by Maisey Yates
Everything went still.
Excruciatingly still.
Hunter’s intelligent blue gaze was much too hot, and Zoe felt an odd constriction grip her, as if something hard and tight was wrapped around her ribs, the way some insane and rebellious part of her wished his hands were.
Moments ticked by, and Hunter didn’t do any of the usual, expected things. He didn’t scoff. He didn’t argue. He didn’t bluster or recoil or toss insults at her head.
He simply...watched her. Studied her. Making her realize, with his intent silence, that she underestimated this man at her peril. It was unnerving. She was beginning to think he was unnerving, and she didn’t understand how he’d managed to convince the world that he was nothing but a jock—
And then he smiled, shattering the moment and making her heart flip inside her chest.
“Okay,” he said.
She was so shaken she almost stammered out her reply, and she never would have forgiven herself if she had. She sucked in a breath, fighting for control. What the hell was happening to her? What was next—tears? A child’s screaming fit on the floor? She could suddenly see the appeal of both.
“I don’t understand what that means,” she said, when she could speak calmly.
“It means...okay.”
What was that dark, hungry thing in his gaze that she could feel burrowing into her, making her edgy and something like nervous, with that clenching feeling low in her belly? What was this? By this point, any other man she’d ever had pursue her like this would have veered off into a temper tantrum—proving once and for all that what they wanted was her surrender, however they could get it.
Not her. Never her. Just the power rush of having her submit to them, one way or another.
She didn’t understand Hunter at all. It made her nervous, down deep into parts of her she’d assumed nothing could ever touch, all those dark and hidden pockets she’d thought she’d walled off and locked away for good.
“‘Okay?’” she echoed. “Are you really telling me that you, Hunter Talbot Grant III, the John McEnroe of football and the most loathed celebrity of our time, secretly harbor submissive fantasies? You—the very poster boy for chest-beating, alpha-male assholes?”
He grinned, wolfish again, every inch of him a dangerous predator, too hot and too hungry, and if she hadn’t had both her feet firmly on the floor, Zoe would have sworn her whole office was spinning all around her in jagged, drunken loops.
“Sure,” he said, with that cocky twist to his lips and a conquering gleam in his bright blue gaze. “I don’t like labels, Ms. Brook. I like to win. Does that make me submissive?”
She’d never seen a less submissive creature in her entire life.
There was no way this man—who oozed Neanderthal from his very pores, who had made a spectacle of himself and his inability to be told what to do, ever, by anyone, even when it was his job to do what his coaches told him—was capable of even the pretense of surrender.
He thought this was a game. He thought everything was a game. But that didn’t mean he’d win.
“Fine, then.” She felt the clamor in her chest, the pulse of all that heat below, but focused instead on calling his bluff, because that was all that mattered. “Then what are you waiting for? The office door is closed. Your secret’s safe with me. By all means, be beta.”
He only watched her, still and focused, wildly male and intensely demanding without saying a word. He didn’t have to speak. He emanated command and iron control from every single one of those perfectly hewn, mouthwateringly smooth muscles. From his beautiful eyes, his tough jaw. Even the way he stood there before her, formidably appealing and still too close, whispered to that tender, feminine place inside her she thought Jason Treffen had killed off years ago.
Hunter made her feel soft, and that was unforgivable.
So she snapped her fingers and pointed at the floor.
“Be a good boy, Hunter. Crawl.”
And the way he laughed then was like a lit match to a flood of gasoline, catapulting them both into a raging inferno Zoe worried—with a desperate surge of panic—would consume them both right then and there. It rolled through her, touching every part of her with flame and wonder and a kind of fear. It made her shiver. It made her want to call this off before it got any worse—
But she didn’t move. She didn’t speak. She couldn’t back down. She couldn’t let him see her consider it.
Hunter inclined his head slightly, almost regally, holding her gaze with his.
Knowing. Demanding.
Pure male challenge cloaked in all that searing blue.
“Ask and you shall receive,” he said in a voice that went straight to her head, and between her legs, and was about as far from submissive as it was possible to be.
Because he was about as submissive as an actual alpha wolf.
And then he opened his arms wide in a parody of surrender wholly belied by that mocking curve to his perfect lips, took a step back and then dropped to his knees—right there in the middle of her office.
Chapter Four
Zoe’s breath deserted her in a rush, then came too hard, too fast.
Her body felt like someone else’s, as if her heart beat that wild and rough of its own volition, as if it wanted to tear its way out of her chest all on its own. It was an insistent pulse in her throat, her belly. In her suddenly too-heavy breasts and that shocking, swollen heat between her legs.
She felt as if he’d punched her. Some part of her wished he had. She was only dimly aware that she’d dropped her hands to her sides and was gripping the edge of her glass-topped desk.
Hard, as if she was afraid of what might happen if she let go.
As if she already knew exactly what would happen.
Because the only thing she could see was Hunter. The crisp bright winter daylight faded away, New York ceased to exist outside her windows, the business she’d made and the revenge she was determined to enact disappeared like smoke.
There was nothing but Hunter.
On his knees in front of her, big and male and that lazy, frankly sensual look in his beautiful eyes that his technically submissive position did nothing at all to undercut. He was such a large man that even kneeling, his head was nearly at the level of her breasts, and her nipples went painfully hard at the notion of what he could do with that.
What she wanted him to do—but no. She couldn’t want that, could she? She wasn’t the kind of woman who wanted. She wasn’t sure she knew how. That was only one among the many things she’d lost. That had been taken from her.
The very thought of her sordid, ugly past should have spurred her into some kind of action, a better defense at the very least, but she couldn’t seem to make herself move.
Hunter looked as if he was this close to simply leaning in and tasting her, taking her—simply because he could, simply because he was Hunter—no matter that she was theoretically standing in the power position. Literally looking down at him.
It should have made a difference. It should have wrecked a man like him right down to the marrow of his alpha male bones.
Clearly, it wasn’t working.
If anything, Zoe felt even more like his prey than she had when he was looming over her, taking up all of her space, making her frighteningly unable to tell the difference between his breath and hers...
Oh, yes. She was in trouble.
And she still couldn’t control her breathing.
“Your wish is my command, Zoe,” he said, that rich current of amusement in his low voice, his eyes never shifting from hers. Her traitorous hands itched to close the distance between them, to bury themselves in the thickness of his dark blond hair, and that trickle of yearning that was very nearly an urge came much too close to overwhelming her. She didn’t understand it. She certainly didn’t want it. “Please tell me those shoes you’re wearing are involved in whatever dominatrix fantasies you’d like to play out. I promise, I’m happy to be your willing slave.”
&nbs
p; “This is ridiculous.” Her voice was a hiss of sound. Desperate, she could hear, and could only hope he didn’t know how desperate. “You’re playing games.”
“Be on top, if you want,” he said in that sinful drawl of his that shivered through her, making it hard to sit still on the edge of her desk. Or at all. His gaze burned into hers. “I don’t care. Whatever turns you on.”
She didn’t want to think about what turned her on. It had never really come up before—not like this. It was as if Hunter knew more about her body, her desires and her needs, than she did. As if he was deliberately provoking her, as if he knew precisely how little it would take to tip her over into a great blaze.
“I need you to stop this,” she said sternly—or as sternly as she could. “That’s what turns me on. You on your feet, an appropriate distance away from me, behaving yourself.”
But he moved then. He tilted his glorious body forward, and caged her hips in his big, sure hands, and everything seemed to explode. Or that was only her—a great, white-hot, rolling sort of implosion, tearing her apart from the inside out. There was so much heat—
From his strong, elegant hands. From that hard, male look on his face. From her—inside her. All the pieces of her she was sure would fly apart into a thousand shattered bits if he hadn’t been holding her fast between his hands, making her flush from head to toe, red and wild and terrified.
And then Hunter simply reached down, took the hem of her skirt in his remarkably agile, hard and calloused hands, and began to ease it up her legs.
“You can’t— What are you—”
She was stammering, and the worst part was, she didn’t care the way she had a few moments ago. Now it was the least of her worries.
“Worshipping you.” Hunter’s voice was a low growl that made her skin tingle, the hair at the back of her neck stand on end, and gooseflesh prickle into life in all the places she’d gone red. “All good surrenders begin with an act of worship, Zoe. Everyone knows that.”
And for a moment, she only stared down at him, stunned. Frozen. Doing absolutely nothing while this man pushed her skirt higher and higher, holding her gaze all the while.
For a sizzling moment, they only stared at each other.
Then Hunter slid one hand around the back of her right thigh, holding it still while the rest of her shuddered. He held her gaze for another endless moment—and then he bent, put his lips to her flesh, and sucked. Hard.
It hurt. It was like a spike of fire, punching into her, from that spot high on her thigh to the melting heat above, then outward to every lost and yearning part of her, making her entire body his, not hers. It was like nothing she’d ever felt before.
It was, she realized from some great distance where her brain worked despite the clamor and riot of all of this, a fucking hickey. He pulled back, his hands still in dangerous places on her thighs, his mouth in a smug crook, and that sting stamped into her skin.
He’d marked her.
And now he looked up at her again, unrepentant and determined, his hands moving up again, deliberate and slow. His next goal obvious.
So obvious, she thought she might drown in her own fire.
So deliciously, heatedly obvious, she knew that if she let this go on for a single second more, he would own her. She would be lost forever, and he would know that with a simple act like this one, he could have whatever he wanted from her.
That was what did it.
Zoe pushed away from the desk, too aware that he let her bat his hands away from her skirt, from those whisperlike touches to the tender skin above her knees that she told herself meant nothing, did nothing. She stepped away from him in an undignified hurry that almost made her trip over her own feet, moving behind the desk in what she hoped looked like temper.
Because she didn’t know what she’d do if he saw the depth of her panic. If he knew how close he’d come to destroying her, and worse, how close she’d been to letting him.
She wasn’t sure he hadn’t.
“You can stay on your knees, Mr. Grant,” she bit out, as if calling him that could erase what he’d done, or allow her to believe in her own strength again the way she wanted—needed—to do. “It suits you. Maybe you’ll learn a little humility down there.”
“It’s unlikely.”
He rose with that innate, athletic grace that reminded her what feats of strength he was capable of performing, if he chose. He was like some kind of warrior, easy and something like beautiful despite the solid, heavy width of his shoulders, the smooth power he wore so easily, the capacity for all of that brutality in every hard line.
When had she stopped finding him disgusting?
“If you touch me again,” she told him, holding his gaze so there was no mistake, no possible misinterpretation, and hoped her gaze was clearer than her head, “I will not only launch a campaign to ruin you even further, I’ll be tempted to report you to the proper authorities.”
He laughed, and it swept through her like a new kind of fire, swallowing everything in its path.
“Nothing like a complete overreaction to prove that you’re not quite as cold as you’d like me to think, Zoe.”
“You manhandled me. This is an underreaction.”
“Then you should have told me to stop.” His gaze hurt, it was so hot. “You didn’t.”
And for the first time in as long as she could remember, Zoe couldn’t find the proper retort to slap him back into place. She simply stood there, the city behind her and the life she’d built all around her like so much set dressing, staring at the man who was supposed to be a tool she used, not...this. Not a certain path to her own destruction.
She could see it. She felt the mark he’d left on her body, like a sweet hot burn.
Like shame.
“If you won’t tell me why you want me, I’ll have to assume this is a particularly creative campaign to get into my bed,” he said, folding his arms over his broad chest and looking entirely too male and arrogant and self-satisfied. Smug, she thought. “And I like sex, Zoe. A lot. So I’m happy to crawl around on the floor if that’s what it takes. What do I care? But if I do, you’re going to have to admit that you want me just as much. That this is all a complicated ploy to get naked with me.”
“I don’t.” It was automatic. And much too fast. “And this isn’t a ploy.”
He considered her. “Or I can just do what I usually do. You’ll huff and puff and call me all kinds of names. Neanderthal, cretin, asshole, whatever.”
“I believe the word you’re looking for is misogynistic.”
“That, too. Not that it’s true. Not that you think it’s true, either, but far be it from me to get in the way of your wishful thinking. We’ll end up in the same place either way.”
His gaze dropped then, tracing over her cheeks, her mouth. Moving lower, and spreading that terrible heat wherever it touched, as potent as if he’d used his hands. The places his fingers had brushed her skin, all along her inner thighs, burned red hot. And made her glad the wide expanse of her desk was between them now.
She realized then that she didn’t know if she’d push him away if he came close again, and that was the most terrifying realization she’d had so far.
“This isn’t ‘huffing and puffing,’ Mr. Grant,” Zoe told him as icily as she could. “The truth is, I don’t find these displays of yours at all attractive.”
Hunter stared at her for a long, dark, infinitely tense and dangerous moment, until there was no pretending her cheeks hadn’t flushed even redder than before, or that he couldn’t see that flagrant evidence right there before him, like a flag.
Showing him what a liar she was.
She was only happy he couldn’t feel that bite of his the way she could, throbbing and kicking at her, telling her a thousand things she didn’t want to know, and all of them a story of her own appalling weakness.
“Yes, Zoe,” he said then, in a mocking little murmur that echoed inside her like a terrible shiver, the ruin of her right ther
e in the gleam of those too-blue eyes, the perilous curve of his mouth. “I think you do.”
* * *
“So you hate him,” her coworker Daniel said later that afternoon, scowling across the office’s snug kitchenette in the wake of Zoe’s ill-advised and bad-tempered little rant on the topic of Hunter and his many image problems. To say nothing of his personal problems. To say nothing of her problems—though she hadn’t mentioned that part. Much less the mark he’d left on her, like evidence. “I hate him, too. The entire world hates him. I believe his own team burned him in effigy at the Super Bowl halftime show. So why, may I ask, are you taking him on as a client?”
You, Zoe noted. Not the we he usually used. Daniel was making a point.
“I don’t like him,” Zoe said carefully, trying—too late—to modify her tone and hide her panic, “but it’s not personal. I just don’t like football.” She let out a small laugh and decided she really didn’t need coffee after all. “That’s not even true, technically—I don’t know anything about football.” Except that her grandfather had treated it like his religion, had made the entire house his place of worship—and woe betide anyone who diverted his attention from his television screen, at any point during the endless football season. “I’ve managed to make my entire adult life a sports-free zone, in fact.”
“Do we need this kind of challenge?” Daniel asked, tightly. His gaze was filled with accusation and temper. “Did you come up with a new mission statement? Take the most reprehensible human beings around and see if you can make them soft and cuddly and suitable for public consumption?”
“He has a temper and some impulse-control issues,” Zoe replied, furious that Daniel was goading her into defending Hunter Grant. Even more furious that she was actually doing it. “He got fired from his job because of some anger-management issues. That makes him slightly less reprehensible than, say, child molesters? Terrorists? Don’t you think?”
