Caitlin Crews - The Shameless Playboy

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When Charles Winthrop had confirmed publicly that, indeed, Hartington’s was delighted to welcome the famous Wolfe heir aboard—and privately that he expected Grace to personally manage the wild-card playboy with her usual aplomb—Grace had smiled calmly, exuded serenity and comforted herself with visions of smashing every piece of china and shred of pottery she owned. The deep blue bowl from her first trip to Paris, in smithereens. The candlesticks from her holiday on the Amalfi Coast, in a million tiny pieces. Bliss.

When she had explained to her awestruck team—in full view of the smirking, flirtatious Lucas, who appeared to bewitch three-quarters of the staff simply by existing, or possibly by lounging across the cabinets so that his magnificent torso was on display—that Lucas was now a crucial component of their strategy for the fast-approaching centenary project, she had kept a suitably straight face and had imagined lighting a small, personal bonfire on her wraparound balcony and setting ablaze the art she’d hung on the walls when she’d moved in a year earlier. The painting she’d bought directly from the hungry-looking painter with the poet’s eyes on the Charles Bridge in Prague. The print of the first van Gogh she’d seen in the famous Metropolitan Museum in New York City. All smoke and ashes. It made her smile feel real.

“We are delighted to have you on the team, Mr.

Wolfe,” she said as they walked together from the conference room, her smile sweet and her tone razor sharp. “But in future, please do try to contain yourself. The secretaries are not here to serve as your personal dating pool.”

“Have you asked them?” he asked lazily, his rangy body moving with a grace that should have seemed out of place in the dim light of the hallway. Instead, he seemed to take it over. “Because I was under the impression that my every wish was their command. I believe one of them told me so.”

“I don’t need to ask them,” Grace replied, smiling more sharply and pretending she was unaffected by his nearness. “I need only consult company policy.”

“Hartington’s has a Lucas Wolfe clause?” he asked, in that deeply amused drawl that wove spells through her and around her. “I don’t know whether to be flattered or insulted.” Against her will, hardly aware of it, Grace found herself standing still in the corridor instead of walking briskly toward her office. Standing, gazing up at him, like a moon-faced calf. How could he beguile her without even seeming to do so?

She could not afford it.

“Leave the secretaries alone,” she said calmly, as if he had not slipped past her defenses somehow already. As if she had meant to stop there and look up at him.

“Happily,” he said. His abused mouth tilted up in the corner. His green gaze was a banked fire that seemed to kick off echoes within her, hot and wild. “But tell me,” he continued softly, pointedly, “where else should I direct my attention?”

“Perhaps to your brand-new job,” she bit out, ignoring the way he looked at her, his eyes so hooded, so suggestive. “You may find it challenging, after all, having never had one before.”

“I am so sorry to shatter your illusions,” he said, laughing, though she thought it did not quite reach his eyes, “but despite my well-documented, dissipated, sybaritic existence, I have, in fact, held a job. We all have our deep, dark secrets, do we not?”

She had no intention of discussing secrets with this man.

“You understand, Mr. Wolfe, that when one says ‘job,’ one is not referring to your rather questionable relationships with somewhat older ladies of excessive means.” She smiled. Hard. “There are other words for that.”

“Someday you will have to teach me all the ins and outs of your vocabulary,” he said, in a voice that seemed to demand she imagine what tutoring him might involve. Something powerful shook through her, stealing her breath. He smiled. “The job I held was somewhat less illicit, I’m afraid.”

“You?” she asked, in disbelief. “Who on earth would employ you?”

“Not everyone finds my face as distasteful as you seem to do,” he said, challenge and mockery stamped across his expression. He angled his head toward her, too close, and she had to fight to keep herself from jumping back and letting him see how he got to her. “In fact, some people find it addictive.”

“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.