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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.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
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.
Or maybe that was her fear about what might happen next.
“Invite me in.” The crack of command in his voice dragged her attention to his eyes, which were far darker and ripe with the tension between them than the rest of him let on.
She was doomed.
“Why would I do that?” she managed to ask crisply, as if she was affected neither by his stark male beauty nor the darker truths she could see move through his gaze. “Do you plan to suck my blood?”
“Is that a request?” he replied, but his customary easy charm was gone. She sensed it before she under stood it—a whisper of trepidation that danced across her skin, snuck down her spine. Something is different, a small voice whispered in alarm. He seemed edgier. More dangerous. Less controlled. She remembered that dark fury she’d sensed in him the first morning he’d walked into her office. Everything has changed, she thought. But she cast it aside.
If she pretended she didn’t notice that the balance had shifted between them, that every breath and every moment seemed taut and terrifying and much too unwieldy to be borne, would that make it so?
“I had to see it for myself,” he drawled, his eyes like green fire as they traveled over her, making her feel scorched. Making her want. Making the air seem to hum with everything that had changed, everything that was new and dangerous. “Up close.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Grace managed to say over the catch in her throat. She left him standing in the doorway, because it was that or risk much more than she dared, and moved back over to the bed as if she meant to finish unpacking. But she was aware only of Lucas.
“You do.” He stepped inside the room and let the door swing shut behind him, which was not at all what she had planned. She jumped slightly and then turned to face him, her stomach dropping. The room seemed much smaller, suddenly, constricting around her. Trapping her—and yet she couldn’t bring herself to run.
Worse, she did not want to run.
She meant to speak, to deny him again, to keep up the civil, professional pretense—but she couldn’t seem to do it. It was the hungry look in his eyes as he moved closer, lean and big and more commanding than he should have been. More intense. More compelling. She could not tear her gaze away from him. It was as if, having seen a glimpse of what was behind the mask he wore, she could not see that mask any longer. She saw the man. Electric and consuming, and so much more real than he had seemed before—more real than was at all healthy for Grace. Her heart began to beat low and deep, the pace quickening—becoming ever wilder, more frenetic—the closer he came.
“I had no idea you even owned a piece of clothing that was not strictly stodgy and office appropriate,” Lucas continued, that mocking note in his voice, the one that suggested he was being playful when she could all but see the tension shimmer through every tendon, every bone of his lean body. “Other than that one red dress.”
“There is nothing in the least bit outrageous, or even interesting,