LITMIR.BIZ

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her shoulder at him, thoroughly disheveled, and he felt a fierce stab of a kind of pride. Her hair was a wild cloud around her face, her lips still slightly swollen, her eyes not entirely focused.

      “I am going to shower,” she said, her voice still rough from passion. There was something awkward in the way she held herself, something uneasy. She did not quite meet his gaze, and he knew as she pulled an arm around herself that she felt the heaviness, the weight, that hung there between them.

      He was a master at this scene. He should have sorted it out already, made her laugh, flattered her and teased her into pleased satiation. But his happy manners, his notorious charm, seemed to have deserted him completely.

      “Grace.” He did not know why he said her name like that, why he felt it reverberate through him, why he wanted to reach for her for no reason at all but to hold her close. To stay in this moment, not to let it go. He did not know why every part of him felt that could be disastrous to move forward, to keep going.

      To admit that he was back in Wolfstone, with all that entailed.

      He was descending into melodrama, and she was not even looking at him.

      “Why don’t you order room service?” she asked lightly, her tone not fooling him at all. But what could he do when he was not even sure what held him in this odd, tight grip around his chest? “We could use some food, I think.”

      And then he watched her walk across the room to disappear into the en suite bathroom, naked and more beautiful than any woman ought to be, her head held high and regal, the culmination of fantasies he hadn’t even known he’d had.

      He was in trouble. More trouble, he understood, than he had ever been near before.

      “You accused me of hiding yesterday,” he said without turning around, not moving from where he stood in front of the big bay window. “In plain sight.”

      He had heard the water shut off, had heard the old pipes cease their chattering and clanking. He’d heard her move around in the bathroom, and then emerge. She brought a cloud of fragrance with her, something floral with a faint kick of spice. Her soap, shampoo, perfume. It teased his nose and made him harden again in the jeans he’d thrown back on to answer the porter’s knock when their food had been delivered. Lamb with buttery mashed potatoes and peas. Hearty fare befitting a cold March night—and yet he could not seem to summon up an appetite.

      “It was an observation,” she replied in an even tone, closer to him than he’d expected, though he still did not turn. “Not an accusation.”

      “It was astute, either way,” he said. “But I cannot seem to do it here.”

      He turned to find her just beyond his shoulder, her face carefully blank, her brown eyes noticeably wary, her hair piled haphazardly on the top of her head and curling at the ends. She was wrapped in a thin silk wrapper of a deep royal blue, her skin flushed pink and rosy from her ablutions. Or perhaps from what had happened between them.

      She looked like candy, sweet and damp and all too edible. And he could not understand why tasting her again, though he yearned to, was not the urge that drove him. Why something else battled to take him over instead.

      It was the ghosts again, he thought darkly. There were too many, especially in Wolfestone. Hadn’t his run-in with Jacob taught him the folly of revisiting the past? And yet here he was, back in this village, as if he’d learned nothing at all. He’d even been the one to suggest coming here, so full of himself, never considering the consequences. The story of his damned life.

      “I don’t know what this is,” he muttered. “If it is you—or this damned place. It brings back far too many memories. None of them good.”

      Her wary eyes searched his face, and he saw her swallow, as if fighting for calm. Oddly, that small sign of discomfort eased him. It made him realize that this woman—who knew something about hiding herself in plain sight just as he did—could understand. That he wanted her to understand.

      “What happened to you here?” she asked in a soft voice, as if she feared he would not like the question.

      He looked at her for a long moment, and then back out the window. The night was dark and blustery, with no hint of moon or stars. He could see only the wind-tossed branches of the trees across the lane, and the impenetrable country blackness beyond. But he still knew precisely where he was. He still knew that the Wolfe estate began just on the other side of the deceptively bucolic river that wound through the town, that the manor house hunkered out there in the dark, empty and brooding and marked, as far as he was concerned—forever marked as soulless and evil as its former owner had been.

      What had he been thinking, to return here?

      “I had the misfortune to be born William Wolfe’s son,” he said, a hollow laugh escaping him. “That is what happened to me. Do not let the tales of his fame, his great charisma and cult of personality fool you, Grace.” He shook his head. “I’ve managed to put him from my mind for vast swathes of my life—but that does not work here, apparently. The things he did and the kind of man he was hang in the air in this village like smoke.”

      She was quiet for a long moment, and Lucas felt that ache inside of him expand. As if he had never known loneliness, not really, until this moment. But then she brushed past him, and sat down on the couch just beside the window and faced him, tucking her long, bare legs beneath her. She tilted her face toward him, and he saw … nothing. No judgment. No arch, inside knowledge she might use against him. Nothing but her warm, steady gaze.

      “He was a monster,” Lucas said baldly. He felt his mouth twist and turned away, staring out the window once again, though what he saw was the past. He shrugged, as if he could will it away.

      “And …” Her voice was hesitant. “Your mother?”

      “I never knew who she was,” Lucas said, on a sigh. Funny that the truth could still sting, when he should have long since ceased caring about a relatively meaningless fact like that one. “He told me only that she could not stand the sight of me, and that was why she’d left me on his doorstep.” He smirked a little bit then, ignoring the small noise she made. “I grew up rather amazed that what people saw when they looked at me was this remarkable face I’d been awarded in the genetic lottery, when I knew the truth about how ugly I was. So ugly it repulsed my own mother, who was never heard from again. So ugly it made my father hate me. Quite a dichotomy.”

      “And you had only your father’s word on that?”

      Grace asked, and it was the lack of pity, the simple calm in her voice that made it all right, somehow, that he was telling her all of this. No matter that he still did not know why.

      Lucas remembered then, unwillingly, the night he’d confronted William in his study with the birth certificate he’d found after hours of searching. He’d been a mere teenager then, angry and bitter that all of his siblings knew their parents—even Rafael, the other bastard son who lived in the village yet out of William’s view, had the comfort of his mother’s presence to ease William’s rejection of him. But Lucas had nothing. Only William’s lifelong loathing and a birth certificate with the mother’s name blanked out.

      William had reacted predictably when Lucas had waved the document in front of him, and Lucas had still been too emotional, too small yet to fight back as he might have done later. It was only when William had him pinned to the wall that he’d relented at all—in true William Wolfe fashion.

      “Your mother is a difficult woman to forget,” he had said, in a vicious sort of tone, designed to wound, confuse.

      He had thrown a photo album at Lucas’s feet, sneered at the nose he’d bloodied with his own big fist and left Lucas to page through photographs of his uncle Richard’s wedding—to a woman who had Lucas’s own unusual green eyes. If what he had seen was true, it meant William had slept with his own sister-in-law. Lucas had been sick right there on the study floor.

      The subject of Lucas’s mother had never been raised again.

      “Yes,” Lucas said

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