That was how it began, Hunter knew. He remembered it, as if it was from a different life. That drive to be something else. To be better.
“Don’t worry, dude,” Aaron said with a sneer, something flashing in his dark eyes that made Hunter feel something very much like proud. “I wasn’t picking out my prom dress just yet. You can calm down.”
“While you can give me fifty push-ups,” Hunter retorted. “And if you don’t learn how to speak respectfully, you’ll be doing them all night. Dude.”
And it wasn’t until he had the team running drills, Jack starting to shout out commands from the sidelines as if he was feeling like a coach himself, Aaron counting out his push-ups in a markedly more polite tone, that Hunter allowed himself that smile.
* * *
This was a lot harder than she’d anticipated.
Zoe ducked out of the cold wind in a recessed doorway halfway down the block from the bar where she was supposed to meet Hunter, her heart clapping so hard against her ribs she thought it might leave bruises.
It was one thing that Hunter knew about her past. A horrible, deeply upsetting thing that she’d spent a whole day trying and failing to come to terms with. But why had she agreed to walk into a public place and tell two more people the secret she’d hidden away all these years?
Especially when one of them was a Treffen.
For a terrifying moment, she couldn’t breathe.
She didn’t know how long she stood there, fighting off the panic. Would she simply fall apart where she stood? Right there on the street? Was it wrong that some part of her wanted that, so at least she wouldn’t have to talk about this again? But slowly, she pulled air into her lungs. One long breath, then another. Eventually, she stood straight. Calm. And when all that noise in her head had quieted, she made herself walk out into the flow of foot traffic again, then the rest of the way down the block, as if she was fine.
Because she was fine. She was.
She had to be fine, one way or another.
Because she could hardly expect to take down the monster who still lurked in every single one of her nightmares if she couldn’t have a simple conversation with two men who, Hunter had assured her, hated Jason Treffen as much as she did.
Hunter. His name in her head, her heart, like a drumbeat. Images of him in that bed, on top of her, inside her. His face, tormented and drawn, when he’d told her to hit him harder—
She couldn’t bear that he knew. She couldn’t stand it. It made her feel wobbly inside, as if she might dissolve at any moment. But she had no choice but to pretend she was made of stone instead.
She never had any choice.
The bar in question was a private club in a boutique hotel. There were two actual velvet ropes and a stone-faced sentry at the final door to navigate before Zoe was admitted to the enclosed rooftop space. It offered views of the quiet Lower East Side street below with the immensity of Manhattan looming everywhere above them, filled with a noticeably elegant and star-studded crowd there, no doubt, to bask in its exclusivity.
It was pretty. She could breathe.
She was fine.
“Zoe.”
She stiffened, more ice than stone, but it was Hunter, pushing himself away from the wall near the entrance to meet her. And then she hated herself, because she’d let him see her reaction. It was as if she didn’t fit in her own skin anymore. It made her feel things she’d gone to great lengths to keep from feeling for all these years. Vulnerable. Small.
She watched his too-clever eyes narrow, knowing he saw too much. As usual, damn him.
And then she hated him, too, because he didn’t reach over and touch her. Oh, no. No fingers at her cheek, no touch against the hair she’d let fall around her shoulders tonight. Hunter thrust his hands into the pockets of his trousers and he stood too close, so close she could almost feel that drugging heat of his—but he didn’t touch her the way she knew he would have before.
Before she’d told him the truth about what she was. Before he’d discovered that she wasn’t that incandescent creature she’d seen reflected in his gaze when he’d moved inside her.
Before.
It was only to be expected, but that didn’t make it any easier. And she hated that it hurt. So much more than it should have.
“Let’s do this,” she blurted out, with perhaps a touch too much aggression. He blinked.
“You don’t have to do anything.” His voice was so calm. A hint of his drawl, no sign of temper or pain or heat. “You don’t have to meet them. You can turn around right now and leave. I’ll still do whatever you want me to do to help bring him down. You don’t have to involve anyone else if you don’t want to.”
“I want to.” Her lips felt numb, but that didn’t matter. So did her heart. She’d do this anyway. “Let’s go.”
But Hunter didn’t move. He frowned down at her, his gaze moving over her face, and she felt nothing but a howling within. Because he’d wanted to touch her so badly he shook with it, before. And now he knew how filthy she was, how polluted, he kept his hands to himself. She hadn’t imagined he’d be any different from the whole rest of the world, so there was no reason that should feel like a punch in the stomach. Like betrayal.
No reason at all.
She unzipped the coat she wore with more force than skill, then unwound her scarf from around her neck, scowling at him as she did it.
“Hunter. I said I want to do this, which means sometime tonight, please.”
“What are you wearing?”
Zoe knew what he meant, but there was temper and heartache and panic pounding at her temples, in her veins, in every breath she took, and she wanted to hit him again. Harder this time. With something very heavy, like one of the nearby tables.
“I believe we call them clothes.” She eyed him, hoping she looked as unfriendly as she felt. As she wished she felt. “But you can call them whatever you want. I don’t really care.”
He blinked again, and she thought he tensed, but when he spoke again his voice was still perfectly smooth. If a shade darker.
“I’ve never seen you in jeans before.” He said it as if it hurt his jaw. “Or red.”
“It’s been a big week. Why not reflect it in my wardrobe?”
His gaze moved over her, and she hated the fact her body responded, shivering into the heat of it, letting that damned need bloom wherever that blue gaze touched.
“I like it,” he said.
“That was, of course, my singular goal.”
His mouth crooked then, as if he knew. As if he’d been there tonight when she decided it was time to come out of her Ice Queen cave of sleek mourning clothes. As if he knew perfectly well that she’d been unable to get that hot gleam in his blue gaze out of her head when she’d pulled on the dark black skinny-legged jeans that hugged her legs and the red top that wrapped around her torso, leaving a deep V open in front. As if he knew exactly what she’d been thinking when she slid on the killer heels in a leopard print that demanded attention and did wicked things to her walk, especially on wintry sidewalks.
As if she was completely and utterly transparent, after all these years of hiding herself away.
And that same fire licked at her, reminding her. The air between them pulled taut. She saw that awareness in his gaze, that same bright blaze.
But he still didn’t make a single move to touch her, and that burned through her like poison, drowning out everything else, sitting heavy on her chest like the tears she refused to cry. Not here. Not in front of him. Not when it already hurt this much.
She wanted to scream, to swing out at him, to burst—
“Come on,” he said quietly, using his chin to point the way, as if even the smallest touch would be corrosive. As if she was infectious. It was her worst nightmare come true, and this man had been inside her
. She felt nauseated, and then furious at herself for expecting anything different. “They’re over here.”
Zoe would have said her heart had been ripped out such a long time ago that it couldn’t break any further. That it couldn’t possibly crack the way it did then, shattering into all those jagged pieces that cut at her every time she breathed in.
But she walked where he pointed her anyway, because it was better than falling apart. She’d have to save that for later, when this was over. When Hunter couldn’t see her do it. When she could make sure he’d never, ever know. That no one would.
Alex Diaz and Austin Treffen waited at a private table far in the corner, and both stood when she appeared, both as good-looking and obviously powerful as she’d expected. Zoe told herself they were like any other clients. Rich, accomplished and probably evil. It was always best to assume that from the start. Fewer surprises, she’d always found.
She supposed it said something about her that the thought soothed her.
“I don’t need an introduction,” she said, pulling her professional persona around her like a cloak and even forcing a smile, surprised when it came easily. As if nothing had changed, even if it felt as though everything had. “I know who you are.” She shook hands the way she always did, brisk and confident, as if she felt either. “Alex. Austin. I’m Zoe Brook.”
“The PR queen of New York,” Alex said, smiling in that intent way she assumed reporters always did, and she wasn’t at all surprised he was as successful as he was. “Of course. It’s nice to meet you in person, though your reputation precedes you.”
“Better than a florist, I guess,” Austin said. Bizarrely. But he was staring at Hunter. “Are you worried about your reputation, Hunter? Because I think that’s a lost cause.”
“Zoe has a particular affinity for Saint Jude, as a matter of fact,” Hunter said, and there was clearly something wrong with her that the reference warmed her. He thought she was toxic and she was getting soft over a throwaway line about a martyr. She wasn’t sure who she hated more just then, herself or him.
Him, she decided, when he maneuvered her so he was sitting in the booth with his buddies and she was on the outer edge. Was he afraid she’d spill her filth all over his friends? Get them as dirty as she was—as dirty as she’d made him?
Far inside her, something keened. A horrible, grieving sound, made of loss and regret, but she ignored it. There was no point to it. There was no fixing anything. There was only revenge, and no matter what she felt about Hunter beneath all of the shattered pieces and the poison and all the ways she’d been tainted by what she’d done, she believed what he’d said. That revenge would work better with Alex and Austin involved.
Assuming they were who he said they were.
“What are we doing here?” Austin asked. He looked at Zoe and smiled slightly. “If you’ll excuse my impatience.”
She smiled back, and was pleased on some level when Hunter tensed, as if he knew what was coming.
“I hate wasting time,” she said. “It’s a pet peeve of mine.”
“Zoe.”
That was Hunter, of course. But she’d clicked back into her professional mode, and it was a relief. She was bulletproof when she was this version of herself. Fully armor-plated. She could even relax against the booth as if this was a garden party and she was here to discuss nothing more dramatic than canapés. A friendly game of croquet. Whatever the rich and bored drawled about while wreathed in all their privilege.
“Your father is a pimp,” she told Austin coolly, and watched his eyes go blank with some mix of resignation and temper she didn’t know him well enough to decipher. She glanced over at Alex, who had gone very still himself. “And I remember both of you from the halcyon days of my time as a legal assistant at Treffen, Smith, and Howell back when your friend Sarah Michaels worked there, which, yes, means exactly what you think it does.”
She heard Hunter sigh from beside her, where he sat close but still not touching her. Zoe understood that he never would again, and she refused to mourn that. She’d wanted to use sex only to end the tension between them and make him more malleable. She should have been thrilled it had been a success.
A great big fucking success, and what she really hated him for, she thought then, was that he’d made her feel whole and new only to turn around and make it clear that she’d never be anything but broken. It was the truth, but that didn’t make it any easier to bear.
She leaned forward and propped her elbows on the table, as if this was a casual chat among friends.
“Hunter assures me that he was never one of the many johns Jason pandered to and then blackmailed,” Zoe said, almost sweetly. She smiled, and she watched both Alex and Austin closely. “What about you two?”
Chapter Nine
As introductions went, it was explosive, Hunter thought, as she’d no doubt intended.
Zoe sat there so calmly beside him, looking perfectly at ease, as if she discussed prostitution and blackmail and human perversity every night of the week. As if he hadn’t seen the scars of her past alive and bright on her face in his own living room only yesterday. As if it had all happened to someone else.
“My mother is finally divorcing my father,” Austin said, once Zoe looked more convinced than not that he and Alex weren’t monsters. “I’m happy to say I helped her reach that decision and that I’m representing her. If I had my way I’d leave him bloody and beaten on the courtroom floor, but I’ll settle for taking as much of his money as possible.”
“Must we choose?” Zoe asked coolly.
Hunter had never admired anybody more.
“You need to tell this story, Zoe,” Alex told her then, his voice intense. He leaned forward. “The call girls. The blackmail of all those clients. The world needs to know the truth about him.”
“I agree,” Zoe said, collected and cool, as always. “But I can’t do that.”
“You must know that first-person, witness, victim testimony—”
“I was his victim for too long,” she said so smoothly it took a moment to feel the edge in it, the blade. “I won’t do it again.”
It was quiet for a moment, a hush over their table while the rest of the club glittered and murmured all around them. Austin’s expression was even darker than usual, while Alex only studied Zoe, as if looking for a way past that smooth wall of hers. Good luck with that, buddy, Hunter thought, but shifted closer to her, in case he tried.
“I understand where you’re coming from,” Alex began, as if he was choosing each word carefully.
“Do you think so?”
That time her voice was so light, so very nearly buoyant, that it took them all a minute to understand that it was a gut punch. Then to feel it.
“I wish I could impress upon you—” Alex began again.
“Enough.” Hunter didn’t know he meant to speak until he heard his own voice. It was an implacable command, barked out as if he was still the quarterback who expected his orders to be followed immediately.
Alex looked at him, then back at Zoe. He didn’t look happy, but he nodded.
“Why don’t we talk strategy?” Zoe asked, sounding utterly unruffled, but Hunter knew her now. He saw her.
Her pulse betrayed her in that hollow at her neck, the hand she held in her lap—beneath the table where only he could see it—was balled into a tight fist, and the leg she’d crossed over the other was too taut, too stiff.
And Hunter despaired of himself, because even now, even here, he wanted her.
If he was a better man, he wouldn’t, surely. Not now. He would simply protect her the way she should have been protected from the start. If he could, he would have kept her safe from vermin like Jason Treffen in the first place. He would have saved her. Instead, he was part of the problem. He was disgusted with himself.
Zoe was outl
ining the same plan she’d shared with him, in her usual concise way. Hunter had no doubt that it would work, eventually. He believed she was as good as she said she was. But he didn’t want the slow build, the right word placed delicately in the right ear. He wanted swift, decisive action.
He wanted Jason cut down and cut off. Now.
“It’s not enough,” he said when she was done. Zoe took a breath before she looked at him directly, and her gaze was too dark on his, as if he’d hurt her. But he couldn’t seem to help that, and what he wanted to do would help more, in the end. “It turns into an extended battle for public opinion, possibly allowing him to win.”
“He won’t,” Zoe said, a frosty edge to her voice.
“He might. Why allow the possibility?”
“Because in addition to all your other well-documented skills, you’re now an expert on PR?” she asked in that sharp tone that he found he still loved, even when it lacerated him. “Oh, no. Wait. That’s me.”
“I keep telling you, it takes a tremendous amount of skill to climb to the many heights I have and fall straight down from each and every one of them.”
“Keep calling it a skill if that makes you feel better.”
“You don’t know Jason as well as we do,” he said, trying to pull the others back into the conversation, aware that they were watching the interchange between him and Zoe a little too closely for his liking.
“And you don’t know him the way I do,” she said, fierce and hollow at once.
Hunter inclined his head, conceding the point.
“But wrecking his reputation isn’t enough. He’s already lost his family, thanks to Austin. Alex is plotting his downfall in the media. There’s something better you and I can do. That only we can do.”
She shifted so she could really look at him then, and Hunter forgot where they were. Who was sitting with them, watching all of this. But he didn’t care. Not when there was a storm in those dark gray eyes of hers, seeing things in him he’d never been able to hide. Not from her.
“This from the man I found in a strip club,” she said softly. Harshly. A kill shot, he understood. “Who wanted to do absolutely nothing but marinate in his own self-pity for the rest of his life.”
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