by Maisey Yates
“This isn’t a charity.”
“Then what? Why am I here?”
She frowned at him when he turned to look at her, and there was a storm he didn’t understand in her gaze, turning it a dark, rich gray. Making him wish—but that was ridiculous. Insane. If he reached out to her she’d probably amputate his hand with a single glare.
“For all you know, one of these kids is the next—” She stopped. “I have no idea what constitutes a football prodigy. You? Maybe one of them is the next you.”
Hunter wouldn’t wish that on anyone, much less a kid who already had nothing.
“There are no prodigies in that room,” he said flatly. “This football team sucks. And yes, that’s an assessment I feel comfortable making without having seen even one of them throw a ball.”
Her eyes were too dark to bear.
“Lucky, then, that they have one of the best players in football history at their disposal. You can teach them how to throw a ball.”
“No.” He sounded far away, even to himself. “I can’t.”
“You will.”
He let out a sound that was far too stark to be a laugh.
“I watched Friday Night Lights, too,” he said. “Everybody loves Coach Taylor, Zoe. But that doesn’t mean I want to become him.”
“No one’s in any danger of confusing you with Coach Taylor,” she retorted, and though that darkness was still in her gaze, her voice sounded the way it always did. Smooth. Cool. A challenge he felt like her hands against his skin, his dick. “Coach Taylor is a beloved figure no one wants to believe is fictional. Not to mention, a good man.”
“My point exactly,” he gritted out. “The last thing these kids need is me.”
He thought she pulled in a breath then, sharp and quick, and it hinted that maybe she wasn’t as cool as she appeared.
It was pathetic how much he wanted that to be true.
“This is called damage control,” she told him. “The real-life equivalent of a bad guy in a movie cuddling a fluffy little puppy. We need to humanize you. You’re too rich and too hated.”
“The paparazzi will find me.” He didn’t know why he was so angry, why he felt so raw. So attacked. So unequal to this, in every way. “They always do. I can already see the headlines. My cynical attempt to turn the tide of public favor. My calculated maneuver to win back my fans. And so on. There’s no way I’ll look like anything but a posturing asshole.”
“Let me worry about that.”
“I don’t want this,” he snapped at her. “I’m bored enough to let my dick lead me halfway up the Eastern Seaboard, but I’m not going to pretend to be some kind of positive influence on a pack of kids. The hypocrisy might actually kill me. You’re going to have to find someone else to play your little games, Zoe.”
“No.” Was that alarm he saw on her face? Did he merely want it to be? “I need you.”
“Too bad.”
“This is the first step,” she said quickly, and he had the sense that she wanted to reach out and put a hand on his arm—but didn’t. Because they both knew what happened when they touched.
And he was enough of an animal that he let that soothe him, that hint that she was as thrown by the fire between them as he was.
She was quiet for a long time, though he could feel her there beside him, that edginess of hers seeming to vibrate, to make the air shake around them. To sneak its way into him, too, as if she was burrowing beneath his skin, when that was the last thing he wanted.
Hunter had to fight to keep himself from reaching over and looping an arm around her slender body, pulling her close to him, as if she needed or wanted his warmth. He didn’t even know where that urge came from. He’d been tender with exactly one person in his entire life, and he was still dealing with the wreckage. He wouldn’t make that mistake again.
“Do this,” she said finally, her voice low, when he’d started to think she wouldn’t speak at all. “Do it and watch what I can do when I leak it, how quickly opinion about you changes. I’m that good.”
“And this is your big plan? You’re wasting your time. Because I don’t care what they say about me, Zoe. I’m immune.”
“I don’t believe you,” she said, so soft it was almost a whisper.
And he couldn’t respond to that. Not here. Not with Sarah’s ghost hanging over him, and Zoe’s secrets like inky shadows at their feet. Not with these kids who deserved better sneaking glances at him through the glass, already recognizing him.
He still wanted to be inside her more than was wise. More than was healthy. More than he was likely to be able to ignore. So he told himself that was why he was doing this. Because it was the only explanation that made any sense.
“How does this work?” he asked, and his voice was far hoarser that it should have been.
“Come here every day,” she told him sharply, as if she knew what he was thinking. He believed she might. “Do what you can. Meet with my team every Tuesday for a status update.” Her gray eyes met his, and he wished he was a different man. A better one. Some kind of good one, even. “Definitely do not mention hate fucking again. Just do as you’re told, Mr. Grant, and we’ll be fine.”
Chapter Five
She was playing with fire.
But in the weeks that followed, Zoe convinced herself she knew what she was doing. That it was a controlled blaze. That she had it under control. That those strange things that had wound so tightly between them, dark and bright at once even in a high school hallway, were a figment of her imagination and anyway, weren’t anything to worry about.
Which was a good thing, because Hunter was enough to worry about. Even—especially—when he was “behaving.”
Zoe had spent a lot of time researching what the tabloids called The Hunter Effect. Now she got to watch it in action as he unleashed it in a relatively restrained way on the Manhattan social circuit, exactly as she’d planned.
“Must you smile like that at every woman who looks at you?” Zoe asked impatiently as she tried to keep from rolling her eyes at the logjam of admirers who all but cooed at him as he swaggered by in white tie at the annual Viennese Opera Ball to benefit Carnegie Hall, held in the distinctly elegant Waldorf Astoria. In a sea of resplendent creatures, he seemed to glow that little bit brighter—his notoriety be damned.
“That’s how I smile, Zoe.”
“You have several DEFCON levels of a smile and if you don’t downgrade to a more manageable one right now, you’ll cause a riot.”
“I like riots.”
“What a surprise. But we’re going for restrained and under-the-radar elegance tonight, not a brawl. I know it’s a stretch.”
Hunter turned that riotous smile on her, then. It was a bone-melting, slumberous affair. Lazy blue eyes, that curve of his confident mouth, and that stunning physique dressed so beautifully it nearly made the photographers weep as they took his picture again and again. Zoe pretended that what shook inside her, hard and long, was simple hunger. She’d missed dinner.
“Put it away,” she told him, and then let out a long-suffering sigh, as if he bored her.
She wished he did. More every day.
But even when he wasn’t smiling so seductively, he was formidable. A force of personality and presence and, much as it pained her to admit it, breathtaking to watch in action. Zoe dragged him to a hospital to minister to terminal patients, where he spent two solid hours reading to a pair of little boys who gazed at him as if he hung a new moon with every word. She took him to a lunch to benefit libraries, where he so thoroughly charmed the dour, otherwise matronly librarians in question that he made them all blush and then giggle as those girls had in his gym that night when he’d been wearing much less.
“He’s a bad, bad man,” one of them told Zoe in an undertone, fanning herself theatrically.
“That is the literal truth,” Zoe replied testily. She smiled, hoping that might play off her unprofessional show of pique, but the the other woman only laughed.
“It’s that sparkle in his eyes,” the librarian confided. “Like he wants you to be in on the joke. How can you help but forgive him everything?”
How indeed?
It raised the question: How had he managed to turn the entire country against him? Because the more time Zoe spent with him, the more she understood that his terrible reputation, his tantrums and his scandals, must all have been deliberate.
She even said as much on a snowy afternoon in Prospect Park out in Brooklyn, where Hunter “happened by” to build snowmen with a particularly photogenic group of schoolchildren.
“You can charm anyone you meet without even trying,” she said flatly as they trudged back across the field, their boots crunching into the icy layer hidden beneath the fluffy new snow. “So why go to all the trouble to become so universally hated?”
“Total commitment,” he said at once in that smirky way of his. “That’s how I roll.”
“I’m serious.”
He wore a fleece hat tugged low on his forehead and a scarf pulled high around his neck, and that still failed to soften the impact of his bright gaze. It seared into her, warming her up from within, making her forget the cold, the snow, the long walk. Making her forget for a long, dizzying moment that she needed to keep this fire contained or it might destroy what was left of her.
Reminding her that so much of what she saw was an act and this Hunter, of the direct blue gaze and that surprisingly somber cast to his mouth, was more likely the real one.
God help her.
“A better question would be, given that I am so despised, how do you think these sappy photo ops of me in obviously staged poses with a hundred rosy-cheeked little cherubs is going to play?” he asked.
“Accidentally,” she replied, and told herself she wasn’t unnerved by all that sudden focus.
“I don’t know what that means.”
“You will. The good news is that I know exactly what it means.”
He looked at her again, long and deep, and she wondered why she didn’t incinerate on the spot, and who cared how cold it was? She thought for a moment he might say something else, and she braced herself. She didn’t know why. There was something about the dark scrape of naked tree branches behind him, the gray sky above, the snow falling all around him like a message. Like something she didn’t want to examine too closely. But he only shoved his hands into the pockets of his coat, bent his head against the wind and kept walking.
Zoe told herself that was a good thing. Because it was. Of course it was.
“I want you to take a carriage ride through Central Park,” she announced early one morning at one of the coffee meetings she’d demanded.
Hunter glared at her, looking sleepy and cranky and ridiculously hot in jeans and a turtleneck sweater and that unshaven fighter’s jaw of his.
“Let me guess. I burst into song at the first lamppost and we all turn into animation that can go viral on YouTube.” He scowled at her, then at his coffee. “No, thank you.”
“It wouldn’t be a romantic date,” Zoe continued as if he hadn’t spoken. She sat across from him at a tiny wooden table that was too rickety and much too small. She pulled out her BlackBerry and made a show of looking at it, as if she wasn’t entirely too aware of how much of the space he took up in their little corner of the café, of how big he was. How shockingly attractive, even when he clearly wasn’t trying to be anything of the kind. Maybe especially then. She kept her tone bright. “You need to take your mother.”
He let out a short, startled sort of laugh.
“Alison Blodgett Grant would no more ride around in a hired carriage like a common tourist than she would turn naked cartwheels down Broadway,” Hunter said derisively. “Besides, she no longer takes my calls. She diverts them to her secretary, who vets them for potential upset before passing any messages along.”
Zoe stopped pretending she was interested in her BlackBerry.
“Your mother has a secretary? I didn’t think she worked.”
“She has a social secretary and no, she doesn’t work. Not the way you mean.”
“But surely she—”
“Zoe.” She’d never heard that tone of voice from him. It made her sit a little bit straighter—and go quiet. “My mother wanted a senator. Prestige and power and all those centuries of upper-crust breeding put to good use. She thinks sports are for children, not grown men. And she’s appalled that any child of hers has appeared in the tabloids, much less as many times as I have. To say nothing of the many embarrassing scandals that landed me there, every one of which she views as a personal slap in the face.” The smile that cracked over his lips then made Zoe’s heart seem to squeeze tight. “She isn’t going to race down to New York to save me from myself. I promise.”
There was absolutely no reason in the world she should have to fight off the powerful urge to comfort him then. To put her hands on his, to touch him, to do something about the way he sat there, alone and resigned and not even aware, she thought, that he looked so terribly sad.
Get a hold of yourself, she snapped inside her head. This is his act. It’s all an act.
But she didn’t believe that.
“Your sister, then,” she said instead, clearing her throat.
“Nora?”
“Do you have more than one?” She knew he didn’t.
“Nora has better things to do.” He frowned down at his coffee, and it took him a long while to look up at her again. “Or so I assume. She’s a very busy little socialite.”
“She runs a fairly impressive art charity in SoHo, in fact,” Zoe said. She frowned when he looked blank. “Did you not know that?”
“I knew it.” He rubbed a hand over his sexily unshaven jaw, and it was insane that Zoe wanted to do that herself. That her palms actually itched to do it. She grabbed her too-hot mug of coffee, as punishment, and didn’t let go when it hurt. “She’s practically an infant.”
“She’s twenty-four.”
“Exactly.”
Zoe sighed. “You do realize that all those strippers you had flocking to you that morning were your sister’s age? If not younger? Does it hurt to have such an extreme double standard, Mr. Grant?”
He took a long pull from his coffee then set it down, too carefully. And when his gaze swung to meet hers, it was fierce with temper and she shouldn’t have cared.
“Leave my sister out of it,” he said shortly. “She has enough to deal with as the living, breathing repository for all my mother’s dynastic fantasies. And as for those strippers...” He leaned forward and Zoe found she was holding her breath. “For someone who spends the bulk of her time manipulating perception to serve her clients, you sure do believe what you see pretty easily.” His voice was as dark and harsh as the way he looked at her. “It’s a good thing you’re hot, Zoe. Or you’d be nothing but a pain in the ass.”
She concentrated on that last part—the offensive part—because she didn’t want to know what he meant. She didn’t want to feel anything but vague pity and rather more pointed disgust when she looked at him.
But she hadn’t felt either of those things in a while. And it took exactly one phone call that afternoon to find out that Hunter hadn’t been partying well into the morning the day she’d tracked him to that strip club. His very famously married ex-teammate had been the one out for an all-night party. Hunter had been called in by the wife when the man was still going strong the next morning, according to the club manager. He’d gathered up his friend, poured him into a car and then had paid for everything—including the strippers’ time. With a very generous tip.
Almost as if he wasn’t who she thought he was.
Daniel, of course, vehemently disagreed.
The rest of the team found their meetings with Hunter—which Zoe stopped attending after that last coffee, because she couldn’t allow herself to lose sight of her goals, and all of that time with him seemed to lead straight to blindness—no more or less outrageous than the ones they had with the rest of their wealthy,
entitled client base.
But not Daniel.
“He’s a pig,” Daniel snarled. He stood in front of her desk in a fury, so angry Zoe didn’t dare voice her confusing little thought—that she’d thought he was a pig when she’d met him, but hadn’t in some time.
And didn’t really like hearing him called that now, if she was honest.
“He’s a client,” she said instead. Daniel didn’t need to know that Hunter hadn’t sought her out and therefore wouldn’t be paying for their services. No one needed to know that. “A very rich client. What does it matter if he’s a pig?”
“You can tell your client that if he calls me weak and breakable again in that he-man way of his, I’ll quit.”
It was important that she not laugh, Zoe understood. That she keep her face absolutely clear of any amusement.
“Why did Hunter call you weak and breakable?” she asked, very carefully. “Was he threatening you?”
“He’s a bully,” Daniel snapped. “That’s what bullies do. And the fact he’s managed to snow you doesn’t mean it works on anyone else, Zoe. He’s a disaster waiting to happen. Why can’t you see that?”
“I know what I’m doing, Daniel,” she retorted, with a little more heat than she should have. Daniel looked as if she’d slapped him, and Zoe didn’t feel as guilty about that as she should have, either. “Listen,” she said in a much calmer tone. “You have to trust me. You always have before.”
“I trust you,” he muttered, though she could see he was still angry.
But the trouble was, she wasn’t sure she trusted herself.
Because when she was with Hunter, she sometimes forgot that the purpose of all of this was revenge.
* * *
Hunter rang the bell of the latter-day speakeasy in Chelsea that night, at precisely nine-thirty as ordered, and let the staff member lead him through the lush interior. It was a plush and sexy expanse of velvet and wood, debonair comfort accented by ambitious cocktails and mood lighting. He was delivered to a private seating area surrounded by gauzy, romantic curtains, through which he could glimpse only the faintest suggestion of the person he assumed was Zoe.
