Scandalize Me

by Caitlin Crews

  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.

  But 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 tha
t 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.”

  “Don’t call—”

  “Zoe.” He pulled her closer, and she was already melting. Already quivering. “Shut up.”

  And when she did, he claimed her.

  He made her feel more than alive. White hot and glowing. He showed her—with his hands, his lips, his mouth and his fine body—that she was anything but ruined. That she could never be ruined. Again and again, until she was limp and he was hoarse and they could only hold each other, dazed.

  When he’d made his point one more time, emphatically, she lay sprawled on top of him, bare skin to bare skin, stretched out across her bed. Breathing in that crisp, intoxicating scent of his, her head tucked in the crook of his neck. The closest she’d felt to safe in as long as she could remember—and she let herself pretend. In the dim light in her bedroom. In his arms.

  That things like this could last. That this was real, when she knew better.

  Tonight, she pretended.

  “You okay?” he asked, and she realized she must have made some noise. She nestled closer, as if she was any other woman in the arms of her lover. As if that was possible.

  “Demons exorcized,” she murmured against his skin, and the funny thing was, in the glow that seemed to surround them then, she almost believed it.

  And that was when Zoe understood what was happening to her. What had already happened. She hadn’t imagined it could happen, so she’d never bothered to protect herself against it.

  But it all made a dizzying, insane kind of sense. Her wild, ungovernable attraction to this man, when she’d been shut down to attraction for more than ten years. The fact she’d let him get to her the way he had, turning the tables on her in her own office. That he’d left a mark on her and she hadn’t hated it. The fact she’d concocted a reason why she had to sleep with him. The fact she’d told him what had happened to her, and had only been hurt that he might not want her afterward.

  Not that her secret was out. Not that she’d exposed herself. But that he might think less of her.

  She’d been head over heels for Hunter Grant since the moment she’d clapped eyes on him.

  How had she failed to recognize that until now?

  “You’ve spent the past decade wallowing in self-pity,” she said, the words tumbling out before she could think them through, sharp and accusatory.

  But he was Hunter. So he only laughed.

  “I have,” he agreed, too mildly. “As you’ve helpfully pointed out approximately nine thousand times. A day.”

  She pushed herself up so she could frown at him. “All that fighting and carrying on, the bimbo parade—what was that?”

  “My punishment,” he said quietly, and the look in his eyes made her ache inside. “And not half of what I deserved.”

  She didn’t look away. That long-ago December night reared up between them, so real she could almost reach out and touch it, however little she wanted to do such a thing. But Zoe knew more than her share about ghosts. How they festered. How they grew.

  “Did you love her?”

  She wasn’t sure she’d meant to ask that. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

  Hunter blew out a breath, and suddenly, the space between them didn’t feel like nearly enough. But she couldn’t seem to move, and his arms were around her, tight, keeping her right where she was, tucked up against him as if she belonged there.

  “I was eighteen when I met Sarah,” he said after a moment. “Twenty-three when I lost her. We broke up and got back together a hundred times in those years. We were kids. If she’d lived, if she’d never gotten mixed up with Jason Treffen...” He sighed. “She was hungry and ambitious, passionate about everything, and I didn’t have that kind of drive. I think she would have left me eventually for someone who did.”

  He smiled then, crooked and quiet.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I did. I really did.”

  He watched her then, and Zoe had the strangest falling sensation, as if everything was spinning all around and instead of it making her sick, she wanted nothing more than to let it sweep her away. The same way she had in her office, what seemed like such a long time ago.

  At least now she knew why.

  “I’m not Sarah.”

  She hadn’t meant to say it like that, so stark and blunt. But she was unable to hide the panic, the desperate tide that threatened to drag her off into the dark. She felt as if she was crumbling into pieces right there in his arms, into ash and dust that could blow away into nothing at the first hint of wind.

  “I know that,” Hunter said quietly, his blue gaze never wavering from hers.

  “You can’t save me, either,” she retorted, as if he’d argued with her.

  There was a red thing inside her, hot and dangerous, and for the first time in years, she had no strategy. No plan. She just...hurt. She loved him and she knew better and she hurt.

  “I don’t need your white horse or your pity or whatever this is. I can’t help you bring her back to life. Do you understand me?”

  He shifted as if she’d sunk something sharp and deadly deep into his side. She let him smooth his palm over her cheek. She felt the heat of it, the strength, and God help her, but she’d never wished so deep or so hard that they were both other people.

  That she was.

  “I’m long past saving, Hunter,” she said, a broken thread of sound, revealing everything. All of that mess inside her, still. The broken pieces, the shadows and the regrets and the terrible shame. “It can’t be done.”

  “The thing is,” he said. “I’m pretty sure you’ve already saved yourself.”

  His skin against her skin. His hand so gentle, so sure. His eyes so blue they took over the whole world, making her heart feel far too big for her chest, as if it might spill over, burst free, all through the apartment and down to the cold street outside, and she knew this couldn’t last. She knew she couldn’t let it. But here, now, she couldn’t help herself.

  She leaned into his hand. She let herself pretend.

  “Not yet,” she whispered.

  * * *

  After a few days of intense plotting, they were shown into a lush conference room on the highest floor of Treffen, Smith, and Howell by a deferential young woman whose carefully blank expression made
Zoe’s stomach hurt.

  But it also fueled that deep, black anger inside her. Reminding her exactly why she was doing this. Exactly why she had to do this.

  The last time she’d been in this building didn’t bear thinking about, so she stood by the window and stared out at New York instead, gleaming there before her in the last of the afternoon light, looking so pretty and perfect and dusted in white, like a snow globe. As if nothing terrible could ever happen in the midst of all that gilt-edged urban beauty.

  She wasn’t aware that she’d made a noise until Hunter came to stand beside her, lending her his vast strength without even touching her. It hit her, then, how terribly she was going to miss him, miss this—but she couldn’t let herself think about that now.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  She’d dressed to be more than okay. She’d dressed to kill, all sharp edges and royal blue, with that promise of payback in every line. Nothing submissive or subordinate or terrified about her. No mourning clothes. Like a sword. Like the avenging angel she’d made herself, just for this.

  “No,” she said. She glanced at him, taking solace in that gleam of pure blue the way she always did. “But I will be.”

  She was so close now. So close. Her revenge was within her grasp—and for the first time in all these years, it occurred to her to wonder what was waiting on the other side. What came after revenge?

  But she heard the conference door open behind her, and she shoved the odd thought aside. She’d deal with it later.

  “Isn’t this a surprise?”

  It was the same voice it had always been. Kind and fatherly, with all that malevolence beneath. The sound of it swept over Zoe like nausea the way it usually did, but she’d expected that. She waited for her knees to feel firm again, for her stomach to stop its pitch and roll, for the automatic wave of clamminess to subside.

  Only then did she turn to face him.

  Jason Treffen stood inside the glass doors of the conference room, smiling at her the exact same way he always had. That same trim, athletic figure in the same Italian sort of suit. The same hint of citrus-scented cologne around him that made her feel as if she was choking. Those same pale eyes of his, flat and cold. Reptilian.