The Shameless Playboy

by Caitlin Crews

  “Is this what you wanted?” he continued as if she hadn’t spoken, in the same thick, rough voice, the volume increasing even as Grace stared up at him. “Did you do this deliberately?”

  “Did I …?” She shook her head, fighting back the tears, wanting to reach over and shove him away from her—but too afraid that if she touched him, it would be to drag him closer. “What are you talking about?”

  “What am I supposed to do now, Grace?” he demanded, outraged. “How am I supposed to carry on with my life? Have you ever thought of that?”

  She felt her own temper kick in, the one that urged her to wreck things, punch things, cause damage and destroy her own property. The one she usually tamped down. It was better than the tears. Anything was better than the tears.

  “I’ve been a little bit busy today, Lucas,” she threw at him, suddenly, deeply furious.

  “There was the invasive tabloid article, complete with photographs, and the gala I still had to prepare for while awaiting my boss’s arrival. Then I was summarily fired because of my whorish behavior. So, no—I’m afraid I have not spent a lot of time wondering what you might do with your life. I’m a bit preoccupied with my own!”

  “You can’t just do this!” he cried wildly, throwing his hands out as if she’d wrecked him, somehow. As if he, the man who defined ease, was at a loss. He moved closer, to glare down at her. “You can’t show up in my perfectly constructed life, turn it inside out and then vanish into the night! Were you even planning to tell me what had happened? That you were leaving?”

  “Was I supposed to?” she demanded, fire and anguish twining inside of her, making her stomach tense—as powerful as the urge to reach over and touch him. Hit him. Caress him. She could not tell. “Before or after you stormed off and left me standing on that staircase? I told you that I loved you, Lucas, and you ran away.”

  “I had to think!” he shouted, completely unhinged, and Grace stopped breathing.

  Lucas Wolfe … yelling? Truly out of control? Was this really happening? This was Lucas stripped down, laid bare, she realized. This was no more and no less than … a man. Not the legend. Not a collection of pretty words and practiced smiles, one for every occasion, whatever the situation called for. This was just a man.

  An angry, emotional man.

  Mine, a small voice whispered, reigniting that flame of hope she’d thought he’d extinguished when he’d walked away from her.

  “I had to think,” he repeated, his breath coming fast, his eyes hard on hers. Almost desperate. “Because I need you, and I have never needed anyone. Ever. It is not an easy thing, to change the habits of a lifetime—”

  “Because, of course, it was so easy for me,” she interrupted, feeling unhinged herself, as if the world was starting to spin, around and around, drunk and erratic.

  “I am not a good bet,” he threw at her, almost snapping out the words. “Quite the opposite, especially for someone who has achieved all that you have achieved, and all on your own. I have actively discouraged anything so much as masquerading as a commitment—even a second night in my company. I have never known any other way to be.”

  “If that is your résumé, it leaves something to be desired,” she said, trying to sound fierce, tough, though she could hear the shake in her voice. The quake. And everything that was not Lucas tilted and whirled—or perhaps that was only her stomach.

  He considered her then, seeming to take in her wet eyes, the slight tremor that shook through her, for the first time since entering the room.

  “I may crash and burn at any moment,” he said, his voice softer, though not necessarily calmer. “There is nothing to suggest that I am not exactly the waste of space everyone believes me to be. Everyone including me.” His green eyes searched hers. “Everyone save you.”

  She was afraid to breathe. Afraid to move. Afraid that she was imagining this wild, electric moment.

  “Are you?” she asked softly.

  He let out a breath that was very nearly a laugh, and suddenly his nearness was overwhelming. She wanted to touch him more than she wanted anything else, wanted to burrow into him and hold him, even if it was to her own detriment. Even if it ruined her more than it already had. She did not care what that said about her, what that made her. A broken ship against the rocks. Her mother. None of that seemed to matter.

  The closer he was, the more she felt free.

  “No one else has ever seen beneath the surface,” he said, his voice low, intense. “But you—you saw through me from the start.” He reached over, taking her shoulders in his hands and bringing her flush against him. “If you give me a year, Grace, I will give you everything I have. I cannot promise it will be much, but it’s yours.”

  She tilted her head back, and saw the warring emotion in his smoky green eyes, the fear and the hope. And something unfurled inside of her then, something strong and hard. Something right and true. Undeniable.

  Because she could recognize truth when she saw it, when he shared it. When he offered her what she had given him earlier today, no matter what words he used.

  The only words he knew, she thought. The only words he could.

  “Are you offering me a test run?” she asked, over the sudden lump in her throat. “A year to see if you can work out all the kinks?”

  “I could tell you that I love you,” he said in a low, intense voice, his eyes fixed to hers. “And it might even be true. I believe it is. But what does the word even mean to one such as me? What context do I have for it?” He leaned close, placed his forehead against hers, as if he needed her to help him stand. Grace felt herself shake against him, into him. With him. “I know that I should let you go—it’s the only thing I’ve ever been any good at—and instead I am here, making promises I have no idea at all if I can keep.”

  “Qualified promises,” Grace pointed out, emotion tangling in her throat, in her voice.

  “What every girl dreams of, I’m sure.”

  He let out a breath, and ran his hands up and down her arms, in an easy rhythm, building heat, spreading fire.

  “My brother Nathaniel is getting married to his Katie next month,” he said. “Will you come with me?”

  She laughed then, unexpectedly, the tears spilling over, and she didn’t care.

  “Have we downgraded from a year to a month?” she asked, sneaking her arms around his narrow waist. “How much testing do you think you require?”

  “I don’t know who I am!” The words seemed almost torn from him. He pulled back and stared down at her. “Don’t you understand? I want to give you the world, Grace, but I have no idea how to do it.”

  “I do not want the world,” she said simply, sliding her hands up to hold his beautiful face between them. “I can get that for myself, if I wish it. I only want you.”

  “I am yours,” he said, his words ringing through her, around her, with the force of a vow. “In every way.”

  “Then what else do we need?” she asked, and pressed her mouth to his.

  Fire and wine. Lucas’s wicked mouth, and her own needy little moan. He pulled back, his eyes dark with passion and something else, something she knew might take him some time to accept as truth. To truly believe.

  But she was more than happy to wait.

  “A date,” he said, tilting his head back, his mouth crooking up in the corner. “I need a date to the gala. And you no longer work for these people, Grace, so really, no more of these appalling suits. I cannot bear it.”

  She did not ask how he managed to produce a midnight-blue gown from nowhere, one that clung to her breasts like a lover and then swept all the way to the floor, fitting her perfectly. And she did not argue when he only looked at her when she emerged from the en suite bathroom, her hair in a French twist, and ordered her, in that dark, demanding voice, to take it down.

  “Enough hiding,” he said, and then held out his hand. And this time, she took it without hesitation.

  She walked into the gala she had planned for so many months w
ith her head held high, her hair swirling around her shoulders, no longer pretending to be anything but what she was. A woman. A competent and confident woman who did not need to hide any part of herself away, no matter what Charles Winthrop might think.

  “Grace,” her former boss said when he saw them come in, his round face creasing with concern. “What are you doing? I thought you understood that you were not welcome here.”

  “She is with me,” Lucas bit off with absolutely no sign of his famous charm, and perhaps a shade too much of the seething danger she had always seen in him. “And by definition always welcome, is that not so?”

  The other man paled. Grace put her hand on Lucas’s arm, and smiled her cool smile at Charles Winthrop.

  “Don’t worry,” she said in her best calm, cutting way. “I am only a guest. But you can be sure that as of Monday morning, I’ll be your competitor. Who knows where? Perhaps I’ll go out on my own. But rest assured, I have no intention of simply drifting off into the ether because you fired me.”

  She had enjoyed the look on his face more than she should have. But then, she had never claimed to be a good person, had she? And in any case, Lucas was smiling at her, in a way she knew he had never smiled at anyone else. In a way that was only hers. Theirs.

  It heated her up like the Texas summers of her youth. The man was lethal, and she loved him.

  “Come, Cinderella,” he said quietly, smiling as he drew her toward the dance floor.

  “It’s coming up to midnight. Do try to keep your shoes on.”

  She did not care about the cameras, the staring and whispering former staff members, the entire rest of the world. She moved into his arms, and let him lead her into the music.

  “I’m beginning to understand the point of the fairy tale,” she said, smiling up at him, losing herself in the hot, bright gleam in his green eyes. “Who cares if I lose a shoe?”

  “Who, indeed?” he asked softly, and swept them both away.

  Much later, when the party had ended and most of the guests had dispersed, Lucas led her away from the tent and out onto the great lawn, where she could see the moon was just starting to rise over the trees. For a moment they stood there, side by side in silence, and gazed out over the darkened grounds. She shivered slightly when he turned to look at her, and told herself it was from the chill in the air.

  “I walked around these grounds for hours today,” he said quietly. “I thought I would confront myself—or my father’s ghost. Perhaps I thought they were the same. But there was nothing here. Only an angry fool tramping about in the cold.”

  “It is just a house,” she said softly. “Just some land. And he is only here as long as you keep him here.”

  He looked at her for a long moment.

  “The only ghost I seem to be haunted by these days is you,” he said, his voice a rasp against the thick night all around them.

  “I am no ghost,” she assured him, feeling a rush of heat to her eyes and fire to her core, an ache behind her ribs. “I am real and I am right here, Lucas.”

  “I have no idea at all how to build a new life without burning the old one to the ground,” he said. “But I suppose we do not all need to be phoenixes, rising from the ashes, do we? Some of can simply walk on. Change.”

  “We can grow,” she agreed in a whisper, heedless of the tears that overflowed and tracked down her cheeks, basking only in the great white heat of the joy that moved through her. “Live. Without ghosts and without fear.”

  Grace nestled against him, tucked into his side as if she’d been made to fit him that precisely, that well. As if she was meant to be his, and there, in the dark and facing all of his ghosts full-on, he let himself believe it.

  The manor house stood behind them, covered in scaffolding, drenched in the past and lit up by the rising moon. Lucas took one last, hard look at it as the lights from the gala went off, one by one, leaving nothing to see but stone and brick and memories.

  look at it as the lights from the gala went off, one by one, leaving nothing to see but stone and brick and memories.

  It was just a house. And he was free of it.

  Finally.

  “Yes,” he said, kissing her again. “All of that, Grace. I want all of it. And you.”

  He took her hand in his, and together they walked down the great lawn toward the lane, toward the village and the world beyond, away from Wolfe Manor at last.

  And straight on into their future.