Shameless Playboy Read Free Page A

“If
by that you mean licentious ,” she
retorted.
                 Her
gaze flicked over his battered face. Her distracting Southern drawl went
suspiciously sweet. “I certainly hope you won’t be left with any unsightly
scars.”
                 “On
my famously beautiful face?” Lucas asked, affecting astonishment with a small
tinge of horror. “Certainly not. And there are always surgeons should nature
prove unequal to the task.”
                 Not
that a surgeon would be much help with his other, less visible scars, he
thought darkly. Lucas had not been particularly bothered by the appearance of
Samantha Cartwright’s movie-producer husband at a delicate moment the night
before. It took more than a few punches to impress him, and in any case, it was
only sporting to let a wronged husband express his ill will. There was nothing
about the situation that should have distinguished the night from any other
night, bruises included.
                 Except
that, upon leaving the hotel, Lucas had not ordered the waiting car to take him
to his soulless flat high above the Thames in South Bank. Instead, responding
to an urge he had no interest at all in naming, he had ordered it to take him
out into the wilds of Buckinghamshire to Wolfe Manor, the abandoned familial
pile of stone and bad memories he had assiduously avoided since he’d left the
place at eighteen.
                 He’d
heard a rumor that his prodigal older brother, Jacob, had returned after
disappearing some twenty years before and Lucas, with the typical measure of
cockiness brought on by the liberal application of too many spirits, had
decided this particular drunken dawn was high time to test the truth of that
story.
                 But
Lucas did not want to think about that. Not about Jacob himself, not about why
Jacob had disappeared, nor why he had returned and certainly not about what
Jacob had said to him that had spurred Lucas into a series of unlikely actions
culminating in his arrival in this office. And so, as he had done with great
determination and skill since he was young, he focused on the woman in front of
him instead.
                 The
one who was still scowling at him.
                 “If
I was someone else,” he said, letting his gaze drift to that expressive mouth
she held so tightly, “I might begin to think that scowl meant you disliked me.
Which is, of course, impossible.”
                 “Never
say never,” she replied, so very sweetly.
                 “I
rarely do,” he assured her in a low voice, lifting his gaze to hers and letting
them both feel the heat of it. “As I’d be happy to demonstrate.”
                 There
was a brief, searing pause.
                 “Did
you just suggest what I think you suggested?” she demanded, her dark eyes
promising fire and brimstone and other such irritants. Her full mouth firmed
into a disapproving line.
                 He
couldn’t have said why he was so entertained.
                 “I
can’t say that I remember what I suggested,” he replied, smiling again. “But
one gathers you’re opposed.”
                 “The
word is insulted , Mr. Wolfe,” she
retorted. “Not opposed .”
                 But
he knew what that spark in her gaze meant, and it wasn’t insult. “If you say
so,” he said, and let his gaze move over her body.
                 She
was tall and slim, with rich curves in all the right places, bright blond hair
and soulfully deep brown eyes, making her the perfect, long-legged distraction.
Unfortunately, she was also wearing entirely too many severely cut articles of
clothing, all of them designed to force a man’s eye from the very places it was
naturally drawn.
                 Add
to that her scraped-back, no-nonsense hairstyle and it was abundantly clear
that this woman was one