Scandalize Me

by Caitlin Crews

  Hunter didn’t know how to handle this moment, stripped bare and so unvarnished. He nodded once, harsh and abrupt, and told himself that was enough.

  “I’ll say your goodbyes for you,” Jack said gently, swallowing hard as he turned for his classroom door. “Take care of yourself, Hunter.”

  Which was when Hunter finally understood what was happening.

  “Jack,” he said, before the other man could open that door, before he could think too much about what he could or couldn’t say. “Why do you think I’m here?”

  Jack turned back to face him. “Uh. You’re leaving? I’m touched you came in person, really—”

  “I’m not leaving,” Hunter barked out, unduly aggressive, because he was afraid that anything else would turn unacceptably soft in a hurry. “I want your job.”

  It was Jack’s turn to stare.

  “My...?” He half turned toward the classroom, but then stopped and shook his head. Then smiled, wide. “You don’t mean my math classes.”

  “No,” Hunter said quietly. And his own smile felt different then, as if it was new. As if it belonged to that man Jack had described, who Hunter didn’t recognize as himself. But he wanted to be that man, after all these years. At long last. He wanted it badly, more badly than he wanted to admit. For these kids. For Zoe, if she ever found her way back to him. Maybe even for himself. “I don’t mean math.”

  * * *

  He was headed toward the school exit some time later when he heard the sound of running feet behind him, hard against the old linoleum flooring. He turned, and realized as he did, as he identified the figure hurtling toward him at breakneck speed, that he probably should have expected this.

  “Listen, kid—” he started, but Aaron was vibrating and out of control. Pissed, Hunter saw, and utterly reckless with it.

  “I don’t give a shit what you do,” the kid threw at Hunter, getting in his face, his own twisted with wild emotion. Loss, Hunter thought, and disappointment. He’d seen them often enough when people looked at him. He knew them well. “It’s not like I was a fan of yours before you showed up, and now? It turns out you’re even more of a loser than I thought you were.”

  “Aaron.” He told himself to be gentle. Kind.

  Both things he wasn’t any good at, of course, or he’d have been someone else.

  “The truth is, you suck,” the kid gritted out, and Hunter recognized that, too. The howl of pain beneath the angry words. The hurt that spoke of other, harder abandonments. Of much deeper losses, the kind that never quite went away. “We didn’t need you showing up here, trying to make yourself feel better about your own shitty life, driving your slick car around and acting like you’re better than everyone else—”

  “Are you talking about football? Because I actually am better than everyone else. In Edgarton anyway. That’s not my ego, kid. That’s fact.”

  “Go to hell.”

  “I’ve been there,” Hunter said, studying Aaron’s flushed face, his bunched-up hands at his sides, that shattered look in his dark eyes. It was like looking in some kind of twisted mirror, and it confirmed that he’d made the right decision here. That no matter what happened with all the rest of the things he had in motion, this was the right thing. This kid, so desperate to be a man and so uncertain how to go about it, was why. He mattered. This mattered. “I can’t recommend it.”

  Aaron said something even more foul, and Hunter laughed. Gentle and kind wouldn’t have worked on him at any point during his downward spiral, and he’d been raised on a steady diet of privilege and financial support. Why try them on a kid like Aaron, who’d probably assume they were a trick?

  Besides, he couldn’t do it. He didn’t know how.

  “Aaron,” he said sharply then. “Shut up.” Aaron glared at him, fury and attitude sparking from his skin, clouding up the air around them like a testosterone mushroom cloud, but Hunter saw beneath it. “I’m your new coach. Officially.”

  The principal had practically wet himself at the notion, assuring Hunter that they could expedite his hiring through the Edgarton School Board, such as it was, especially as Hunter was perfectly happy not only to take the lowest salary they could offer him by law, but to donate three times that amount back into the school system—to the brand-new athletic budget.

  Because it had occurred to him after Zoe left that he could actually do what he’d told Jason he was going to do only to mess with the other man’s head, to push him where they’d needed him to go. It had occurred to him that more than that, he wanted to do it. That he might even be good at it.

  He didn’t share that part with Aaron. He only stared at him as the kid’s breathing changed from that wild, angry panic into something more manageable.

  “I’m not going to be at practice for the next few days,” Hunter continued evenly. Because he had to get used to that hollow place Zoe had left inside him before he unleashed it on these kids. And because he’d decided he should drive up to Boston and offer an overdue apology to his long-suffering parents while he was feeling so benevolent and bruised. “But you better be. And believe me when I tell you that when I return, your attitude needs to be adjusted. One hundred percent. Do you understand me?”

  Aaron looked like the kid he was then, sagged there against the wall, and Hunter’s chest felt a little bit too tight. Maybe more than a little.

  As if he’d been frozen, too, all these years, and Zoe had melted all that ice away.

  “I understand,” Aaron said after a minute, and Hunter nodded.

  “If you don’t, you’ll figure it out in push-ups and extra laps,” he said darkly. “Count on it.”

  He hesitated a moment, then reached over and clapped Aaron on his shoulder, feeling the boy’s breath rush out of his body. And then he walked away, back toward his car and New York and all the other things he needed to do—but not before he saw Aaron grin, wide and hard and kind of painful at the floor between his feet, as if he was afraid someone would see and take it from him.

  But not too afraid. Not enough to stop.

  Chapter Eleven

  The world didn’t stop turning just because her world had shifted off its axis, Zoe found.

  There was still her work, which she told herself she’d never enjoyed more. She sorted out a politician’s unfortunate sexting scandal, tutored a debutante on how best to counteract her reputation as an airhead in order to raise money for a charity close to the heart no one knew she had, and started initial talks with a band who wanted to make a splash with their first new album in ages.

  She’d lived more than thirty years without Hunter Talbot Grant III. Why should a week without him seem so empty? This was the good life, she told herself as one day turned into the next, and she was perfectly fine. Perfectly fine. This was what it looked like when Jason Treffen was neutralized and she could simply...live.

  Except Hunter refused to disappear the way she’d assumed he would.

  He’d showed up for his usual meeting a few days after that last wrenching scene in his apartment, shocking her. She hadn’t been ready to see him. She hadn’t been ready to watch that low, easy saunter of his, or see that cool, assessing gleam in his blue eyes. He’d walked into her office as if he owned it, then thrown himself down on her couch with all the nonchalance in the world.

  She hadn’t been prepared for how much it still hurt. So much she had to sit down at her desk, for fear her legs would betray her.

  “What are you doing here?” she’d asked him, in some shaky rendition of her usual businesslike tone.

  “It’s Tuesday,” he’d said, as if that was an explanation. When she’d only stared at him, his mouth had crooked slightly. “I have a standing Tuesday meeting. I require that much consultation about my image, so damaged is it. You said so yourself.”

  “Jason left the law firm,” she’d said, helpl
essly. Something had rocked through her as he stared back at her, vicious and extraordinarily painful.

  “I know. I was there.”

  “This isn’t necessary any longer.”

  There’d been a gleam in those blue eyes of his that had made her feel hollowed out. Raw.

  “Do I strike you as rehabilitated, Zoe?” he’d asked, more dangerous than she’d ever seen him.

  Which was when she’d admitted to herself that she didn’t want him coming to her for his image. That she’d looked up, seen him in her doorway, and hoped against hope that he’d decided not to take no for an answer—

  But he’d promised her he’d never do that.

  She’d been appalled at herself, that she should want him to do it anyway. At the sad truth that she was still so weak.

  And worse, she’d been certain Hunter had known it.

  “Let me get Daniel,” she’d thrown back at him. “He’ll be taking over your account.”

  “Of course he will. With a song in his heart, I’m sure.”

  “If you have a problem with that,” she’d said tightly, “there are a number of other public relations firms in the city that I’d be happy to recommend to you.”

  But Hunter had only smiled.

  And Zoe had to live with that, because making the scene she wanted to make would expose her too completely and she suspected Hunter knew it. She had to take it home with her to an apartment that had always seemed perfectly comfortable before, and now felt empty.

  As if he’d left holes behind when she’d left him. In everything.

  And then Daniel, who knew nothing about Jason Treffen or the deliberate way they’d been keeping Hunter’s reimagined image under wraps to force him into the corner where they wanted him, went ahead and treated Hunter like any other client.

  Which meant Zoe suddenly saw him everywhere. In the tabloids, which screamed about his romantic assignation in a horse-drawn buggy through Central Park, only to shamefacedly announce that no, in fact, the new woman in Hunter Grant’s life was his little sister, Nora. In the papers, which showed him at art events and charity functions, smiling and almost avoiding the cameras.

  He was doing every single thing she’d told him he should do, but she refused to let that ignite within her like hope. He was doing it because she was good at her job, and what she’d suggested worked. That was all.

  She told herself it couldn’t possibly be anything else. That she didn’t want it to be anything else.

  “I thought you hated Hunter Grant,” Zoe said after she and Daniel had gone over a few figures one afternoon and he didn’t rage about Hunter even once. Not even the smallest bitter aside. “Yet you seem to be working past that.”

  “It turns out he’s not that bad,” Daniel said, and he even smiled. “I’m as surprised as anyone, but I kind of like the guy.”

  It was beneath her, Zoe told herself after he left her office, to view that as some kind of personal betrayal.

  Daniel chose a very popular comedy show that focused on the news for Hunter’s first brand-new-image interview, letting Hunter go on the show to allow them to make fun of him. A lot of fun of him. Merciless fun of him, as was their trademark.

  Hunter even joined in.

  And then at one point he grinned as if he was embarrassed and rubbed a hand over his head, saying almost bashfully that it was actually his honor to see if he could teach his new students a little love of the game—and, God willing, better manners—

  “So, you’re a ‘do as you say, not as you do’ kind of guy?” the host asked. Hunter shrugged, and then laughed. At himself.

  “I think I’m more of a ‘if you can’t be a good example then you’ll serve as a horrible warning’ kind of a guy,” he said. “And I think I’ve made it pretty clear that being any kind of a good example is off the table. Making me six feet and then some of a harsh warning.”

  The way he laughed then, long and deep, like a shower of light that bathed her in brightness where she sat all alone in her bedroom, told Zoe she’d made the absolute right decision to walk away from him, for all the reasons she’d told him and the ones she hadn’t told him, too.

  But it was killing her.

  And Zoe told herself that she’d been dead long enough. It was time to live, no matter what it cost. To stop hiding the way she’d promised herself she would, no matter the collateral damage.

  To do something, because she didn’t think she could spend another moment pretending she was fine when she doubted she’d be anything like fine again, as long as she drew breath.

  As long as he did.

  * * *

  Zoe didn’t let herself think too much once she’d decided what she’d do.

  It was easy to find out Hunter’s schedule from Daniel’s calendar, and easier still to sweep past the usual gatekeepers into the benefit event held in a cavernous art gallery in SoHo.

  What was difficult was walking up to Hunter when she saw him standing near the bar in a loose group of well-dressed beautiful people, among them his sister and Zair, her former client, the only one of her clients whose nondisclosure agreements had stumped her own lawyer.

  If she could take down Jason Treffen in the very same office where he’d destroyed her so long ago, she told herself as she eyed that gleaming little knot of people, Hunter the brightest by far among them, she could do this.

  But he looked up and saw her from across the room, his gaze searing into her as if he’d been expecting her, and it was the longest, hardest walk of her life.

  “Zoe,” Zair murmured when she approached, in his cultured, British-tinged voice that was as dark and as dangerous as he was. “What a pleasure.”

  Austin greeted her with a smile, his arm around a pretty girl who looked familiar. Alex grinned, as if they were all friends. When Zoe thought that really, they were Hunter’s friends the way they were meant to be, and she was just...a problem she should have kept away from this. From him.

  But she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t make herself do it any longer, and while she knew what that made her, she couldn’t seem to stop this.

  “I wasn’t aware you were attending this gala,” Hunter said after a moment, when it was clear she wasn’t going to say anything to him. His gaze was blue and knowing and it almost took her down to her knees. She almost let it. “Do you know my sister? Nora, this is Zoe Brook. She manages my PR.”

  Zoe smiled, shook hands with his pretty, innocent sister, who had no idea who she was touching, and wanted to die.

  “Can I talk to you?” she asked him, with an urgency she wasn’t sure she managed to conceal.

  Hunter arched a brow. “Here? But the dancing’s just started, and I wouldn’t want to abandon my sister to all these vultures.”

  He was teasing her, she thought. This was ripping her apart where she stood, this was harder than she’d imagined anything could be, and he was teasing her.

  “Leave Nora to me,” Zair said with a certain dark gallantry that would have piqued Zoe’s interest, had she been capable of such things at a moment like this.

  “Nora is a fully functioning human being, thank you,” Nora herself interjected, but Zoe couldn’t tear her eyes away from Hunter, and he only laughed.

  And then it was a blur. He led her across the great room, dodging all the people who wanted to stop him to say a few words, smiling and laughing as if he was having the time of his life—

  Until he ushered her through a door into a smaller gallery, blocked off from the main event with canvases stacked three-deep against the wall.

  And when he looked at her then, she saw he wasn’t happy or carefree at all.

  The blue in his eyes burned her. His mouth was in that flat, hurt line she remembered much too well, and he looked at her as if the things he wanted to say to her were fighting to get out.

/>   But he didn’t say a word. He waited.

  “You seem to spend a lot of time with your sister these days,” she said in a panic, because she didn’t know how to do this.

  “Someone once pointed out to me that she is, in fact, fairly impressive for a twenty-four-year-old.”

  Then he continued to do nothing at all but watch her.

  He looked too good. He looked like Hunter. He wore a sleek dark suit tonight, and oozed power. And safety. And the look he was giving her made her heart thud too hard inside her.

  And he deserved so much better and she wasn’t sure she cared.

  “You paid the firm for our—for Daniel’s services,” she said.

  “Is that why you’re here? To discuss accounting?”

  “I told you it was pro bono,” she gritted out.

  “I pay my bills, Zoe. Always. You can take that as a meaningful metaphor if you like.”

  She thought he might say something else then, but he still merely stood there, big and forbidding. Waiting. He shoved his hands in the pockets of his trousers and his blue eyes bored into her, and she knew she had to do this.

  Before she talked herself out of it. Before she lost her nerve.

  It was the most selfish act of her life, and he was looking at her as if he knew it, and she understood that if she was any kind of good person or ever wanted to be, if she cared about him at all, she would turn around and leave him. That doing that before had been the right thing to do. She knew it.

  But she couldn’t bring herself to move.

  “Hunter,” she whispered, trembling as if she was freezing cold and more scared than she’d ever been in her life, “I think I’ve made a terrible mistake.”

  He didn’t crack. He didn’t even bend.

  “You think or you know? And which mistake are we talking about, Zoe? I’ll need specifics.”

  * * *

  She shook as if he’d hit her, and Hunter wanted nothing more than to go to her. To pull her close, feel the press of her against him, assure himself she was real and here, safe instead of standing in front of him with all of that fear so stark and clear on her pretty face, as if she was terrified of him.