by Maisey Yates
So he could live a life outside Jason Treffen’s shadow. Zoe might have exacted her revenge on the man, but he’d still destroyed her. There was no changing that. Hunter could be free of that, at last. She wanted that for him. For one of them.
She started for the door, but she couldn’t help stopping when he called her name, as if her body was conspiring against her.
“I love you,” he said again, with even more of that painful ferocity, as if it was tearing him apart. “That’s not going to change just because you don’t want to believe it. It’s never going to change.”
“You love a ghost,” Zoe said. She turned back to face him and hated herself when she trembled at that look in his beautiful eyes, on his perfect face. “She died ten years ago, Hunter, and I’m not her replacement.”
“I can tell the difference.” That was anger there, mixed with the hurt, and that was better. She told herself that had to be better. “She took herself out. You didn’t. You fought. You’re nothing like her.”
She jerked her head at the flowers surrounding them, like a wall of fragrance. Like her own wake.
“Your friends lost her, too,” she said. “You should give them a chance.”
“This is not about Sarah, and it’s not about them,” he threw at her. “How stupid do you think I am?”
That stung. “I don’t think you’re stupid at all.”
“Then stop treating me like a dumb jock. I know how you feel about me. And I know how much that must terrify you.”
She could see how he fought himself, his hands in fists at his side. She knew exactly how hard it was for him to keep from coming to her, because she felt it, too. Need and longing coursed through her, clamoring inside her, demanding she not do this—
But the fear was worse. And she knew she couldn’t do it again. She couldn’t trust herself. If she loved something, if she trusted it, she was wrong every time. Her grandparents. Jason. Hunter deserved better than that. Than her.
And she knew that no matter what he said, she was broken beyond repair. Broken where it counted. He didn’t want that. He couldn’t. He wanted that girl he’d loved a long time ago, who’d left him before he’d discovered what she was, and hadn’t lived to let all of that darkness turn her into...this.
“You took him down,” Hunter said quietly. So fiercely that it beat inside her like its own harsh drum. “Don’t let him take this.”
But that was the point, wasn’t it? It was too late. It always had been. Jason Treffen had taken the best part of her a decade ago. What she had left was good, and it was hers, but it wasn’t what she might have been. It wasn’t what Hunter deserved.
She loved him enough to see that.
Zoe smiled at him, but it felt like acid, and he took it like a punch. Hard and to the gut. She saw him flinch, and that only made her hate herself more.
“This is the right thing to do,” she said.
“Are you trying to convince you or me?” he threw back at her.
And so she did the only thing she could: she walked away.
* * *
Hunter drove out to Edgarton the next day, hours earlier than the usual time he showed up for his makeshift practices. He waited until classes were in session before he walked into the school, not wanting to cause any kind of commotion. Not wanting anyone to see him until he got what he came for.
The security being as nonexistent as ever in Edgarton High, it didn’t take him long to find Jack’s classroom simply by walking the halls until he happened upon it. Jack looked different standing at a blackboard. He stood taller, was more engaging. Because he knew who he was when it involved math, Hunter thought. Just as Hunter knew who he was with a football in his hand. It was what he could do, what he was good at.
He might have been walking around without a heart since Zoe had ripped it out and flattened it right there in front of him, but he could still throw a football. He supposed there was magic in that, somewhere. And as he’d wasted enough of his life feeling sorry for himself, he might as well use it.
He stood in the hall until Jack glanced out and saw him, then he indicated the other man should come out and speak to him with a simple lift of his chin. Jack look startled. Hunter heard his voice rise, ordering textbooks opened and talking stopped, with the supreme confidence of a man who expected to be obeyed in his domain.
Jack closed the door behind him gently as he stepped through it, and cleared his throat a few times as he moved into the hall. He looked around as if surprised to see that Hunter was alone—or, Hunter reflected, maybe he simply wasn’t comfortable looking Hunter in the eye. That made him feel like an ass, so he made an effort to adjust his stance, to ratchet back that unconscious level of aggression he suspected he broadcast automatically. Maybe he always had.
Maybe that was why she’d left—but he stopped himself. He knew it wasn’t. Just as he knew that he had to let her choose. He’d promised her that he’d never force her into anything. He couldn’t rescind that promise because things hadn’t gone the way he’d wanted them to go. That would make him no better than Jason.
But Jack didn’t relax. As if the man who commanded that classroom so easily was only a role he played. And suddenly, shockingly, Hunter realized where he’d seen that before. In himself. In the dumb jock role he’d played for his more intellectual friends, the whole world, all the way back to the ruthlessly smart Sarah, who he’d believed cheated on him with the most intelligent man they knew: Jason. He’d been playing his clown role ever since.
And Zoe was the only one who hadn’t bought it.
That insight stunned him so completely that for a moment he hardly knew where he was.
“I knew this day would come,” Jack was saying, and his rueful tone snapped Hunter back into the here and now. “It’s okay. I’ll think of something to tell them.”
Hunter only stared at him and Jack cleared his throat again, shifting from one foot to the other.
“Do I make you uncomfortable?” Hunter asked. Jack look startled, but then he grinned.
“Only in the sense that you’re built like a tank, and could crush me with one hand,” he said. “Maybe two fingers? But I wouldn’t say that makes me uncomfortable. Reasonably cautious, perhaps.”
Hunter found he was biting back a grin. “Caution is good.”
“They won’t thank you, so I will,” Jack said after a moment, his own grin fading. He straightened, squared his narrow shoulders. “What you’ve done here made a difference. I know what kind of prospects these kids have, and they do, too. They’ll carry this with them for a long time.” He took a breath, and met Hunter’s gaze straight on. “No one in Edgarton will ever think you’re anything but a hero, Hunter. That’s who you are. Not that story they tell on SportsCenter, stitched together from disgruntled old teammates and too much envy. I hope you know that.”
It took Hunter a very long time to catch his breath against that sudden pressure in his chest, that mighty fist around his head, making him think he might burst wide open, betray himself.
“I’m not a hero,” he said gruffly, when he thought he could speak. “Not by a long shot. Ask anyone.” Ask Zoe, who he couldn’t save. Not from Jason. Not from herself. Or Sarah, who he’d never tried to save. “I only came here to make myself look good. It was a cynical manipulation from the start.”
Jack’s gaze didn’t waver on his.
“Maybe that’s why you came the first time,” he said evenly. “But that’s not why you kept coming back.”
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, helplessly. 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.
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.”