by Maisey Yates
“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 outlining 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.
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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.”
Austin laughed. Alex winced. And Hunter was obviously as slow as he sometimes acted, because it was only then he realized that she was very, very angry with him.
Hunter made himself breathe in slow, then let it out slower. As if he was back on the football field. He blocked everything else out. The blow she’d just delivered with such deliberate precision. That awful, betrayed look in her eyes. The noise from the bar around them, the clinking of expensive glasses and the muffled sounds of Manhattan high life on all sides. He shunted it all aside and focused solely on the goal: Jason Treffen.
“Do you want to win this argument or do you want your revenge?” he asked her, straight and simple. “Because you have to choose.”
He watched her bite something back, then blink, as if maybe she’d forgotten where they were too. That fist, tucked away in her lap, tensed.
Later, he promised her silently. He’d deal with this later, whatever this was. When they didn’t have an audience. When he could dig in a little bit and see what was happening in the middle of that winter storm he could see raging inside her. When he could figure out a way to kiss her again without being one more thing she had to recover from. Her lips flattened into a line, but she didn’t argue further.
“I like it,” Alex said when Hunter laid out his plan in all its quick and dirty simplicity. But they all looked at Zoe.
Who made them wait, of course. One beat, then another. That fist clenched hard, then she released it and folded both hands before her on the table.
“That might work,” she said.
Grudgingly, Hunter thought, but she said it.
“It will work,” Austin said with a short, bitter laugh. “Good job. He won’t see it coming.”
“I’m banking on it,” Hunter said. “That and the fact his vanity won’t allow any other outcome.”
“Which puts him right where I want him.” Alex grinned.
He met Hunter’s gaze, and for the first time in years, Hunter didn’t look away first. He didn’t change the subject, crack a joke, put on his Hunter Talbot Grant III act and play the clown. He didn’t pretend this man didn’t know him—the real him he’d only just begun to understand he’d buried with Sarah.
Alex’s grin broadened.
“I remember this Hunter,” he said quietly, and then he reached over and clinked his glass against Hunter’s. He looked at Zoe as if he had her to thank, then back toward Hunter as though they’d never been anything but close. “I like this Hunter. Welcome back.”
* * *
He caught up with her at the corner outside, where Zoe was forging straight on through the intersection toward Union Square as if she couldn’t get away from him fast enough.
“Are you running away from me?” Hunter demanded, forgetting that he was trying not to upset her. The look she threw at him assured him that she wasn’t making any such attempts.
“I am walking, not running,” she said icily. “To a northbound avenue, where I will hail a taxi. Then I will instruct it to drive the hell away from you.”
“Fine,” he said. It was two blocks to Park Avenue, the next northbound street. That gave him a window. He moved so he was walking in front of her, but turned back around to face her.
“Perfect,” she said darkly. “I won’t say that I hope you walk into a street sign and knock yourself unconscious, but I’m not going to do anything to prevent it, either. Just so you know.”
“You should think about what I spent the past ten years doing for a living. I could walk the entire length of Manhattan backward without hitting a thing. I believe they call me nimble.”
She stopped walking. It was too cold, too dark on that side street, surrounded by brick buildings and concrete and the shoveled-high remains of the last snowstorm, but she didn’t seem to care. So he didn’t, either.
“That is not what they call you.”
“What is this?” He had to clench his hands in his pockets to keep them to himself, and it was a battle to keep his voice pitched low. To remain—or anyway, appear—calm.
Zoe blew out a breath he could see against the frigid air, and then something swept over her. He could see it. Like a terrible quake. As if she was being shaken apart from the inside out.
But when she spoke, she whispered. And she wasn’t looking at him.
“You’re obviously disgusted,” she said, not making any sense, though there was that darkness across her face and that vulnerable cast to her proud mouth, and he couldn’t quite breathe. “Why can’t you just admit it? Why play this sick game?”
“I’m not playing any games.”
“I get it. I do. There’s a reason I don’t exactly advertise my sordid past—”
“Wait.” He bent to make sure he was looking her straight in the face. “What are you talking about?”
“Don’t pretend, Hunter.” Her whisper had turned ragged. “Don’t make it worse. All you see when you look at me is what he did. What I did. The taint of it.” He was frozen solid in astonishment, and she kept talking, and he was sure she didn’t realize that tears were rolling down her cheeks as she did, ripping into him with every track they left behind. “You couldn’t keep your hands off me until you found out—”
“You were fucking violated!” he blazed at her, and she jumped, and he didn’t care. Not when it was this important that she hear him. “You think I should grab you five seconds after you tell me something like that? You think my response to what you’ve been through should be trying to get in your pants?”
“Yes.” Her voice cracked. “Yes, damn it.”
“That’s what—” He stopped and stared down at her, amazed. “Did you just say ‘yes’?”
“It was a long time ago,” she threw at him, as if she was trying to hurt him with every word. “I didn’t die. I’m right here and I’m not broken.”
And Hunter understood she was talking to herself, not to him. Not really.
“You can’t really believe—”
“I’m not going to beg you, Hunter, no matter how big that might make you feel. I shouldn’t have to prove to you that I’m the same person I was two nights ago.”
“Listen to me.” It was an order, and he waited for her to stop. To look at him. To keep looking at him. “You like to play power games, and so do I. They’re fun. But this has nothing to do with that.”
“Don’t kid yourself,” she hissed at him. “Everything is a power game. Everything.”
“I’m. Not. Him.”
He didn’t yell. He didn’t have to yell. Those three words were their own brutal wind, howling around them, then down the urban canyon into the dark night. She flinched as if it had sliced straight through her, as if he’d cut her in half.
“Don’t confuse me with that fucking degenerate again,” he told her in the same voice, brooking no argument. “We’re going to be very clear, you and me, about consent. Do you understand me? About what you want.”
She shook, but he knew it wasn’t from the cold this time. She was fragile and fierce and Zoe, staring back at him from the middle of a nightmare she’d banished all by herself, and he thought he’d never loved another person like this in all his life. And he never would.
The truth of that rang in him, a long, low note, and changed everything.
Bu
t he still waited.
“I want to feel alive,” she told him, her dark eyes too bright. Her voice was thick with that unmistakable crack in it, telling him everything. “Unbroken. Like he never ruined me in the first place.”
“He never could,” he whispered, shattered.
“Then why won’t you...?”
But she didn’t finish. Maybe she couldn’t.
And this time, Hunter wasn’t thinking about sex. He didn’t care who was in charge and he wasn’t thinking about playing games at all. He cared only about that look on her face, that matching hole in his heart. He was thinking only and entirely about Zoe.
He sank down to his knees again, right there on the frigid sidewalk, never taking his gaze from hers, giving her everything.
If she wanted it.
“I don’t want you to beg,” he told her, watching her face contort with the sobs she was fighting to keep back, the tears that had already betrayed her. “But I will, if you want. You can have anything you want from me, Zoe. All you have to do is ask for it.”
She didn’t ask. Instead, she moved forward. She wrapped herself around him, sinking her hands into his hair, and then kissed him.
Salt and sweet.
As if she already knew the answer.
As if he was a hero after all.
* * *
Zoe took him back to her apartment. Her sanctuary, where no one was ever allowed inside.
He stood in the center of her living room, starkly male, entirely Hunter. He seemed bigger than he had on the street—consuming all of the available oxygen without even seeming to try. The air around him seemed to hum, alive and electric, the way it always did. She felt too bright, too exposed, actually shaking with the effort to keep from flipping out—demanding he leave or, worse, collapsing in a jittery heap on her own floor. Instead, she pulled him down to the couch and climbed on top of him.
“This is consent,” she whispered.
“That’s all I need,” he replied, and then, finally, he touched her. His warm, strong hands on her face, streaking down her back to cradle her hips. “You idiot.”
