Kate Hewitt - Bad Blood

“Me,” Lucas said. But there was an odd note in his own voice, and it seemed as if the rain roared in his ears. His mouth crooked to the side. “They would be me.”

“Well,” she said after a long, searing moment. Her voice seemed thicker—or did he only imagine that? “Life is not about want , Mr. Wolfe.”

Something passed between them, electric and alive, dancing in the breath of space between their bodies and jolting into him. He did not know what to make of it. He only knew he could not look away.

“You mean your life,” he amended quietly, as if they stood in the presence of something bigger—something important.

“And in any event,” she continued, squaring her shoulders as if he had not spoken, “I have a very strict policy against becoming personally involved with coworkers. I understand you’ve never really worked in an office before—”

“If I kissed you right now,” he said, his eyes trained on hers and the truth he could see there—the truth that resonated in him no matter what words she threw out to deny it, “I could make you forget your policies. I could make you forget your own name.”

That hung there like smoke for a heartbeat, then another, and then, impossibly, she laughed.

At him.

GRACE thought she sounded on the verge of hysteria—and that was certainly how she felt, her chest too tight and her skin on fire—but Lucas merely stared down at her, his beautiful face looking nonplussed and not a little disconcerted. His hand tightened around the handle of the umbrella he still held above them. She could still feel the places where he’d touched her face, her hand—as if he’d burned the imprint of his hand into her flesh.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, biting back the laughter before it gave her away, before he saw the truth. Before he realized she was putting on a desperate act to divert his attention. “I have no doubt you could do all of those things. You are Lucas Wolfe, are you not? You’re famous for doing all of that and more to the better part of Europe.”

“Never fear,” he said stiffly. His green eyes burned like smoky emeralds in the wet, gray air. “I am reckless with the feelings of others, perhaps, but never my own health.”

“I’m sure you’re all you claim to be,” she said, injecting a placating note into her voice, which made his eyes narrow and his full lips thin. But he was no longer touching her, which meant he was no longer turning her brain and body to smoke and need, and Grace felt she had to count her blessings where she could.

“You have no idea,” he murmured.

I have more of an idea than I should , she thought ruefully, pushing aside a host of dangerously vivid images that taunted her, teased her, made her yearn to throw herself headlong into the very thing she knew would destroy her. It was as if Lucas Wolfe had been created with every one of Grace’s preferences and secret desires in mind. The aristocratic drawl. The quick, smart wit that suggested an agile mind he chose to hide behind his famed laziness. The lean, arrogant swagger. The narrow, beautiful face that made Grace think of fallen angels and other impossible creatures, all seduction and compulsion, magic and wonder, wrapped up in a package that was unmistakably, devastatingly male.

“And that is yet one more reason I can’t possibly allow anything to happen between us,” Grace said as politely as she could, speaking more to herself than to him. She forced herself to meet his gaze fully and blandly. She forced herself to smile serenely, despite the wild tumult that raged inside of her, nearly knocking her from her feet.

“Grace …” he began, but she had one more card to play. She splayed one hand over her chest, and let her smile take on just the slightest hint of something in the neighborhood of pity.

“I am, of course, very flattered,” she said. Distinctly. Sweetly. Sympathetically.

She knew she’d hit the right note when he stiffened, his eyes narrowing to outraged green slits. She almost opened her mouth then to take it back, to tell the truth, compelled by a force she could not begin to understand. Why should she have the insane urge to protect him? To shield him—even from herself, at her own expense? What was happening to her?

It was the rain, she told herself with some desperation. The rain and a man she should never have met, who she could never allow herself to know in any way other than the superficial. Just the wet and the peculiarly British dampness that crept into the bones and stayed there, squatting, like a kind of grief.

It was the rain, she thought, and nothing more.

“I think we’re done here,” she said, when he only stared at her, affront and something else she was afraid to consider too closely written plainly across his face.

“Are you certain?” he asked coolly. “Surely you are only now warming to the subject. Just think, with some more time and energy you could flay my flesh entirely from my bones using only that sharp tongue of yours.”

“Tempting,” she could not help but reply, not wanting to think about her tongue near any part of him, not wanting to feel how much of a temptation he truly was, how completely he could ruin her if she let him. “But I think I’ll pass.” A kind of shadow passed across his face, darkening those fascinating eyes, and she felt an answering twinge in the vicinity of her chest. She cleared her throat. “I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings—”

“Please contain yourself, Ms. Carter,” he interrupted her smoothly, with a touch of hauteur, all hint of shadows gone from his perfect features as if she’d imagined them. “I am Lucas Wolfe. I don’t have feelings, I have sycophants. I think, somehow, I will manage to survive the disappointment.”

She was surprised she was still standing, that they were still huddled together beneath the same umbrella—that she was not lying in pieces scattered at his feet after that lacerating tone of voice.

But this was a good thing, she reminded herself when she was tempted to let that affect her as it should not. When it came to this man, antagonism was the better part of valor. It was the hint of tenderness, the suspicion of emotion, that would be her downfall. But this— this she could handle.

She smiled her frostiest smile at him, the one that had helped earn her the title of ice queen from everyone who’d been unlucky enough to receive it.

“If you say so, Mr. Wolfe,” she replied in a tone as sharp as his had been, his formal name feeling bitter against her teeth.

Then she strode toward the car, grateful for the rain against her face because it was cold. Grateful for the cold because it snapped her out of the strange spell she’d been in since she’d gotten in the car with him in London. Grateful because finally— finally , she told herself — she felt like herself again.

Grace would have preferred it if Lucas had reverted to his expected type over the next few days—rolling into work at odd hours, drunk and disreputable and incapable of doing more than ogling the secretaries, which was just as everyone expected him to behave—but he did not.

Instead, he turned out to be good at his job.

He threw a press conference to announce his own new position at Hartington’s, deliberately starting the kind of media frenzy that would have taken anyone else a great deal of time and money to attempt to duplicate. And then he simply … went out on the town, as he normally did. He attended all the usual parties, with all the usual people. Pop stars and models, actors and Sloane Rangers. Up-and-coming artists across all mediums, and brash rockers known as much for their prodigious use of recreational substances as their music. And wherever he went, whoever he was with and whatever the event, when he was photographed—and he was always, always photographed—he talked about Hartington’s.