The Shameless Playboy

“How …?” she repeated icily. “By exercising restraint, assuming you are capable of such a thing.”

“How will you thank me?” he asked, enjoying the flash of something darker than temper in her eyes, despite himself. “I am quite easily bored, you understand, and therefore only accept the most shocking and ingenious displays of gratitude these days. It’s my personal policy. One must have standards.”

“How interesting,” she said smoothly. Too politely. “I was under the distinct impression that your standards were significantly more lax.”

“A common misconception,” Lucas replied easily. “I am not so much lax as laissez-faire.”

“If by that you mean licentious,” she retorted.

Her gaze flicked over his battered face. Her distracting Southern drawl went suspiciously sweet. “I certainly hope you won’t be left with any unsightly scars.”

“On my famously beautiful face?” Lucas asked, affecting astonishment with a small tinge of horror. “Certainly not. And there are always surgeons should nature prove unequal to the task.”

Not that a surgeon would be much help with his other, less visible scars, he thought darkly. Lucas had not been particularly bothered by the appearance of Samantha Cartwright’s movie-producer husband at a delicate moment the night before. It took more than a few punches to impress him, and in any case, it was only sporting to let a wronged husband express his ill will. There was nothing about the situation that should have distinguished the night from any other night, bruises included.

Except that, upon leaving the hotel, Lucas had not ordered the waiting car to take him to his soulless flat high above the Thames in South Bank. Instead, responding to an urge he had no interest at all in naming, he had ordered it to take him out into the wilds of Buckinghamshire to Wolfe Manor, the abandoned familial pile of stone and bad memories he had assiduously avoided since he’d left the place at eighteen.

He’d heard a rumor that his prodigal older brother, Jacob, had returned after disappearing some twenty years before and Lucas, with the typical measure of cockiness brought on by the liberal application of too many spirits, had decided this particular drunken dawn was high time to test the truth of that story.

But Lucas did not want to think about that. Not about Jacob himself, not about why Jacob had disappeared, nor why he had returned and certainly not about what Jacob had said to him that had spurred Lucas into a series of unlikely actions culminating in his arrival in this office. And so, as he had done with great determination and skill since he was young, he focused on the woman in front of him instead.

The one who was still scowling at him.

“If I was someone else,” he said, letting his gaze drift to that expressive mouth she held so tightly, “I might begin to think that scowl meant you disliked me. Which is, of course, impossible.”

“Never say never,” she replied, so very sweetly.

“I rarely do,” he assured her in a low voice, lifting his gaze to hers and letting them both feel the heat of it. “As I’d be happy to demonstrate.”

There was a brief, searing pause.

“Did you just suggest what I think you suggested?” she demanded, her dark eyes promising fire and brimstone and other such irritants. Her full mouth firmed into a disapproving line.

He couldn’t have said why he was so entertained.

“I can’t say that I remember what I suggested,” he replied, smiling again. “But one gathers you’re opposed.”

“The word is insulted, Mr. Wolfe,” she retorted. “Not opposed.”

But he knew what that spark in her gaze meant, and it wasn’t insult. “If you say so,” he said, and let his gaze move over her body.

She was tall and slim, with rich curves in all the right places, bright blond hair and soulfully deep brown eyes, making her the perfect, long-legged distraction. Unfortunately, she was also wearing entirely too many severely cut articles of clothing, all of them designed to force a man’s eye from the very places it was naturally drawn.

Add to that her scraped-back, no-nonsense hairstyle and it was abundantly clear that this woman was one of those stuffy, deeply boring career women who Lucas found tedious in the extreme. The only kind of distraction this woman would be likely to provide, he knew from painful experience, would come in the form of a blistering lecture concerning his many moral failings rather than a few hot moments with her long legs wrapped around his hips while he thrust deep and true.

A great pity, Lucas thought, grudgingly.

“I beg your pardon?” It was not the first time she had said it, he realized. She was still staring at him in a horror he found overdone and on the verge of insulting, her honey-and-cream voice laced with shock. “I don’t mean to be rude, Mr. Wolfe, but are you by any chance still drunk? “

She might have gone out of her way to hide her many charms, but he happened to be a connoisseur of women. He could see exactly what her full lower lip promised and could imagine the precise, delicious weight of her full breasts in his palms. Why a woman would hide her own beauty so deliberately was a mystery to Lucas—and one he had no interest at all in solving.

Not today, when there were mysteries to go around. Not ever.

He moved to one of the chairs in front of her desk and lowered himself into it, watching the way her huge brown eyes tracked his every movement as he sprawled into a much more comfortable position. Not with the shell-shocked, often lascivious awe to which he was accustomed, but with a certain, unexpected wariness instead. He was interested despite himself.

“Not at all,” he said, smiling at her, knowing that one of his legendary dimples was even now appearing in his lean jaw. “Though a drink would certainly not go amiss. Thank you. I find I am partial to bourbon this week.”

“I am not offering you a drink, or anything else,” she said, a snap in her voice, though her smile remained nailed in place. “From what I observed last night, I can’t imagine you would ever require another one.”

“I’m sorry,” he replied easily, still smiling, propping up his jaw with one hand. “Did we meet last night—or were you simply one of the many onlookers? Part of the inevitable crowd? Perfect strangers do so love to watch my every move and make up stories to suit their own opinions of my character.”

It was meant to embarrass her, as Lucas knew well that even the most prurient gossipmonger hated to be called out as such, but she did not balk. Instead, she waved a hand at his black eye, his split lip, her eyes steady on his. Bold, even.

“Is a story required?” she asked from behind that veneer of politeness that he noted and knew better than to believe. “The truth seems sordid enough, surely.”

He forced himself to sink even farther into the chair, every inch of him decadent and debauched, exactly as vile as she believed him to be. He knew more about veneers, about masks and misdirection, than anyone ought to know. It had always been his first and best defense. He thrust aside the dark cloud of memory that hovered far too close today, another offense to lay at Jacob’s prodigal feet, and forced a smile.

“The wages of sin,” he murmured, his voice suggestive, smoky.

She would see what he wanted her to see, he knew. The useless parasite, the indolent playboy. They always did.

“Sin is your area of expertise, Mr. Wolfe,” she said briskly. “Mine is events management.”

“And never the twain shall meet,” Lucas said with an exaggerated, theatrical sigh. “My heart breaks.”

“I rather think you operate from a different part of your anatomy,” she said, those dark eyes gleaming.

“I’m delighted you think about that part of my anatomy,” he replied smoothly. “Feel free to indulge yourself. At length.” He smiled. “No pun intended.”

He was fascinated by the color that showed against her high cheekbones, the way her full mouth firmed. She was dressed to exude a particular message—competence and elegance—and Lucas could see she hit those notes perfectly. But only a blind man could miss the fact that she was perfectly formed—which made him wonder about the rest of her, the trim body buttoned up tight beneath her layers of black and gray.

She held herself under such tight control. How could he not imagine what she would be like without it?

“I should tell you,” he said idly, flicking an imaginary piece of dust from his lapel as if he was not watching her closely, “I have never laid eyes upon something buttoned-up that I was not drawn to unbutton, whether I choose to indulge that urge or not.” He smiled as her hand crept toward the buttons on her suit jacket and then dropped sharply to her side as if she’d reprimanded herself. “It is one among my great many personal failings.”

She crossed to the front of her desk and leaned back against it, folding her arms over her chest. In that position, as she was clearly well aware, she could look down her fine, delicate nose at him as he sprawled below her in the visitor’s chair. He was no doubt meant to feel his inferiority keenly. But Lucas had grown up subject to the uncertain temper and intermittent cruelty of the late, unlamented bully William Wolfe, also known as his deeply despised and little-mourned father, and he knew power games when people were unwise enough to play them in his vicinity. He also knew how to win them. After all, he was Lucas Wolfe. He was not a legend by accident.

Something moved inside of him, rolled over and shook itself to life.

“Let me be frank, Mr. Wolfe,” she said, smiling at him again, that bland, placid smile that he knew, with sudden certainty, was meant to manage and soothe him even as it hid her own feelings. Unfortunately, it only drew his attention to her mouth.

“If you have so far been less than candid, I cannot imagine the difference,” he drawled as those brown eyes narrowed. “Will I require full body armor? “

That sweet, fake smile sharpened. “Not at all,” she said, and her honey-and-cream voice seemed to pool in his groin, making him uncomfortably hard. Surprising him. Intriguing him. “I do apologize if I seem anything less than thrilled about what will be, I’m sure, a long and productive relationship between you and Hartington’s. As you know, Hartington’s greatly values its relationship with your family.”

His family. Lucas refused to think about them, the great damaged mess of them, much less the cavern of guilt that always yawned open when he considered his own epic failures where they were concerned. He shoved the thoughts, the memories, aside—cursing Jacob’s name, his sudden reappearance. And then, as ever, himself. He needed to sleep, he thought; he needed to regain his usual equilibrium, to reaccess his sense of humor, at the very least.

“Do you always speak in press releases?” he asked mildly, allowing no hint of his inner turmoil to color his voice. “Or is this for my benefit? Because there are far more interesting ways to secure my undivided attention.”