Shameless Playboy

by Caitlin Crews

But, unfortunately, she did have to look at him when the topic of the gala’s entertainment was raised. She glanced over, surprised to see that while he lounged carelessly in his seat like a pasha, his eyes were on the tablet in front of him. It should have felt like a reprieve. Instead, she felt a hollowness behind her breastbone.

  “We have some exciting news,” she said crisply, infuriated with her own weakness. Again. “Once again, our newest addition has proven himself to be an invaluable asset to the Hartington’s team. If you’ll explain your latest coup, M—”

  She never finished saying Mr. Wolfe. She didn’t even fully say the word mister, because his head snapped up, his green eyes fierce. Searing. Furious. Daring her to call him a name designed to distance him, after all that had happened. After they had tasted each other and burned in the same fire. Daring her.

  There was a tense, tight silence. Grace felt herself flush. His eyes slammed into her, and she was terrified that everyone could see—that everyone knew—that she might as well have been writhing in his lap there and then, making a fool of herself, a spectacle of herself just like before, every inch the names her mother had thrown at her….

  She was losing it.

  “Lucas,” she said, knowing as she did so that she should not have capitulated, that she should have prevented that gleam of deep male satisfaction from warming his gaze by any means necessary. That he had won something she could not afford to lose. “If you could share …?”

  She could not let this happen, she told herself as Lucas began to talk. She watched him play to the crowd, with a self-deprecating smile and that wickedly funny turn of phrase that had everyone on the edges of their seats, hanging on his every word.

  And she was no better.

  She was, in fact, everything her mother had predicted she would become.

  Grace let that sit there for a moment, a shocking and breathtaking realization, cruel and all-encompassing—but it was true. How could she deny it? Lucas Wolfe possessed not one single redeeming characteristic, and still, she had melted, become a stranger to herself, at his slightest touch. How could that make her anything but … loose? Easy? Ruined already, from within?

  She thought of those strange, loaded moments in the rain outside the hotel last night. She thought of the arrested look in his eyes, as if he’d felt the same complicated rush of emotion and confusion that she had—

  But she shoved that all aside, ruthlessly.

  She would do whatever she had to do, but she would not let him destroy her. She would not let everything she’d worked for disappear so easily. She would not, could not, let herself be everything her mother had told her she’d be, sooner or later. Not now. Not ever.

  He had expected a cold reception. He had even expected that she might pretend nothing had happened and carry on as if that was the case.

  But Lucas had not been at all prepared for Grace Carter, the most determined and prickly woman he could remember tangling with, to completely avoid his gaze. To blush in public. And then to bolt toward the door when the meeting had ended, quite as if she planned to run away from him altogether.

  He wanted to feel something like triumph, but did not. It was something else, something closer to temper, that surged through him.

  “Grace?” he called after her, not bothering to rise from his seat, but loud enough to carry to the rest of the team as they filed for the door. To force her hand. “If I could have a word?”

  He saw her back stiffen, but when she turned, that smile of hers was firmly stamped across her mouth. Perhaps only he could see the color high on her elegant cheekbones. Perhaps only he noticed the storm in her dark brown eyes.

  She waited by the door, smiling and exchanging a few words with her staff as they left, and then closed it behind the last of them, trapping them together in the great fishbowl of a conference room. It was glass on three sides, and sat in the center of the offices and cubicles all around them, so that anyone happening by in the halls could glance in and see what was going on.

  He wondered if that made her feel safe. It made him … twitchy. He remained in his seat, with the whole glossy width of the big table between them, because he knew that if he stood he would put his hands on her, and if he touched her again, he did not think he would stop.

  “That is the ugliest suit I have ever seen,” he told her, his voice low, his careless posture at complete odds with the strange tightness that held him in a secure grip. “I cannot imagine where you find these things. It is as if you pay to deliberately obscure your figure and your natural beauty.”

  “Is this what you wished to discuss in private?” she asked, her voice frigid even as her brown eyes shot flames at him. Even as she retained the razor’s edge version of that smile. “My fashion sense?”

  “I think you mean your lack thereof,” he replied lazily.

  “Your concerns are duly noted,” she said tightly. “And this is a world-renowned designer suit, for your information. But if that is all, I really must—”

  “Grace.” He liked the way her name felt on his tongue. He liked the sound of it in the air between them, the command in it. He liked how her eyes darkened in reaction. He wondered where else she reacted, and how it would taste.

  “We are not going to discuss it,” she told him, her full lips thinning in distress. “Not any of it. We will never mention it again. I am deeply appalled at my own behavior and can only assume you feel the same—”

  “I do not.” He arched his brow. She let out an impatient, aggrieved sort of breath.

  “You should!” Her voice was harsh. Raw.

  She cleared her throat, and smoothed back her hair with one palm. It did not require any attention—it was already ruthlessly yanked back into her typical slick twist, and all he could think of was the glorious fullness of it when it had fallen around them. The weight of it, the scent of it. Her delicate, intoxicating little moans against his mouth.

  “I will thank you not to tell me how to feel,” he said mildly. It was only a figure of speech, he told himself. It was only to score a point. It did not mean he felt.

  She looked away, and he could see that she fought with herself—for control, perhaps. He wanted her to lose that control, once and for all. He had already tasted it, and he wanted more. He wanted her wild and wanton and free.

  He simply wanted her. It was no more complicated than that.

  “I do not have time for this,” she said at last. “For you. For … what happened. I can think only of the gala.”

  He thought she sounded desperate. He told himself he wanted her that way. That had always worked well for him in the past. He ignored the small voice that insisted that this woman was not like other women. That she could see him. That she could know him. That she was Grace, and different.

  “All work and no play …” he began, teasing her, alarmed at the direction of his own thoughts.

  Her eyes shot to his. “That is not a topic I suspect you have any familiarity with at all,” she snapped out. She let out a breath, and when she spoke again, her voice was smoother. “It’s wonderful that you are able to help so much, that your connections are so useful. It really is. But that doesn’t change the fact that my florist is a prima donna or that the security firm keeps changing its estimate, does it? And those are the things that require my attention. Not you.”

  “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.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  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.

&
nbsp; 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.