still lodged like bullets beneath Grace’s heart. She could still feel them when she breathed.
“Once they think you’re a whore,” she said quietly,
“that’s how they treat you. Even my own mother. And more to the point, her boyfriend.”
All the things she did not say hung there between them, and Lucas only looked at her, as if she was not more naked, more vulnerable, than she had ever allowed herself to be before. Grace felt a deep trembling move through her, climbing from her feet to her neck, and fought to breathe.
“I’m sorry,” Lucas said, his voice too soft, so soft it made her eyes heat with the tears she refused to shed. “As it happens, I understand completely what it is like to be judged on photographs, and the conclusions about one’s character that so many people draw from them.”
“So one would imagine,” she said. She turned around and met his gaze fully, not sure when he’d climbed to his feet and not certain she liked the reminder of his height, his surprising grace.
“Why do you care so much what so many ignorant people think?” he asked, still in that soft voice.
“Because they were my people!” Grace blinked to keep the wet heat from sliding down her cheeks. “Racine was the only thing I ever knew, and I can never go back. Do you understand what that feels like?”
“I cannot understand why you would wish to return to a place that scorned you,” Lucas said, his voice low.
“Those pictures are the reason my mother threw me out of the house when I was seventeen,” she said, as evenly as she could. “I hate them and every thing they stand for. I wanted to make some money for college, and instead I lost my family, my hometown and, for a long time, my self-respect. That’s all you need to understand.”
“But that was then,” Lucas said, smiling slightly, encouragingly. “Now they are an acknowledgment that you were always, as you are now, a beautiful woman.”
“I don’t want to be a beautiful woman, whatever that is!” Grace cried, old and new emotions boiling too hot, too wild, inside of her. Why couldn’t he understand? Her looks had never done anything but cause her trouble. She would have removed them if she could. The life she’d built had nothing to do with her body, her face. It had everything to do with how well she did her job, and she couldn’t let go of the panicked notion that if everyone knew what she looked like half-naked that would be all they knew about her, ever after. Again. What would she lose this time?
“Why should you hide yourself away?” Lucas asked, in the same light tone, because what wasn’t light to this man?
And it was just too much. Over a decade of anguish seemed to well up within her, threatening to spill over and drown her. She had already been down this road—she knew what happened. Let a man see her as a piece of meat and he would treat her that way, too. This was the truth about men. This was what Grace inspired in them. Hadn’t she spent all these years completely immersed in her job, her career, to keep from having to face the uncomfortable truth? The loneliness? Why had she wanted so desperately to believe that Lucas was any different?
“Did you really believe I would be delighted to see these pictures?” she countered. Her eyes narrowed. How had she tricked herself into believing there was more to him than this shiny surface? When would she learn that she knew nothing of men—especially not men like Lucas, who wielded sex as just one more weapon? “Or was this one more of the sick little games you play that mean nothing to you, because you are completely heedless of the damage you cause to the people around you?” She was unable to hide the hurt from her voice. “Because you can be?”
He stood there against his desk, an arrested look on his face, his smoky green eyes changing to something much darker, much grimmer. It was as if she watched him alter before her eyes. Gone was the sly, insinuating good-time guy, made of sin and rumor and utter carelessness. And in his place was this … man. Different. Darker.
Tortured, she thought, her heart pounding like a drum, too fast and too hard. But how could that be? How could he be hurt?
And why should she care?
He is like all the rest! that old voice inside of her cried, still nursing the wounds her mother and Travis had inflicted so long ago. Don’t listen to a word he says—don’t believe the things you think you read on his face!
But she could not bring herself to move.
“You have no idea of the damage I can do,” he said, his voice thick with what could only be self-loathing, the lash of it making her blink and sway slightly on her feet. “And ferreting out a few perfectly tasteful pictures from a decade ago hardly match up to the destruction I can wreak. You should count yourself lucky, Grace.”
She did not want to care about this man. She did not want to feel that unwelcome tug in the vicinity of her heart, or want to soothe away the darkness that had overtaken him. She wished she did not know that he could feel pain, that he could react at all to the things she’d said. She wished he was no more and no less than the flighty playboy she’d believed him to be.
But if she’d truly believed that, why, the relentlessly logical part of her brain asked, had she told him the story she’d never told another living soul?
“Do not show those pictures to anyone,” she said, her voice shaking slightly, trying hard not to notice the way his mouth twisted, as if she’d wounded him again.
“They are only pictures,” he said softly, with a bitterness she could not understand. He swept the folder into his hand, and then pitched it into the wire trash bin that stood next to his desk. “And now they are gone. No lives ruined. But I am Lucas Wolfe, after all. I’m sure there are six or seven other lives I can destroy before the evening news.”
Grace knew she should have walked away then. She should have turned on her heel and left the offensively luxurious top-floor office he’d done nothing to earn. She should have considered the matter finished, and comforted herself with the knowledge that he was the person she’d believed him to be from the start—shallow, conscienceless, empty.
But she did none of those things.
“Why do you want me—the world—to think the worst of you?” she asked before she knew she meant to speak. That odd tension that had gripped her in the lobby of the hotel and out on the street the other night returned, hovering between them, making the air feel heavy with portent and meaning. Regret and fear. Secrets. Hope. Or perhaps that was no more than the way he looked at her.
“It saves time,” he replied, his voice strained, almost harsh. “There is nothing here, Grace. Nothing beneath the pretty face. Isn’t that what you think? What everyone thinks? Congratulations. You are correct.”
His pain has nothing to do with you! she cried at herself, but it was as if another person inhabited her body. Another person who swayed closer to him, whose hands itched to reach over and touch him—a person who could not let that much raw pain go unacknowledged. Especially when it was his. A person who could not believe he was who he said he was. Who would not believe it.
God help her.
“I think,” she said, very quietly, unable to look away from him, unable to hide herself as she should, as she’d meant to do, because something about the way he was talking made her think he was grieving and she could not ignore that, she simply could not, “that
