And then, to his horror, her dark brown eyes filled with tears.
* * *
She could not cry. She would not cry—not in front of this man, who had managed to expose her darkest secret with the same lackadaisical smirk and easy carelessness as he did everything. Not here, not now, where she was already far too vulnerable.
She had almost passed out when she’d opened that folder after the morning meeting. Shame and horror had slammed into her with too much force, too much pain, and the fact that it had been Lucas who had found the pictures, Lucas who had seen her like that … It made her want to sob. Or scream. Perhaps both.
Thank God she’d been alone in her office! Of all the things she’d expected to see in a folder from Lucas, the very worst mistake she’d ever made had not been on the list. Sometimes, eleven long years later and a world away, she even let herself forget about it for long stretches at a time. She would tell herself that everyone had things they would prefer to forget tucked away in their history, that it hardly bore thinking about any longer.
That her mother had not been right. That she had not been ruined so long ago, when she had let it all happen. That she was not beyond the pale, as she’d been treated. That her mother should have believed her—and should not have disowned her.
But she had been kidding herself, apparently.
He had presented the glossy reminder of the worst year of her life to her in bright color photographs, in her office, the one place where Gracie-Belle had never existed. Could never exist. Gracie-Belle had died the moment those pictures were published, and she’d been so young and so stupid it had taken her far longer than it should have to recognize that fact. She’d needed money desperately enough to forget everything she’d learned about the way men were, and the way the world worked—and she’d paid for that. She was still paying.
Grace’s hands curled into fists at her sides. How dare he throw those pictures in front of her as if he knew something about them—about her?
“I do not expect you to understand,” she said coldly, stiffly, desperately fighting to sound calm—no tears, no sobbing, no shouting—and not quite succeeding. “You have never needed anything in your privileged, aristocratic, yacht-hopping life, have you?”
“Grace,” he said, his green eyes growing dark as he stared at her, that confidence he wore like a second skin seeming to slip before her eyes, “you are taking this the wrong way. I only meant—”
“To humiliate me?” she interrupted him wildly. “To punish me because I refused to sleep with you?”
He looked appalled. Shocked. “What? Of course not!”
They stared at each other for a searing, tense moment. He swallowed, then shrugged, visibly uncomfortable. “I only wanted to remind you. Of who you are. Who you could be.”
“Who I am?” she asked, hearing the bitterness in her own voice. She tried to shake it off, turning away from him toward the wall of windows and the lush little seating area grouped before them. “How could you possibly know who I am?”
“It’s funny, isn’t it?” His voice was deceptively mild in the quiet office. “We all think we know someone because we’ve seen them in pictures. Isn’t that how you knew I was so contemptible?”
She did not want to admit that he had a point, throwing that word back at her, and she told herself it didn’t matter, anyway. Rich men acting badly made the world go around. They could, like Lucas himself, wake up one morning wishing for a change, and just like that, executive positions were doled out like candy.
It was different if one happened to be born dirt poor. And a woman.
“Let me tell you a story,” she managed to say past the lump in her throat and the tight ball of anxiety in her gut. “You’ll have to use your imagination because it takes place far, far away from a sprawling estate in the English countryside or the glamorous Christmas windows of Hartington’s.”
She shot a look at him over her shoulder, not sure how she felt when she saw how he watched her, as if he really did know her—something almost tender in his expression. But what did that really mean? He thought the pictures he’d unearthed were a good memory, that they were something other than desperate. He did not, could not, know her at all.
“I grew up poor, Lucas,” she said as evenly as she could. “Not ‘Daddy refuses to pay my bills this month’ poor, but real poor. ‘Having to choose between rent and food’ poor. A trailer park in a dirty little Texas town that nobody’s heard of and nobody ever leaves, because there’s no money for dreams in Racine.”
“Grace …” he said, but she was too far gone to stop. She could hear the emotion in her voice, could feel it pumping through her. She did not know why she was telling him this, only that she had to.
“Mama didn’t understand why I couldn’t just settle down with whatever boy would have me and live the same kind of life that everyone we knew lived, that she lived, but I couldn’t.” She shook her head, as if that would help ward off the accent that returned when she talked about Texas, her words sprawling, her drawl thickening. “I read too much. I dreamed too hard. And even though there was a part of me that loved Racine more than words, because it was home, I knew I had to leave.”
She swallowed, as if she was still standing in that dusty trailer park, so blisteringly hot in the summer, and the wheezy old air-conditioning forever being turned off to save pennies—even though she could see London in front of her, sparkling and cosmopolitan through the windows.
“So while the other girls my age were making out in backseats and getting ready to marry their high school sweethearts,” she said quietly, as if remembered dust and despair were not choking her even now, “I was banking everything on a college scholarship.”
She could hardly bear look at him then, so beautiful and impossible, high-class and expensive, like a male fantasy made flesh. Her fantasy. The only man who had gotten under her skin in eleven long years. She didn’t know why it made her ache to see him as he sat there behind his big desk, as far away from her now as he had ever been. She told herself she wanted it that way. That the kisses they had shared, the odd moments of communion, were no more than an elaborate game to him, and she was not at all the worthy player he seemed to think. That he simply hadn’t known it, but he would now.
She told herself she was glad.
“It was one thing to be bookish,” she said, looking at the folder of the photographs that had damned her. “And something else to be pretty.” Her mouth twisted in remembered shame and trembled slightly. “And I was much too pretty. Mama’s new boyfriends were always quick to comment on it. Some of them tried to get too friendly when they were drunk. I kept my head down, hid in the library and studied. I was the top of my class—the top of the state, even. I knew I’d get some kind of scholarship—but I also knew it very likely wouldn’t be enough to cover my expenses. I’d have to do work/study, at the very least. Maybe more than one job, if I wanted textbooks. Or food. But I was destined for better things. That’s what I thought.”
“You were clearly correct.” Lucas’s voice was cool, crisp. His aristocratic accent seemed to cut through her memories of those hot Texas days like a knife through butter. But it only served to remind her how vast the gulf between them was, and how little he could ever understand her.
She did not want to think about why she wanted him to understand her in the first place.
“That fall my class took a field trip to San Antonio to see the Alamo,” Grace said, forcing herself to continue, however little she wanted to keep talking. “And that was where Roger discovered me.”
She didn’t want these memories. She wished she could excise them from her head and throw them away as easily as she’d gotten rid of all the other things that had held her back from the future she’d so desired. Like her accent. Her roots. Even her mother, who hadn’t wanted her enough, in the end.