Bad Blood

“I loathe Cinderella,” Grace said, trying to firm her spine, to breathe. To retain control. “There is never any need to wear shoes so precarious that you might lose one should you need to run. And why was a ball so important to her, of all things? She’d have been much better off looking for a job instead of a prince.”

“I suspect you are missing the point of the fairy tale,” Lucas said in that same quiet voice. His dark brows rose. “Deliberately.”

She did not know why she stood there, simply looking at him. She did not know why the moment felt so heavy, yet so breakable, and why she could not seem to make her escape as she knew she should. As she knew she must.

“Come home with me,” he said, and it was a command, not a request. It licked through her, into her. She could not seem to breathe through the heat suffusing her, the tight, hot desire that coiled in her and pulled taut.

What terrified her was how tempted she was to simply do it. To give in to the demands of her body. To surrender to him and the pleasure she knew he could deliver. Had already delivered, little as she wanted to admit it.

But it was that terror that spurred her into action. She heard herself sigh, or perhaps she’d tried to speak, but then she stepped around him and headed for the grand entrance across the lobby. There was nothing to be gained by a discussion, because she could not be trusted around him. It was as simple as that. She had to get away from him—from this spell he’d cast that seemed to compel her to do the very thing she’d vowed she would never do.

The night outside was frigid and wet, but Grace welcomed both, gasping slightly as the cold slapped into her.

“This is absurd,” Lucas said from behind her, his voice clipped with impatience. “The weather is vile. You’ll contract pneumonia.”

“That would be preferable, at this point,” she said without thinking and heard his short laugh.

And then she was spinning around, because his hands were hot and firm on her bare shoulders, and then the world tilted again and there was nothing but the smoky green of his impossibly beautiful eyes. The ones that saw too much, however unlikely that should have been.

“You would prefer the fate of an opera heroine to one moment more in my company, is that it?” he asked with a certain grim amusement, and were he any other man, Grace might have thought she’d hurt his feelings.

But this was Lucas Wolfe. He had none, as he would be the first to announce.

“Yes,” she said, lifting her chin and wishing that alone could clear her head. “Consumption. Tuberculosis. Either is far better than being photographed as yet one more hapless female connected at the mouth to the infamous Lucas Wolfe.”

The night was dark and the rain seemed to blur the edges of things, but, even so, Grace could have sworn that she’d wounded him somehow. Far more confusing than that possibility was her reaction. She wanted to apologize, to comfort him. To make that hint of vulnerability disappear.

She had no idea what was happening to her.

“Don’t worry,” he drawled, his eyes flashing as his fingers flexed slightly against the flesh of her shoulders before letting go. “I cannot imagine anyone will recognize you as my ‘unnamed companion du jour,’ or care. I doubt that it will even make the papers.”

“I’m so glad,” she bit out, unable to process why she was suddenly so angry with him—and not wanting to examine it, just as she did not want to examine why she felt so jagged, so messy, so ruined—as her mother had spitefully predicted all those years ago. She wrapped her arms around herself, her hands moving to absently cup the places he’d just vacated.

“Grace,” he said, and her name was something between a sigh and a curse. “Come home with me,” he said again. He shook his head slightly, as if he was as unnerved by his own tone of voice as she was. “Please.”

“I …” But she could not seem to finish the sentence. She could not bring herself to break the odd spell between them, the enchantment—as if doing so would cause him pain. And, she acknowledged with great reluctance, her, too.

He looked at her for an age, a moment, a heartbeat. Cars skidded past them on the late-night street, the traditionally uniformed doorman hailed a cab with a shrill whistle and London carried on all around them, the city bright and noisy and shimmering in the winter rain.

And there was Lucas, brilliant against the night, as if nothing else had ever mattered, or could.

“Come with me,” he whispered, and held out his hand.

She could not speak, or move. She felt herself sway slightly, as if pulled to him by some invisible chain. She knew too much now—that his body was so strong, so warm, so incredibly male. That he could set her on fire with only that dark, stirring gaze even as the cold rain fell down on them both.

She felt the great gulf of the loneliness she spent her waking hours denying yawn open inside of her, reminding her of all the nights she’d spent alone, all the years she’d denied she was a woman, all the vows and promises she’d made to herself about how different she would be than her mother, than her own past. Than what had happened to her. But then Lucas had touched her, and she was nothing but a woman.

Finally, something inside of her whispered, and that word seemed to ricochet inside of her, leaving marks. Scars.

She wanted to reach over and slip her hand into his more than she could remember ever wanting anything else.

He was far too good at this, she thought in a kind of daze—and it was that sudden spark of reality that gave her the courage, the strength, to step back from him. To really see him again, instead of what she felt.

To remember exactly who he was, and what he did, and why he knew all the right buttons to push, and how best to tempt her. He could seduce a stone gargoyle. He probably had.

And if her heart hurt inside her chest, well, that was just another secret she would learn how to keep. And hide away, where he could never find it again to use against her.

“I can’t,” she whispered. “I won’t.” And then she turned away from him, blind but determined, and did not breathe again until she’d hurled herself into the nearest black cab and slammed the door between them.

Walking into the morning meeting the following day, with a smile on her face and exuding all the professionalism she possessed, was one of the most difficult things Grace had ever had to do.

If she could have, she would have called in sick. But she’d suspected that doing so would be far too telling—it would give Lucas far more of an advantage than he already had, and she could not live with that possibility.

I am my own heroin, he had said, and now she was terribly afraid he was hers, too. She felt very nearly strung out, and he had done nothing but kiss her. Just imagine …

But she refused to go down that road.

“Good morning,” he said, along with the rest of the team as she entered the conference room—his voice seeming to arrow straight into the center of her, kicking up echoes and vibrations.

There was no need to look at him directly, she told herself as she took her place at the head of the table and confidently addressed those gathered. There was no need for anything so foolish, and anyway, she had already blinded herself staring into that particular sun. She had already flirted with her worst fears. No need to compound her sins.

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.