he’d been given at
Hartington’s. Who would have thought it? He could not help a wry smile then.
Lucas Wolfe had become what had long been his own worst nightmare: an office
drone. By choice. It was the most extraordinary thing.

 
          
The
iconic old building was dark and quiet all around him. What few noises there
were echoed slightly down the abandoned halls. Very few employees were still
around this close to midnight on a Thursday, but there was something about the
emptiness of the usually busy place that appealed to him. Lucas sat behind his
vast, powerful desk and stared out the window, wondering if he looked as much a
fraud to the casual observer as he felt. The sudden and inexplicable
businessman. The nouveau tycoon. He was certain that if he sat still long enough,
he’d be able to hear the howls of derision rise from the wintry London streets
far below.

 
          
And
yet he could not seem to summon the necessary energy that would be required to
go out on the town as he normally would, wearing his overused public face and prepared
to cavort in front of the cameras as expected. It was as if the Lucas Wolfe he
had worked so hard to present to the world for so long no longer fit him as it
should, and he did not know what to do about it. There had always been such a
fine line between the way he behaved according to the low expectations of
whomever he came into contact with and what he did in private, and that line
had never, ever been crossed.

 
          
No
one knew the truth about Lucas, and he liked it that way. Better to remain
silent and be thought a fool than to argue the point and find that one was
suddenly expected to live up to a host of responsibilities that were completely
beyond one’s capabilities. Lucas was all too familiar with that brand of
failure. That was why, among other things, he kept his particular flair for
money management secret and allowed the world to speculate that he lived off
the kindness of certain desperate patronesses like a bloodsucking leech.

 
          
He
did not want to think about why those long-defended and maintained lines seemed
to be blurring these days. He had not wanted to impress someone else in so long
now that it seemed almost like an elaborate practical joke he was perpetrating
against himself, this brand-new compulsion to do so. But he knew it was true.
He wanted Grace Carter to think well of him. He could not think of a single
reason why he should, and yet there it was, stark and impossible to deny,
sitting in front of him like a wall he kept butting his head against.

 
          
It
was absurd. Suicidal. And yet he still could not manage to get that woman out
of his head. The cutting way she spoke to him, as if she expected better from
him when she should know that he quite famously had nothing to offer. The
grudging respect in her chocolate eyes when it turned out he was good at this
PR game or that he knew his way around a marketing plan. The way she’d looked
at him that night in the hotel lobby, as if she could see into him, into the
places he’d denied existed for so long that he’d almost forgotten about them himself.

 
          
He
was becoming maudlin, he thought derisively, annoyed at himself. What was next?
Perhaps he could rend his garments and start talking about his terrible
childhood in the streets, like all the other madmen. Perhaps he could write a
self-pitying memoir and hit the talk show circuit to weep crocodile tears and
garner sympathy for his poor-little-rich-boy plight. He could not think of
anything more pathetic.

 
          
So
instead, he thought about Grace. She remained a mystery to him, and that had
not happened in a very long time. A woman was not usually much more to Lucas
than a pleasant diversion, especially not after he’d tasted her. He could not
understand why Grace was so different. Why she resisted him, or why she should
want to continue to do so. Twice now she had walked away from him.
Twice
. He could not imagine why anyone
would deny the kind of chemistry that raged between them, so explosive he had
forgotten himself completely in that party—had actually forgotten where they
were. What was the point of denying something so elemental? Chemistry like
theirs was hardly commonplace. Surely she knew that.

 
          
Or,
he considered, rubbing a hand over his jaw, perhaps she did not. Perhaps she
was as shocked by it as he had been. She did not strike him as the kind of
woman who had had a battalion of lovers. Perhaps she was unaware that she
should be chasing this kind of connection like the Holy Grail it was. That
seemed so unlikely—she was so strong, so intriguingly self-possessed—yet what
did he really know about her?

 
          
He
leaned back in his decadently plush office chair and considered. He was all too
aware that she took her job quite seriously—so seriously, in fact, that it had
begun to rub off on him in ways he was not entirely comfortable with. The fact
that he was musing over Grace while seated in his office instead of in a hot
tub filled to the brim with nubile women whose names he would never learn did
rather tell its own story, he reflected, wincing slightly.

 
          
He
knew that she was quick, and smart, and not in the least bit intimidated by
either his famous name or his admittedly formidable good looks, both of which
had been known to overawe those who encountered him in the past. He knew she
gave as good as she got, and could throw his own words back at him as if she
was trying to best him at a game of tennis. He even knew that, on some level,
she enjoyed the deliciously combative relationship they’d developed, because he
found it surprisingly addictive—and he’d seen the look in her eyes that
indicated she did, too.

 
          
He
knew that she buttoned herself up like a latter-day Victorian maiden and
reacted with the same level of overblown outrage when called on it. He
suspected she did it deliberately, to hide the mouthwateringly perfect body he
had now seen in clinging silk and felt with his own hands. He knew that she
unfairly concealed her glorious mess of hair from view, which he felt was an
offense against every aesthetic he possessed. Why would a woman allow her hair
to grow like that, so wild and free and sexy, and then spend most of her life
scraping it back and wrestling it into submission?

 
          
Grace
was a mystery, and Lucas discovered that he did not much care for mysteries.
Not knowing
left too much to chance, and
left him far too unsettled.

 
          
Before
he knew it, Lucas found himself typing her name into the search engine on his
computer, just to see what other tidbits he could come up with. There were
pages upon pages of links to her name, most having nothing at all to do with
the Grace Carter, events manager for Hartington’s, that he knew. There were
images of all kinds of Grace Carters, none of whom were
his
Grace.

 
          
He
scrolled idly through the list, trying to imagine the Grace he knew as a
production assistant in Los Angeles, a concert pianist from Saskatchewan, a
book-writing missionary in the Côte d’Ivoire. And then his eyes fell on one
link that did not seem to go along with the others.
Gracie-Belle Carter
, it read. It made Lucas laugh, even as he
clicked through.
Gracie-Belle
sounded
absolutely nothing like the Grace he knew—in fact, it sounded a lot more like
the kinds of women, soft and smiling and always submissive, who had helped him
solidify his reputation over the years.

 
          
But
then the picture loaded on the screen in front of him, and Lucas froze in his chair.
Desire and curiosity combined, rushing through him like something heady and
illicit.

 
          
Because
it was—yet also wasn’t—the Grace he knew.

 
          
The
woman before him in full-color photography was more properly a girl, all
coltish limbs and ripe curves, hair flowing all around her, sexy and rumpled,
wet and lush. One picture showed her in nothing but a pair of bikini bottoms,
looking coquettishly over her shoulder at the camera with big eyes and sultry
lips, the line of her bare back an enticing, mesmerizing curve. Another
featured an even smaller bikini, and a whole lot of sand plastered in
interesting places, as she knelt on a dark rock and stared moodily at the
camera, holding back her wild, wet hair with both hands. A third showed her
lying on her back in some kind of hammock, eyes closed, a wet T-shirt showing
the full swells of her breasts while her thumbs were hooked in her bikini
bottoms as if she were about to tear them from her body and bare all.