There was no need to look at him directly, she told herself as she took her place at the head of the table and confidently addressed those gathered. There was no need for anything so foolish, and anyway, she had already blinded herself staring into that particular sun. She had already flirted with her worst fears. No need to compound her sins.
But, unfortunately, she did have to look at him when the topic of the gala’s entertainment was raised. She glanced over, surprised to see that while he lounged carelessly in his seat like a pasha, his eyes were on the tablet in front of him. It should have felt like a reprieve. Instead, she felt a hollowness behind her breastbone.
“We have some exciting news,” she said crisply, infuriated with her own weakness. Again. “Once again, our newest addition has proven himself to be an invaluable asset to the Hartington’s team. If you’ll explain your latest coup, M—”
She never finished saying Mr. Wolfe. She didn’t even fully say the word mister, because his head snapped up, his green eyes fierce. Searing. Furious. Daring her to call him a name designed to distance him, after all that had happened. After they had tasted each other and burned in the same fire. Daring her.
There was a tense, tight silence. Grace felt herself flush. His eyes slammed into her, and she was terrified that everyone could see—that everyone knew—that she might as well have been writhing in his lap there and then, making a fool of herself, a spectacle of herself just like before, every inch the names her mother had thrown at her….
She was losing it.
“Lucas,” she said, knowing as she did so that she should not have capitulated, that she should have prevented that gleam of deep male satisfaction from warming his gaze by any means necessary. That he had won something she could not afford to lose. “If you could share …?”
She could not let this happen, she told herself as Lucas began to talk. She watched him play to the crowd, with a self-deprecating smile and that wickedly funny turn of phrase that had everyone on the edges of their seats, hanging on his every word.
And she was no better.
She was, in fact, everything her mother had predicted she would become.
Grace let that sit there for a moment, a shocking and breathtaking realization, cruel and all-encompassing—but it was true. How could she deny it? Lucas Wolfe possessed not one single redeeming characteristic, and still, she had melted, become a stranger to herself, at his slightest touch. How could that make her anything but … loose? Easy? Ruined already, from within?
She thought of those strange, loaded moments in the rain outside the hotel last night. She thought of the arrested look in his eyes, as if he’d felt the same complicated rush of emotion and confusion that she had—
But she shoved that all aside, ruthlessly.
She would do whatever she had to do, but she would not let him destroy her. She would not let everything she’d worked for disappear so easily. She would not, could not, let herself be everything her mother had told her she’d be, sooner or later. Not now. Not ever.
He had expected a cold reception. He had even expected that she might pretend nothing had happened and carry on as if that was the case.
But Lucas had not been at all prepared for Grace Carter, the most determined and prickly woman he could remember tangling with, to completely avoid his gaze. To blush in public. And then to bolt toward the door when the meeting had ended, quite as if she planned to run away from him altogether.
He wanted to feel something like triumph, but did not. It was something else, something closer to temper, that surged through him.
“Grace?” he called after her, not bothering to rise from his seat, but loud enough to carry to the rest of the team as they filed for the door. To force her hand. “If I could have a word?”
He saw her back stiffen, but when she turned, that smile of hers was firmly stamped across her mouth. Perhaps only he could see the color high on her elegant cheekbones. Perhaps only he noticed the storm in her dark brown eyes.
She waited by the door, smiling and exchanging a few words with her staff as they left, and then closed it behind the last of them, trapping them together in the great fishbowl of a conference room. It was glass on three sides, and sat in the center of the offices and cubicles all around them, so that anyone happening by in the halls could glance in and see what was going on.
He wondered if that made her feel safe. It made him … twitchy. He remained in his seat, with the whole glossy width of the big table between them, because he knew that if he stood he would put his hands on her, and if he touched her again, he did not think he would stop.
“That is the ugliest suit I have ever seen,” he told her, his voice low, his careless posture at complete odds with the strange tightness that held him in a secure grip. “I cannot imagine where you find these things. It is as if you pay to deliberately obscure your figure and your natural beauty.”
“Is this what you wished to discuss in private?” she asked, her voice frigid even as her brown eyes shot flames at him. Even as she retained the razor’s edge version of that smile. “My fashion sense?”
“I think you mean your lack thereof,” he replied lazily.
“Your concerns are duly noted,” she said tightly. “And this is a world-renowned designer suit, for your information. But if that is all, I really must—”
“Grace.” He liked the way her name felt on his tongue. He liked the sound of it in the air between them, the command in it. He liked how her eyes darkened in reaction. He wondered where else she reacted, and how it would taste.
“We are not going to discuss it,” she told him, her full lips thinning in distress. “Not any of it. We will never mention it again. I am deeply appalled at my own behavior and can only assume you feel the same—”
“I do not.” He arched his brow. She let out an impatient, aggrieved sort of breath.
“You should!” Her voice was harsh. Raw.
She cleared her throat, and smoothed back her hair with one palm. It did not require any attention—it was already ruthlessly yanked back into her typical slick twist, and all he could think of was the glorious fullness of it when it had fallen around them. The weight of it, the scent of it. Her delicate, intoxicating little moans against his mouth.
“I will thank you not to tell me how to feel,” he said mildly. It was only a figure of speech, he told himself. It was only to score a point. It did not mean he felt.
She looked away, and he could see that she fought with herself—for control, perhaps. He wanted her to lose that control, once and for all. He had already tasted it, and he wanted more. He wanted her wild and wanton and free.
He simply wanted her. It was no more complicated than that.
“I do not have time for this,” she said at last. “For you. For … what happened. I can think only of the gala.”
He thought she sounded desperate. He told himself he wanted her that way. That had always worked well for him in the past. He ignored the small voice that insisted that this woman was not like other women. That she could see him. That she could know him. That she was Grace, and different.
“All work and no play …” he began, teasing her, alarmed at the direction of his own thoughts.
Her eyes shot to his. “That is not a topic I suspect you have any familiarity with at all,” she snapped out. She let out a breath, and when she spoke again, her voice was smoother. “It’s wonderful that you are able to help so much, that your connections are so useful. It really is. But that doesn’t change the fact that my florist is a prima donna or that the security firm keeps changing its estimate, does it? And those are the things that require my attention. Not you.”
“What are you afraid of?” he asked, almost conversationally.
But