The Shameless Playboy

But Lucas did not want to think about that. Not about Jacob himself, not about why Jacob had disappeared, nor why he had returned and certainly not about what Jacob had said to him that had spurred Lucas into a series of unlikely actions culminating in his arrival in this office. And so, as he had done with great determination and skill since he was young, he focused on the woman in front of him instead.

The one who was still scowling at him.

“If I was someone else,” he said, letting his gaze drift to that expressive mouth she held so tightly, “I might begin to think that scowl meant you disliked me. Which is, of course, impossible.”

“Never say never,” she replied, so very sweetly.

“I rarely do,” he assured her in a low voice, lifting his gaze to hers and letting them both feel the heat of it. “As I’d be happy to demonstrate.”

There was a brief, searing pause.

“Did you just suggest what I think you suggested?” she demanded, her dark eyes promising fire and brimstone and other such irritants. Her full mouth firmed into a disapproving line.

He couldn’t have said why he was so entertained.

“I can’t say that I remember what I suggested,” he replied, smiling again. “But one gathers you’re opposed.”

“The word is insulted, Mr. Wolfe,” she retorted. “Not opposed.”

But he knew what that spark in her gaze meant, and it wasn’t insult. “If you say so,” he said, and let his gaze move over her body.

She was tall and slim, with rich curves in all the right places, bright blond hair and soulfully deep brown eyes, making her the perfect, long-legged distraction. Unfortunately, she was also wearing entirely too many severely cut articles of clothing, all of them designed to force a man’s eye from the very places it was naturally drawn.

Add to that her scraped-back, no-nonsense hairstyle and it was abundantly clear that this woman was one of those stuffy, deeply boring career women who Lucas found tedious in the extreme. The only kind of distraction this woman would be likely to provide, he knew from painful experience, would come in the form of a blistering lecture concerning his many moral failings rather than a few hot moments with her long legs wrapped around his hips while he thrust deep and true.

A great pity, Lucas thought, grudgingly.

“I beg your pardon?” It was not the first time she had said it, he realized. She was still staring at him in a horror he found overdone and on the verge of insulting, her honey-and-cream voice laced with shock. “I don’t mean to be rude, Mr. Wolfe, but are you by any chance still drunk? “

She might have gone out of her way to hide her many charms, but he happened to be a connoisseur of women. He could see exactly what her full lower lip promised and could imagine the precise, delicious weight of her full breasts in his palms. Why a woman would hide her own beauty so deliberately was a mystery to Lucas—and one he had no interest at all in solving.

Not today, when there were mysteries to go around. Not ever.

He moved to one of the chairs in front of her desk and lowered himself into it, watching the way her huge brown eyes tracked his every movement as he sprawled into a much more comfortable position. Not with the shell-shocked, often lascivious awe to which he was accustomed, but with a certain, unexpected wariness instead. He was interested despite himself.

“Not at all,” he said, smiling at her, knowing that one of his legendary dimples was even now appearing in his lean jaw. “Though a drink would certainly not go amiss. Thank you. I find I am partial to bourbon this week.”

“I am not offering you a drink, or anything else,” she said, a snap in her voice, though her smile remained nailed in place. “From what I observed last night, I can’t imagine you would ever require another one.”

“I’m sorry,” he replied easily, still smiling, propping up his jaw with one hand. “Did we meet last night—or were you simply one of the many onlookers? Part of the inevitable crowd? Perfect strangers do so love to watch my every move and make up stories to suit their own opinions of my character.”

It was meant to embarrass her, as Lucas knew well that even the most prurient gossipmonger hated to be called out as such, but she did not balk. Instead, she waved a hand at his black eye, his split lip, her eyes steady on his. Bold, even.

“Is a story required?” she asked from behind that veneer of politeness that he noted and knew better than to believe. “The truth seems sordid enough, surely.”

He forced himself to sink even farther into the chair, every inch of him decadent and debauched, exactly as vile as she believed him to be. He knew more about veneers, about masks and misdirection, than anyone ought to know. It had always been his first and best defense. He thrust aside the dark cloud of memory that hovered far too close today, another offense to lay at Jacob’s prodigal feet, and forced a smile.

“The wages of sin,” he murmured, his voice suggestive, smoky.

She would see what he wanted her to see, he knew. The useless parasite, the indolent playboy. They always did.

“Sin is your area of expertise, Mr. Wolfe,” she said briskly. “Mine is events management.”

“And never the twain shall meet,” Lucas said with an exaggerated, theatrical sigh. “My heart breaks.”

“I rather think you operate from a different part of your anatomy,” she said, those dark eyes gleaming.

“I’m delighted you think about that part of my anatomy,” he replied smoothly. “Feel free to indulge yourself. At length.” He smiled. “No pun intended.”

He was fascinated by the color that showed against her high cheekbones, the way her full mouth firmed. She was dressed to exude a particular message—competence and elegance—and Lucas could see she hit those notes perfectly. But only a blind man could miss the fact that she was perfectly formed—which made him wonder about the rest of her, the trim body buttoned up tight beneath her layers of black and gray.

She held herself under such tight control. How could he not imagine what she would be like without it?

“I should tell you,” he said idly, flicking an imaginary piece of dust from his lapel as if he was not watching her closely, “I have never laid eyes upon something buttoned-up that I was not drawn to unbutton, whether I choose to indulge that urge or not.” He smiled as her hand crept toward the buttons on her suit jacket and then dropped sharply to her side as if she’d reprimanded herself. “It is one among my great many personal failings.”

She crossed to the front of her desk and leaned back against it, folding her arms over her chest. In that position, as she was clearly well aware, she could look down her fine, delicate nose at him as he sprawled below her in the visitor’s chair. He was no doubt meant to feel his inferiority keenly. But Lucas had grown up subject to the uncertain temper and intermittent cruelty of the late, unlamented bully William Wolfe, also known as his deeply despised and little-mourned father, and he knew power games when people were unwise enough to play them in his vicinity. He also knew how to win them. After all, he was Lucas Wolfe. He was not a legend by accident.

Something moved inside of him, rolled over and shook itself to life.

“Let me be frank, Mr. Wolfe,” she said, smiling at him again, that bland, placid smile that he knew, with sudden certainty, was meant to manage and soothe him even as it hid her own feelings. Unfortunately, it only drew his attention to her mouth.

“If you have so far been less than candid, I cannot imagine the difference,” he drawled as those brown eyes narrowed. “Will I require full body armor? “

That sweet, fake smile sharpened. “Not at all,” she said, and her honey-and-cream voice seemed to pool in his groin, making him uncomfortably hard. Surprising him. Intriguing him. “I do apologize if I seem anything less than thrilled about what will be, I’m sure, a long and productive relationship between you and Hartington’s. As you know, Hartington’s greatly values its relationship with your family.”

His family. Lucas refused to think about them, the great damaged mess of them, much less the cavern of guilt that always yawned open when he considered his own epic failures where they were concerned. He shoved the thoughts, the memories, aside—cursing Jacob’s name, his sudden reappearance. And then, as ever, himself. He needed to sleep, he thought; he needed to regain his usual equilibrium, to reaccess his sense of humor, at the very least.

“Do you always speak in press releases?” he asked mildly, allowing no hint of his inner turmoil to color his voice. “Or is this for my benefit? Because there are far more interesting ways to secure my undivided attention.”

“My focus is the centenary relaunch of the Hartington’s brand,” she continued, only the faintest flash in her milk-chocolate brown eyes to show him she’d even heard him. “You may not be aware that we will be throwing a gala event in just over three weeks to celebrate our hundredth year as we reintroduce Hartington’s to the modern age.”

“As a matter fact, I do know that,” he said, his gaze captured by the front of her stern jacket, where her crossed arms drew attention to the tempting valley between the breasts he saw only the barest hints of behind the gray silk of her blouse. He dragged his eyes north and bit back a laugh when he saw her eyes were narrowed even further in outrage. A different woman might have preened, but she didn’t, and Lucas found he was less disappointed by the fact she was not that woman than he should have been.

“Then you must also know that this is an exciting time for Hartington’s,” she said. Lucas did not think she sounded at all excited—rather, she sounded as if she would like to have him forcibly removed from her office. He was well acquainted with that tone, having heard it so often in his lifetime, even if, in her case, it was drenched in all that Texas honey. “I’m sure that a man of your stature will have a great deal to contribute.”

“And by ‘stature,’” he murmured silkily, unable, somehow, to look away from her narrowed chocolate gaze, and just as unable to rationalize his own behavior—why should he care what she thought or meant?—”am I to assume you, in fact, mean ‘notoriety'?”

“Yours is a face with which the whole of Britain, and indeed the world, is intimately familiar,” she said, her cool gaze at odds with her soft, velvety voice. “Your headline-grabbing antics are, truly, a gift to the public relations department. No publicity is bad publicity, after all.”

“I will have to schedule further antics at once,” he said, with bite, though she neither quailed nor colored as she gazed back at him, as she should have done. “I am certain there is no limit to the number of headlines I can grab, all for the greater glory of Hartington’s.”

“You are too kind,” she said sweetly, as if she had not picked up on his sardonic tone, when he was more than certain she had. He could see that she had. She nodded at his battered face. “Though perhaps you might let those bruises heal a little bit first.”

Lucas realized, belatedly, what a powerful asset she had in that voice of hers, so soft and sugary and deadly all at once. A rapier-sharp blade sheathed in honey and cream. It was impressive.

But he did not wish to be impressed.

“In any case,” she continued, “I am truly delighted to have had this opportunity to meet with you, Mr. Wolfe—”

“By all means, call me Lucas,” he said quietly, weighing that soft, sweet voice against the steel he could sense beneath, and could even see in her gaze. “I insist that all character assassinations be made on a first-name basis.”

“—and I am certain,” she continued, that smile remaining firmly in place, “that I will have the pleasure of working with you sometime in the future, after we’ve had the relaunch. I’ll be sure to schedule a meeting with the PR team in the next few weeks, once you’ve had time to settle in and get your bearings… .”

This time she trailed off as he shook his head, her brows rising in inquiry. Lucas found he enjoyed that far more than he should.

“You are Grace Carter, are you not?” He enjoyed saying her name—because he could see that she did not like the way he said it. As if he could taste the flavor of it with his tongue. It was his turn to smile. “Charlie assured me you were the person I needed to find.”

There was a slight, humming sort of pause. She blinked, and he felt it like a victory.

“Charlie?” she asked, an odd, slightly strangled note in her voice.

“Charlie Winthrop,” Lucas supplied helpfully, and was delighted when her cheeks reddened again—this time, he had no doubt, with temper.

It made him wonder what she would look like if it was passion that heated her. If it was him. “I am to be at your disposal,” he said, making his voice as suggestive as possible. “Completely.”

He was intrigued when the expression that flashed across her face was anger. Most women were not angry when flirted with, especially not when the flirt in question was as accomplished as Lucas, without a shred of immodesty, knew himself to be. He had once made the queen smile while enjoying the races at Ascot. What was one embittered executive next to Her Royal Majesty?

“Of course,” she said through her smile, even as she glared at him as if she’d like to incinerate him on the spot with the force of her gaze.

“Perhaps you’ve heard of him,” he said, unable to keep the amusement from his voice. The hint of triumph.

Lucas found himself fascinated by the way she visibly wrested control of herself, wrapping her show of temper behind another wide smile and an extra helping of that sweet, sweet Texas honey with its swift, sure kick beneath.

“If, as the CEO of Hartington’s, Mr. Winthrop feels your contributions to the company are best utilized through my office,” she said, her voice smooth while her eyes burned, “then I am delighted to have you aboard.”

If he had not known better, he might have believed her. If he had not seen her mask slip, and the way she put it back on so skillfully. If he had not been as accomplished a master of disguise himself, he might not even have recognized hers when he saw it.

But, God help them both, he was.

And, worse—she intrigued him.

He shifted in his chair, deliberately emphasizing his idle bonelessness because he knew, somehow, it would infuriate her. He stretched his long legs out in front of him, nearly brushing her feet with his, and watched her spine stiffen as she deliberately did not move out of the way, did not cede her ground. More power games, presumably.

Lucas had never encountered a power game he did not feel compelled to win. That was how he was wired, to his own detriment. And, unfortunately for Miss Grace Carter of the too-dark clothes and the obvious disapproval, he never, ever lost.

Not in decades now. Not ever again.

“You are a liar,” he continued, letting his voice drop into an insinuating growl that he knew would get to her. “Lucky for you, so am I.”

Their eyes met. Held. Seared.

“We should get along famously,” he said with a deep satisfaction, and then he let loose his smile, like the holstered weapon it was, and let it do its work.

* * *

When Charles Winthrop had confirmed publicly that, indeed, Hartington’s was delighted to welcome the famous Wolfe heir aboard—and privately that he expected Grace to personally manage the wild-card playboy with her usual aplomb—Grace had smiled calmly, exuded serenity and comforted herself with visions of smashing every piece of china and shred of pottery she owned. The deep blue bowl from her first trip to Paris, in smithereens. The candlesticks from her holiday on the Amalfi Coast, in a million tiny pieces. Bliss.

When she had explained to her awestruck team—in full view of the smirking, flirtatious Lucas, who appeared to bewitch three-quarters of the staff simply by existing, or possibly by lounging across the cabinets so that his magnificent torso was on display—that Lucas was now a crucial component of their strategy for the fast-approaching centenary project, she had kept a suitably straight face and had imagined lighting a small, personal bonfire on her wraparound balcony and setting ablaze the art she’d hung on the walls when she’d moved in a year earlier. The painting she’d bought directly from the hungry-looking painter with the poet’s eyes on the Charles Bridge in Prague. The print of the first van Gogh she’d seen in the famous Metropolitan Museum in New York City. All smoke and ashes. It made her smile feel real.

“We are delighted to have you on the team, Mr.

Wolfe,” she said as they walked together from the conference room, her smile sweet and her tone razor sharp. “But in future, please do try to contain yourself. The secretaries are not here to serve as your personal dating pool.”

“Have you asked them?” he asked lazily, his rangy body moving with a grace that should have seemed out of place in the dim light of the hallway. Instead, he seemed to take it over. “Because I was under the impression that my every wish was their command. I believe one of them told me so.”

“I don’t need to ask them,” Grace replied, smiling more sharply and pretending she was unaffected by his nearness. “I need only consult company policy.”

“Hartington’s has a Lucas Wolfe clause?” he asked, in that deeply amused drawl that wove spells through her and around her. “I don’t know whether to be flattered or insulted.” Against her will, hardly aware of it, Grace found herself standing still in the corridor instead of walking briskly toward her office. Standing, gazing up at him, like a moon-faced calf. How could he beguile her without even seeming to do so?

She could not afford it.

“Leave the secretaries alone,” she said calmly, as if he had not slipped past her defenses somehow already. As if she had meant to stop there and look up at him.

“Happily,” he said. His abused mouth tilted up in the corner. His green gaze was a banked fire that seemed to kick off echoes within her, hot and wild. “But tell me,” he continued softly, pointedly, “where else should I direct my attention?”

“Perhaps to your brand-new job,” she bit out, ignoring the way he looked at her, his eyes so hooded, so suggestive. “You may find it challenging, after all, having never had one before.”

“I am so sorry to shatter your illusions,” he said, laughing, though she thought it did not quite reach his eyes, “but despite my well-documented, dissipated, sybaritic existence, I have, in fact, held a job. We all have our deep, dark secrets, do we not?”

She had no intention of discussing secrets with this man.

“You understand, Mr. Wolfe, that when one says ‘job,’ one is not referring to your rather questionable relationships with somewhat older ladies of excessive means.” She smiled. Hard. “There are other words for that.”

“Someday you will have to teach me all the ins and outs of your vocabulary,” he said, in a voice that seemed to demand she imagine what tutoring him might involve. Something powerful shook through her, stealing her breath. He smiled. “The job I held was somewhat less illicit, I’m afraid.”

“You?” she asked, in disbelief. “Who on earth would employ you?”

“Not everyone finds my face as distasteful as you seem to do,” he said, challenge and mockery stamped across his expression. He angled his head toward her, too close, and she had to fight to keep herself from jumping back and letting him see how he got to her. “In fact, some people find it addictive.”

“Are you referring to yourself?” she asked lightly, and smiled to take the sting away.

His smile then was as sharp, and far more dangerous. “I mean myself most of all,” he said quietly, an undercurrent in his voice she did not understand. “I am my own heroin.”

It was the ferocity in his voice that lingered with her even hours later, and the fact she could not dismiss the man from her thoughts made her fantasize anew about destroying all of her belongings in a dramatic—if private—show of temper.

But the sad truth, she acknowledged late that evening when she arrived home and looked around the carefully pristine, perfectly decorated penthouse apartment that normally made her feel happy and successful and tonight felt oddly empty, was that she was entirely too practical.

She could not let herself be so reckless, so careless. No matter how good it would feel. She’d learned that lesson the hard way.

“Women in our family are built to love,” her mother had said with a shrug years ago, when Grace had collapsed in a sobbing mess on her bed, trying to handle the fallout of her first, doomed relationship. Back when her mother still spoke to her. “Too much and too long, and always messy. That’s how it goes. It’s our curse.”

“You don’t understand—” Grace had moaned.

“You’re no different, Gracie,” her mother had said, and shaken her head as she’d reached for another cigarette. “I know you want to be, but you’re not, and the sooner you get your head around that the happier you’ll be.”

Now, so many years and miles away from that conversation, and all the betrayal and pain that had followed it, Grace sank down on her smooth, modern couch in the foreign country she called home, and reached back to let her hair fall, heavy and thick, from its place on the back of her head. She shook out the pins, and ran her fingers through the wild mess of it that she only ever dared let down when she was alone. It was too unruly, too untamed—too reminiscent of the girl she had been, who she preferred to pretend had never existed at all.

I am my own heroin, he had said, and she thought it was an apt description of his lure, his innate danger.

There was never any something more with a man like Lucas. There was only heartbreak and loneliness. She needed only to consider her poor mother’s endless string of misery and despair, her life lived on the strength of broken promises and late-night tears, as one more man smiled like he meant it and Grace’s mother believed. She always believed, and they always let her down. Always.

And Mary-Lynn never blamed the men. She always blamed herself, and so lost a little bit more of herself, her battered heart and the light in her eyes every time. Until the day she’d blamed her daughter instead.

Grace kicked off her shoes and curled up on the couch. She could not afford to be fascinated with Lucas Wolfe. She could not allow herself to be intrigued. She had to throw a relaunch party so fabulous that it cemented her reputation for years to come, and she could not permit any deviation from her plan, especially not in the form of a man who was clearly put on the earth to ruin every woman he touched.

It made her heart ache that she was so susceptible, as if it really was a genetic defect passed down from mother to daughter. When all this time, after everything that had happened in high school had changed her so completely, she’d truly believed she was immune. She would be different, no matter what her mother thought—no matter what she’d screamed at Grace when she’d thrown her out like so much trash. She would.

But she would start tomorrow, she thought, closing her eyes, succumbing to her weariness and letting all of her heavy armor drop from her for a moment. She felt the helpless fascination creep in and take her over, and then curled up on the couch with the memory of his devastating smile raging through her like a wildfire she could not bring herself to put out.

Not yet. Not tonight.

CHAPTER THREE

“I’VE remembered you,” Lucas announced, swaggering into her office like a conquering hero, his smile far too bright and much too wicked as it played over his mouth. “It came to me over the weekend.”

It was Monday morning, nearing eleven o’clock, and Grace was not feeling at all charitably inclined toward her new team member. She sat back in her desk chair and regarded him stonily.

It did not matter in the least that he looked even more delicious this morning, in yet another absurd, catwalk-ready sort of suit that made him seem like a sleek, wild, green-eyed jaguar set down among a fleet of tamed and corpulent house cats. His dark hair was still too long for civility—and the office—and stood about in what she imagined were spikes as carefully managed as his wardrobe. His perfect male form was still showcased to mouthwatering effect, his muscled shoulders and lean hips lovingly defined, his torso a work of art in dark wool. His beauty was still far greater, far more masculine and disturbing, than one would suspect from having seen him in photographs.