by Maisey Yates
Daniel only stared at her, a mulish set to his jaw, a light she didn’t want to acknowledge in his gaze.
“Problem?” she asked. As mildly as she could.
“I don’t like the way he looks at you,” Daniel said. Too fast, as if he’d been wanting to say it since he’d dropped in to discuss a few campaign logistics with the two of them in Zoe’s office earlier. While Zoe had sat there pretending to be professional with a freaking hickey on her thigh and Hunter had done nothing but smirk. “And I really don’t like the fact you don’t seem to mind the way he looks at you.”
This was her fault. She’d walked right into this, and Zoe bit back a sigh as he glared at her, slipping her right hand up to her opposite shoulder and squeezing hard against the tension there that made her neck feel as unyielding as rebar. Daniel had been her first hire when she’d started her own company four years ago, an easy choice to make after knowing him since her earliest days in PR.
But Daniel was more than that. He was the first man she’d let herself trust—on any level—after escaping from Jason Treffen.
And one night in Park City, Utah, while managing a hotshot director’s post-cocaine addiction revival at the Sundance Film Festival, she’d let the fact she liked him and trusted him slip over a line she should have held fast.
That had been a year ago, and she’d paid for that mistake in a variety of ways ever since. Apparently, this afternoon would be another form of payment.
“I need you to be my associate, Daniel,” she said softly now, holding his gaze even though she didn’t particularly want to hold it. But she thought she owed him that much. “My coworker. Not a jealous boyfriend.”
“I’m not your boyfriend.” There was no disguising the bitterness then. It made his mouth look fierce and fragile all at once, and his whole lean, rangy body tensed. “It was one kiss. You ended it, not me—”
“And this is exactly why,” she bit out, an icy thrust of the knife, her aim true.
Daniel’s green eyes flared with temper, and something else she didn’t want to face, but then he looked away. He blew out a breath. Zoe dug her fingers harder into the side of her neck—half massage, half punishment—and let the fact she was such a liar swirl around her like a cape. Like shame, again.
Like that telltale burn, that mark on her thigh.
It wasn’t some sense of her responsibility as Daniel’s boss that had made her push him away that night at Sundance. It wasn’t any fear over what their working relationship might have become if she’d let that kiss go where he’d wanted it to go. She wished it had been. She’d let Daniel think it had been, because either of those things would have been better than the truth.
Which was this: she’d felt nothing.
She’d thought what had happened to her, what she’d done because she’d had to do it, had left her frigid. Unable to feel anything at all, even when an objectively good-looking man she liked, who she considered one of her few friends in this world, wanted her. When she’d thought she wanted that, wanted him, too.
Daniel adored her; she’d known that for years. He was good, kind. Perfect for her—and she’d felt nothing. She’d thought that was yet another part of the price she’d already spent so long paying, for the cardinal sin of being a naive idiot at the age of twenty-two.
She’d thought she was broken on a fundamental level. Beyond repair or salvation. Ruined straight through.
Until today.
Not everything is a joke, she’d thrown at Hunter back in her office, after he’d left her standing there, stunned, and had walked over to the couch and thrown himself down on it as if nothing had happened. When she’d been wrecked. In pieces.
He’d studied her for a moment, that gorgeous face of his somber. Not joking at all.
Tell me what you want from me, he’d said quietly. Or tell me what you’re afraid of. Your choice.
And Zoe still didn’t know how to handle that. The fact that Hunter Grant was the only person she’d met in years who saw the truth. Who saw what she hid beneath her tough-as-nails exterior. Hunter Grant, who could have pressed his advantage today, but hadn’t.
She didn’t understand that, either. And it certainly wasn’t something she could discuss with Daniel, who might love her, she knew, but had never seen her. Not the way Hunter had. Not all of her.
Zoe knew the storm had passed between them when Daniel let out a short laugh.
“Fine,” he muttered. “I get it.”
He looked at her then, that male awareness she didn’t want to see edged out by concern. Unlike Hunter in every possible way. Daniel might not see her, but he cared for her. Why couldn’t that be enough?
But she knew.
In a way, it even made sense. She was tarnished straight through, stained by the things she’d done, and she knew it. She’d accepted it a long time ago. It stood to reason, in an awful sort of way, that the only man who could make her feel anything had been crafted directly from a selection of her darkest fears. He was the kind of man she hated the most. The kind of man who would revel in that sort of power over her, she had no doubt. He’d already started.
That mark on her thigh seemed to glow, then ache.
“I don’t like this, Zoe,” Daniel said now, reminding her where she was, and with whom. “I think he’s dangerous.”
“Of course he’s dangerous,” she said lightly, and even laughed. Pretended it didn’t hurt. That none of it hurt. “That’s why it’s our job to make him into a cuddly little kitten.”
Step one of which started tomorrow, and called for a lot more alone time with the man. The very last thing Zoe wanted.
But she would do it, she knew. Because she had no choice. Because her revenge was more important than anything else, including her own feelings, and she would make it work.
She didn’t have a choice.
* * *
Hunter drove into the depressing town some two hours from Manhattan that Zoe directed him to, mystified and annoyed. All around them were crumbling brick buildings, the oppressive air of deeply saturated despair, all the usual ruins of what had once been a mill town. Similar places dotted the East Coast, he knew, none of them particularly appealing all these years after the last gasp of the textile industry. This was the most time he’d spent in one, and he already wanted to leave.
“This looks like a lovely place to live,” he said, staring out the window at the small, desolate-looking row houses that lined the street, looking abandoned in the weak light of the winter afternoon, though he suspected they weren’t. “So welcoming.”
“Let’s stop at a Realtor’s on the way out,” Zoe retorted, and she let out a small noise that was too sharp to be a laugh. “You can buy a house or two with your pocket change.”
“What are we doing?” he asked, not as softly as he had the first time, right after he’d picked her up outside her office this afternoon. Or even the fifth time, when they’d picked up I-95 at the George Washington Bridge and headed north. “Why are we here?”
“You’re going to have to wait and see,” she said, her cool tone perfectly even, as it had been this whole time. Her attention was on her BlackBerry, her thumbs tapping at the keys. “You might even have to trust me.” She glanced at him and her lips curved slightly. Almost sharply. “Turn right at the light.”
Hunter didn’t trust her. He didn’t even trust himself. But he’d tasted her. He’d felt the sweet smooth heat of her skin beneath his hands. He’d smelled her heady scent, lavender and woman, hot and needy. He wanted more.
He wanted answers, too. But he wanted her more.
He turned right at the light, and followed her directions all the way to the parking lot of an old, unrenovated high school building on the far side of town. Edgarton High read the weathered sign on the nearest wall. He parked with what he could admit was a slightly showy screech of his tires, though it elicited zero reaction from Zoe. He beckoned her out of his car, but, naturally, she didn’t do as directed. She turned to look at him instead, to st
udy him as if he was a painting on the wall of some second-rate art gallery and she didn’t quite see the point. He felt the punch of her gaze again, the electricity, and it pissed him off.
If this was about sex, the way he wanted it to be, they would have had sex by now. A lot of it. And he didn’t want to think about what else it could be about, because she didn’t seem inclined to answer and he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to know.
She sat there, elegant and aloof, her long legs crossed and her hands folded neatly in her lap. Only her eyes seemed warm—hot, really, and far too calculating as they moved over him. Judging him and dismissing him and making sure he was aware of it while she did it.
“Are you familiar with the concept of a hate fuck?” he asked.
She smirked. Of course she smirked, though he flattered himself that maybe, just maybe, there was the slightest flush over her lovely cheeks as she did. What did it say about him that he wanted to believe that? With an urgency that felt a little too close to desperation?
“How awkward,” Zoe said, though she didn’t sound anything like awkward. “I don’t hate you, Mr. Grant. This is called indifference.”
“Don’t worry,” he told her shortly, not bothering to hide his bad temper, if that was what it was. It felt like ground glass in his throat, his gut. And even lower, as if he was still a fifteen-year-old idiot. “I can hate you enough for the both of us.”
“You don’t hate me.” She was remarkably, unflappably confident, which he really shouldn’t find arousing. And yet. “You can’t understand why I’m not fluttering about in awe and wonder at the great gift of your attention, and the only way a man like you can interpret that is with your...” She eyed the area in question, which didn’t help improve matters, then raised her gaze to his. Hers was like the winter sea, and much too amused besides. “Well. I’ll just say no, thank you, and leave it at that.”
“Just as well,” he muttered. “I have the feeling you’d be a messy crier. And yes, they usually cry. Tears of joy and wonder. It’s my gift.”
“I wouldn’t brag that you kiss the girls and make them cry, Mr. Grant,” she replied at once, the only person he’d ever met who was so cheerfully immune to him. He told himself the way that made him feel—that jostling inside him, scraping at him from the inside out—was happy. Perfectly fucking happy. “There are words for men like that, and some of those words come with jail time.”
“Are we going to sit here all day?” he growled.
She only laughed and started to open her door, leaving Hunter to jerk his attention away from her smart-ass mouth and heave himself out of the low-slung car before he did yet another thing he’d regret.
Zoe exited with far more grace, seeming wholly unperturbed by the fact her jet black boots sported high, wicked heels and the parking lot beneath them was more ice than asphalt. And then she sauntered toward him. There was no other word for it. She was a menace, he was hard, and he was deeply and utterly disgusted with this whole situation. With himself.
Was this really an improvement over numb?
“Why do you great big men insist on driving these tiny little cars?” she asked. He was coming apart at the seams while this infuriating woman was chatting as if she was at a boring cocktail party and she’d decided to grit her teeth and be polite to him. “You practically have to lie down to get in it. Surely with all the money you have at your disposal you could find a sports car that you actually fit in.”
“I like fast cars,” he said. “And the faster they are, the smaller they are. It’s simple aerodynamics.”
In a minute he’d be beating his chest like an ape. Or doing exactly what he wanted to do, what he’d effectively warned her he might do, which was drag her off to the nearest cave with his hands sunk deep into that glossy swing of her dark hair.
And then. And then.
But she was laughing at him. Arch. Aloof. And still he wanted her.
“Just follow me, please,” she said with all of that infuriating calm. “And try not to trip over anything while you’re busy looking down your nose at how the simple folk live.”
“Can you really just...walk in?” he asked when she threw open the heavy door to the school and ushered him through it with an incline of her pretty head. “Shouldn’t there be guards or something?”
“This isn’t the kind of place where the community rallies around and demands security measures at the high school,” she said, her tone slightly more icy than before. “It’s more the kind of place where meth use is on the rise, everyone drinks their considerable troubles away in the depressing local bars, and the only thing you can possibly do to survive is get out. But then, very few people manage to do that.”
“Thank you so much for bringing me here,” he said, not even trying to contain his irritation. “Nothing I enjoy more than—”
“This is where Sarah came from,” Zoe said, her voice like a knife through the quiet hallway. Hunter thought he turned to stone, or maybe he only wished he had. Zoe’s cool gaze searched his, and there was a kind of dark heat there he didn’t recognize—but she blinked it away. Then treated him to that edgy, demanding smile. “This is the high school she went to. She was valedictorian that year. That’s how she got into Harvard. Did you know that?”
He knew parts of it. But there was a terrible foreboding gripping him then, like a hard hand on his throat, and he didn’t want to have this conversation. He didn’t want any part of this. He didn’t want to know more than he already did.
“No,” he said. “I didn’t.” Because that was close enough to the truth.
“How long were you two together?”
“You could at least try to keep the judgment out of your tone.”
She laughed, a hollow sound. “That was me trying.”
“Try harder,” he suggested. He eyed her for a minute. “Or find a different ghost to keep throwing in my face.” He didn’t understand the multitude of shadows he saw cross her face then. He didn’t want to understand, much as he didn’t want to ask the next question. But he did. “Are you going to tell me how you knew her?”
Zoe didn’t answer, and the coward in him was relieved. She started walking and he wanted to leave, there and then. He wanted nothing to do with this sharp, edgy woman who hid her softness so deep, much less those dark things he’d seen in her storm-tossed eyes. Nothing about her—nothing about this—would lead him back to numbness, and that was the only thing he knew how to do. The only thing he wanted.
Yet Hunter followed her anyway.
The school was a mess. Dingy walls, peeling paint. No facilities to speak of, or none that hadn’t seen their glory days a long, long time ago. It was a far cry from the exclusive prep school he’d attended outside Boston. This was a place where dreams were pounded down into dust, then denied. The apathy soaked into the walls, echoed down the dim corridors, burrowed under Hunter’s skin and made him feel guilty with every step. Guilti-er.
Sarah had walked here. She’d lived through this, and somehow, when he’d met her at Harvard, she’d been like a live wire. Not beaten down. Not crushed. She’d bristled with all the dreams she’d planned to make real, and she’d insisted that everyone around her do the same.
If it hadn’t been for Sarah, he’d have taken the path of least resistance straight into the hedge fund his father ran in Boston, a path his younger brother had followed without a murmur. He’d have lived the life Zoe Brook had laid out for him in that strip club, all Monopoly money and Mayflower blue bloods like his sister, Nora, and her snooty art charity their parents were happy to subsidize, because that was what he’d always been expected to do. He was a Grant, and Grants were financiers. Businessmen. Occasional philanthropists, not professional athletes. Such vulgar displays were beneath them, as his mother had only stopped reminding him after his third or fourth much-publicized scandal.
It had been Sarah who’d told him he should do what he wanted to do, not what his family expected him to do. And who knew what his life might have been like
if he’d handled things differently ten years ago? Maybe he would have saved Sarah from her nightmare. Maybe then he would have taken pride in the dream she’d encouraged him to make real and done something other than waste it.
But he’d never know now.
He stopped walking when Zoe did, and saw they stood outside an empty gymnasium and the sad little weight room with broken blinds that abutted it. He frowned through the glass, and it took a moment for him to understand that he wasn’t angry, despite the kick of something a lot like anger in his blood. If anything, he was defensive.
He was so tense it actually hurt.
“That’s the high school football team,” Zoe told him. “Such as it is.”
He stared at the kids on the other side of the window. They didn’t look anything like a football team. They were scrawny. There wasn’t a natural athlete in the group, something that was painfully evident even at a cursory glance.
That foreboding feeling was starting to choke him again, and harder this time.
Hunter raked his hands through his hair, agitated. He wanted to move. Do something. This restlessness was his undoing. It always had been. It led him to fight or fuck, no matter what his brain told him to do. He doubted Zoe would appreciate either.
She was very still beside him. Too still. It tripped all kinds of alarms in him, but he didn’t understand why, and he liked that about as much as that restless thing inside him, still kicking at him.
She pointed at the young teacher in the corner, talking intensely to one of the students.
“That’s Jack,” she said. “He teaches math and I’m pretty sure the only thing he knows about football he watched on YouTube. He bought most of the weights in there himself and pretended he’d found the money for it somewhere in the athletic programs budget, which, let’s be clear, doesn’t exist in a place like this.”
“Is this a charity thing?” he asked after a moment. “Because I didn’t have to drive two hours into the hinterland to hear another fucking sob story. I could have written you a check in your office yesterday.”
