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 read 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.
“Sorry, Grace,” Sophie muttered again, red-faced with embarrassment, as everyone else pretended to be absorbed in their morning tea and full English breakfasts. “But everyone was reading it and I thought you should know.”
A quick glance around showed Grace that there were, indeed, copies aplenty of this particular tabloid rag—seemingly one on every table in the restaurant. No doubt on every breakfast table in all the world. Her mother was no doubt reading it even now in Racine, Texas, and nodding knowingly over Grace’s behavior and patting herself on the back for stamping out the viper in her nest. Terrific.
“Thank you, Sophie,” Grace said with every stitch of poise she could dredge up from inside herself.
It was her very worst nightmare, broadcast in lurid color, in the shape of her seventeen-year-old bikini-clad body. She knew what happened next. She knew how this scene played out. She felt her gorge rise in her throat, and wondered, still as if from a distance, if she might actually get sick in full view of her entire staff and half the village of Wolfestone, all of whom were packed into the Pig’s Head to watch her with avid gazes only some tried to hide.
She simply could not allow that to happen.
Especially not when Lucas sauntered in from the lobby, looking sleepy and rumpled and as if he’d just rolled out of a decadent bed— which she happened to know that he had, as she had been in it with him. Every head in the room swiveled to track him as he wound his way through the tables toward her. Grace could hear the whispering, the muttering.
She could feel the speculation heat up the room, as if gossip were an electric current and she was being slowly, surely electrocuted.
Grace watched him approach, noting that easy lope, that careless swagger that called so much attention to his inescapable masculine beauty. She’d spent a week learning every last detail of his long, lean body, and melting under the sorcery of his clever hands, and her body wanted more. Now. It readied itself for him as if on command, melting and shivering, as if he had not been thrusting deep inside her, kneeling over her with his hot mouth fastened to the nape of her neck, one wicked hand wrapped around her breast and the other at her core, not twenty minutes earlier.
She had to clench her thighs together and force her bland, professional smile.
Apparently, he was irresistible, even when the worst had happened. Was happening, she amended. Right now.
But something occurred to her then, as Lucas walked toward her. This had already happened. Lucas had seen these photos, and nothing had changed. He had still wanted her. Her, not some fantasy photograph of her. He had not called her names, or looked down at her. The world had not ended—if anything, the photos had been the catalyst for a whole new world of possibility she’d never imagined.
Why do you care so much what so many ignorant people think? he had asked.
And she could not help but ask herself, why did she?
Grace watched him read the room as he moved through it. She saw the cool calculation in his green gaze as he drew close, and could now tell the difference between the real Lucas and the self-mocking, lazy and careless Lucas he produced on cue, as he did now, smirking slightly as he reached the team’s table.
She preferred the real one, but she was deeply grateful for his easy mask today.
“Has it finally happened?” he asked mildly, yet in a voice that seemed to accidentally carry throughout the room. He smoothed a hand down his chest, calling attention to his excellent physique, and the phenomenal way he’d chosen to package it today in a tight-fitting green designer T-shirt beneath a fashionable black sport coat and a pair of distressed denim jeans that transformed his delectable behind into sheer poetry. “Have I become better-looking overnight?”
A wave of laughter swept through the room. Because everyone loved Lucas, Grace thought. How could they not? He was so good at pretending to take nothing seriously, least of all himself, and it was impossible not to laugh when he did.
Their eyes met, held. Something almost painful flared between them, silently, and she felt her practiced calm sweep through her. She saw that fierce light gleam in the depths of his gaze, the one she wondered if only she could see. The one that showed her the truth of him, that she craved more than she should. But she was forced to ignore it in front of so many interested gazes. She handed him the tabloid, keeping her face expressionless.
“Not yet,” she said. “Though you are, apparently, as interesting to the press when you are shilling for Hartington’s as when you are romancing minor royalty on the Continent.”
She could see the nearly imperceptible way his body tensed. She could almost see, as well, the anger roll off him in waves. Was it the fact that they were in the tabloids, or the offhanded way she’d introduced the topic, as if she thought what had happened between them had something to do with Hartington’s? She could not tell. And either way, no one else seemed to notice anything in his body language at all. All they could see was scandal, and the bright shining light that was the presence of Lucas Wolfe.
“Unfortunately, I grew bored of me years ago,” he said in his everyday, mild and languid tone. He tossed the paper aside without so much as a glance at it, as if the article held no interest for him. He then sat down at the table with every appearance of relaxed ease, signaling the hovering waitress for hot coffee—the topic clearly closed as far as he was concerned.
Grace swept a quick look over the table as she took a seat opposite him, confident she exuded nothing but her usual competence in the face of all the averted eyes, the speculative glances. She would not give them the reaction they clearly wanted. She would not let them see her crack. She would be nothing but her usual ice queen self, ready for another day’s work with a calm smile and a no-nonsense approach to even this.
They were only pictures, and the truth was, before Travis and her mother had sullied the experience, she’d liked them. They were gorgeous pictures, and just happened to be of her. They’d paid for her college educatio
n and, one way or another, they’d made her the driven, successful woman she was today.
Why should she be ashamed of them?
And what went on between her and Lucas was nobody else’s business.
So she ignored the damned tabloid, and the too-beautiful man who watched her with hooded green eyes and a disconcerting intensity, and snapped open her event notebook instead.
“All right, then,” she said briskly, as if this was any other morning. Any morning meeting on any normal day. As if everyone at the table had not seen what she knew they’d seen. Her nearly naked body, in so many suggestive poses. Her passion-flushed face. But there was nothing she could do about that now, and she’d be damned if she’d apologize for herself, so she shoved it aside. “We’re in the final countdown, people,” she said. “Tell me where we are and what needs to happen before tonight.”
The irony, she thought as the staff member nearest her launched into his spiel, was that before she’d walked into the breakfast room this morning, she had been on track to thinking this had been the most magical week of her life.
The week in Wolfestone had passed like some kind of delicious, wickedly sensual fever dream. For the first time in her life, Grace had not analyzed, plotted or planned out her every last move. Nor had she let the past keep her locked down, hidden away. Once she had accepted the fact that she would not be beating Lucas at his own game, that she wanted him as much as he wanted her, and could neither fight it nor summon the will to try, she had simply … lived.
The days were full to bursting with all the last-minute details involved in transforming the long-forsaken Wolfe Manor into the appropriate spot to celebrate the new Hartington’s. Grace traipsed over every inch of the site with the designer and various contractors, nailing down the final details of placement, construction, access and out-of-bounds areas, parking and security. She had coordinated all the reports from her staff regarding the floral arrangements, the dramatic ice sculptures and their delivery, the many food stations that would have to entice the guests yet never overpower the tented area with long queues—all stocked with delicacies available in the revered Hartington’s gourmet food hall.
She went over set lists with the DJ and the band, debated the placement of the dance floor and spent hours placating both the talent and their often far more excitable representatives. She made sure the details of transportation for all of the A-list guests, talent and executives were nailed down and agreeable to all parties. She held the caterer’s hand during a brief breakdown over the mini-Cornish pasties. She did her job, and she did it well.
And then, every night, she lost herself in Lucas’s arms.
He was the least inhibited, most adventurous lover imaginable. He knew no boundaries, had no hang-ups and always maintained his wicked sense of humor. He was as happy to have her standing up against the wall as slippery and wet in the deep tub. He was as interested in exploring her body as in having her test his hardness in her mouth. He reached for her again and again, but he also held her so tenderly, and kissed her so sweetly, that it made Grace ache in ways she knew better than to consider too closely. He was not at all the man she’d thought he was when he’d first walked into her office, and Grace hardly knew how to reconcile all the different images she had of him in her head—much less in her heart.
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, hardpartying 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 yachtstudded 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, a
t 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.”
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