Kate Hewitt - Bad Blood

“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 your looks are quite probably the least interesting thing about you.”

“Grace—”

He bit out her name, but she could not stop. She lifted her chin and did not so much as blink as she gazed at him. As she saw him.

“I think that you could teach lessons on how to hide in plain sight,” she said. “That you do it all the time. That you are doing it even now.”

THE following afternoon, Grace forced herself to unpack her things from her suitcase and put them away in the wardrobe of her cozy room at the Pig’s Head, the only inn and tavern in the quaint little village of Wolfestone—just down the road from Wolfe Manor. The honey-colored beams above her head and the cheerful fireplace in the corner should have made her feel relaxed, as if she was on holiday, but she could not seem to keep the wild tension swirling inside of her at bay.

In fact, she was not sure she’d breathed fully since that stark, upsetting scene in Lucas’s office. She did not know what might have happened had they not been interrupted by Charles Winthrop’s pursed-mouthed secretary, who had taken no notice at all of the crackling tension in the room and had invited Lucas to visit Mr. Winthrop at once.

It was only after he’d left that she had retrieved the photographs from his waste basket, because she could not leave them lying around, and certainly not in his office. She had shredded them with great relish in her own office, shoved the past back down into the vault where it belonged and told herself she’d had a lucky escape.

But somehow, she did not feel lucky at all.

She should be jubilant, she told herself now and not for the first time, that they had been stopped before they could go any further along that road of personal revelation. She had a feeling that they had hovered perilously close to a great disaster, and disaster was something she could not afford with the gala so close. It had been a relief to depart for Wolfestone this morning, knowing that this last stretch of time before the party was crucial—and that living immersed in the venue and on hand to deal with the inevitable issues that would crop up was necessary.

Necessary and convenient, Grace acknowledged ruefully. There would be little time to deal with the mysteries of Lucas Wolfe. Much less her own confusion regarding her reaction to him. So far she had discovered that she could neither keep her hands off Lucas nor her mouth shut around him. Even his own behavior failed to give her pause. What was next? She shuddered to think.

There was a sharp knock at her door, and she walked over to wrench it open. A jolt of awareness shot through her when she found Lucas himself standing there, as if she’d summoned him.

Were they both thinking about those photographs? Grace wet, wild, debauched? She swallowed with some difficulty and felt herself flush.

Lucas smiled.

Up close, all hints of the tortured, wrecked man she’d seen the day before were gone. He lounged in the doorway as if he was the local gentry—which, of course, she reminded herself, he was. His wicked mouth crooked invitingly, making his lean and clever face seem positively sinful. One arm was propped up over his head against the doorjamb. His dark hair was artfully tousled, as if he’d just woken from a nap or had raked his fingers through the mess of it. Repeatedly. He was wearing a soft-looking shirt in bright blue that clung like a lover to the planes of his hard chest, thrown carelessly over a pair of denim trousers that fit him like paint, and Grace could not pretend to herself that he was anything but the most gorgeous man she’d ever beheld. He made her mouth run dry.