For a long moment they had both stood there, the early-morning light just beginning to chase away the gray, sizing each other up as if they were adversaries.
On the one hand, Lucas had thought, Jacob had once been his best friend, his partner in crime and his brother. They were only a year apart in age, and had grown up sharing the brunt and burden of their father’s temper. If Lucas could have been there that one fateful night to do what Jacob had done for their family, he would have. Happily—and without a shred of the agony he knew Jacob had felt for what Lucas had always viewed as a necessary act, if not long overdue.
On the other hand, Jacob had taken off without a word and stayed gone for well over a decade. He had left Lucas in his place—a disaster for all concerned. They had been boys back then, if much older than they should have been and far too cynical, but they were grown men now and, apparently, strangers.
But Lucas had not wanted to believe that. Not at first. Not after so long.
“It is lovely to see you, dear brother,” he’d said when the silence had stretched on too long. “I would have slaughtered a calf in your honor, but the kitchens are in some disrepair.”
“I’ve followed your exploits in the papers,” Jacob had said in his familiar yet deeper voice. His black eyes raked Lucas from head to toe again, then back, missing nothing.
Even Jacob, Lucas had thought, something sinking through him like a stone. But he had summoned his most insouciant smile. He had not otherwise reacted.
“I’m touched,” Lucas had replied, blandly. “Had I known you were so interested in my adventures, I would have added you to the annual Christmas card list. Of course, that would have required an address.”
Jacob had looked away for a moment. Lucas had wanted to reach out, to bridge the gap, but he had not known how. His head had pounded ferociously. He’d wished fervently that he’d just gone home, slept it off and left the ghosts of his past alone. What good had this family ever been to him? Why did he still care?
“It’s not as if we don’t already know where this lifestyle leads,” Jacob had said, so quietly that Lucas almost let it go, almost pretended he hadn’t heard. Anything to maintain the fiction of Jacob he’d carried around in his head all these years. Jacob, the hero. Jacob, the savior. Jacob, who knew him.
“My original plan was to prance off into the ether, abandoning family and friends without so much as a backward glance,” Lucas had snapped back at him. “But unfortunately, you’d already taken that role. I was forced to improvise.”
“You know why I had to leave,” Jacob said in a low voice, thick with their shared past and their family’s secrets, public and private.
“Of course,” Lucas had interrupted him, years of pain and resentment bubbling up from places he’d spent his life denying even existed. He’d laughed, a hollow sound that echoed against the stones of the manor house and inside of him in places he preferred to ignore. “You’re nearly twenty years too late, Jacob. I don’t need a big brother any longer. I never did.”
“Look at yourself, Lucas—don’t you see who you’ve become?” Jacob’s voice had been quiet, but had flashed through Lucas as if he’d shouted.
It was not the first time Lucas had been compared to his father, but it was the first time the comparison had been made by someone who shared his bone-deep loathing of the man who had wrecked them both. By someone—the only one—who ought to know better. It was a body blow. It should have killed him. Perhaps it had.
“I thought you were dead,” Lucas had said coldly, unable and unwilling to show his brother how deeply those words cut at him. “I’m not sure this is an improvement.”
“For God’s sake,” Jacob had said, shaking his head, his eyes full of something Lucas refused to name, refused to consider at all. “Don’t let him win.”
Staring out the windows of his luxurious office now, Lucas let out a hollow sort of sound, too flat to be a laugh. He had turned on his heel and left his prodigal brother behind—and had thought, To hell with him. He’d spent the whole long walk down the private lane pretending nothing Jacob had said had gotten to him. Yet when he’d reached the road, he’d flipped open his mobile and rousted Charlie Winthrop from his sleep to announce he’d had a sudden change of heart and would, despite years of claiming otherwise, dearly love to work for Hartington’s in any capacity at all.
Careful what you wish for, he mocked himself now. Especially if you were Lucas Wolfe, and had a tendency to get it.
At half past eleven, Lucas dutifully walked into the conference room, expecting to be bored silly by corporate nonsense. Bureaucracy and posturing. It was one of the reasons he managed his own affairs almost entirely via his computer. But instead of a dreary presentation, he found the room in the grips of evident chaos. One did not have to know a single thing about business to know that something had gone wrong. The very fact that none of the events team seemed to notice or care that he had entered the room told him that—it was a rare experience for him and, strangely, felt almost liberating.
He sank into a seat at the oval-shaped table, reveling in the feeling. It was as if he was very nearly normal, for the first time in memory.
Even smooth, efficient Grace looked harried when she strode into the room a few minutes late, a frown taking the place of the competent, soothing smile he already knew was as much a part of her as her ruthlessly controlled blond hair.
“I’m so sorry, Grace,” one of the anxious-looking girls said at once, all but wilting against the glossy tabletop, distress evident in her very bones.
“Don’t be silly, Sophie,” Grace said, but that marvelous voice was tighter than it had been earlier, and tension seemed to reverberate from her in waves as she set down a stack of files in front of her. “You could hardly have foreseen a burst pipe when you found the place six months ago.”
Another team member rushed up to whisper something in her ear, making her frown deepen, and as the rest of the staff took their seats, Lucas took the opportunity to simply look at Grace.
He wasn’t at all certain why he found the woman so compelling.
There was absolutely nothing about the severe gray suit she was wearing that should have appealed to him. Lucas preferred women in bright colors, preferably showing swathes of tanned, smooth skin. He liked impractically high heels and tousled manes of lustrous hair. Glimpses of toned thighs and full breasts. Not a skirt that showed far too little leg, a jacket he knew she had no intention of unbuttoning and another boring silk blouse in some pale, unremarkable pastel shade that covered her up to her delicate collarbone.
And yet. There was something about Grace Carter that he could not dismiss. That kept him captivated. That had plagued him throughout the long, boring weekend while he had been surrounded, as always, by the kinds of women he usually preferred yet had found unaccountably tedious and insipid this time. That had kept him awake and brooding until he’d placed exactly where he’d seen her before and why he’d noticed her in the first place. He’d thought her a boring prude, of course—but the point was, he’d remembered her.
That in itself was highly unusual.
“All right,” Grace said, calling the meeting to order, her brow smoothing and that great calm seeming to exude from her once again. Lucas could feel the room relax slightly all around him. That was her power, he realized. The gift of that smile.
He felt something in him ease, which should have alarmed him—but, oddly, did not. Instead, he watched her take over the room without seeming to do so. It was almost as if he could not bring himself to look away.
“As