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 there 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?”
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 study 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 i
mprove 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.
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