Of course not!”
They stared at each other for a searing, tense moment. He swallowed, then shrugged, visibly uncomfortable. “I only wanted to remind you. Of who you are. Who you could be.”
“Who I am?” she asked, hearing the bitterness in her own voice. She tried to shake it off, turning away from him toward the wall of windows and the lush little seating area grouped before them. “How could you possibly know who I am?”
“It’s funny, isn’t it?” His voice was deceptively mild in the quiet office. “We all think we know someone because we’ve seen them in pictures. Isn’t that how you knew I was so contemptible?”
She did not want to admit that he had a point, throwing that word back at her, and she told herself it didn’t matter, anyway. Rich men acting badly made the world go around. They could, like Lucas himself, wake up one morning wishing for a change, and just like that, executive positions were doled out like candy.
It was different if one happened to be born dirt poor. And a woman.
“Let me tell you a story,” she managed to say past the lump in her throat and the tight ball of anxiety in her gut. “You’ll have to use your imagination because it takes place far, far away from a sprawling estate in the English countryside or the glamorous Christmas windows of Hartington’s.”
She shot a look at him over her shoulder, not sure how she felt when she saw how he watched her, as if he really did know her—something almost tender in his expression. But what did that really mean? He thought the pictures he’d unearthed were a good memory, that they were something other than desperate. He did not, could not, know her at all.
“I grew up poor, Lucas,” she said as evenly as she could. “Not ‘Daddy refuses to pay my bills this month’ poor, but real poor. ‘Having to choose between rent and food’ poor. A trailer park in a dirty little Texas town that nobody’s heard of and nobody ever leaves, because there’s no money for dreams in Racine.”
“Grace …” he said, but she was too far gone to stop. She could hear the emotion in her voice, could feel it pumping through her. She did not know why she was telling him this, only that she had to.
“Mama didn’t understand why I couldn’t just settle down with whatever boy would have me and live the same kind of life that everyone we knew lived, that she lived, but I couldn’t.” She shook her head, as if that would help ward off the accent that returned when she talked about Texas, her words sprawling, her drawl thickening. “I read too much. I dreamed too hard. And even though there was a part of me that loved Racine more than words, because it was home, I knew I had to leave.”
She swallowed, as if she was still standing in that dusty trailer park, so blisteringly hot in the summer, and the wheezy old air-conditioning forever being turned off to save pennies—even though she could see London in front of her, sparkling and cosmopolitan through the windows.
“So while the other girls my age were making out in backseats and getting ready to marry their high school sweethearts,” she said quietly, as if remembered dust and despair were not choking her even now, “I was banking everything on a college scholarship.”
She could hardly bear look at him then, so beautiful and impossible, high-class and expensive, like a male fantasy made flesh. Her fantasy. The only man who had gotten under her skin in eleven long years. She didn’t know why it made her ache to see him as he sat there behind his big desk, as far away from her now as he had ever been. She told herself she wanted it that way. That the kisses they had shared, the odd moments of communion, were no more than an elaborate game to him, and she was not at all the worthy player he seemed to think. That he simply hadn’t known it, but he would now.
She told herself she was glad.
“It was one thing to be bookish,” she said, looking at the folder of the photographs that had damned her. “And something else to be pretty.” Her mouth twisted in remembered shame and trembled slightly. “And I was much too pretty. Mama’s new boyfriends were always quick to comment on it. Some of them tried to get too friendly when they were drunk. I kept my head down, hid in the library and studied. I was the top of my class—the top of the state, even. I knew I’d get some kind of scholarship—but I also knew it very likely wouldn’t be enough to cover my expenses. I’d have to do work/study, at the very least. Maybe more than one job, if I wanted textbooks. Or food. But I was destined for better things. That’s what I thought.”
“You were clearly correct.” Lucas’s voice was cool, crisp. His aristocratic accent seemed to cut through her memories of those hot Texas days like a knife through butter. But it only served to remind her how vast the gulf between them was, and how little he could ever understand her.
She did not want to think about why she wanted him to understand her in the first place.
“That fall my class took a field trip to San Antonio to see the Alamo,” Grace said, forcing herself to continue, however little she wanted to keep talking. “And that was where Roger discovered me.”
She didn’t want these memories. She wished she could excise them from her head and throw them away as easily as she’d gotten rid of all the other things that had held her back from the future she’d so desired. Like her accent. Her roots. Even her mother, who hadn’t wanted her enough, in the end. And it had all started with Roger Dambrot.
“He was a photographer,” she said. She could feel Lucas looking at her, and she had no one to blame but herself. She had started this, hadn’t she? “Quite a famous one, actually.”
She had decided to share this story of her past, but that didn’t mean she had to share all of it. Like her doomed, childish love for Roger, who had been as happy to sleep with her as he had been to disappear the moment she veered toward any emotion. She thrust the memory of that first, last heartbreak aside. She had been a colossal idiot, but wasn’t every teenage girl? She’d been so pleased with the attention. So delighted that he could make her look like that with his camera. She’d thought she’d found her calling—her ticket out of Racine and into the bright future she’d always believed she’d deserved.
“Thanks to him,” she said, fighting to stay calm, “I was offered a lot of money for a modeling contract, and it never even crossed my mind to refuse it.” She smiled, unhappily. “I was proud of it! I thought it proved that I was different—that I was special.”
“Grace …” Lucas’s voice was a caress. She shook it away.
“What I did not expect,” she said tightly, “was that appearing in a bathing suit in a national magazine meant that every one in Racine would consider me a whore. The teachers at school. The other kids. My mother’s boyfriend.”
She could remember it all so clearly, no matter how hard she’d tried to forget it over the years. Travis, her mother’s latest boyfriend, with his copy of an American sports magazine in his hands and that knowing, lustful look in his mean black eyes. The tiny bedroom in the trailer that Grace had always considered her refuge. Travis’s hands, touching her. His big body, reeking of stale beer and old cigarette smoke, pressing her back, pushing her down, making her freeze in panic and confusion.
And then her mother’s appearance in the doorway—to save her, Grace had thought. Thank God, she’d thought. It had taken so long, too long, for her brain to accept that her mother’s rage and fury was directed at her, not Travis.
“I should have known you would pull something like this!” Mary-Lynn had screamed at her. “This
