LUCA LEGRAND COULDN’T decide whether he had the best luck in the world or whether he was actually cursed with the worst fucking luck ever. At the moment, sitting in a holding cell that stank like piss and rancid sweat, he was pretty sure it was the latter.
“Legrand!” A uniformed member of the Paris Police Prefecture banged on the bars. “Votre avocat est ici.” Your lawyer is here.
Pushing himself to his feet, Luca waited for the man to unlock the cell and then followed him down the hall to a cubicle not much larger than a toilet stall. François Chevalier, the lawyer for the Legrand Estate vineyard, was already waiting inside, reading a newspaper at a steel table that was bolted to the floor.
François glanced up when the door opened. He didn’t stand, and did not greet Luca, but rather drummed his fingers on the metal tabletop as he waited for Luca to take the seat across from him.
Once the door was shut behind the officer, François went back to reading the paper. More specifically, he perused an article with the headline, Héritier de Legrand Vineyard en Prison Pour Voies de Fait. Heir to the Legrand Vineyard in Prison for Assault. Beneath the headline was a blown-up image of Luca being shoved into a police car.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Luca said.
“Really? Because it looks bad,” François said calmly, though his mustache twitched.
Luca leaned back in the hard metal chair, folding his arms over his chest. He gazed directly at François, not willing to look away because he was not contrite in the fucking least.
“It’s not my fault,” he said.
“Is that so?” François leaned toward him, palms on the table, forcing Luca to look up at him. His face—though always red—was now the color of a sun-ripened heirloom tomato. “You punched a reporter. You broke his nose. You smashed his camera. How is that not your fault?”
He stood up and swept a hand around the tiny room that smelled like mildew and stale cigarettes. “The first Legrand man to ever be arrested. Yet still you sit there and say it’s not your fault?” He made a sour face, as if tasting a too-green wine, one that should be spit out immediately.
Slowly, Luca got to his feet, all six feet two inches of him, so François had to look up at him. “The man deserved what he got.”
“I don’t care what he deserved. All I care about is your legacy. Which you have single-handedly destroyed.” He glared at Luca. His heavy lids and the bags beneath made it nearly impossible to see his eyes, but Luca was determined to hold François’s gaze. The fact that François looked away first did not give him any pleasure, however.
“The value of our champagne has dropped significantly since you took over. Do you realize that?”
Luca ground his teeth, forcing himself to count to five. Un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq... But counting did not stop the deepest part of his gut from rumbling with liquid fire that was amplified with every breath. Through clenched teeth, he said, “The value of our champagne dropped the day my father died.”
It was true. His father had run the estate for thirty years, continuing in the footsteps of his father and grandfather and two hundred years of ancestors before that. His father had been a robust, healthy man and it had seemed as if he would live forever. Not that Luca had seen much of him in the past ten years while he was competing on the Grand Prix motorcycle racing circuit.
“This cannot continue—” François gestured toward Luca’s chest. “These scandals.”
Here we go. Luca leaned against the wall, crossing one ankle over the other. Waiting for François to detail each of his latest “scandals.” There was no point in defending himself.
Ticking items off his finger, François began the lengthy list. “Disturbing the peace.”
Disturbing the peace? Luca had broken up with his girlfriend, Anika Van Horn, a model he’d quickly learned was more interested in the fame and fortune of the Legrand name than in Luca himself. She did not take the breakup well. In fact, she’d slapped him, making sure to do so at an outdoor café, causing a scene that spread in seconds via social media. He still wasn’t sure how charges had come of it.
“Public drunkenness.”
He had attended a fellow Monster teammate’s bachelor party. While Luca had had his fair share of drinks, he had not been nearly as drunk as the groom-to-be, whom Luca had rescued from the Fontaine Stravinsky.
“Public nudity.”
It had been his friend, the bachelor, who was naked. But the press had a way of spinning things so that it sounded like Luca was the one who’d disrobed, jumped into the fountain and done lewd things to a colorful, busty mermaid with water spouting from the tips of her breasts.
Sighing, Luca waved for François to keep going with the damning list, knowing what was coming next.
“Then. Just to up the ante...a sex video gone public. And not just any sex...” François paused, arching his brow for effect. He sniffed instead of finishing his sentence. “Such a boost to the prestige of your esteemed family name.” François grimaced with sarcasm.
Luca opened his mouth, the excuse—the fact that the video was meant to be private and that Anika had obviously been
