Page 30 of Boss of the Year

Immediately, my amusement faded. “Daniel left?”

Lucas nodded. “He and Emma Hubbard—that’s the senator’s daughter—are…friends, and the senator is the head of the appropriations committee. It was the right thing for him to do.”

I didn’t know what any of those things had to do with one another. All I knew was that this night was wasted now that Daniel was gone.

I might as well go find that bath.

“I thought this might help.” Lucas held up a bottle of champagne and two glasses.

I peered at them, then looked back at him. “Um…why?”

The dimple appeared again. It was the same as Daniel’s, but deeper, almost like a fresh cut. I resisted the urge to press my finger into it.

“I was sent,” Lucas said as he opened the bottle with a loud pop, “to take care of you.”

“Like a babysitter?”

“Like a brother.” He proceeded to pour me another glass of the expensive tipple. “Cheers.”

A fourth glass of champagne.

Guilt chimed through me as I looked at the golden liquid, though I couldn’t say why.

“Everything all right?” I found Lucas watching me. “You don’t have to drink that if you would prefer not to.” He blinked. “It occurs to me that I’ve never seen you drink before tonight. Not even at the staff Christmas party.”

“Well, usually I don’t.”

He seemed genuinely surprised. “No?”

I shook my head. “No. Other than a little wine at communion, I’ve never been much of a drinker. You wouldn’t be either if drinking killed your dad and put your mom in jail for twenty years.”

The words toppled out before I could stop them. Good lord, that was revealing a bit much. Lucas had come in here to convey a quick message, not to hear my family’s sordid history. I shut my mouth, but not before shock flickered through those dark eyes.

“Christ. I didn’t know.” He started to pull back the glass, but I found shaking my head.

No. I didn’t want to go back there. My whole life, my siblings and I had been treated differently when people discovered what had happened with our parents. Joni and I got the majority of that pity. “Practically orphans,” they called us when they thought we weren’t listening. “Fatherless children.”

Like that was all we could ever be.

“It’s all right.” I seized the flute and took a hasty gulp. The champagne burned going down. “I’ve already started. And it’s a party, right?”

Lucas looked skeptical but allowed me to drink anyway, then filled his own glass, though only a few sips’ worth. We watched each other while we drank. The stars in his eyes came out again.

They weren’t the luminous, tropical blue of his brother’s, but there was something about the brewing storm that invited me in just the same.

“Does he do this a lot?” I meandered about the plants, drink in hand. “Send girls here to meet him?”

One of Lucas’s dark brows arched as he followed me. “I think you know the answer to that. You followed him to the end once, didn’t you?”

My cheeks heated. “I wasn’t in his closet because?—”

I cut myself off when his brow lifted even more. I wasn’t sure how Lucas knew what had been going on in that bedroom before he entered, but obviously he did. Just like he knew I’d heard it all.

And he had been gentleman enough not to mention it until now.

“I went there to say goodbye, not hide in his dirty laundry,” I muttered as I turned to face a gardenia, its shy petals just emerging for the end of summer. “It wasn’t on purpose.”

“Of course not.”