That was going to have to stop. From now on he needed to realize that the two of them had to work in concert. Only by succeeding at this job and standing alone would she claim that independence she craved. Only by completing this task and moving on to the next and the next could he begin to make amends for his past transgressions. When this was over, she needed to move on. He needed that, too.
No more touching, he told himself. But he still craved another taste.
Genevieve stared in the mirror. She touched her aching lips. Something had happened back there with Lucas.
“A lot of somethings,” she whispered. First of all, she had seriously messed up, allowing her daydreaming ways to get in the way of doing her job well. The room was a mess and she intended to fix it.
But more important than that was the other. Not the kiss. She wouldn’t think about the kiss. It had been too overwhelming, too wonderful, too insane, too … everything. Thinking about kissing Lucas—or worse, kissing him again—would make her crazy. As it was, her nerves were tingling. If she hadn’t somehow recalled herself, she would have been totally lost in his arms and then …
“Then, nothing, you idiot.” Because that was what happened with Lucas. She’d been warned. Women tripped over each other trying to get to that incredible mouth of his and then he got tired of them. He moved on. Always. Always. And anyway, she did not want a man, did she?
“No, I can’t want a man.” Certainly not Lucas.
Yet here she was, doing what she had forbidden herself to do. Thinking about the kiss.
So Gen forced herself to remember the other, the way Lucas, a man who exuded power and control had been so angry at the thought that he might have harmed her that he let that famous control slip. She’d seen the pain behind the mask.
Lucas wasn’t a man without feelings, as some thought. He was a man who didn’t want to feel. He kept it bottled up. What had he said? That line about how a man like him should have learned how easy it was to hurt a woman? Apparently, he had regrets, bad memories of past relationships. He wasn’t as cold as people said he was.
And there it was. Another brick in the wall that separated her from Lucas. Because if she fell in love with him and got hurt when he left her …
“I’ll be a part of his pain,” she said. Like Rita. Like … Angie? Was there a real Angie?
Don’t think about it. Don’t go there. And don’t get too close to him. It was immensely clear that any personal involvement between her and Lucas could only end up badly for both of them. Best to keep her distance.
A full hour after he had pulled Genevieve into his arms, Lucas was still agitated. He’d removed himself from the house to the yard, had taken off his jacket and was concentrating on splitting wood for the fireplaces for the winter. But the physical activity wasn’t chasing away his irritation.
What had he been thinking? Lucas thought, slamming the ax into the wood so hard that the two halves flew across the yard. He never got involved with his employees; he certainly never had anything to do with potentially vulnerable women. Yet he had kissed Gen, a move that was surely only going to complicate things in major ways.
What was a man to do in such circumstances?
“Man up,” he muttered, setting up another log and cleaving it cleanly in two. “Apologize.”
But he’d already done that. It didn’t feel like enough. The only thing to do now was move on. Never touch her again. Stop looking at her as a woman. At all.
Just do whatever you can to make this project move forward, make this project successful and get everything done and out of the way.
Then he would finally feel as if he deserved some small degree of absolution. By helping a few women forge a path back to happiness, he could find some solace.
But to do that he had to stop sidestepping time spent with Genevieve and just … get down to business. Surely if he kept his head down, his nose to the grindstone, and never touched her again, they could both walk away from this situation reasonably satisfied in just a few weeks.
CHAPTER SIX
GENEVIEVE LOOKED at her watch. Rats! She was running behind again. Ever since she’d moved in, ever since Lucas had kissed her, the two of them had been working at a feverish pace to finish everything before they opened the doors to Angie’s House and Lucas moved on to France.
And until I … do what? she wondered. But there wasn’t even time to worry about that. Thank goodness. Thinking about her future filled her with determination but also with trepidation and doubts. At least doing her job kept her mind off all that.
And off the memory of Lucas kissing her.
“Stop that,” she ordered herself.
Out of the corner of her eye she caught Jorge looking at her, and she gave him a sheepish smile. “Sorry. Sometimes when I’m tense or rushed, I talk to myself.”
He shrugged and returned her smile. “I noticed. You’ve been talking to yourself a lot lately. Lots of stress around here. Even Lucas has been talking to himself and that’s not like him. I worked with him here when he opened one of his stores. I think this place—” Jorge gestured toward the wall “—means a lot to him. He told me it was special. I wonder if there really is an Angie. Why did he choose that name?”
“Maybe it’s just a name, Jorge. And anyway, I’m sure that Lucas would have told us if he wanted us to know more.” But she had wondered the same thing, she thought, as Jorge agreed and went on his way.
Truly she had wondered about whether there was an Angie too much, too often. Repeatedly. Especially since she knew that this was the first such project Lucas had taken on and he spoke of it with such fervor. Especially since she’d glimpsed that pain in his eyes. She hoped that all of the wondering she’d been doing didn’t have anything to do with how Lucas had made her feel when he’d kissed her crazy.
Because that kiss couldn’t matter. It was almost as if it had never happened in Lucas’s eyes. Because once he’d apologized, he made it a point to keep his distance from her. He’d very politely told her that in order to speed up the project, she should feel free to use him in whatever way she needed to. Then he’d given her a curt nod and walked away. Now, although they saw more of each other than they had in those first few days, they kept their personal interactions brief. Nonexistent, really.
He handled the financial end of things, some of the more technical aspects of structure. She handled the big picture, the “what do girls like?” items, the pizzazz end of things.
Those areas might have normally crisscrossed. They should have. Somehow, however, she and Lucas managed to keep a polite distance between them.
At least she hoped she gave the appearance of polite distance. She hoped he never caught her staring at his mouth or his chest and remembering how it had felt to be in his arms.
A buzzer went off at that moment, sending her thoughts flying. “Darn it,” she said, looking at the reminder that appeared on her phone. She was supposed to be meeting with some of the neighbors over coffee tomorrow and she needed to finalize the food. That she could manage. The other item on her to-do list, sending out the invitations to the “meet the elite” party Lucas had requested was more problematic. Her throat closed up at the enormity of the task. The people he would want and expect might have come at her parents’ calling. They wouldn’t come for the “no artistic talent” daughter of the Patchetts. They especially wouldn’t want to come to a party she was throwing if they had heard any of the rumors Barry had spread, and they surely had. Gossip expanded like bread dough in her parents’ inner circle. She was going to fail Lucas.
For now she would concentrate on the coffee, the easy task. At least