“And what would sucking it up entail, David?”
“Just doing more of what you did here today. That’s all. Did it hurt so much?”
In the back of his mind, he heard Gabriel speaking English to him, saw all the boys lined up by the food tables and smiling in an effort to impress him.
Him—the notorious Lucas the Lover.
Respect, he thought. How would it feel to finally have it?
But it was impossible to come clean with David at this point. After all, it’d been tough enough to admit to his brother that he’d gone overboard in Rome with Cecilia DuPont and that he needed to cut the shenanigans.
And it’d been awful to admit it to himself, too. Admit that, more than anything, he craved one kind damn word from a father who didn’t give out many of them.
In response to that, Lucas had made a career out of being apathetic about the business his dad had raised from the ground up with his heart and soul. TCO was the son Ford Chandler favored best, so why didn’t he expect resentment from Lucas?
Resentment. God, it wore him out. He was weary from fighting a father who’d seemed to age fifteen years in the last month. The last time Lucas had seen his dad—hell, it was the day the competing tabloids had come out with that picture of Cecilia dancing in all her naked glory in a fountain, with a champagne-swilling Lucas cheering her on—the man had looked almost done. Finito, as Lucas’s Italian buddies would’ve said.
His fed-up father had been in a hospital bed in the penthouse of one of his New York buildings, skin pale from the pains Lucas had brought on. That was the day Lucas had realized that he might not have much time to show his dad he could be an actual success—not the punchline of the family.
“I think we accomplished a lot here,” Lucas said. “I wouldn’t say no to doing more of it.”
There. Underplay it. Don’t let them know how much it would mean for you to be taken seriously.
A small grin lifted the corners of David’s mouth, and Lucas knew he’d said the right thing.
“Today was just the first step,” his brother said. “It’ll take more than a few charitable photo ops to erase that bad-boy image you’ve got going.”
The memory of his father’s exhausted sighs and the slump of his shoulders—disappointment—edged into Lucas. He could do more, all right.
Still, he didn’t want to seem too excited. He couldn’t go that far yet. “You have something in mind, Einstein?”
“I’ve had some ideas today.” David’s eyes went a bit dreamy, the pose of many genius brainstorms that had kept TCO afloat. “It’d be perfect if you could do something to put the world’s—and Tadmere’s—doubts to bed for good. What we need to do is make you a pillar of society.”
“We’ve had a good start.”
“It goes way beyond the orphanage. I’m talking about a life change. A total tabula rasa so no one remembers Rome or Paris or the many screwed-up headlines you’ve inspired.”
Lucas bristled, mostly because the words were coming from his younger sibling. Mostly because they were true.
“Mammoth task,” he muttered.
“Not really.”
David was watching something in the distance, so Lucas turned around.
Without warning, his heart pinged around his chest and jumped up to lodge in his throat. Alicia Sanchez was walking hand in hand with a work-clothing-garbed Gabriel to the stables, swinging arms and laughing together.
“You got along with her real well,” David said. “And you’re good with kids, especially that one.”
Slowly Lucas turned back around, shoulders stiff and wary, his blood racing.
David held up both hands. “Trust me on this—if you could even do one thing like convince the public that you’re capable of a stable relationship with a decent woman, Tadmere would be ours. It might take some time for them to see what a wonderful monogamous man you’ve become, but… What can I say? Love changes even the wildest of miscreants. Then maybe, in the future…kids.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.” But even as he said it, a part of Lucas—the one that’d felt numb today, the one who’d cried out for a father’s respect—didn’t completely shut out the idea.
“Think of how the world would look at you,” David added. “A reformed rake. People love that.”
Monogamy. Respect. A relationship. Respect.
Respect, respect, respect.
That was the bottom line, the one prize that had eluded Lucas for so long that it seemed like a dream.
“She’s beautiful.” David again, damn him. “If you could be paired with a ‘nice’ woman like her…pure gold.”
“Yeah, and, if the public found out that this was just a relationship built on the need for good PR, I definitely would come off looking even worse than before.”
“Lucas—” David cocked a stoic eyebrow “—think of those Rome pictures with Cecilia. How could you possibly come off as more of a rake? Besides, we’ve got our publicity machines to cover for us.”
Embarrassed anew to have been caught nearly in flagrante delicto by the press, Lucas glanced over his shoulder. Alicia and Gabriel were disappearing behind the buildings.
But that wasn’t the only reason he couldn’t help looking.
Fantasy merged with reality just for one pulse-stopping moment: Alicia’s smooth cheek against his palm, her curly hair between his fingers, her lips against his…
But then the rebuttals rushed in, pounding against his skull. Good girl. Playboy. Right.
“Forget it,” Lucas said, his tone brooking no argument.
“Listen, celebrities do this kind of thing all the time for good ink when they want to polish themselves up. Can you imagine the great press, even from the sources we don’t own?”
And it’d be just a business decision, Lucas added. Nothing different from any of the other safe relation ships—dead ends—that you’ve had with every woman up until this point.
As Gabriel scuttled into the open, laughing and trying to break free, Alicia emerged to catch him, hugging him to her. Lucas’s stomach somersaulted.
Why? Because… Well, hell, because he was having doubts that he even had the ability to be a one-woman guy. All the press’s snide opinions testified to that.
Right? That’s the only reason he was feeling so weird.
“It wouldn’t hurt to talk to her to test the waters and see how she might react to such an idea, anyway,” David’s voice said.
The words drifted over Lucas as he kept watching Alicia, the woman who intrigued him and, Gabriel, the child who he suspected was so much like him.
Something like a family, Lucas thought as an unfamiliar emotion filled up the emptiness behind his ribs. What if…
Lucas turned to his brother, ending the discussion with a lethal glare.
Yet that didn’t mean he wasn’t hearing David’s logic over and over in his own mind as they drove back to his five-star resort room, where he ended up pacing the floor most of the night.
Chapter Three
When