“I beg your pardon?” she asked, desperately, though she already knew. She could not seem to believe it, to accept it, and her stomach twisted in protest, but she knew.
That smile of his deepened, showing off the indentation in his jaw that had been known to cause hysteria when he flashed it about like the deadly weapon it was. The smile that had catapulted him into the hearts and fantasies of so many people the world over. The smile that drove so many women to distraction and regrettable decisions.
But not me, she told herself desperately. Never me!
“I believe we’ll be working together,” he confirmed, smiling as if he knew better. As if he knew her better than she could ever hope to know herself. As if he had that power already, had claimed it and who knew what else along with it. “I do so hope you’re the hands-on sort of colleague,” he continued, in a voice that should have infuriated her and instead made her feel weak. Susceptible. His smile deepened like he knew that, too. “I know I am.”
CHAPTER TWO
SHE looked appalled, which was not a reaction Lucas often inspired in women. Not even in starchy, standoffish females like this one, not that he met a great many of that breed in the course of his usual pursuits.
“Working together?” she echoed, sounding as if he’d suggested something unduly perverse. “Here?”
“That’s the idea,” he said, smiling wider. “Unless, of course, you can think of a better way to pass the time in this dreary office.”
Normally, even the most constitutionally unimpressed—librarians and nuns and the like—melted at the very hint of his smile. He had been wielding it as the foremost weapon in his arsenal since he was still a child. It had felled entire battalions of females across the globe. It was, in his practiced opinion, even more devastating than that of his younger brother Nathaniel, who was currently up for a Best Actor Sapphire Screen Award and whose inferior smile could be seen via every press outlet on the planet. Lucas was not entirely certain why Grace Carter, prim events manager for bloody Hartington’s, should be immune when legions before her had dissolved at the merest sight of it.
In point of fact, she scowled.
“I certainly cannot,” she said, judgmental and starched stiff and horrified. “And I’ll thank you to keep your suggestive comments to yourself, Mr. Wolfe.”
“How?” he asked with idle curiosity, shifting toward her and watching her tense in reaction.
“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