only she could run from herself as easily.
She heard her mother’s voice echo in her head, weathered from too many cigarettes and too many bad choices. “Someday you’ll ruin yourself on some no-account man just like the rest of us. You’ll see. Then maybe you won’t be so high and mighty.”
Grace felt a rolling swell of a multitude of things—none of them high and mighty. Maybe no one could escape her destiny. Maybe she’d been a fool to try so hard, for so long.
It was not until she’d made it down into the lobby of the exclusive luxury hotel that she realized she’d left her bag behind on the top level—behind the tight wall of high-level security that only Lucas’s famous face had managed to breach. She sighed, a noise that was dangerously close to a sob.
Her keys. Her wallet. Her PDA. How could she leave without them? Where could she go?
She came to a stop in the middle of the marble floor, her legs feeling unsteady beneath her, her breath still too quick and her heart still so loud she was afraid it echoed in the hushed space.
“Grace.”
Of course he had followed her. He was the reigning champion of this particular game, and she had just forfeited. All over him and on film.
It was not possible to hate herself more than she did at that moment, but Grace tried. Oh, how she tried.
She did not turn around, but still, she knew when he drew close. Her body reacted as if his proximity was a caress. She felt an inevitable, breathless kind of heat slide from the nape of her neck to her breasts, then down between her legs where it coiled tight and bloomed into a fire. She found she was biting her lower lip and forced herself to stop. Just as she forced herself to raise her head and meet his penetrating yet oddly shuttered gaze when he stepped around to her front to face her.
For a moment, the world fell away. The glittering, ornate lobby, with its hint of tasteful music from above and the acrobatic flower displays in large ceramic vases, faded into a gray nothingness, and there was only Lucas. Only the things she told herself she did not, could not, see in him, because he was only surface no matter how he made her ache. Only the deep, abiding desire for him that rolled inside of her, the fire banked and smoldering, but too-easily kindled by the way he tilted his head to one side as he considered her, his mouth crooking slightly in one corner.
“I would almost say that you were running away from me,” he said quietly, his gaze too perceptive for such a supposedly shallow man, “if I did not know that such a thing were impossible. Women run to me, not away from me.”
“I must not have received that memo,” she said, attempting to match the lightness in his tone, if not his eyes—but her voice betrayed her. It was too rough, too emotional. Too fragile.
Wordlessly, he held out his hand, and that was when she noticed that he held her small, glittering clutch. She swallowed and reached for it, taking care not to touch him in any way. She knew, somehow, that it would ignite that fire all over again, and she was not so foolish as to think she could walk away from this man twice. She was not even sure she could do it now.
“I never took you for the Cinderella type,” Lucas said. Still that light, easy tone, but she could see something much darker, much more intense in his face, his gaze. As if he knew, too, that they danced around the same land mines, the same quicksand. That one false step would incinerate them both.
“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
