He loved it.
“See?” His grin was too big, taking over his face, moving in him in a way that felt like sunlight. “You like me.”
She shook her head, a firm denial, but her hands still covered her mouth as if it would betray her otherwise, and he didn’t recognize that buoyant feeling that swelled in him then. Light and shiny. Bright.
“For some reason, no one believes this,” he confided. “But I’m incredibly likeable.”
Zoe dropped her hands, but she was smiling as if she couldn’t help herself, and it killed him. It pierced him straight through. It knocked down walls he’d erected so long ago, he wasn’t sure he knew what they were for—and more of that sunlight poured through him, rolled in him, made him forget, for a moment, who he was. What he was. What shadows lurked in him.
What he’d done. What he hadn’t.
Zoe coughed. “I’m certain I was laughing—”
“Giggling, to be precise.”
“—at you, Hunter. Not with you.”
“I don’t think so.”
And he was laughing, too, realizing how close he was to her, how her head was tipped back so her hair brushed against his arm. Her gray eyes had gone bluer than he’d ever seen them, and that pooled in him, making his stomach knot and those shadows that lived in all his empty places seem even brighter, somehow. He didn’t know what the hell that meant.
He traced a vague pattern down the side of her lovely face with a lazy finger, skirting that razor-sharp, dangerous mouth, which only made him want her more. And he felt that white-hot heat flare between them again, tighter this time. Tauter. Winching them together, making it hurt.
“Who else knows the fierce Zoe Brook snorts a little bit when she giggles like a schoolgirl?” he asked softly. “I imagine that’s proprietary information. Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone. I want it for myself.”
He watched her pull in a breath as if her life depended on it. Or as if his might—that and the heat in her gaze, bright and unmistakable. It lit him up all over again, brushfires building into blazes. Walls crumbling into ash.
“Since when are you sweet?” she whispered, her voice rough. The need in it damning them both.
“Never.” But his fingers still drew lazy symbols on the satin expanse of her cheek, her neck.
“This is sweet.” Her voice was stronger then, and rang with accusation. There was that hint of a frown on her face, etched between her brows. “You can’t deny it.”
“If I’m doing it,” he said, and he could hear the fire in his voice, the desire, “it can’t be anything like sweet. By definition. You can ask any of my eight million enemies. Or read their depositions.”
“Sweet is unacceptable.”
“Just wait a few moments,” he assured her, too many things he didn’t want to accept in his own voice then, the low grit of it, the urgency at such odds with the reverent way he learned the shape of her, each clever eyebrow, with his fingertips. “I’m sure I’ll turn back into an asshole. I can’t help myself.”
He watched, fascinated, as emotions he didn’t understand rose and fell across the face she normally kept so cool. He only recognized the flash of panic, followed quickly by a kind of resignation that made his chest ache.
“I only know how to break things,” he said gruffly, suddenly, and he saw her react to that, as if it hurt her. “Zoe, I don’t want—”
She didn’t let him finish. Her gray eyes went dark—too dark—and then she surged forward, a liquid twist of her perfect body, her hands coming up to frame his face. To hold him steady, as if she had the power to immobilize him that easily.
But then—he realized with some surprise as he simply sat there, his own hands circling her wrists but not attempting to shift her grip on him at all—it turned out that she did.
He tried again. “Zoe—”
“Shut up,” she ordered him. He heard the fire and the panic, the madness and the need, and he felt it all inside him, rising like a tide. “For God’s sake, Hunter. Just shut up.”
And then she closed the final bit of that searing, electric space between them and slammed her mouth to his.
Chapter Six
Zoe kissed him as if her life depended on it.
All that fire. All that danger, that impossible need. All the things she felt that she shouldn’t, that until him she’d thought she couldn’t. That wildfire, burning through her, through him, making her shake against him as she tasted that mouth of his, again and again.
Because she thought that maybe her life did depend on this, after all.
Zoe had already showed him too much. She didn’t understand how it had happened. This wasn’t supposed to be complicated. He wasn’t.
But she’d finally realized that there was only one way to deal with Hunter Grant.
He thought he wanted her? Then he could have her—but only on her terms. She thought there was a certain poetry in taking back from this man what other men had taken from her.
He’d said he’d crawl. She’d make sure he did.
But first, she kissed him. She took charge, and she took what she wanted from that too-clever mouth of his that shouldn’t have attracted her, much less beguiled her. She shifted over him, shimmying the tight column of her dress up her thighs so she could climb over his lap. He made a deep, guttural sound that should have been surrender, but instead echoed in her like a battle cry.
Because it was.
Zoe was fighting for her life with every slide of his perfect mouth on hers, every shift of his stunning athlete’s body beneath her. She pressed herself closer to him, angling her head to taste him deeper, wetter, hotter. She found the thick ridge of his need and rode it.
She would do the taking. She would take what she wanted and leave him behind when she was done. She would conquer this thing. She would win, at last.
But it didn’t help that he tasted like fire.
He kissed her as if she was a revelation and he was a connoisseur who trafficked in such things. He licked into her, tasting her and tantalizing her in equal measure, making the flames dance, the fire burn hotter, wild and impossible. He was hard between her legs, packed muscle and all of that delicious male power, but he didn’t use any of it against her.
It made her shake. It made her want. It made her forget what she was doing—
He was the one who pulled back, and she hated it. Hated that he had the presence of mind when she was still so lost. Hated that he looked at her for a long, breathless moment, still so hard against her, his bright eyes seeming to pierce right through her. Hated that all she wanted—with every shuddering beat of her heart, with every harsh breath—was his mouth on hers again.
“You taste too good,” he rasped out, one of his hands moving, his thumb rubbing over her lips, branding them with so simple a touch. She felt it in her breasts, heavy against the tight bodice of her dress. She felt it deep inside her, hungry and throbbing and pressed against him.
His eyes were too blue. As if he was some kind of sun, lighting them both up, though she knew that was impossible. He was too debauched and she was too damaged. None of this was real. None of this could be happening.
But he shifted beneath her, one of his big hands wrapping over her hip and holding her to him, and she stopped telling herself what was or wasn’t real. Because she felt him everywhere.
“How can you taste so good?”
His voice was no more than a murmur, then, as if he was crooning it to her, and she wanted to tell him he was wrong—that she was blackened within and ruined for years now—but he didn’t wait for her answer. He reared up and captured her mouth with his again, turning her inside out.
And Zoe melted. And she forgot.
She forgot what she’d been through, what she’d survived.
Who she’d become. Who she
’d created from the wreckage of her former self.
It was as if he kissed the Zoe she might have been, longing and magic and all those bold, bright futures. A tumult of color. A cacophony of possibility.
And all that delicious, drugging heat.
And for a moment, Zoe gave in to that insanity, as if toppling through the back of a wardrobe or down a rabbit hole. She let herself go.
She let him taste her. Tempt her. As if they were other people. As if they could do this without paying for it later when she knew full well they couldn’t.
There was always a price.
But for a little while, with his mouth like a searing, addicting flame against hers, she pretended otherwise. She pretended she didn’t know better. She pretended there was nothing at all but him. This kiss. This frantic heat, the way she rocked against him and made them both sigh. The fire that shouldn’t have existed in the first place.
Nothing at all but him.
God help her, but she couldn’t seem to stop.
“Your place,” she said then, tearing her mouth from his.
He blinked up at her, his hands gripping her bottom, holding her in a way that might get them arrested should a staff member stick his or her head through the gauzy curtains of their little nook.
“What?” His voice was thick.
“You want to fuck me, don’t you?” Her throat was harsh with all that longing, and her determination to keep from sobbing out her need.
She could control this. She would control this.
He blinked, and his clear eyes became unreadable again. “Is that a trick question?”
“I’d prefer not to attract the attention of local law enforcement,” she said coolly, moving back and up in a single sleek movement. She held his gaze as she smoothed her dress back into place. “So. Your place?”
It was only sex. And it was the only way she was going to break this spell.
She couldn’t risk letting him chase her any further. He was too intuitive, shockingly. He saw too much. She had to stop being surprised by that, and start taking the appropriate steps to counter it.
All she had to do was let him catch her. He’d be bored before he pulled out, the way he always was with all his little starlets and models-slash-actresses the tabloids tallied up each year, and this taut little dance of theirs would be over.
She could hide again—and stay hidden. And then she could use him the way she’d planned she would, to help take Jason Treffen down, with none of this extraneous heat.
All she had to do was survive the night.
“Well?” she asked. It was a taunt. A dare. “Don’t tell me, after all this, that you’re nothing but a tease. I’ll be devastated.”
“Oh,” he said softly, a hint of sensual menace in his tone, “I’m not a tease.”
“Is this not romantic enough for you?” She smirked at him. “Do you need a card? Some flowers?”
She didn’t understand that smile he gave her then, heart-stopping and intense. Just as she didn’t understand the way her breath caught when he stood.
“It never hurts,” he said, his voice low, as if he was talking about something else. As if this was a line or two of poetry and he was reciting it to win her favor. “I enjoy gardenias. And the occasional sunflower, but only in moderation. They’re so gaudy.”
The way he looked at her then, at her breasts and her belly, at her legs and then back again, hurt. It all hurt. She felt raw. Undone.
But she knew she had to do this.
So when he extended his hand with an oddly taut sort of look in his eyes and a kind of fierceness in his expression as he looked down at her, as if he was holding himself back from taking her right there where they stood, Zoe told herself this was the only way—it was—and took it.
* * *
She strode into Hunter’s immense apartment, staring imperiously around her as if she wasn’t the least bit impressed by its three vast levels so high above Wall Street, its spiral stairs, stunningly high white walls and dizzying views showing lower Manhattan in every direction.
Zoe stopped in the middle of the sunken, sterile living space, pivoting around in a circle as she unbuttoned the dramatic, thickly lined cape she’d worn against the winter cold. She eyed the gargantuan television set flat against one wall, the crisp corners of the scrupulously modern sectional that could have seated Hunter’s entire previous football team, and the total lack of anything even hinting at Hunter’s personality.
No photographs. No books. No art to relieve the white sheen of the walls. Not even the collection of trophies and sports memorabilia she would have imagined must be ubiquitous for a man with his résumé. No pulse. A robot could have lived here. Maybe this was who Hunter really was, she told herself: empty and barren. Nothing more than a very expensive, very chilly shell.
She didn’t know why everything inside her rebelled at the thought—but it was time to lock such unhelpful thoughts away and do what she must.
“It looks like you live in a morgue,” she said, tossing her cape onto the sofa with flourish. Her dark, inky blue cape was the only splash of color in the entire, sprawling penthouse, and it made her feel edgy. Some kind of restless, as if that simple fact—as if all of this—held meaning she was afraid to look at too closely.
“You should think about livening it up a bit,” she continued when he didn’t speak. “Nothing too crazy, mind you. Maybe a single, solitary painting to relieve the hospital-meets-serial-killer atmosphere you have going on?”
She looked over at Hunter then, and her heart kicked at her, then started to gallop in her chest.
He still didn’t speak. He only watched her, his blue eyes darker than they should have been, darker than was possible, gleaming so brightly she nearly forgot the lack of color everywhere else. He shrugged out of his coat, letting it drop where he stood, though it didn’t strike her as carelessness. It struck her as intention.
He didn’t move that electric blue gaze from her. She wasn’t sure he so much as blinked.
It was unnerving.
It moved over her, inside her, like a blast of near-painful heat.
“Or perhaps that’s what you like,” she said, as if nothing about him got beneath her skin. As if she was utterly unmoved as she stood there, her hands on her hips and her head at an arrogant tilt, staring back at him. As if this wasn’t a skirmish that she absolutely had to win, no matter what it took from her. “Do you like to play doctor, Hunter? Is that what this is? A little operating-room style to make you feel sexy?”
His sculpted lips moved then into something far too intense to be a smile, and she fought off a shiver, remembering how they felt against hers. She thought he might say something, but he merely indicated the spiral staircase nearest her with a peremptory jerk of that iron jaw of his.
“I thought you’d never shut up in that bar,” she continued coolly, aware she was poking at him, trying to shatter the tension that had her in its grip before it ripped her in two. “And now you’ve gone completely silent? I don’t know whether to be amused or alarmed.”
“Either one works for me.”
It was a starkly male rasp of sound, scraping against her skin, insinuating itself into her blood, the very beat of her heart. The air in the cavernous apartment thinned. Then blistered.
So did she.
Zoe decided there was nothing to do but keep playing her part, and hope it would work. Because it had to work.
Because there was absolutely no way she could risk herself like this again.
She crossed the room slowly, making sure her hips rolled, making sure she used every part of her body as she moved.
An invitation. A challenge. The perfect male fantasy.
Sensual and powerful at once, the way she wanted this to be—the way she wanted to be. She watched his blue eyes na
rrow, watched the skin pull taut over his inhumanly beautiful cheekbones.
Desire. Need.
She told herself it didn’t matter how dry her throat was, or that the wild galloping beat in her chest set her on the razor’s edge of panic. It didn’t matter that she could feel the way he looked at her in the wet heat between her legs, in the wild flush that suffused her skin, in the aching stiffness of her nipples, in every ragged-edged breath she tried to keep him from hearing. What mattered was that she make Hunter lose his control.
She could do this. She could.
His eyes were too bright on hers, his gaze too hard, and once again, he saw things he shouldn’t. “Change your mind?”
Zoe made herself laugh, told herself the butterflies in her stomach were nothing more or less than nerves. He might have made her feel something in her office that day, in the bar during that wild kiss, in all the strange moments they’d spent together in these odd winter weeks, but that would pass. And then there would simply be getting through the night intact, so she could take charge of him again, of this, of the revenge plot she’d started hatching since before she’d escaped from Treffen, Smith, and Howell.
“Did you?” she shot back.
“That’s not going to happen,” he said, and then that smile of his went feral.
He nodded toward the stairs again. Zoe fought to keep from shaking, at least where he might see it, and forced herself to turn toward the metal spiral that rose elegantly from this floor all the way up to the top of the three levels.
Calm and easy, she chanted at herself. Be casual, yet in control. As if you do this all the time. Or at all.
Zoe climbed his stairs slowly, aware of him behind her the moment she began, like a wall of heat. A scalding furnace of male fire—and he wasn’t even touching her. She hoped he couldn’t see the shiver of gooseflesh that rose on her arms, her neck—but she heard him make the slightest, smallest sound, deep and low and satisfied, and she knew that he had.
He knew. Men like him always knew. It was what made him a predator, the kind she could feel deep in her bones, like an ache from within, as if he was using her against herself.
Scandalize Me Page 10