Lucien had the particular gift of entering a room the way a natural disaster enters a coastal town — without warning, without apology, and with the absolute certainty that whatever destruction followed was someone else's problem.
He stood in the ballroom doorway with his coat hanging off one shoulder, his cravat nowhere to be seen, and a bottle of champagne dangling from his left hand like a lantern he had forgotten he was carrying. His dark hair — the same shade as Caelan's, because genetics were nothing if not consistent in their cruelty — was dishevelled in a way that suggested either a fight or a romantic encounter, and knowing Lucien, it was probably both.
He was grinning. The wide, reckless, incandescent grin of a man who had decided that the evening's carefully orchestrated performance was missing a vital ingredient, and that ingredient was chaos.
