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.
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.
But then the picture loaded on the screen in front of him, and Lucas froze in his chair. Desire and curiosity combined, rushing through him like something heady and illicit.
Because it was—yet also wasn’t—the Grace he knew.
The woman before him in full-color photography was more properly a girl, all coltish limbs and ripe curves, hair flowing all around her, sexy and rumpled, wet and lush. One picture showed her in nothing but a pair of bikini bottoms, looking coquettishly over her shoulder at the camera with big eyes and sultry lips, the line of her bare back an enticing, mesmerizing curve. Another featured an even smaller bikini, and a whole lot of sand plastered in interesting places, as she knelt on a dark rock and stared moodily at the camera, holding back her wild, wet hair with both hands. A third showed her lying on her back in some kind of hammock, eyes closed, a wet T-shirt showing the full swells of her breasts while her thumbs were hooked in her bikini bottoms as if she were about to tear them
