Scandalise Me

Chapter Two (#u3376de89-f8ad-5b63-8788-8d2bf8b8f20a)

Sarah.

That name seemed to echo through the club, drowning out the music, slamming everything else straight out of his head. It seared through Hunter’s whole body like a lightning strike, only much darker. Much worse. Much more damaging.

He should have known.

If he hadn’t been so thrown by the appearance of Zoe Brook—like a jolt of caffeine, dressed in slick dark colors that only emphasized the powerful punch of her smoky, blue-gray eyes and lips painted a dusky shade of red—he would have seen this coming, surely. She was wearing too many too-expensive clothes, for starters, which meant she wasn’t flashing any skin. She hadn’t thrown herself at him in lieu of a greeting. There was absolutely no reason at all she should get to him, much less make an entire club filled with far more conventionally beautiful and accessible women simply...fade.

And yet she’d been the only thing he could see, from the moment she’d locked eyes with him.

But women like Zoe didn’t approach him at all these days, much less in places like this. They didn’t seek him out. They thought they knew all they needed to know about him, and he went out of his way to confirm their low opinions. They condemned him from nice, safe distances, way up high on their moral high grounds, and he liked it that way. He didn’t want to be near anyone he could ruin, not ever again.

He should have known.

Sarah was still the noose around his neck, all these years later. Forever. Deservedly—and he’d been kidding himself, thinking that he could avoid it now that he was back in New York. Imagining he could ignore the terrible truth. Blowing off his old friends’ attempts to finally do something about what had happened to her, a decade too late.

“I beg your pardon?” He hardly sounded like himself, whoever the hell that was.

Zoe’s smile affected him more than was healthy. Far more than was wise. “You heard me.”

“Yes. But I don’t think I know what you mean.”

Her smile deepened, and he felt thrust off-balance. Angry and needy instead of his preferred state of numbness. Something like lost—and it was that last he found unforgivable. He’d accepted that he was the worst kind of man a decade ago. He’d proved it every day since, hadn’t he? Why couldn’t that be the end of it?

But it never was.

“Oh, I think you do,” Zoe was saying almost cheerfully. “But you can pretend otherwise, if you like. I won’t think less of you. I doubt that’s even possible. Either way, I’ll expect you at my office tomorrow morning at ten.”

“Your expectations are destined to end in disappointment.”

“I hope not.” Her perfectly wicked brows rose, and he didn’t know what was the matter with him, that she could threaten him and he wanted her anyway. “I’m very good at getting what I want, Mr. Grant. You don’t want to test me.”

“Are you blackmailing me, Ms. Brook?”

Her smoke-colored eyes filled with a gleaming sort of triumph, making her look nearly beautiful in the club’s dark light. But Hunter had made beautiful women his life’s work, and Zoe Brook didn’t fit the bill. She was too sharp, too edgy. Her full lips were too quick to a smirk and her cool, blue-gray gaze was far too direct and intelligent. Her dark hair was thick and inky, her figure trim and smooth beneath clothes that murmured of her success in elegant lines, but she wasn’t anything as palatable as pretty. He liked softness and sweetness. Obliging whispers, melting glances. She was too...much.

And that was without knowing that when he touched her, he caught fire.

“That would suggest that there’s something about your ex-girlfriend that could be used to blackmail you,” she said after a moment of consideration. Her mouth twitched. “Are you saying there is?”

“I have no idea. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Hunter smiled. “But then, everyone knows what a dumb jock I am.”

“I don’t think you’re dumb,” she said, and not in a complimentary way. “Whatever else you are.”

“You may be right,” he agreed, amused. “It takes a certain level of intelligence to remain this committed to my own destruction.” He held her gaze. “But that still doesn’t mean I know what you’re talking about.”

There was a small pause, and the world crept back in. The insistent pulse of the club’s loud music. The distant sound of laughter. His own heart, pounding hard.

“You’re remarkably self-aware for a Neanderthal, I have to admit,” she said then, as if she was extending an olive branch.

“I was a Neanderthal professionally, never socially. It’s a crucial distinction.”

“Are you telling me you’re the way you are deliberately?”

“Aren’t we all?” he asked, more harshly than he’d intended. Giving too much away, he saw, when she tilted her head slightly to one side and regarded him with uncomfortable frankness.

He needed to walk away from this woman. He needed to end this conversation. He didn’t know why he couldn’t seem to do it. Why he stood there before her as if waiting for her to render judgment—when he knew she already had. Before she’d arrived, no doubt, or she wouldn’t have sought him out like this.

When it shouldn’t matter anyway.

“I’d be very careful playing this game, if I were you,” he said quietly. Too quietly. Showing more than he should, again. “You might not like where it goes.”

“Don’t worry,” she said, something so sharp in her gaze it looked like hatred, and that shouldn’t have surprised him. Not anymore. It certainly shouldn’t have made him feel so hollowed out, as if she’d done it herself with a jagged spoon while they stood here like this, close enough to touch. “I’m not going to hurt myself because you’re mean to me, Mr. Grant. I’m not her.”

It was a shot through the heart. Unerring and lethal.

Zoe Brook smiled again, wider than before.

“Ten o’clock,” she told him while he stood there like a dead thing, as he was certain she’d intended. Her amused drawl in place and that cool fire in her eyes that reminded him of the sea outside his family’s rambling cottage high on the Maine coast, where he’d seen this precise shade of dangerous gray at Christmas. And that rawness in him that grew the more she looked at him and saw nothing but the dark and terrible things he’d done.

Hunter preferred himself empty. At least then he knew who he was.

She reached over and pressed a business card into his hand. “Don’t be late.”

And when she walked away, he stayed where she left him, as surely as if she’d cut him off at the knees.

As if there was nothing left of him but shattered pieces. Shadows and lies where his bones should have been. Ruins of the man he’d never been.

* * *

This is the life you made, he told himself when he finally pushed his way out of the club into the cold, crisp February morning some time later, the slap of winter harsh against his face.

Hunter hailed a cab out on the frigid avenue and then stared out the window as Manhattan slid by on the jerky trip back toward his soulless, minimalist penthouse that towered above Wall Street: the perfect crypt for the walking dead, he’d thought when he’d bought it a few months back.

After all, he’d been the one to punch that smug referee in the face in December in the middle of a hotly contested call; he’d known what he was doing and he’d known what was likely to happen when he did it. He simply hadn’t cared enough any longer to bother restraining himself. His whole career had been an exercise in pushing limits. He’d been benched, fined, reprimanded. He’d once told a reporter that he wanted to see what it took to be ejected from the NFL altogether—and as he’d finally proved, he hadn’t been joking.

“And behold,” he’d told two of his three college roommates with his typical self-aggrandizing swagger at their depressing annual dinner, before their odd vigil had become even more upsetting than it usually was with an anonymous letter and a host of unsavory accusations he didn’t want to think about.

He’d shown off his scraped knuckles with the pretense of great pride, fooling neither of the men who had once known him so well, but that was how they’d rolled for years. Big smiles. Great stories. A howling abyss within.

Or maybe that was him.

“I am a success in all I do,” he’d said, grinning widely at Austin Treffen and Alex Diaz as if they were all still eighteen years old and bursting with hopes and dreams and grand ideas about what their lives would be. Instead of what they actually were. What they’d let themselves become in these years of silence. Bought and paid for. Complicit. “As ever.”

But he didn’t want to think about Sarah Michaels, especially now that Zoe Brook had thrown her in his face. He’d been avoiding it since the night she’d died, but fate and that damned letter Austin had slapped down on the table that night in December had intervened.

Ten years ago, Hunter had suspected that Sarah had betrayed him after their three intense years of dating, from college into their first year of life in New York City. That, he’d thought, was why she’d broken up with him back then. He’d believed guilt over her behavior had led her to take her own life that awful night, and he’d never forgiven himself for his role in her decision. That he’d been terribly wrong about her had been clear after she’d died, and that had been bad enough. But the letter Austin had received had suggested it was so much worse than that—so much more—