Fifth Avenue Box Set: Take MeAvenge MeScandalize MeExpose Me

by Maisey Yates

  “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.

  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.”