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.”
“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.”
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