Shameless Playboy Read Online Free PDF

“Are
you referring to yourself?” she asked lightly, and smiled to take the sting
away.
                 His
smile then was as sharp, and far more dangerous. “I mean myself most of all,”
he said quietly, an undercurrent in his voice she did not understand. “I am my
own heroin.”
                 It
was the ferocity in his voice that lingered with her even hours later, and the
fact she could not dismiss the man from her thoughts made her fantasize anew
about destroying all of her belongings in a dramatic—if private—show of temper.
                 But
the sad truth, she acknowledged late that evening when she arrived home and
looked around the carefully pristine, perfectly decorated penthouse apartment
that normally made her feel happy and successful and tonight felt oddly empty,
was that she was entirely too practical.
                 She
could not let herself be so reckless, so careless. No matter how good it would
feel. She’d learned that lesson the hard way.
                 “Women
in our family are built to love,” her mother had said with a shrug years ago,
when Grace had collapsed in a sobbing mess on her bed, trying to handle the
fallout of her first, doomed relationship. Back when her mother still spoke to
her. “Too much and too long, and always messy. That’s how it goes. It’s our
curse.”
                 “You
don’t understand—” Grace had moaned.
                 “You’re
no different, Gracie,” her mother had said, and shaken her head as she’d
reached for another cigarette. “I know you want to be, but you’re not, and the
sooner you get your head around that the happier you’ll be.”
                 Now,
so many years and miles away from that conversation, and all the betrayal and
pain that had followed it, Grace sank down on her smooth, modern couch in the
foreign country she called home, and reached back to let her hair fall, heavy
and thick, from its place on the back of her head. She shook out the pins, and
ran her fingers through the wild mess of it that she only ever dared let down
when she was alone. It was too unruly, too untamed—too reminiscent of the girl
she had been, who she preferred to pretend had never existed at all.
                 I am my own heroin , he had said, and she
thought it was an apt description of his lure, his innate danger.
                 There
was never any something more with a
man like Lucas. There was only heartbreak and loneliness. She needed only to
consider her poor mother’s endless string of misery and despair, her life lived
on the strength of broken promises and late-night tears, as one more man smiled
like he meant it and Grace’s mother believed .
She always believed, and they always let her down. Always.
                 And
Mary-Lynn never blamed the men. She always blamed herself, and so lost a little
bit more of herself, her battered heart and the light in her eyes every time.
Until the day she’d blamed her daughter instead.
                 Grace
kicked off her shoes and curled up on the couch. She could not afford to be
fascinated with Lucas Wolfe. She could not allow herself to be intrigued. She
had to throw a relaunch party so fabulous that it cemented her reputation for
years to come, and she could not permit any deviation from her plan, especially
not in the form of a man who was clearly put on the earth to ruin every woman
he touched.
                 It
made her heart ache that she was so susceptible, as if it really was a genetic
defect passed down from mother to daughter. When all this time, after
everything that had happened in high school had changed her so completely, she’d
truly believed she was immune. She would be different, no matter what her
mother thought—no matter what she’d screamed at Grace when she’d thrown her out
like so much trash. She would .
                 But
she