Kate Hewitt - Bad Blood

He knew the very fact that he’d taken a job would be considered noteworthy, and so he milked the public’s fascination with the idea of him at work for all it was worth. All the while talking so much about the Hartington’s gala at Wolfe Manor that Grace was soon reading breathless reports on celebrity gossip sites about who was and who wasn’t on the guest list, which artists were jockeying for a chance to perform—the kind of exposure and excitement she normally only fantasized about. With the centenary gala approaching so quickly, there simply could not be enough publicity—and certainly not of this kind and caliber.

Lucas Wolfe, it turned out, was a publicity machine, completely adept at using the press to his own ends.

“Your ability to manipulate the press is really very impressive,” Grace told him at the morning meeting, the paper in front of her spread open to yet another story about the perennially shiftless Wolfe brother and his shocking newfound interest in corporate life.

Though she could not help but wonder—if he was this good at making the press do his bidding, had he been doing precisely this all along, creating the very image that even she now reacted to as if it was the gospel truth about him? Perhaps he really was as clever as she’d now and again imagined him to be, Grace thought, and could not have said why that revelation made her shiver slightly. Nor why he would have deliberately chosen to spend his life this way, to be known far and wide as this … dismissible.

“Not at all,” Lucas replied with a careless shrug, though there was a measuring sort of look in his eyes when he met Grace’s gaze across the conference table. Something much too commanding for a lifelong layabout. Something dark. Aware. “Paparazzi have followed me around for the whole of my life. It’s long past time they made themselves useful.”

“Usefulness is apparently going around,” Grace said, unnerved by the way he looked at her and determined not to show it in front of her team members, all of whom still gazed raptly at Lucas as if he descended to work each morning from Mount Olympus itself, complete with a thunderbolt and a golden chariot.

Lucas, meanwhile, only watched her with an undecipherable expression that made Grace distinctly uncomfortable. Wrenching her gaze from his, she returned to the business at hand, grateful that hers was a high-pressure career that had taught her years ago how to always, always appear calm and collected no matter what fires burned inside of her or around her.

No matter if she felt scorched.

This was what she had wanted, she reminded herself more stridently than should have been necessary when she was back in her office, away from his too-incisive green scrutiny. She wanted distance. She wanted him to stay away.

She did.

So there was no reason at all for her heart to skip a beat in her chest when she looked up from a frustrating email chain regarding the florist’s latest temper tantrum about the changed location to see Lucas filling up her doorway, far too broad of shoulder and smoldering of eye.

Her smile felt more forced than usual. As if that odd interlude in the rain had happened only moments ago, instead of days. As if she thought that somehow Lucas could truly see inside of her, where she still shivered for him, still wanted him, still ached for him to put his hands on her, no matter how much she wanted to deny it.

“I need a date,” he said, the corner of his mouth quirking slightly.

For a moment, one panicked beat of her heart and the next, Grace wondered if this was yet another in the succession of vivid dreams she’d been having about Lucas and this very office—all of which started innocuously enough, just like this, and then quickly became shudderingly, achingly carnal.

But he merely waited in the open door, his face particularly unreadable in the gray light from the window. Grace surreptitiously dug a fingernail into her own palm and told herself she was relieved when the sharp little pain lanced through her.

She was awake. But he was still here.

“I’m sure you can auction yourself off for charity, or some such good cause,” she said briskly, as if there had been no strained moment at all. She leaned back in her chair and eyed him warily. “Or, alternatively, step into the street and announce you have a gap in your social schedule. I imagine eligible ladies will tackle you where you stand.”

That knowing smile flirted with the curve of his mouth. There was something especially untamed about him today, Grace thought helplessly. The suit he wore had been crafted with loving attention to every long, sinewy muscle he possessed, every hard, flat surface. His roguish dark hair fell over his forehead, begging for female hands to rake it back into place. But more than that, he seemed edgy. Determined. Words she would never have thought to associate with this deliberately languid, casual man.

But she would not have thought he could act in the interests of Hartington’s, either, a small voice whispered, nor in so skillful a fashion, and he already had.

“Those are both attractive options,” he said after a moment. “But my needs are more specific. You, to be precise.”

Grace felt her stomach drop out of her body. She carefully folded her hands on her lap to keep them from betraying her by shaking. She ruthlessly tamped down on any outward sign, any reaction, because she knew, somehow, that it would be far too dangerous to show him any hint of what those words did to her. Any whisper of the clamoring inside of her, her heart thudding against her chest, all of her wanting with a force that scared her—and she would be lost.

And then what would become of her? She was afraid she already knew—and shoved aside another guilty flash of memory, resolving she would call her mother later to assuage her guilt and attempt to make amends. But that did not mean she would become her.

“I am running out of ways to tell you I am not available to you,” she said with a great calm she did not feel. She met his gaze, her own firm. “Along with the patience necessary to keep saying it.”

“I received the message, believe me,” he assured her, sounding wholly unrepentant. “Though I believe it was the laughing in my face that truly drove the point home.”

His green eyes gleamed with amusement. She found the sight a relief, and then immediately wondered why she cared whether he found her entertaining, on any level. She should not care if he hated her. She should not care if he was entirely indifferent to her. And yet …

“I apologize if I bruised your ego,” she said, with a razor-sharp pretense of sympathy. “I will confess, I thought it impossible.”

“Oh, it is,” he said easily. “Which is why you can spare me a new lecture on appropriate behavior—it bounces right off my shiny, pretty surface.” His mouth pulled into that self-mocking curve. “But I still need you to be my date tonight.” He shook his head when she started to protest. “It is work-related, of course. I may be a desperate egomaniac, but I can, on occasion, listen.”

His eyes were intent on hers, hinting at all the layers of himself he kept hidden that she could sense hovered there, just out of reach.

“Sometimes I am even capable of processing the information I hear,” he continued, deep irony laced through his voice. “It is astonishing.”

“There is no need for sarcasm,” Grace said, trying to sound firm and in control but fearing she sounded unnecessarily prim instead.

He did not answer for a moment, and then, he casually dropped the name of the current reigning pop star sensation, the young woman who had recently taken the country by surprise with her debut album—an achievement made all the sweeter because she was the daughter of one of England’s most beloved former football heroes.