Fifth Avenue Box Set: Take MeAvenge MeScandalize MeExpose Me

by Maisey Yates

  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 decide
d 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 narrow, 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.

  When she reached the second level, she shifted slightly to look over her shoulder, and he grinned at her.

  Hot and certain. Fallen angels and a thousand sins in that searing blue gaze, and she felt it like a blow. Like a lick of fire, trailing from her shoes up the length of her spine, burning her alive where she stood.

  “Keep going,” he said in that same low, growly way, that made her body clench and then flood with more of that exquisite heat.

  He was a few steps below, one hand on the rail and one hand braced against the stair above his head, and she had the dizzying notion that he was doing that deliberately—to keep his hands off her.

  For now.

  As if he wasn’t sure he could control himself if he didn’t.

  Zoe turned away from him and swallowed hard against her pounding pulse, her growing inability to breathe. Her limbs felt heavy, weighed down with that same fire, and she wanted nothing more than to simply let herself burn.

  Instead, she kept moving. She kicked off one ankle boot, then the next, smirking at the greedy sound he made when she did.

  “Everyone likes a Cinderella fantasy,” she murmured. “Even the most hated man in New York, it seems.”

  “Does that make me—?”

  “Prince Charming? Hardly.”

  “I’m remarkably charming. Nine out of ten tabloids agree.”

  “I’ve seen absolutely no evidence to support that.”

  “Would you like me to prove to you how charming I am?” His voice was smooth and closer than it should have been, his breath fanning against her ear, the exposed skin at her neck, and she had to fight to keep from shivering. From melting. From surrendering then and there. “All you have to do is reach behind you, and I’ll charm you all you like.”

  Zoe laughed, amazed it came out so throaty, so full. Sex and desire, right there in the sound, as naked as if she was helpless beneath him, spread open to his touch. As powerful as if she knew what she was doing with this, with him, with this pointed flirtation that could end only one way.

  It was almost as if she was doing this simply because she wanted to do it. As if she really did want him this much.

  The novelty of that crazy notion made her sway on her feet and, deeply off-balance, she went with it, holding on to the rail for support as she turned to look down at him again, now only a single step behind her. Big and hard and blocking her retreat.

  Weakness was bad, she told herself, no matter what kind. It shouldn’t feel so good, so deliciously feminine, as if this kind of breathlessness was a good thing. Hot. Encompassing. As if she might never breathe fully again, thank God.

  “There are better uses for you than shoe retrieval, I think.” She told herself she was trying to sound like that, sexy and alluring. That it wasn’t simply how she sounded when he was this close to her, making all her senses go haywire.

  He smiled, and it was edged with a dark intent she felt against her skin, sensual and stark, then deep inside, like a harder, deeper ache. The air around them—between them—felt thick. Sultry. Humid with this need, this pulsing desire, that made her feel real. Real. Flesh and blood, filled with yearning and capable of longing, like anyone else. That was what he did to her.

  That might be the death of her.

  Then again, that traitorous part of her whispered, dying might be a small price to pay. Hunter might be worth it.

  It didn’t matter what she felt, she reminded herself fiercely then, astonished at herself. It mattered what he felt, and she had to be prepared to manipulate that—and to handle it when he forgot her the moment he turned over and went to sleep. To use that.

  This was all part of the plan.

  “Unzip me,” she ordered him then, presenting him with the hidden zipper at her side by lifting one arm up over her head, very slowly, with a deliberately sinuous grace designed to make him as wild as she felt.

  She thought he froze for a second, but she must have imagined it, because when he reached for her, his hands were as steady as all those dark promises in his deep blue gaze. The feel of his hands against her was a torture, a gift. She forced herself not to react when his fingers brushed gently over the skin he exposed as he tugged her zipper down to her hip, though deep inside, she cracked and shattered.

  Soon there’d be nothing left of her but rubble.

  But she could hide that, she knew. She could hide anything.

  “Thank you,” she said with a deep calm she didn’t feel at all. “Remember when you promised to be my willing slave? Now’s your chance to prove it.”

  That smile of his went wolfish and her breath deserted her in a rush.

  “Keep walking,” he said, “and I’ll prove any number of things.”

  She believed him.

  Zoe turned away, panic mixing with that terrible excitement inside her.

  She started up the stairs again, but something had changed. Everything felt brittle, now. Taut. Fragile. Or she did. She ignored it all resolutely, gritting her teeth and peeling her dress down as she climbed. Inch by inch she took it off, slowly revealing herself to him as she took the last curve of the spiral that delivered her directly into the master bedroom that sprawled across the entire top level of the penthouse.

  Where she couldn’t help herself. She stopped dead.

  It was like a chapel. The room was three sides glass and a huge steeple of even more gl
ass above, arching up high over the dark wood floors and the central altar at the heart of it: his bed. It sat on a black dais raised a farther three wide steps up from the floor, massive and commanding, sleek and somehow primitively masculine all at once.

  There was nothing else. There was only that carnal bed and the crisp winter night on all sides, just there on the other side of the glass, making her feel almost as if she had vertigo—as if she’d tipped over the side of the world and was free-falling straight out into the sky.

  Zoe thought wildly of cavemen and their pallets, wolves and their dens, as if Hunter really had dragged her off by her hair to this place, where the only color at all was on that bed, a pile of rich browns and deep reds that made her think of furs. Of sex and unwavering, irrevocable possession. Of the kind of brands that didn’t mark the skin, but left scars all the same. Of a thousand things she shouldn’t—didn’t—want.

  Of course she didn’t.

  But deep inside her, she felt shivery and too hot, a trembling and a liquid kind of weakness. The urge—the need—to simply spread herself out before him like a sacrifice to whatever ancient, unknowable deity it was who commanded this stark room, who understood the things that moved in her. That yearning to surrender and the longing to let go, to submit to whatever he might do to her however he might do it because she’d like it, too. That unprecedented desire to give in, at last, as if that meant safety instead of unbearable risk.

  She wasn’t afraid of him, she realized in a blinding flash of painful, shocking insight. She was afraid of herself. She was terrified of the things she wanted, that she’d never known she could want until right now.

  But this wasn’t about want. It was about revenge.

  “Your groupies must love this room,” she said, to remind herself of reality. Who he was, what this was.

  He laughed, a low rumble of sound that she felt like a caress. “The groupies don’t make it past the first floor. I have some standards.”

  Zoe let her dress fall to her feet before she could think better of it—and because she didn’t want to think about the implications of what he’d said. She kicked the dress aside, moving briskly toward that huge, staggeringly male bed, pretending with all her might that it didn’t get to her. That it was simply a bed.