by Rin Daniels
She widened her eyes in projected innocence. “What do you mean, under it?”
“Lace?” he guessed. He pushed her back another step, but the car was in her way—instead, she sat back on the sun-warmed hood. She sucked in a breath to protest—this was his car, she’d never sat on it—but he leaned down and planted a hand on the frame beside her, pinning her in place.
His dimples winked.
When was the last time she’d seen him so…happy? Was this happy Lucas?
Well, a part of him was happy, anyway. Nadine shifted her legs, watched as his lashes flickered when her knee grazed the hard ridge of his cock behind his zipper. Yeah. She turned him on.
She liked that.
The announcer at the center show rattled off a list of points that were about as clear as Greek to her. Lucas’s fingers grazed down her chest. Skimmed over the swell of her breast. The halter material was smooth, with built in cups to keep everything in place, but the designer hadn’t accounted for the power of Lucas Bourdin.
Her nipple beaded under his touch.
His smile warmed. “Good curves,” he murmured. “Classic lines.”
Her fingers caught in the sides of his shirt. “Is that a joke about my waist?”
“Your waist,” he replied, his breath easing over her cheek, “is no joke.”
Her lips ached to kiss him.
She held on. “Sweet talker.”
“Is it working?”
Based on the potentially embarrassing dampness between her thighs, hell, yes, it was working.
His lips grazed the curve of her jaw. “So?”
Nadine shuddered. “So, what?”
“So,” he repeated, “what are you wearing?”
When her lips eased into a wicked little smile, she tipped her head back and slanted him a look that was so far from innocent, spots of color appeared in his cheeks. “Find out?”
His breath shuddered out, which echoed in the ache he’d coaxed inside her. Nadine couldn’t exactly widen her legs in this skirt, and as the breeze skimmed over her sensitized flesh, she shivered.
The crowd cheered.
Lucas skimmed his palm up the side of her bare leg.
Gooseflesh rippled down her arms.
They were in public. Outside, even.
At a car show.
What the hell was she thinking?
Except she wasn’t. Nadine wasn’t thinking and she didn’t want to, and so what? As he slid his fingers under the hem of her bright red skirt, as his warm, callused palms scraped over the soft flesh of her inner thigh, Nadine cupped his nape in one hand and held on for dear life. Arousal, hunger, desperate need—and with it, sheer, unadulterated enjoyment.
Everything about this day had gone perfectly. His car, her look, the fact he’d been able to make contacts with the people she’d introduced him to.
And this. This unbelievable pleasure that filled his face as he looked at her, as he touched her.
Her skirt hem hiked up.
His fingertips grazed naked flesh, and his whole body jerked with surprise.
His voice went harsh and graveled, like it did when he was frustrated—or turned on. The folds of her body parted beneath his probing touch. She sucked in a breath. It hitched. “Fuck,” he breathed, “I love you.”
She shuddered, strained to widen her thighs, but her skirt wasn’t made for that.
“Lucas,” she whispered.
His lips ghosted over hers, so lightly she wanted to scream. His fingers explored her naked skin.
A hard hand grabbed his shoulder, pulling Lucas violently around and almost tearing Nadine off the car. “Get your hands,” Germaine Sherwood snarled, “off my daughter.”
She caught herself before she slid off the hood. “Daddy, wait—”
To her horror, her father’s fist drove into Lucas’s jaw with a sound like a thunderclap.
In the event speakers, the crowd applauded.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
NADINE TOOK A frantic step. Her shoe buckled under her, the wedge tilting on the grass, and she fell back against the car instead. Heart hammering, she could only yell, “Daddy, stop!”
He staggered, but Lucas didn’t fall. He grabbed at his jaw, swearing.
Her father squared up, fists clenched so tight, he shook with rage. “How dare you,” he spat.
“Daddy!”
“Nadine, be silent.” Her mother’s voice, from between the Cobra and the white Jaguar next to it, crackled with brittle anger. One manicured hand grabbed Nadine’s upper arm. “I knew we shouldn’t have let you leave.”
She shook her mom’s grip off. “What are you doing here?” she demanded, gaze flicking across the lot. Most of the crowd still occupied the center rings, but a few had meandered through the lanes. Eyes were beginning to drift their way.
Her face burned. Anger. Embarrassment.
Betrayal.
She glared at her father, who stared Lucas down with red-faced fury. “You low-life,” Germaine snarled. “My baby deserves better than some criminal.”
“Daddy,” Nadine snapped.
“He’s right,” Mary cut in. A flapping sheaf of papers slapped her arm.
Nadine frowned at it, but didn’t take it. “Oh, look,” she said tightly, laughing in hollow humor. “More of your creeper spying?”
“Look at it,” her mother said, her eyes pinning on Lucas with disgust. “Turn over the right rocks, and it’s amazing what comes crawling into the light.”
Lucas took a step forward. “Nadine—”
Her father sidled into the way, his shoulders rigid. “You go near her, and I swear to God—”
“Germaine,” Mary said coolly, a warning implicit. Her gaze leveled on Nadine.
Her father’s gasps for air peppered the stinging silence.
Nadine shook her head, gaze flicking to Lucas, who had gone strangely quiet. He stood with his hands clenched at his side, a splotch of bruising color already forming under his skin. His gaze pinned on hers with a blazing mix of desperation and fury.
But he didn’t take another step.
A muscle ticked in his jaw.
Nadine stepped away from the car—and the papers her mother held out. “I don’t need them.”
“Don’t be a fool,” Mary said crisply. She reversed the sheaf, held them like she was a lawyer in a court room and read crisply, “Wallace & Roane, Financial Enterprises. Established—”
“Are you serious right now?” Disbelief filled her. She flung out a hand, circled her father to grab Lucas by the arm and hold him there as she rounded back on her parents. Her heart hammered so hard, she wasn’t sure she could speak without trembling. “I already told you that was for Kat.”
“Oh,” her father growled, a thunderous peal of bone-deep anger. “That’s a whole other story. Did you think we wouldn’t investigate all your friends?”
Lucas’s forearm was hard as stone under her fingers. He said nothing, but Nadine could feel the tension rolling off him in palpable waves. If he trembled in her grasp, or if she was the one shaking, she couldn’t tell.
Hurt overwhelmed disbelief; bled into anger. “I can’t believe you.”
“We’re your parents, Nadine.” Her mother held up the papers like a victory trophy. “Lucas Bourdin is a partner in Wallace & Roane. I bet he didn’t tell you that, did he?”
The arm in her grasp jerked.
Nadine’s sucked in a breath. “Ohmigod.” A bitter laugh. “You guys will do anything—”
Her father’s ice blue stare locked on Lucas. “Ask him.”
“I don’t have to,” she shot back, but it trembled. Her parents may have been overprotective, may have always made sure that she was taken care of, but they didn’t usually have to lie to do it. Her father made his living on financial logic and accountability. She’d never caught him lying.
Never even suspected he could.
Her mother’s mouth compressed into a thin, downward curve. “Go on,” she encouraged, gentle for all it rippe
d out Nadine’s heart with its sympathetic anticipation. “Ask him if it’s true. Look in his eyes.”
Behind her, Lucas swallowed so hard she could hear it like a gunshot between them.
She turned slowly.
She didn’t know what she expected. Couldn’t say what she hoped to find, but it wasn’t this.
Nadine would have given anything to see something other than guilt.
His eyes settled somewhere over her shoulder, his jaw so tight it could have been carved from marble and been softer. The arm she held shook.
It wasn’t just her.
“Lucas?” She couldn’t stop her heart from pouring out into his name. It killed her to ask, to make the words that could set fire to the bridge between them. “Is it…” Her voice cracked with the effort.
He closed his eyes.
“Ohmigod,” she whispered. She let go of his arm like it burned her, then regretted it when the skin around his eyes flinched. But she couldn’t touch him again. Not when the ground felt like it rolled beneath her feet. She tried to lick her dry lips, but her whole mouth felt like cotton. With a rasp, she asked, “You’re a loan shark?”
“For years,” her mother said thinly.
Nadine ignored her, her gaze imploring on Lucas’s.
He wouldn’t look at her. “I was…trying to get out.”
“And you didn’t tell me?” she asked, her fingers locking together. “All this time, you—” She sniffed hard before her frustration, her anger, shifted to tears. No tears. He always folded when she cried. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
He said nothing.
Her father snorted. “Why should he when he can scam money out of everyone you know? What’s the story, Bourdin?” Lucas stiffened. “Was her family next?”
Nadine whirled on them, slashing a hand through the air. “Stop it,” she cried. “Everyone, just stop! Can’t you see I love you all?”
Lucas muttered something behind her she didn’t catch.
Her father took a threatening step forward. “What was that, boy?”
Nadine flinched when Lucas’s voice trembled with rage. “I don’t want your money. Not again.”
Her mother laughed. “Oh, that’s rich, coming from the son of—”
“Mary,” her father warned, but too late.
Nadine’s eyes widened as understanding dawned so cold, even the late afternoon sun couldn’t warm her. “Again?” she repeated, and when her father jammed a hand through his hair, said louder, “When?”
“Pumpkin—”
She pressed a hand to her forehead, shaking her head. “When?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Lucas said behind her.
Relief flickered across her parents’ features—the mark of culpability.
Nadine very slowly turned her back on them to pin Lucas with a hard, angry stare. “They paid your parents to move you, didn’t they?” She could only whisper it. “I always wondered why you moved so suddenly, it wasn’t even a better house.” Her breath wheezed as she laughed. “Oh, God, I thought your parents just fell on hard times and then they left—”
Lucas’s features shut down. “It doesn’t matter,” he said again. “Look, this wasn’t how I wanted to talk about this.”
“Were you?” she demanded, her smile a sick curve that only made her want to throw up. She took a step back. “Were you ever going to tell me anything? Who are you?”
“He didn’t have to tell you,” her father said to her back, his voice cutting. “He was counting on you to give him everything he needed to make it in your world.”
“We warned you,” Mary added, and again, that sympathy.
She wanted to scream.
But then Lucas’s gaze pinned on her with such narrow-minded focus that she forgot to breathe. “Give me what?” he asked, so quietly she wasn’t even sure her parents could hear.
She shook her head. “I was just—”
“Oh, you should have heard her singing your praises,” her father said, cruelly twisting a knife he didn’t know he held. “She swore she’d make you succeed. You would have been so pleased with your scam.”
Nadine’s hand flattened against her heart as Lucas's expression went black with rage.
“Once a delinquent,” her father added.
“Shut up, Daddy,” Nadine whispered, but it was too late.
“Make me succeed, huh?” Lucas’s throat worked as he swallowed whatever it was he felt. Anger, betrayal. Hurt.
Pride.
He’d always had that.
Nadine shook her head. “It’s not what it sounds like.”
“Oh, yeah?” He flicked a hand at the cars around them. “How much for the ticket, Nadine? The shirt?” He pulled at his tie, loosening it with a sharp, angry tug. “New jeans in your version of fashionable. The people you introduced me to?”
Nadine’s temples hurt, heart beat echoed in repressed tears as he plunged his fingers into his back pocket and withdrew the business cards he’d picked up. His brown eyes blazed in violent fury.
“This was all part of your training, right?”
All she could do was shake her head over and over.
“Did I perform well?” he demanded. “Did I bark on command?”
“It’s not like that,” she said, a sob caught in her throat.
Lucas leveled her a look of such disgust, of such blatant revulsion, that she took a reflexive step back. He flicked the cards to the ground at her feet. “Well, it sure looks like it from here,” he said, every word carved in a finality that cracked her heart.
Ignoring her parents, ignoring the crowd as it began to trickle out of the completed show, Lucas fished his keys out of his pocket and strode past them all to his car.
Nadine tried to call his name, to stop him, to explain, but it only tangled in her mouth.
The engine he prided so much turned over.
Her father grabbed her arm, pulled her out of the way of the glossy red car.
Nadine tore out of his grasp with a ragged sob. “Is it true?”
“I don’t know—”
“Don’t lie to me,” she begged, fingers tangling at her chest. It did nothing to hold in the pain beating there. “Are you the reason Mr. and Mrs. Bourdin left Sulla Valley?”
Her father searched her face for a long moment. When he nodded, she bit back another sob. “We offered them an exchange,” he said grimly. “The terms were that they’d move to the next school district. If they took what we gave them and ran,” he added, “that had nothing to do with us.”
“The hell it didn’t,” she bit out. Her tears slid over her cheeks. “So what if Lucas is a loan shark? So what? What was he supposed to do?”
“Please, Nadine, that boy had choices.”
“What choices?” She flung a hand in the direction he’d gone. “You took away his parents, made him go to a school with a terrible education rating, and you expected him to end up how? For what?”
Her mother joined her father’s side, the papers held listlessly at her side. “We’re sorry, sweetheart,” she said softly. “We only want what’s best for you.”
She could put all the right sympathy notes in her voice she wanted, but Nadine wasn’t fooled. Never again.
“Come home, pumpkin,” her father said, reaching out his large, warm hand, palm up. “We’ll chalk this up to life experience.”
“You’re still young, sweetheart,” her mother added, smiling crookedly as if that was all it’d take to mend the heart Lucas left cracked in its wake. “There’s so many good men out there for you.”
“Great,” Nadine rasped, staring at her father’s hand. “I’ll sleep with them all, shall I?”
The hand lowered. “Nadine.”
“Really,” her mother added, sympathy fading. “Don’t be crass.”
Her tears slid over her lashes as she raised her gaze to them. Her smile hurt. “Why not?” she asked lightly. “Long as they take care of me, who cares, right?”
“Nadine,” her mother snapped.<
br />
“Yeah.” Nadine nodded, taking a step back. “So, I’m just going to go, okay?”
“Young lady, you walk away now, and it’s over.”
She met her father’s stare, read anger and desperation inside the blue so like her own. He meant well.
They both did.
Turned out they didn’t make her feel all that well about it.
“Bye,” she whispered, and turned around, careful not to fall over her wedge sandals. Her father yelled in her wake, her mother hurrying to shush him on account of the car show attendees flocking back around, and she ignored it all. She picked her way back across the lawn Lucas had driven across.
There was only one thing she could do; a desperate thing that would either clear the air or make everything worse.
But she had to try.
* * *
He didn’t go home. Maybe it was because he knew that she’d follow. Maybe it was because he didn’t want to go back to that house his folks had left behind when they’d left him behind.
Lucas drove aimlessly for a while, until he found himself on the ridge overlooking the north side of Sulla Valley. The early evening sun crept towards the horizon, and shades of blue darkened across the sky—the same shade as her eyes when she fought back tears.
He leaned against the trunk of his Cobra, staring out over the only place he’d ever called home and seeing none of it.
Everything had gone to hell today.
Christ, who was he kidding? It had gone to hell the day his parents had taken that check from the Sherwoods. Everything about his life now, he could attribute to that defining moment.
He knew his worth. It had more zeroes than he would have expected, but in the end, his parents hadn’t even kept him, so maybe it was just a zero after all.
And Nadine had promised to mold him, huh?
Lucas dragged a hand through his hair. His tie flapped in the wind that rolled over the ridges, and he looked down at it with mild surprise. Was he still wearing this get-up?
As if becoming aware of it was enough, his skin itched. With angry, sharp tugs, he tore off the tie, tugged the buttons free and stripped down to the plain white T-shirt he wore underneath. The air cooled with the evening, but he was too angry—too upset, too lost—to feel the chill as gooseflesh rippled down his arms.