Shameless Playboy (16 page)

 
          
She
was delectable. Shockingly sensual in ways he had not imagined she could be,
and he knew how she tasted.

 
          
It
took Lucas longer than it should have to realize that he was looking at an old
American sports magazine with a swimsuit photo shoot. It took even longer than
that for him to accept that he was, without a doubt, looking at Grace.
His
Grace, listed as Gracie-Belle Carter
from Racine, Texas. She could not have been eighteen when these pictures were
taken. She was flushed with youth, yet still somewhat unformed—beautiful in the
way young girls could be, but not yet as mesmerizing as she would become with
the passing of the years.

 
          
His
Grace, the born-again Victorian, a swimsuit model? That went against everything
he thought he knew about her—and some deep, male part of himself loved it.

 
          
Alone
in his office, Lucas smiled. He’d known it, hadn’t he? He’d known that she was
wild beneath that prim, severe exterior. He’d sensed it, and he’d tasted it.
And now he knew for certain.

 
          
What
would it take to bring the real Grace out of hiding? What would she be like if
she let this part of herself free? He felt himself harden just imagining her
fierce and unfettered, bold and sexy, hiding nothing.

 
          
He
sent all the images he could find to the printer. His Grace, a wanton. His
Grace, unrestrained and unbound by propriety. He was deeply, darkly thrilled.
He couldn’t wait to get under her skin and taste the truth of her, at last.

 
          
Grace
slammed open his office door without knocking, which was his first clue that he’d
riled her considerably. She was halfway across the room before he had time to
react at all. When he did, he found he could only watch her as she stormed
toward him, the file folder he’d left on her desk gripped tight in one hand.

 
          
She
was furious.

 
          
And
glorious, he could not help but notice, with the flush of temper high on her
cheeks and the light of battle in her eyes. She had hidden herself away in one
more dreary corporate suit, a depressing gray with a long hem and a high
collar, and he could not help but imagine her in nothing but her bikini instead.
She stopped in front of his desk and slapped the folder of photographs down in
front of him.

 
          
“I
expected you to be contemptible,” she told him in a low, angry voice. “After
all, you quite famously have the moral standards of an alley cat in heat, but
this is over the top, even for you.”

 
          
“I
don’t know what you mean,” Lucas said easily, leaning back in his chair and
eyeing her. She was like a high-octane narcotic, a rush and a thrill, and he
could not help the fact that he enjoyed it when she fought with him. “I am
excoriated daily for photographs of me, many of which are taken without my
consent. You, on the other hand, posed for these, did you not?”

 
          
“I
was
seventeen!
” she gritted out from
between her teeth, her hands in fists at her sides. “And
I
have not courted public opinion and infamy every day since!”

 
          
“
I
do not have to court attention, Grace,”
he replied, smiling slightly. “It finds me whether I want it or not.” He
indicated her presence before him with a languid wave of his hand, and was rewarded
by the sparks that flashed like lightning in her eyes.

 
          
“That
might have been more believable before you proved yourself to be a master
manipulator of the press, the marketing department and anyone else you come
into contact with,” Grace seethed at him. She shook her head fiercely. “I don’t
believe your lazy playboy act any longer.”

 
          
Lucas
did not speak for a moment, watching the play of emotion across her face
instead. There was fear behind her anger, fueling it. He found it fascinating—and
disconcerting. Something turned over in his gut.

 
          
“What
happened to you?” he asked her quietly, his eyes searching her flushed face.

 
          
He
took in the inevitably sleek and perfect bun she’d wrapped her hair into, the
severe and overly conservative cut of her suit. All she was missing was a pair
of clunky black eyeglasses, and she could have completely embodied the
stereotype. Why was she hiding? What was she hiding
from?

 
          
And
why was he so compelled to find out the truth about her?

 
          
“If
you mean what happened to me
this morning
,”
she snapped at him, vibrating slightly with tension and fury and that
incomprehensible fear, “I came into the office to discover that the resident
Don Juan spent his free time digging around in a past I leave buried for a
reason!”

 
          
“I
mean, in your life,” he said, shaking his head slightly. The look in her dark
eyes made him feel restless, made him want to do things that were anathema to
him—like try to save her, galloping in on a gleaming white horse and pretending
to be someone who could. But he had stopped rescuing people a long, long time
ago. “I could hardly believe these were pictures of you. Why do you hide all
your joy, power, beauty? Why do you pretend that part of you never existed?”

 
          
“Because
she never did!” Grace threw at him, her hands rising and then dropping against
her thighs, her voice much too rough, too raw.

 
          
And
then, to his horror, her dark brown eyes filled with tears.

 
          
* * *

 
          
She
could not cry. She would not cry—not in front of this man, who had managed to
expose her darkest secret with the same lackadaisical smirk and easy
carelessness as he did everything. Not here, not now, where she was already far
too vulnerable.

 
          
She
had almost passed out when she’d opened that folder after the morning meeting.
Shame and horror had slammed into her with too much force, too much pain, and
the fact that it had been Lucas who had found the pictures, Lucas who had seen
her like that … It made her want to sob. Or scream. Perhaps both.

 
          
Thank
God she’d been alone in her office! Of all the things she’d expected to see in
a folder from Lucas, the very worst mistake she’d ever made had not been on the
list. Sometimes, eleven long years later and a world away, she even let herself
forget about it for long stretches at a time. She would tell herself that
everyone had things they would prefer to forget tucked away in their history,
that it hardly bore thinking about any longer.

 
          
That
her mother had not been right. That she had not been ruined so long ago, when
she had let it all happen. That she was not beyond the pale, as she’d been
treated. That her mother should have believed her—and should not have disowned
her.

 
          
But
she had been kidding herself, apparently.

 
          
He
had presented the glossy reminder of the worst year of her life to her in
bright color photographs, in her office, the one place where
Gracie-Belle
had never existed. Could
never exist.
Gracie-Belle
had died
the moment those pictures were published, and she’d been so young and so stupid
it had taken her far longer than it should have to recognize that fact. She’d
needed money desperately enough to forget everything she’d learned about the
way men were, and the way the world worked—and she’d paid for that. She was
still paying.

 
          
Grace’s
hands curled into fists at her sides. How dare he throw those pictures in front
of her as if he knew something about them—about her?

 
          
“I
do not expect you to understand,” she said coldly, stiffly, desperately
fighting to sound calm—no tears, no sobbing, no shouting—and not quite
succeeding. “You have never
needed
anything in your privileged, aristocratic, yacht-hopping life, have you?”

 
          
“Grace,”
he said, his green eyes growing dark as he stared at her, that confidence he
wore like a second skin seeming to slip before her eyes, “you are taking this
the wrong way. I only meant—”

 
          
“To
humiliate me?” she interrupted him wildly. “To punish me because I refused to
sleep with you?”

 
          
He
looked appalled. Shocked. “What? 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.