Scandalize Me

by Caitlin Crews

  Then he dismissed her with a single glance, looking at Hunter instead, as if Zoe was worthless. Invisible. Dirt unworthy of further notice.

  But she’d expected that, too. She couldn’t prevent the wave of familiar, sickening self-loathing that dismissal triggered, as he’d meant it to do, the bastard. But she’d known it was coming, so it helped her keep her sharp smile in place while it crashed over her.

  “Hunter,” Jason said warmly. “I’m so happy you dropped by. It’s been too long. I only have a few minutes tonight, but if you come by the house—”

  “Like old times?” Hunter asked softly. Too softly. “Will we play some pool, drink some whiskey and laugh uproariously as you tell me how my life could be if I follow your shining example?”

  Zoe watched Jason absorb that. The dark irony and leashed ferocity in Hunter’s voice, at complete odds with the way he stood there next to her, one shoulder propped up against the wall as if he was wholly at his ease.

  “Barring that, you’re welcome to make an actual appointment to see me here.” Jason’s voice was soft, polite. “I always have time for you, Hunter.”

  That faint emphasis on the word you. As if it was embarrassing that Hunter had brought a filthy creature like Zoe here, but Jason was too well-mannered to mention it directly.

  He was a master at these games. He always had been. On some level, she knew she’d learned more from him than she wanted to admit. But the benefit of that was he’d inadvertently taught her everything she needed to know to beat him.

  As he was about to discover.

  “Should he make that appointment with Iris?” Zoe asked, cool and unbothered, as if she was unaware of all the tensions and undercurrents that seethed in the room between them. “Wasn’t that the name of the girl who brought us in here? I’m sure I saw you with her at a party not long ago, Jason. You remember.”

  There was a flicker in Jason’s lizard eyes, then a different edge to that smile, and she knew she’d surprised him. Because she’d called him Mr. Treffen when he’d owned her and because this was the first time she’d initiated a conversation with him in a very long while.

  But he looked at Hunter when he replied, “Iris is a legal assistant, not a secretary. She doesn’t book my appointments.”

  Legal Assistant, Zoe thought then. Such a fussy title for such a deep, dark, damaging hole.

  “Who does?” Hunter asked, in that deceptively light tone. He looked very large and very dangerous looming there, even in one of his absurdly expensive suits that had been tailored to make him look debonair instead of deadly. Like an uncaged animal pretending to be tame, New York spread out behind him like a great and glorious cape, and Zoe knew none of that was lost on Jason. “Book your appointments, I mean.”

  Jason’s head tilted slightly to one side, as if he was seeing Hunter for the first time. “Did you really come to see me after all these years to discuss my support staff?”

  “That depends on what kind of ‘support’ you think we’re talking about. I’ll give you a hint. It’s not clerical.”

  Jason regarded him for a long, tense moment, then turned that slithery, horrible look on Zoe. And she forced herself to breathe, to really look back at this man, this vicious little man, and see him.

  Not the savior she’d thought he was when she’d met him. Not the terrible monster he’d become. Not the tormentor he’d been all these years since, showing up when she least expected it, hurting her and threatening her and terrorizing her at his whim, for his own sick amusement.

  Today, she’d chosen to come here. He had nothing to hold over her head. He was nothing but a man. A terrible man, still drunk on his own power. But only a man. And she was different, somehow, than she’d been before, all those other times he’d made sure to run into her. Fundamentally altered, because now that the initial punch of nausea had passed, he looked...smaller. Older. And next to a man the size and solid heft of Hunter, she could see that he was frail. Breakable.

  So she met that awful gaze of his without flinching, and smiled.

  “What is this?” Jason asked quietly, shifting his gaze back to Hunter. “I haven’t seen you in a decade at least, and this feels a good deal like an attack. Especially given the company you’re keeping.”

  “This isn’t an attack,” Hunter said in that same soft, dangerous way. “Believe me, you’ll know it if I attack you.”

  “I expect this kind of bluster from Austin,” Jason said. With a certain vicious precision. “He’s always been a terrible disappointment, like so many sons are to their fathers. As I believe you have been to yours throughout your many escapades. It’s a terrible cliché. But I’ll confess, I did think better of you.”

  “I can’t imagine why,” Hunter said, and now he was smiling, because they’d planned for this, too. Austin had practically quoted his father in advance. “I’ve made it impossible for anyone to think better of me. All that unsportsmanlike behavior. All the temper tantrums out there on the field for all to see and judge. My complete lack of character is my singular adult achievement.”

  “Men like you aren’t expected to have much character,” Zoe agreed, in that arch way that kept her clients on edge, and appeared to have much the same effect on Jason.

  “I don’t really need it, do I?” Hunter grinned at her, and it warmed her. It reminded her that she wasn’t alone here. That all of this was part of the strategy. That between them, and with Austin and Alex’s help, they’d anticipated every one of Jason’s moves. “I can let football do the talking. My throwing arm has always been pretty eloquent.”

  “And that’s the beauty of it,” Zoe replied, but she turned her gaze on Jason then. “Imagine if Hunter was to stumble into a character-building scenario. Become a new man in the eyes of the world. See the light, if you will, and in so doing, unburden himself about the terrible life he’d led up to that point.”

  “My own little road to Damascus,” Hunter said, because he loved his saints, and Zoe had to bite back her smile.

  Jason let out a sigh. “Zoe is a piece of ass, Hunter. You’re supposed to fuck girls like this, not let them parade you around by your dick.” He shook his head, as if he pitied Hunter. As if Zoe was radioactive. “This is embarrassing.”

  “Not yet,” Zoe assured him. Was he aware that Hunter had turned to stone beside her? As if he was half a breath away from tossing Jason out the window? Or did he want to provoke that kind of violence—but he did, she realized. Of course he did. Then he could call himself the victim and sue. “We haven’t even gotten to the good part.”

  Jason smiled, and it was deadly.

  “What do you imagine you can do to me, you little bitch?” he asked in the same voice he’d always used. So kind, so genial, and that crushing darkness behind it. “Do you really think you can threaten me? Me? You must have forgotten everything I ever taught you.”

  “On the contrary,” she said softly. “This is me using every last one of those lessons.”

  “Call her a bitch again,” Hunter said conversationally, still so tense and furious behind that lazy exterior that it made the fine hairs on the back of Zoe’s neck prickle, “and I’ll break every single bone in your body.”

  But Jason only laughed. Still in that happy, fatherly way he always did, which made what came out of his mouth sound that much worse.

  “If you’d been any kind of a man, maybe your girlfriend wouldn’t have had to prostitute herself, then kill herself to get away from you ten years ago. Should we talk about that?”

  Zoe wanted to kill him then. Hunter didn’t react, but she felt the lash of that blow, the sting of it, and the urge to draw Jason Treffen’s blood hummed in her, electric and something like terrifying.

  It was time to wrap this up. To be done with him.

  “You’re not going to do any more talking, Jason,” she said with a grim satisfaction ten
years in the making, feeling Sarah there with her and all the other girls he’d wrecked. Every one of them a part of this. “You’ve done quite enough. What you’re going to do is leave this firm. Your days as a practicing lawyer are over. You’re done.”

  There was a small, intense silence. Then Jason laughed again, a bigger laugh than before and nothing kind about it, and turned toward the door, dismissing her as if she was beneath his notice. Beneath contempt. Zoe waited until he had his hand on the door handle.

  “And if you don’t go of your own volition,” she warned him with a great relish she made no attempt to hide, “you’ll force me to have you kicked out.”

  That sparked the response she’d thought it would. Another laugh and then Jason turned back to look at her, cold and amused. Nothing but a nasty challenge in that flat gaze of his.

  “I’d like to see you try.”

  Chapter Ten

  Jason didn’t actually say the word bitch this time but it hung there anyway, oily and vicious, polluting the air of the conference room, connecting with that reservoir of shame inside Zoe like a harsh kick to the belly.

  She breathed through it, refusing to let him see he’d gotten to her.

  “I was hoping you’d say that,” Hunter said. He straightened then, and made a show of glancing at his remarkably expensive watch. “I’m meeting with the firm’s equity partners in fifteen minutes. Given the number of lawsuits I generate, as I’m sure you know, I’m considered something of a cash cow. They like to keep me happy. All those billable hours and the personal fortune to keep on paying for them.”

  “Are you threatening to sue me?” Jason rolled his eyes. As if all of this bored him. “You can’t simply wave your hands and create a lawsuit from thin air, Hunter. The courts tend to frown on that.”

  “I know I’m just a dumb jock,” Hunter replied with the genial grin he’d trotted out a million times before, in any number of press conferences over the years, and Zoe loved him, deep and hard and frightening, “but I can still read. You remember the terms you drew up in the firm’s partnership agreement, don’t you? It takes a majority vote among equity partners to remove one of their own. I read it all by myself.”

  Jason wasn’t smiling anymore. “That will never happen.”

  “Oh, it will,” Zoe assured him. “I suspect the partners here are well aware of your little side business. I’m confident that none of them would like Hunter to make that business the cornerstone of his image rehabilitation tour, as discussing the firm’s connection to your moonlighting as a pimp is unlikely to make the bar association happy. To say nothing of the firm’s clientele, none of whom would enjoy having their relationship to a pimp speculated about in the press.” Her lips crooked. “I’m just guessing.”

  “Who do you imagine would believe you?” Jason wasn’t hiding anymore. The truth of who he was stamped on his twisted, furious, ugly face, and he took a step toward Zoe as if this was a decade back and he’d use his hands if he wanted. Some part of her wished he would. He’d find things had changed. “In case you’ve forgotten, Zoe, you’re nothing but a whore. As I’ll be more than happy to tell the entire world.”

  Hunter tensed again, harder, and his blue gaze went homicidal, but Zoe stepped forward, because it all came down to this moment. She’d fantasized about it for years. She’d schemed and she’d plotted and she’d gone over it in her head a thousand times. More.

  And it was still better than she’d imagined.

  “I’m not afraid of you any longer,” she told the architect of her deepest, darkest shame. The monster beneath her bed. This small, pathetic man who preyed upon the weak—but she wasn’t weak anymore. “I’m not the one who’s about to receive a lifetime achievement award. I’m not the one who’s built up such a shining reputation, based entirely on the perception that I’m good and kind and deeply committed to charity. I can have Hunter tell the world your entire sordid story, and what will it matter to me? No one will connect me to it, and even if they do, you’ll still be tarnished.” She leaned forward slightly. “Tainted. Forever.”

  “No one will listen to a word you say.” But Jason didn’t look as calm as he had before, or anything like amused.

  “But they might listen to me.” Hunter smiled then, and launched into his spiel, deeply earnest and sincere, as if he was playing it to the cameras. “The thing is, I’m changing my life. I’ve seen the light. I’m not a superstar football player anymore. I’ve let my family down and I’ve betrayed all my fans. I’m just a guy who’s only good at one thing, and that’s why I’ve decided to work as a football coach at Edgarton High. For free, until we win a state championship.”

  Jason’s eyes narrowed at that, and Zoe took great pleasure in the beads of sweat that broke out across his forehead.

  “You’ve heard of Edgarton, haven’t you?” Hunter asked, conversationally. “Not a great place, or a great team, for that matter. I figure the state championship is a few years off. And, of course, that’s where Sarah was from. But I’m sure you know that.’

  “Sarah Michaels was a white-trash tramp,” Jason said, harsh and quiet, one ugly slap after another. “From an entire family of born losers. I did her a favor. At least the kind of whoring she did for me, she got paid. She would have done much worse, and for much less, had she stayed in that dump.”

  “I bet those were her final thoughts,” Zoe said, her voice a deliberately cool breeze in the tense room, her eyes fixed on the enemy. Almost there. Almost. “Gratitude for all your ‘help.’”

  She wondered if Sarah knew, somehow. If she was out there somewhere and could see what Zoe was doing. Sarah, who had been Zoe’s first friend in New York City. Sarah, who had been Zoe’s only friend once everything got so dark. Sarah, who had loved Hunter first, enough to leave him out of this nastiness. She flattered herself that Sarah would have supported this.

  Zoe watched Jason breathe, more heavily than before. Then she watched the older man adjust his tie, smooth his hands down his jacket.

  Nerves, she thought, with great satisfaction. Jason was betraying himself at last.

  “You have ten minutes to decide if you’re retiring or getting kicked out and then outed,” she said into the simmering silence. “And I have to tell you, I don’t care which you choose. I win either way.” She caught Jason’s eye, and held it, and it was almost worth all these years of suffering to see that little spark of uneasiness. Of something a good deal like fear. “I like to win, Jason. You should congratulate yourself. You taught me how.”

  Jason stood as still as a statue, and Zoe thought she could almost hear his twisted mind whirl, turning it over and over, looking for an exit strategy, a way to outplay them, a way to come out the winner. Zoe glanced at Hunter, who nodded almost imperceptibly in support, but she felt it bloom inside her, warm and bright like one of his smiles.

  “Time’s up,” Hunter drawled after ten long, bitterly quiet minutes dragged by. He straightened and moved toward the door. “I have that meeting.”

  For a moment, Jason was silent, and Zoe wondered if she’d misjudged this, if they’d all miscalculated—

  “I’ll leave the firm,” Jason gritted out, grudgingly, sourly, hatred heavy in each syllable, and distorting his face. His flat, pale eyes were the stuff of nightmares. But Zoe had been having this same nightmare for years now. She was over it. “But I’ll give the media my own reasons for it.”

  “I don’t care what you tell the media,” she told him, not making the slightest attempt to hide her satisfaction. Her triumph. “Just so long as you leave this firm and all your victims behind. Because let’s be clear. Your pimping days are over. You leave this firm and you say goodbye to your little ring. You lose everything except your good name. Just like we all lost everything the day you ‘took an interest’ in us.”

  Jason sneered at her, and she knew that face. She knew this man. This nast
y little man, who was so vain he believed they’d actually leave him anything. Just wait, she thought.

  “I wouldn’t pop the champagne just yet, Zoe,” he said. Murderously. “It will take more than that to best me. I’m adored by this entire city. This country. These little games of yours won’t change that.”

  But then, Zoe was counting on that. They all were.

  “Time to talk to your partners,” she said, and then she smiled, big and bright and she didn’t care if he saw it, because it was over. It was finally over.

  She was free.

  * * *

  She was free, and that made her foolish. Sentimental and soft.

  Or maybe that was Hunter.

  That first night, she couldn’t help herself. Jason quit the law firm as they’d told him he must, and she and Hunter had walked out of that loathsome building together, stunned. Victorious. They’d been in a taxi together before she could think better of it, and he’d pulled her into his lap, kissing her again and again, as if she was a marvel.

  How could she do anything but fall into the man who had shared this exquisite, hard-won triumph with her? How could she keep herself from enjoying him?

  Just this one last time, she told herself as the cab lurched its way south. As Hunter kissed her, deep and slow and long, as if he was content to do nothing else. As if there was nothing else. Just his mouth on hers, the dance of tongues and teeth and longing, his hand at the back of her head and that hard body of his below her, around her.

  As if it could never end, when she knew better.

  And in the morning, Jason Treffen was all over the news, puffed up and magnanimous, talking about how he’d felt it was time he left his law practice to better dedicate himself to his charity work.

  The unsubtle subtext was: Aren’t I the most wonderful man alive?