The Shameless Playboy

“Are you referring to yourself?” she asked lightly, and smiled to take the sting away.

His smile then was as sharp, and far more dangerous. “I mean myself most of all,” he said quietly, an undercurrent in his voice she did not understand. “I am my own heroin.”

It was the ferocity in his voice that lingered with her even hours later, and the fact she could not dismiss the man from her thoughts made her fantasize anew about destroying all of her belongings in a dramatic—if private—show of temper.

But the sad truth, she acknowledged late that evening when she arrived home and looked around the carefully pristine, perfectly decorated penthouse apartment that normally made her feel happy and successful and tonight felt oddly empty, was that she was entirely too practical.

She could not let herself be so reckless, so careless. No matter how good it would feel. She’d learned that lesson the hard way.

“Women in our family are built to love,” her mother had said with a shrug years ago, when Grace had collapsed in a sobbing mess on her bed, trying to handle the fallout of her first, doomed relationship. Back when her mother still spoke to her. “Too much and too long, and always messy. That’s how it goes. It’s our curse.”

“You don’t understand—” Grace had moaned.

“You’re no different, Gracie,” her mother had said, and shaken her head as she’d reached for another cigarette. “I know you want to be, but you’re not, and the sooner you get your head around that the happier you’ll be.”

Now, so many years and miles away from that conversation, and all the betrayal and pain that had followed it, Grace sank down on her smooth, modern couch in the foreign country she called home, and reached back to let her hair fall, heavy and thick, from its place on the back of her head. She shook out the pins, and ran her fingers through the wild mess of it that she only ever dared let down when she was alone. It was too unruly, too untamed—too reminiscent of the girl she had been, who she preferred to pretend had never existed at all.

I am my own heroin, he had said, and she thought it was an apt description of his lure, his innate danger.

There was never any something more with a man like Lucas. There was only heartbreak and loneliness. She needed only to consider her poor mother’s endless string of misery and despair, her life lived on the strength of broken promises and late-night tears, as one more man smiled like he meant it and Grace’s mother believed. She always believed, and they always let her down. Always.

And Mary-Lynn never blamed the men. She always blamed herself, and so lost a little bit more of herself, her battered heart and the light in her eyes every time. Until the day she’d blamed her daughter instead.

Grace kicked off her shoes and curled up on the couch. She could not afford to be fascinated with Lucas Wolfe. She could not allow herself to be intrigued. She had to throw a relaunch party so fabulous that it cemented her reputation for years to come, and she could not permit any deviation from her plan, especially not in the form of a man who was clearly put on the earth to ruin every woman he touched.

It made her heart ache that she was so susceptible, as if it really was a genetic defect passed down from mother to daughter. When all this time, after everything that had happened in high school had changed her so completely, she’d truly believed she was immune. She would be different, no matter what her mother thought—no matter what she’d screamed at Grace when she’d thrown her out like so much trash. She would.

But she would start tomorrow, she thought, closing her eyes, succumbing to her weariness and letting all of her heavy armor drop from her for a moment. She felt the helpless fascination creep in and take her over, and then curled up on the couch with the memory of his devastating smile raging through her like a wildfire she could not bring herself to put out.

Not yet. Not tonight.

CHAPTER THREE

“I’VE remembered you,” Lucas announced, swaggering into her office like a conquering hero, his smile far too bright and much too wicked as it played over his mouth. “It came to me over the weekend.”

It was Monday morning, nearing eleven o’clock, and Grace was not feeling at all charitably inclined toward her new team member. She sat back in her desk chair and regarded him stonily.

It did not matter in the least that he looked even more delicious this morning, in yet another absurd, catwalk-ready sort of suit that made him seem like a sleek, wild, green-eyed jaguar set down among a fleet of tamed and corpulent house cats. His dark hair was still too long for civility—and the office—and stood about in what she imagined were spikes as carefully managed as his wardrobe. His perfect male form was still showcased to mouthwatering effect, his muscled shoulders and lean hips lovingly defined, his torso a work of art in dark wool. His beauty was still far greater, far more masculine and disturbing, than one would suspect from having seen him in photographs.

His bruises had faded considerably, she could not help but notice. His dizzying appeal had not.

Happily, she told herself with some internal rigor, her moment of weakness had passed. There was no genetic defect, no predisposition. Lucas Wolfe was nothing more than the human version of a well-known painting, widely regarded as beautiful in the extreme—even a masterpiece. One could appreciate such a painting the way one appreciated all forms of beauty. Lucas Wolfe was a curiosity to be admired, and then ignored.

“Mr. Wolfe,” she said now, smiling perfunctorily. “I understand that this may be a new experience for you, and I’ll try to be sensitive to that, but I think you’ll find the team is expected to make it into the office at nine o’clock sharp each morning, not at eleven. Even you, I’m afraid.”

“At Samantha’s party,” he continued, unperturbed. Quite as if she had not spoken, much less reprimanded him. “It was when I went to get the drinks, wasn’t it? You were standing by the bar.” His dark brows rose in challenge, and something else she told herself she did not wish to explore, even as it slid intimately along her skin, kicking up goose bumps. “I knew I recognized you.”

“I’m afraid I can’t remember,” Grace said, lying coolly and without a single shred of remorse.

“Of course you do,” he said, with that easy confidence and a knowing gleam in his bright eyes that arrowed directly into Grace’s sex, making her knees feel weak even as she felt herself soften. For him. Her heart jumped in her chest. She was entirely too grateful that she happened to be sitting down. He was lethal.

And impersonal, she reminded herself sharply, crossing her legs beneath her desk. You could be a random shopgirl. A bus driver. The bus itself. He has chemistry with the very air around him—he can’t help it.

“Mr. Wolfe, really,” she said, frowning at him. “This project is doomed to failure if you cannot respect the most basic rules of the workplace. Allow me to give you a refresher course.”

“Less a refresher course, and more an introduction,” he amended, with a careless shrug and no visible sign that he was at all embarrassed he’d never worked a single day in his pampered, over-privileged life of sin and excess—whatever he might have claimed the previous week.

He certainly made it easy to dismiss him, Grace thought. She dearly wished that she could—that she had not been ordered to personally handle him. But she had been, and so she waited until she had his full, if amused, attention, and began to tick off her points on her fingers.

“You must knock and receive permission to enter before barging into an office,” she said briskly. “You must not ignore your coworkers when they are speaking to you, no matter if you think what you have to say is more interesting—it is unlikely that your coworkers will agree. And it is completely inappropriate to make insinuations regarding the private lives or thoughts of anyone you might work with, under any circumstances. Do you understand me?”

It was as if he lounged against something, though he stood in the center of her office. Such was his natural indolence. He reminded her of the great cats she found so fascinating in the nature programs she often watched—a lazy grace, sleepy-eyed and seemingly harmless, and yet with all that predatory watchfulness and physical prowess hidden just beneath his sleek surface.

“Did I make insinuations?” he asked, not seeming remotely cowed. Only interested. And, if possible, even more amused. “I do beg your pardon. They cannot have been particularly interesting, if I cannot recall them.”

“One imagines that you are so used to insinuating inappropriate things about everyone you meet that it is rather like a comment on the weather for anyone else,” she replied sweetly. She let her smile widen. “Please do try to remember that this is not a yacht on the Côte d’Azur, brimming with starlets and debauchery—this is Hartington’s, a much-beloved and revered British institution.”

He thrust his hands into his pockets and regarded her with that cool green gaze that made her wonder, against her will, what else he hid behind all that sexiness and swagger.

“Rather like me,” he said after a moment, his mouth curving, daring her, somehow. “A bit tattered around the edges, perhaps, the pair of us, but I think somehow the gilt and glamour remain.” He smiled. “Don’t you agree?”

Grace eyed him, torn between the urge to laugh—or to scream. Or, worse, to give in to the hugely inappropriate and somewhat alarming urgings of her body and the heat he seemed to ignite within her without even trying. She did none of the above. She did not even fidget under his scrutiny, though it cost her.

“The team will be meeting in the conference room in a half hour for our daily status update,” she said instead, pointedly glancing at the slim gold watch she wore on her wrist, and then back toward her computer monitor, dismissing him. “If you don’t mind …?”

“You were the only woman in the crowd who refused to smile at me,” Lucas said, in that silken voice of his that, she reminded herself sternly, had seduced millions in exactly the same way. No need to be the next in line in the endless parade. Not that she was considering it! “At first I thought you were one of the ones who scowl at me on purpose, to distinguish themselves from the fawning fans, but you didn’t do that, either.”

“Are you sure it was me?” Grace asked, pretending to be bored with the conversation. “I remember your rather spectacular exit from the party, but very little else.” She gazed at her computer screen as if she could read a single thing on it. As if she was not entirely too focused on the man who stood so close, just on the other side of her desk, commanding all the air in the room despite his seemingly languid slouch and his unkempt hair.

“Neither a smile nor a scowl. You simply looked at me,” Lucas said, his voice like a caress, dark and unfair as it worked its way through her like fine wine, turning her too warm too quickly. She could feel him everywhere. Hot. Shivery. “Even after I said hello.”

“Sorry,” she said in mild yet clear dismissal, her attention on the screen in front of her, as if she could not feel the pull of him, the heat. “You must have me confused with someone else.”

“No,” he said, his gaze shrewd, considering. “No, I don’t think so.”

Grace would rather die than admit she remembered that moment—because she had been quite literally struck dumb to turn from the bar and find him so close, so glowing and impossibly compelling, sexy and rumpled and male. In painful hindsight, it ranked as one of the single most humiliating moments of her life. She, twenty-eight years old, a fully grown adult woman who oversaw teams of staff and high-level events, had been struck mute at the sight of this man. This waste of space, famous for no particular reason aside from his name, who used his considerable charm like currency. Yes, something in her had whispered, deep and sure—as, no doubt, it did in every silly female who laid eyes on him up close. But Grace had never forgiven herself for losing her head so spectacularly over a man back in high school, with so many horrible consequences; she would not compound the error now. She would not do it again.

“Yes, well,” she said, proud that her voice remained cool, “perhaps I was simply astounded that you could manage to speak coherently. You do have the reputation of being somewhat consistently drunk, don’t you?”

“Which means that I am rarely incoherent,” he said, smiling faintly. “It is my finest skill. For all you know, I could be drunk right now.”

But his eyes were too clear, too watchful. His voice too deliberately blasé. He was about as drunk as she was.

“I will keep that in mind in future,” she replied briskly. She straightened in her seat and let impatience creep into her voice. “I’m sorry I don’t remember meeting you at Samantha Cartwright’s party, Mr. Wolfe. How embarrassing, when I am usually so good with faces. But then, it was a busy night for everyone, wasn’t it?”

She could not seem to keep her own insinuations from creeping in, and she knew why when she saw his green eyes warm with a kind of rueful acknowledgment. With a kind of recognition she knew she should fight. Instead, something about him made her want to needle him, to get under his skin.

She could not bring herself to imagine what that might mean.