Shameless Playboy (17 page)

 
          
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. And it had all started
with Roger Dambrot.

 
          
“He
was a photographer,” she said. She could feel Lucas looking at her, and she had
no one to blame but herself. She had started this, hadn’t she? “Quite a famous
one, actually.”

 
          
She
had decided to share this story of her past, but that didn’t mean she had to
share all of it. Like her doomed, childish love for Roger, who had been as
happy to sleep with her as he had been to disappear the moment she veered
toward any emotion. She thrust the memory of that first, last heartbreak aside.
She had been a colossal idiot, but wasn’t every teenage girl? She’d been so
pleased with the attention. So delighted that he could make her look like that
with his camera. She’d thought she’d found her calling—her ticket out of Racine
and into the bright future she’d always believed she’d deserved.

 
          
“Thanks
to him,” she said, fighting to stay calm, “I was offered a lot of money for a
modeling contract, and it never even crossed my mind to refuse it.” She smiled,
unhappily. “I was proud of it! I thought it proved that I was different—that I
was special.”

 
          
“Grace
…” Lucas’s voice was a caress. She shook it away.

 
          
“What
I did not expect,” she said tightly, “was that appearing in a bathing suit in a
national magazine meant that every one in Racine would consider me a whore. The
teachers at school. The other kids. My mother’s boyfriend.”

 
          
She
could remember it all so clearly, no matter how hard she’d tried to forget it
over the years. Travis, her mother’s latest boyfriend, with his copy of an
American sports magazine in his hands and that knowing, lustful look in his
mean black eyes. The tiny bedroom in the trailer that Grace had always
considered her refuge. Travis’s hands, touching her. His big body, reeking of
stale beer and old cigarette smoke, pressing her back, pushing her down, making
her freeze in panic and confusion.

 
          
And
then her mother’s appearance in the doorway—to save her, Grace had thought.
Thank God
, she’d thought. It had taken
so long, too long, for her brain to accept that her mother’s rage and fury was
directed at
her
, not Travis.

 
          
“I
should have known you would pull something like this!” Mary-Lynn had screamed
at her. “This is how you repay me? After all these years?”

 
          
And
the names she’d called Grace. Oh, the names. They were still lodged like
bullets beneath Grace’s heart. She could still feel them when she breathed.

 
          
“Once
they think you’re a whore,” she said quietly,

 
          
“that’s
how they treat you. Even my own mother. And more to the point, her boyfriend.”

 
          
All
the things she did not say hung there between them, and Lucas only looked at
her, as if she was not more naked, more vulnerable, than she had ever allowed
herself to be before. Grace felt a deep trembling move through her, climbing
from her feet to her neck, and fought to breathe.

 
          
“I’m
sorry,” Lucas said, his voice too soft, so soft it made her eyes heat with the
tears she refused to shed. “As it happens, I understand completely what it is
like to be judged on photographs, and the conclusions about one’s character
that so many people draw from them.”

 
          
“So
one would imagine,” she said. She turned around and met his gaze fully, not
sure when he’d climbed to his feet and not certain she liked the reminder of
his height, his surprising grace.

 
          
“Why
do you care so much what so many ignorant people think?” he asked, still in
that soft voice.

 
          
“Because
they were
my
people!” Grace blinked
to keep the wet heat from sliding down her cheeks. “Racine was the only thing I
ever knew, and I can never go back. Do you understand what that feels like?”

 
          
“I
cannot understand why you would wish to return to a place that scorned you,”
Lucas said, his voice low.

 
          
“Those
pictures are the reason my mother threw me out of the house when I was
seventeen,” she said, as evenly as she could. “I hate them and every thing they
stand for. I wanted to make some money for college, and instead I lost my
family, my hometown and, for a long time, my self-respect. That’s all you need
to understand.”

 
          
“But
that was then,” Lucas said, smiling slightly, encouragingly. “Now they are an
acknowledgment that you were always, as you are now, a beautiful woman.”

 
          
“I
don’t want to be
a beautiful woman
,
whatever that is!” Grace cried, old and new emotions boiling too hot, too wild,
inside of her. Why couldn’t he understand? Her looks had never done anything
but cause her trouble. She would have removed them if she could. The life she’d
built had nothing to do with her body, her face. It had everything to do with
how well she did her job, and she couldn’t let go of the panicked notion that
if everyone knew what she looked like half-naked that would be
all
they knew about her, ever after.
Again. What would she lose this time?

 
          
“Why
should you hide yourself away?” Lucas asked, in the same light tone, because
what wasn’t light to this man?

 
          
And
it was just too much. Over a decade of anguish seemed to well up within her,
threatening to spill over and drown her. She had already been down this road—she
knew what happened. Let a man see her as a piece of meat and he would treat her
that way, too. This was the truth about men. This was what Grace inspired in
them. Hadn’t she spent all these years completely immersed in her job, her
career, to keep from having to face the uncomfortable truth? The loneliness?
Why had she wanted so desperately to believe that Lucas was any different?

 
          
“Did
you really believe I would be delighted to see these pictures?” she countered.
Her eyes narrowed. How had she tricked herself into believing there was more to
him than this shiny surface? When would she learn that she knew nothing of men—especially
not men like Lucas, who wielded sex as just one more weapon? “Or was this one
more of the sick little games you play that mean nothing to you, because you
are completely heedless of the damage you cause to the people around you?” She
was unable to hide the hurt from her voice. “Because you can be?”

 
          
He
stood there against his desk, an arrested look on his face, his smoky green
eyes changing to something much darker, much grimmer. It was as if she watched
him alter before her eyes. Gone was the sly, insinuating good-time guy, made of
sin and rumor and utter carelessness. And in his place was this … man.
Different. Darker.

 
          
Tortured
, she thought, her heart
pounding like a drum, too fast and too hard. But how could that be? How could
he be hurt?

 
          
And
why should she care?

 
          
He is like all the rest!
that old voice
inside of her cried, still nursing the wounds her mother and Travis had
inflicted so long ago.
Don’t listen to a
word he says—don’t believe the things you think you read on his face!

 
          
But
she could not bring herself to move.

 
          
“You
have no idea of the damage I can do,” he said, his voice thick with what could
only be self-loathing, the lash of it making her blink and sway slightly on her
feet. “And ferreting out a few perfectly tasteful pictures from a decade ago
hardly match up to the destruction I can wreak. You should count yourself
lucky, Grace.”

 
          
She
did not want to care about this man. She did not want to feel that unwelcome
tug in the vicinity of her heart, or want to soothe away the darkness that had
overtaken him. She wished she did not know that he could feel pain, that he
could react at all to the things she’d said. She wished he was no more and no
less than the flighty playboy she’d believed him to be.

 
          
But
if she’d truly believed that, why, the relentlessly logical part of her brain
asked, had she told him the story she’d never told another living soul?

 
          
“Do
not show those pictures to anyone,” she said, her voice shaking slightly, trying
hard not to notice the way his mouth twisted, as if she’d wounded him again.

 
          
“They
are only pictures,” he said softly, with a bitterness she could not understand.
He swept the folder into his hand, and then pitched it into the wire trash bin
that stood next to his desk. “And now they are gone. No lives ruined. But I am
Lucas Wolfe, after all. I’m sure there are six or seven other lives I can
destroy before the evening news.”

 
          
Grace
knew she should have walked away then. She should have turned on her heel and
left the offensively luxurious top-floor office he’d done nothing to earn. She
should have considered the matter finished, and comforted herself with the
knowledge that he was the person she’d believed him to be from the start—shallow,
conscienceless, empty.

 
          
But
she did none of those things.

 
          
“Why
do you want me—the world—to think the worst of you?” she asked before she knew
she meant to speak. That odd tension that had gripped her in the lobby of the
hotel and out on the street the other night returned, hovering between them,
making the air feel heavy with portent and meaning. Regret and fear. Secrets.
Hope
. Or perhaps that was no more than
the way he looked at her.

 
          
“It
saves time,” he replied, his voice strained, almost harsh. “There is nothing
here, Grace. Nothing beneath the pretty face. Isn’t that what you think? What
everyone thinks? Congratulations. You are correct.”

 
          
His pain has nothing to do with you!
she
cried at herself, but it was as if another person inhabited her body. Another
person who swayed closer to him, whose hands itched to reach over and touch him—a
person who could not let that much raw pain go unacknowledged. Especially when
it was his. A person who could not believe he was who he said he was. Who would
not believe it.

 
          
God
help her.