Praise for

CAITLIN CREWS

‘Crews’ pulse-pounding, sensual feast of a page-turner keeps the heat turned up in this unforgettable, love ‘em, hate ‘em romance. She showcases luxurious settings, while her aweinspiring couple entertains with their sexual banter and some of the most jaw-dropping lovemaking ever written.’

—RT Book Reviews on A Scandal in the Headlines

‘Crews’ tale is intensely dramatic, set in a quaint fictional European principality. The royal repartee is all-consuming, their lovemaking is sensual and volatile and their romance is a nightmare turned fairy tale.’

—RT Book Reviews on A Royal Without Rules

‘Crews’ magnificently intense and passion-filled romance is so volatile you'll feel the heat radiating from her couple, who trade barbs and ignite sparks right into the bedroom.’

—RT Book Reviews on No More Sweet Surrender

‘Crews’ scorching love scenes and cryptic hints will keep readers rapt as she pieces her puzzle together, with a couple who truly deserves happiness.’

—RT Book Reviews on Heiress Behind the Headlines

‘Crews’ modern-day Beauty and the Beast story comes alive with a hero and heroine who are both so much more than they seem.’

—RT Book Reviews on The Man Behind the Scars

CAITLIN CREWS discovered her first romance novel at the age of twelve. It involved swashbuckling pirates, grand adventures, a heroine with rustling skirts and a mind of her own, and a seriously mouth-watering and masterful hero. The book (the title of which remains lost in the mists of time) made a serious impression. Caitlin was immediately smitten with romances and romance heroes, to the detriment of her middle-school social life. And so began her lifelong love affair with romance novels, many of which she insists on keeping near her at all times.

Caitlin has made her home in places as far-flung as York, England, and Atlanta, Georgia. She was raised near New York City and fell in love with London on her first visit when she was a teenager. She has backpacked in Zimbabwe, been on safari in Botswana and visited tiny villages in Namibia. She has, while visiting the place in question, declared her intention to live in Prague, Dublin, Paris, Athens, Nice, the Greek islands, Rome, Venice and/or any of the Hawaiian islands. Writing about exotic places seems like the next best thing to moving there.

She currently lives in California with her animator/comic-book-artist husband and their menagerie of ridiculous animals.

Scandalise Me

Caitlin Crews

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MILLS & BOON

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Contents

Cover

Praise for: CAITLIN CREWS

About the Author

Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Extract

Copyright

Chapter One

Zoe Brook strode into the exclusive strip club, hidden away beneath a discreet sign on a side street in an otherwise upscale Manhattan neighborhood, like an avenging angel on the warpath at last.

It had taken almost seven years, but her revenge was within grasp.

At last.

She paid no attention to the dull-eyed bouncers who waved her through the doorway, much less the plastic smile of the hostess as she swept past the welcome desk. There were very few clients at this hour of the morning—10:17, last she’d checked—and that made it easy to find who she was looking for in the dimly lit, too-loud space, dotted here and there with the requisite poles and a handful of sleepy-looking dancers eking out halfhearted performances in the dark red gloom.

Not that her quarry was making any attempt to hide.

Hunter Talbot Grant III, one-time golden boy, dumb jock extraordinaire and current professional fuckup, sprawled on a plush booth in the corner of the otherwise sparsely populated club, neck deep in mostly naked women. Zoe’s lips thinned as she took in the scene, which was as distasteful as she’d expected. The women giggled on each side of him, they shimmied in front of him, they writhed for his pleasure as if his table was its own stage and Zoe, dressed in her usual sleek sort of sheath dress and a tailored coat against the winter chill, was wearing more clothing than all of them put together.

“Good morning, Mr. Grant,” she said crisply, eying the man himself in all his sordid glory. “You seem to have forgotten our nine-thirty meeting today.”

It wasn’t exactly a surprise that someone who currently ranked as the Most Hated Celebrity in America was a pig. In fact, Zoe was counting on it. Hunter Grant was the disgraced sports figure du jour, wealthy beyond measure and disreputable by choice, and strip clubs such as this one were his natural habitat. Pig was redundant.

“And you seem to be wearing entirely too many clothes.”

His voice was a rough growl, deeply male and shot through with raw, velvet arrogance, which went with his very big, undeniably impressive body sprawled there in the booth, dripping with strippers. But he met her gaze as if they were alone and he was entirely sober, and there was suddenly a certain hum in the air, a kind of electric charge, that made her skin feel much too tight.

She ignored the odd sensation, keeping her gaze on him as if the shock of his intense physicality didn’t seem to suck the air from all around him like a vacuum. Or as if she simply didn’t notice it, because she shouldn’t. Because she couldn’t.

“It’s a terrible habit of mine.” She let her brows rise in challenge, because he was a man who’d played games for a living, and men like that lived for challenges of all kinds. They couldn’t help it. And that meant she could use it against him. “I can’t seem to break it.”

“I recommend quitting cold turkey,” he said with a dark gleam in his famously sky blue eyes, about which whole songs by pop princesses had been written over the years.

Zoe had dutifully downloaded every one of them over the past few weeks as part of her exhaustive research into the life and times and various offensive behaviors of Hunter Grant, the worst-behaved NFL quarterback in recent history. She needed to know every single thing about him if she was going to use him like her own, personal weapon.

And she was. He just didn’t know it yet.

“And what have you quit that makes you an expert on the subject?” she asked now. “Besides football, I mean.”

“I didn’t quit football. I was fired. With extreme prejudice. You can read about it in all the tabloids.”

“I’m thinking, then, that maybe you’re not the best person in the world to talk to about quitting things.”

Hunter’s mouth curved. “I don’t give a shit what you quit or don’t quit, honey. But I’d like you a whole lot better if you were naked.”

It was a pity he was even more attractive in person, Zoe thought then. It was that careless dark blond hair that never seemed to be fully tamed no matter how short he cut it. That gorgeous face of his, with eyes that should have been pretty and high cheekbones that should have been fey, but somehow worked with that pugnacious jaw of his to make him decidedly, almost alarmingly masculine, despite the offensive things he said.

Zoe knew every inch of his famous face, that well-documented smirk, and most of that much-photographed body of his, that today—or last night, more likely—he’d shoved into faded jeans and a tight gray Henley that hugged his rangy male form. He would have been a tabloid favorite anyway because of his wealthy family background, his all-American good looks and his penchant for vapid yet beautiful starlets—but it was his half brat, half thug behavior on the football field that had kept him plastered across every glossy magazine in existence for the rocky decade that had made up his football career.

He’s nothing but a frat boy, she thought, smiling at him as if she liked him. Pretty as a picture with malice and entitlement beneath, like all the rest of his kind. She knew. She’d been there a decade ago when he’d proved exactly what kind of man he was. She didn’t expect him to remember that, but then, she didn’t want him to remember her.

Not yet.

Not until he did what she needed him to do and helped her take down Jason Treffen.

“Looked your fill?”

His voice wasn’t friendly or polite, and he didn’t flash that absurdly charming smile she’d seen him wield throughout the series of insincere mea culpas he’d issued after each of his many scandals as a football star. He only watched her, in a curiously intent way that made her feel as if she ought to hold her breath.

“I’m not admiring you,” Zoe said coolly, and she wasn’t. Of course she wasn’t.

“Don’t you think you should?” His voice was as lazy as ever but still, she heard the challenge in it. The thrown gauntlet—because, as expected, he couldn’t resist. “I’m usually the object of intense and potentially life-altering admiration. It’s but one of my many burdens to bear.”

She was surprised that some part of her wanted to laugh at the way he said that, with that sardonic lash that suggested he was far more self-aware than she’d imagined. But she didn’t know what to do with that, so instead of exploring it, she got down to business. She dug into her bag, opened her wallet and handed her credit card to the nearest dancer, not looking away from Hunter until the other woman took it from her fingers.

“Take this. Take them. And don’t let anyone come back over here unless I say it’s okay,” she ordered her.

She stared at the dancer until the woman did as she was told with only a quick glance at Hunter, herding the pack of strippers out of Hunter’s booth with a single jerk of her head.

“It’s like you’re my fairy godmother,” he said when they were left alone, a hint of a drawl in his voice, reminding her he’d spent the past decade in Texas. If possible, he seemed even lazier than before now that there was only him in the booth. And, somehow, bigger. “But I’m all grown up now. I can pay for my own strippers.”

Zoe settled herself on the seat next to him so she could turn toward him, the better to quietly block him in where he sat. The gleam in his gaze told her he knew exactly what she was doing. That he let her do it. She ignored the gleam.

“Congratulations, Mr. Grant,” she said crisply. “This is your lucky day.”

“It felt a lot luckier five minutes ago, before you scared off all the half-naked women.”

“I set up an appointment through your manager, but it appears you prefer to operate through more casual channels these days.”

“If that’s a convoluted way of saying I told Harvey to go fuck himself, you are correct.”

Zoe smiled. Harvey Speer was a frothing bulldog of a sports agent, well-known for creating insurmountable barriers between his clients and the world, so she’d hardly weep salty tears if he wasn’t involved in Hunter’s life any longer. It made what she wanted to do with him that much easier.

“I’m Zoe Brook,” she told him now. “You really should know that already. I’m the best PR agent in New York City, if not the whole world, and I’m going to rehabilitate your image—which I think we can both agree is more than a little tarnished.”

He eyed her for a long moment, and she was sure she saw something hollow move through his gaze, stark and almost painful, completely at odds with the shallow, degenerate man she knew he’d been all his life. But then his mouth kicked up in one corner, his eyes shone blue and clear, and she was certain she’d imagined it.

“I’ll pass,” he said. She had the strangest notion that he was dangerous, suddenly, which was absurd, but he never moved that unnervingly direct gaze from hers. “Send some of those strippers back over here on your way out, won’t you?”

She let her smile go sharp. “You misunderstand me. I’m not asking you if you’d like me to do it. I’m telling you that I will.”

“Is this a fan thing?” he asked, his voice still mild but his gaze intent. “Some stalker fantasy? Knock yourself out. Rehab away. But please don’t expect me to have anything to do with it. I like my notoriety just fine the way it is.”

Zoe laughed. “Oh, I’m not a fan.”

“It’s okay to admit it. I have a lot of fans, even now. Some of them like to make up complicated little stories to get close to me, and I don’t really mind. I don’t care who you are. But then again, I don’t much care who I am, either.”

“Let’s be honest, shall we, Mr. Grant?”

“By all means. All this flattery is making me dizzy. Of course, I’m drunk.”

Except she didn’t think he was. His gaze was too sharp, there were no bottles on the table, and she was sitting so close to him that if there’d been any alcohol on his breath, she’d have been able to smell it. Why would he want her to think he was drunk if he wasn’t? She shook that off, then leaned in, her smile hard.

“You have the kind of throwing arm that makes strong, silent men weep tears of joy, yet you’ve treated it shabbily and without the slightest respect throughout your career,” she said coolly. “Your bad behavior is legendary and you quite possibly lost your team the Super Bowl this year. On top of that, you were—literally, it’s rumored—born with a silver spoon stuck in your patrician mouth as the heir to the great Grant fortune, meaning no one is ever likely to sympathize with you. About anything.”

“The rumors are wrong.” His smile was bland. “Unless you mean the sort of silver spoon more commonly used to snort large quantities of cocaine. Those we pass down during our strange puberty rituals, one stuffy WASP to the next. The first exchange took place on the Mayflower, I think. It’s a genetic imperative at this point.”

Zoe was surprised that she wanted to smile at that bit of nonsense. Possibly even laugh. But surely that was weakness, and she didn’t allow any of that. Not any longer. Certainly not with someone like him, who wasn’t high on cocaine any more than he was drunk, but apparently wanted to be thought both.

But she wasn’t here to understand him, only to use him.

“You could have sailed straight into some investment bank after Harvard and played with all of your Monopoly money for the rest of your life like your father and grandfather before you, but you opted for professional football instead, to the enduring dismay of your snooty, upper-crust relatives. Everyone expected you’d be crushed as a rookie, but instead, you dominated. You should be one of the great success stories of the age, an athlete with an Ivy League–trained mind. A role model for our time.” She eyed him, not making the slightest effort to hide her disdain. “A hero among men.”

“Sadly,” Hunter said, and though his smile never wavered, she was sure that she saw something dark move over his face again before he hid it, “I’m only me. Though my wasted potential haunts me, I promise.”

That wasn’t darkness, Zoe told herself firmly. That was emptiness. He was nothing but a pretty shell wrapped tight around nothing at all. Which was precisely why she’d chosen him to push the repulsive Jason Treffen where she wanted him, at last. She’d spent a few hellish years under Jason’s control, and she remembered three men in particular from that long-ago December night that had convinced her she had to save herself or die. Jason’s own son, Austin, now a lawyer like his evil father. Alex Diaz, now an investigative reporter. And Hunter, the rich and pretty football player, clearly not the brains of the trio. She’d decided that now she was finally ready to do what needed to be done, Hunter would be the easiest to manipulate. Obviously.

“I doubt that very much,” she said now, her voice light, though her stare was anything but, and she was surprised he returned it so steadily. That he didn’t so much as flinch. “You’re more likely than not a complete and utter blank, straight through to your benighted soul. One shade up from sociopathic, if I had to guess. The good news is this makes you a perfect candidate for a high-profile corporate position, which I’m assuming has to be your next move. Or let me rephrase that. It should be, and I can help you achieve that.”

“I’ll hand it to you...” She thought that smile of his sharpened, that there was more of that temper there, just behind the blue of his eyes as he leaned in closer as if he was sharing his secrets. “This is certainly a unique approach.”

It was the age-old carrot-and-stick routine, in fact, and he shouldn’t seem so aware of it yet simultaneously unruffled by it. Zoe forged on.

“It’s the transition from football-field temper tantrum to corporate dominance that needs to be refined,” she continued, still sounding so airy and easy, despite the fact this wasn’t going quite how she’d imagined it would. “What you need to learn is how to hide your true face better.”

“I don’t hide my true face at all,” he said, and there was something quietly devastating in the way he said it. It struck Zoe like a blow, low and hard, and she didn’t know why. “What would be the point? Everyone’s already seen it.”

Zoe crossed her legs, settling back against her seat as if she, too, was completely relaxed, here in this tawdry place, in the company of a man who should have disgusted her—who had disgusted her, and thoroughly, before she’d started talking to him. She ignored that odd pang inside her at the dark look on his face, the leftover echo of that strange blow.

“I find it’s better to beware rich and powerful men who are also renowned for their good looks, because they tend to believe their own bullshit and usually don’t even know they’re lying. And they’re always lying, especially when they claim to be telling the truth.”

He held one hand to his chest, covering the place his heart should have been, had he possessed one. She was skeptical. His mouth curled in one corner, mocking them both. “It’s like you know me.”

He shifted in his seat then, and she imagined for a moment he was uncomfortable, though there was nothing on his face to suggest it. Just that fierce maleness that was uniquely his, and an odd intensity she couldn’t quite place. A strange kind of quiver hummed in her, low and deep, like the echo of a far-off earthquake, stirring up uneasy memories of her dusty, sun-drunk California childhood.

“You’re staring at me,” he pointed out. “Are you sure you’re not a fan? I ask because generally, that’s exactly what fans do.”

Zoe smiled, and she could feel the sharp edge of it, like the knife it was. She could only hope he did, too.

“I’m calculating the extent of your dissipation,” she told him. “There are only so many miracles I can be expected to perform, you understand. Some prospective clients require a few weeks or months in what we euphemistically call a health spa before we can even begin to have a sensible conversation about overhauling a tarnished public persona. And yours...” She let the blade of her smile cut deep, then waved a hand between them to indicate their surroundings. “Well. You’re rather more rusted through than most, aren’t you?”

“I like to think there’s no actual structural damage.”

His mouth crooked again, though his gaze stayed level on hers, and she knew better, somehow, than to believe him.

“I imagine that depends on what the structure was originally. Or what it was meant to be before all the years of dissolution and decay.”

There was the flicker of something unsettling in his too-blue gaze, still oddly intent on hers.

“And here I thought you were the best PR person money could buy,” he said softly. “According to your own sales pitch not five minutes ago. Capable of turning any rusted thing into a gleaming, squeaky-clean pillar of the community if you choose.”

There was no false modesty in her when she answered simply, “I am.”

“That’s hard to believe, if this is how you talk to your potential clients. All of whom can’t possibly be as laid-back and jovial as me.”

“You haven’t yet agreed to be my client, Mr. Grant.” She let him see the steel behind her smile, her gaze. “But I should warn you that I’m not talking about miracles, here. No one’s going to confuse you with the Dalai Lama no matter how brilliant a campaign we run. I’m a PR specialist, not the patron saint of lost causes.”

“That would be Saint Jude.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Saint Jude. Martyred with an ax a very long time ago, which had to have hurt, or it isn’t really martyrdom, is it? And since then, the patron saint of lost causes.”

“I wouldn’t have pegged you as the religious sort. More the blasphemous, deliberately profane sort, if your personal history and laundry list of paternity suits is any kind of guide.”

“Dismissed paternity suits,” he corrected her, a faintly chiding note in his voice. “And the fact I know the names of a few saints doesn’t make me a believer.”

Something hollow moved over his face then, but when Zoe blinked, it was gone, and he looked the way she assumed he always did. Vaguely challenging. Mocking. Arrogant and lazy, as if she’d only imagined he could be anything else, though she hadn’t the slightest idea why she seemed to want to do that.

“Doesn’t it?” she asked, but she was losing her grip on this conversation the more he watched her, as if she was edible and he was suddenly famished.

“It only makes me widely read.” He shrugged. “The more sacred cows you’re aware of, I find, the more fun it is to tip them over. One after the next.”

“And by ‘widely read,’ I assume you mean, what? Playboy magazine? I hate to break this to you, but I don’t think anyone’s likely to believe you’re in it for the articles.”

“I’m more of a doer than a reader, I’ll admit.” His expression shifted into dark amusement. “Want a demonstration?”

There was a crackle of something then, a kind of sharp, hot pang of awareness, and Zoe reminded herself that she wasn’t here to banter with this man. She had a very specific agenda. A plan, and he was nothing more than the perfect tool to execute it. There was no room for anything else. It didn’t matter that he was significantly more clever and far less drunk than she’d anticipated.

And besides, she knew exactly what he was. She knew what he’d done. Why was that so difficult to keep in mind now that she was this close to him?

“Do you imagine that I’ll be so easily seduced?” she asked, trying to keep her voice more arch than accusatory. “Is that how it normally works for you? You roll out a halfhearted sexual innuendo and they fling themselves at your feet?”

“I hadn’t imagined anything of the kind,” he said, and he was laughing at her, if only with those unnervingly clear eyes. “But I am now.”

“You’re not my type,” she said, sharp and smooth. “I prefer brains over brawn, for a start.”

“I beg your pardon.” But he wasn’t even remotely offended, she saw. If anything, he looked genuinely amused. It made his gorgeous face lighten, made those eyes of his very nearly shine. “I went to Harvard.”

“As did almost every single relative and ancestor you have, stretching back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1600s.” She kept her voice dry. “It’s somewhat less impressive to be a legacy times twenty. It would only be noteworthy if you didn’t go to Harvard.”

“I didn’t merely get into Harvard,” he pointed out, that gleam in his gaze never fading. If anything, it intensified, as if he really was imagining her at his feet, spread out before him like—she stopped herself right there. “I also graduated. That’s harder, even for someone with so much Crimson in his bloodstream.” He grinned. “Brains and brawn.”

Zoe shrugged. “I also don’t like sports. Especially football. Pointless and brutal little war games dressed up in silly costumes and pretending to be important.” She smiled. Sweetly. “No offense, of course. Just my opinion.”

“I pride myself on never taking offense at the unsolicited opinions of strangers,” Hunter said.

He shifted in his seat again, moving his strong legs beneath the table, making Zoe aware of how close they were sitting. How intimate it really was to be practically cuddled up in a private booth with this man. This terrible man. It took everything she had not to jerk back to a safe distance—but then, this was the game. This was what she had to do to win it. And she would win it.

“I was fired from the war games,” he confided after a moment. “If that helps.”

“And I don’t really like WASP-y Sons of the Revolution, either,” she said almost sadly. “With blood so blue it practically weeps, who still think the world is their own, personal fiefdom. It’s a strange character flaw of mine, I’m sure.”

That made him grin. “Given the research you’ve clearly done, you must know that I’m the black sheep of my WASP-y, Sons and Daughters of the Revolution family. They sigh heavily whenever they see me, which isn’t very often. I’m terribly scandalous.”

“Or maybe it’s just you, Mr. Grant. I can’t say I particularly like you.”

“And yet here you are,” Hunter said, something about that tone making it clear she’d be a fool to underestimate him, though he still grinned with every appearance of pretty-boy ease. “Giving me your sales pitch in a strip club at ten-thirty on a Tuesday morning. Do you know who does things like that, Ms. Brook?” There was something about her name in his mouth, that famously dissipated mouth, that worked inside her, making her feel looser than she should, as if he could melt all the ice and iron within her that easily. She told herself she was horrified at the thought. “Fans and stalkers.”

“I promise you, I’m neither.”

“Then why on earth would you take on the Herculean task of attempting to restore my good name?” He laughed. “It can’t be done.”

“I have my reasons. All you have to do is benefit from them.”

“Let me guess. The goodness of your heart?”

“I don’t have a heart, Mr. Grant. I have a plan. You figure prominently in it, that’s all.”

That intensity that spiked the air around him tightened then, like an implacable fist. And then he smiled, sending a shot of something silken and ominous down the length of her spine. It occurred to her that she didn’t understand this man at all. That her research hadn’t prepared her for this, whatever this was. For him.

“I’m sorry to disappoint you,” he said in a velvet whisper, the way another man might talk of sex and desire, and it shivered inside Zoe like a touch, “but I’m committed to my downward spiral, and that leaves no room for anything else. Certainly not a mysterious woman and her ‘plan.’”

He rose to his feet then, in a kind of powerfully sinuous way that reminded her that he’d made his living for most of his life with that steel-hewn body of his. She didn’t know why that made her throat go dry, but it did. It bordered on painful.

What was happening to her?

“Feel free to stay and enjoy the show,” he said, smirking down at her. “The dancers here are very talented. Don’t forget to tip.”

Then he started to move past her, headed for the door, dismissing her that easily.

“Wait.”

Zoe rose and reached out for him as she spoke, but he saw her and shifted, throwing out one of his remarkable hands—widely held to be miracles in their own right, or so she’d read—to clasp hers in midair. As if they’d choreographed it.

And sensation poured into her, a white, wild heat, turning her to stone where she stood. Turning her body against her. She felt that simple touch like a hammer. It coursed through her, and before she could think better of it, before she could think, she jerked her startled gaze from their hands to his face—

And everything sizzled. Bright. Hot. Painful.

Impossible.

Hunter’s gaze narrowed. Turned dark.

Hungry.

It took every single bit of hard-won pride and determination Zoe had not to rip her hand out from his much bigger one, to reclaim it, to shut off this insane thing that lit her up in the worst possible places, from the hollow of her belly to the secret places below. Behind her knees. The curve of her neck. The suddenly taut and aching crests of her breasts, thankfully hidden behind the thick wool of her dress.

But she didn’t kid herself. He knew.

And she hated that she could react like this to a man like him. That her body didn’t seem to care what she knew about him. That she’d learned nothing from all these long, hard years. That she simply burned.

“I prefer not to be manhandled, thank you,” she said, her voice even and precise, as cold as the winter winds in the concrete canyons of the city outside this club, and he would never know what that cost her. “Particularly by strange men renowned for their long years of compulsive promiscuity and generally loutish behavior.”

He dropped his hand, but there was still that new light in his eyes, intense and certain, focused on her as if he saw all the things she’d hidden, her secrets and her scars. As if he knew she wore a mask. As if he could see it—and therefore, her—when no one else ever had.

That shook her, hard, but she fought to keep it from her face. Her eyes. Her rigid body that wanted things she’d never wanted, that she didn’t know how to want.

“I’m renowned for other things, too,” he pointed out, almost gently.

And she’d read about that, of course. His supposed sexual prowess. And she hated the fact that she could imagine it, too vividly now. Insistent. As if she was like other women, and could yearn—

Enough.

Zoe made a small noise that was too scornful to be laughter.

“Rich, bored men are remarkably predictable, Mr. Grant. I can assure you, I’ve seen every possible permutation of human perversity, and what has to be almost every last ‘dungeon’ on the island of Manhattan. Whips, chains, spanking benches, it’s all so tiresome.” She smiled, big and fake. “And though I’m sure your particular kinks are fascinating, I’ll just take your word for it.”

He laughed then, abruptly. And she didn’t understand why she imagined she heard something there in that sound, something more and deeper than the tawdry, tedious legend of Hunter Grant, professional asshole. Something that suggested he was more than that when she knew, firsthand, that he wasn’t.

He was the key to her revenge. That was all he was. And nothing else mattered. She wouldn’t let it.

“There’s only one way you’re going to learn about my particular kinks,” Hunter was saying, his voice shifting into something smoother, darker, connecting directly to that thing still too bright and too dangerous inside her, making her painfully aware that it was her own hunger. An impossible, alarming hunger for the very things she refused to let herself want. That she didn’t want. He waited until she was looking at him again. “But you’ll have to ask nicely.”

She told herself she felt nothing then. No lick of fire. No kick of need.

Nothing, damn it. Not for a man like this.

“There is absolutely no chance of that ever happening.” Her voice was flat. Cold.

He shook his head, though his blue eyes gleamed, and it was still like a shower of sparks inside her—and would terrify her, she was sure, if she let herself think about it.

“If you say so, Ms. Brook.” But he smiled, confident and sure despite that darkness she sensed in him. Or maybe because of it. “Yet I find I’m suddenly much more interested in your...services.”

It was time to remember who she was, who she’d become. What she’d been through. She wasn’t sure why being near this man made her forget. She arched a brow.

“I don’t ask nicely, Mr. Grant. I’m the one who’s asked. And honestly? I prefer to be begged.” She smiled then, the way he had. “You can start on your knees.”

This time, he really did laugh, and yet he still didn’t look anything but hungry as he regarded her from far too close, like some kind of ravenous wolf. Zoe couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt like this. Daring, off-balance. Something other than in complete and total control.

When she knew perfectly well she would die before she’d let that happen. Never, ever again.

“I don’t need any PR,” he said, very softly, as if it was an endearment. “If that’s really what you’re offering.”

She didn’t know why she couldn’t seem to pull in a full breath, why her eyes felt too bright, why the way he was looking at her then made her feel as if she was turned inside out. Exposed and vulnerable. How was that possible?

“It is.”

“That’s too bad.” He was so big and entirely too beautiful, and she’d never been aware of another man the way she was of him—of every single part of him, especially that heated way he looked down at her. “Because if you wanted to see for yourself what the fuss was all about? Regarding my particular, predictable rich-man kinks? That, I could probably do.”

It wasn’t the first time a man had propositioned her. But it was the first time she’d felt a burst of flame lick over her when he did, and she was terribly afraid he knew that, too. That he felt the same slap of heat.

She couldn’t let that happen, it was impossible, so she shoved it aside.

“Is that caveman code for ‘sleep with me so I can put you back in your proper place?’” she asked, cool and challenging and back on familiar ground, because she knew this routine. She could handle this. Jason Treffen had taught her well, one painful lesson at a time. “Because you should know before you try, dragging me off by my hair somewhere won’t end the way you think it will. I can promise you that.”

Hunter looked intrigued and his head canted slightly to one side, but that wolfish regard of his never wavered—bright and hot and knowing. Reaching much too far inside her, deep into her bones, like an ache.

It was that last part that made her wonder exactly how much control she was clinging to, after all.

“I don’t want to drag you off somewhere by your hair and have my way with you, Ms. Brook.”

The smile on her lips turned mocking, but she was more concerned with the sudden long, slow thump of her heart and the heavy, wet heat low in her belly. “Because you’re not that kind of guy?”

There was something more than predatory in his eyes then, hard and hot, a dark knowing in the curve of his mouth that connected with that deep drumroll inside her, making it her pulse, her breath, her worst fear come true.

“I’m absolutely that kind of guy. But I told you. You have to ask me nicely.”

He smiled, as if he was the one in control. And she couldn’t allow it.

“No,” she said, furious that it came out like a whisper, thin and uncertain. His smile deepened for a moment, like a promise.

“Your loss,” he murmured, and that aching fire swelled inside her, nearly bursting.

And then he laughed again, dismissing her that easily, and turned to go. Again. For good this time, she understood, and she couldn’t let that happen.

Zoe had no choice.

“I wouldn’t do that, Mr. Grant.” She didn’t know why that dryness in her mouth seemed to translate into something like trembling everywhere else, when she’d known before she’d approached him that it would probably come to this. She waited until he looked back at her, and pretended the blue gleam of his eyes didn’t get to her at all, with all that weary amusement, as if he could see right through her when she knew—she knew—he couldn’t. That no one could. She made herself smile. “I know about Sarah.”

Chapter Two

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—

Hunter didn’t see how he could live with what he knew now. With himself, for not knowing it then.

He was a heartless, soulless man, he knew: blind and selfish to the core. He’d wasted his life as if he’d been on a mission to do so from the start. He’d disappointed his family, his friends, both football teams he’d played for in his career, all of his fans. He’d squandered each and every gift he’d ever been given. He’d let the only girl he’d ever loved walk away from him, straight into the hands of a monster, and he hadn’t noticed anything but his own pain and jealousy.

And he knew these were the least of his sins.

Because he still remembered every moment of that night ten years ago, at the annual Christmas party at Austin’s father’s law firm. How Sarah had come to him with all that dark pain on her face and he had liked it.

Can I talk to you? she’d asked. Please?

Maybe later, he’d said, making such a show of not caring, of hardly paying attention to her. This is a big night.

It was about time she’d felt some of what he was feeling, he’d thought. He’d liked that she looked lost and scared and tentative, all things Sarah Michaels had never been. He’d assumed that she was finally recognizing what a huge mistake she’d made in breaking up with him. He’d thought it was so ironic that he’d been entirely faithful to Sarah even though he was the professional athlete—that she’d been the one to cheat on him, and with Austin’s father, no less.

He’d been so smugly certain he was the victim. So self-righteous that Sarah had done this terrible thing and he—out of respect for who she’d been back in college, he’d told himself piously—had opted to keep it to himself. Because he was such a great guy.

And because he was all things petty, because he’d thought that shattered look on her face—all about him, he’d been so certain—wasn’t quite enough, he’d taken the whole thing a step further and asked the bimbo he’d been parading around on his arm to marry him, right there in the middle of the Christmas party in all of the elegance and old-money sparkle Treffen, Smith, and Howell claimed as its own.

He’d watched Sarah leave the room as the champagne was popped, looking small and beaten, and all these years later he was still ashamed of how deeply satisfied he’d felt then. He’d had no idea that that would be the last time he’d ever see her. That he’d spend the rest of his life wondering if, had he known he’d never lay eyes on Sarah alive again, he might have done something differently.

One shade up from sociopathic, Zoe Brook had said. She had no idea how right she was.

Then again, if she knew about Sarah, maybe she did.

* * *

Zoe didn’t take a full breath until she shut her apartment door late that night, cutting herself off from the world at last. She tugged off her boots in her entry hall and padded barefoot into the apartment that ambled over the whole of the third floor of a prewar brownstone on the Upper West Side.

She let herself breathe in deep as she moved through the living room with its commotion of bright colors, letting her Tough Bitch Mask drop away. Here at home, she was someone else. Here, she was the Zoe she might have been.

The Zoe who hadn’t been ruined.

She moved into her bathroom as she stripped out of her work clothes, headed for the pretty claw-footed tub perched on the black-and-white checkerboard tiled floor. She turned on the water and poured in a sachet of her favorite bath salts, letting the lavender scent work on her.

There was more Jason Treffen in her head than usual tonight, and it made her edgy.

Her interaction with Hunter Grant this morning hadn’t helped. The thing was, she’d wanted to touch him again, standing there in the middle of a strip club, of all places. She’d wanted to touch him, and that didn’t make sense. Not for her.

Her skin felt itchy. New. As if it wasn’t hers any longer. And that strange notion threw her right back into the past.

Her grandparents had raised her grudgingly after her own parents took off, reminding her daily that they were doing no more than their Christian duty. And that was exactly what they’d done. She’d grown up in the high desert of southern California, whole worlds and a long drive away from glamorous Los Angeles. It had been bitterly cold in the winter, brutally hot in the summer, and there was always that unsettling desert wind, sweeping down from the stark, brown mountains to keep everyone on edge.

Zoe had tried her best to love her grandparents and their pinched-mouthed charity they’d never allowed her to forget would end the day she turned eighteen. She’d tried. School hadn’t come easily to her, but she’d applied herself and excelled her way into a scholarship—because she’d had no other choice if she wanted to escape.

When she met Jason Treffen at a scholarship student function her senior year at Cornell, he was charming and kind. He understood. And because he did, when he offered to help her, she let him.

She still couldn’t forgive herself for that.

He’d paid off her student loans because, he said, he knew promise when he saw it. He’d hired her as a legal assistant at his very upscale law firm in New York City, and Zoe had been so grateful. For the first time in her life, she’d felt cared for. Pampered, even. As if she’d been worthy of love after all, despite her grandparents.

It wasn’t until the second time Jason asked her to go out to dinner with a friend of his—because the old guy was lonely and Zoe was a pretty girl who could be friendly, couldn’t she?—that she got that sick feeling in her gut. It wasn’t until one or two more “favors” ended with increasingly intense negotiations for sex that Jason suggested later she should have accepted, that she finally understood. That she finally saw the wolf in his gleaming sheep’s robes.

But by then, of course, she was trapped. Jason was good at what he did. And even better at punishing the girls who didn’t play along. He was rich and powerful and connected, and, as he told her repeatedly, no one would believe her anyway.

It took Zoe three long, horrible years to buy her freedom. She watched other girls give in. To drugs, to despair. She almost wavered herself—it was so hard, and she was so alone, and did she really think she could beat a powerful man such as Jason at his own game?—but then her friend Sarah had taken her own life.

And that had changed everything.

Zoe had understood she had to escape. She had to. Or all of it—Sarah’s death, what she’d suffered those terrible years, what had happened to the other girls—would have been in vain.

She had to escape, or Jason won.

Zoe twisted her long black hair into a messy knot on the top of her head now, and tested the water in the bath, letting it run through her fingers. And it all rushed back. It flooded into her, demanding her surrender, the way it always did.

Insisting she remember everything.

Do you really believe you can run away from me? Jason had laughed at her that last day in his dark wood office so high above the city, when she’d thrown her hard-earned check down in front of him and told him she was done. Leaving. Free at last. I plucked you from obscurity. You don’t have anything I didn’t give you, and you never will. Remember that.

You made me a whore, she’d thrown at him, hatred and terror and disgust making her voice too thick. Too obvious.

Whores generally close the deal. He’d looked so pleased with himself. So smug. Not in the least bit concerned that she was getting out from under his thumb. That’s the point of whores. What you do is play dangerous games. You’re lucky there are so many men who enjoy paying for the privilege of that kind of tease.

But she’d had one or two nights that had tipped over that edge, hadn’t she? When they’d simply taken what they wanted. And the way he’d looked at her then, she knew that he knew it.

Yes, she’d hissed at him. Lucky is exactly how I feel. I’m overcome with gratitude.

You will be, he’d assured her.

Years had passed and she still couldn’t get the ring of his laughter out of her ears, erase that vicious smile from her memory.

Hello, Zoe.

He’d surprised her backstage in the green room of one of the nighttime shows that taped locally that time, where she’d been shepherding a client as part of her first job in PR. She’d stared at him, hoping he’d disappear the way he sometimes did in the nightmares she’d refused to admit she’d been having since her escape from Treffen, Smith, and Howell.

But, of course, he’d only smiled at her.

It wouldn’t kill you to be polite, he’d said, kindly, but she could see the monster in his eyes.

In fact, she’d said, it might.

His smile had only deepened, turned friendlier. Jason Treffen at his most dangerous.

Enjoy that sassy spirit of yours, he’d said, as if he’d been bestowing a gift upon her. It won’t last.

Some of her coworkers had burst into the room then and had been wowed at the sight of Jason Treffen, saint of New York, standing there with a lowly new PR associate like Zoe. She’d had to smile politely while he took pictures with them. When he’d slung an arm around her shoulders. While he’d chatted with them, doling out his usual host of platitudes and insights, all of which took on a nightmarish hue should you happen to know what lurked beneath it.

He’d engineered that meeting, she knew he had. To remind her that whenever he so desired, he could reach out and make her feel slimy and cheap. Used.

Zoe had already vowed she’d take him down some day. After that run-in, she’d determined that she wanted it to hurt. And her desire for revenge had burned in her, a naked flame, hot and bright. Eclipsing everything else.

You exist because I allow it, he’d told her at a charity event not five years ago, cupping her elbow in his hand and making her feel as if a thousand insects swarmed over her skin. Everything you own, all you’ve accomplished, is mine. I gave it to you and I can take it away, Zoe.

She hadn’t been quite so young then. And she hadn’t much cared that she was dead inside.

I can’t imagine why you’d bother, she’d said, and she’d been so proud that she’d stood there as if turned to stone, as if it didn’t matter that he was touching her.

Why do I do anything? Again, that nasty laugh. He’d dug his fingers into the tender place above her elbow, making her whole arm numb. She’d remembered that he’d liked pain. Inflicting it, watching others suffer it. But she’d only stared back at him, cool and unimpressed, unwilling to give him the satisfaction of reacting. Because I can, Zoe. I can do whatever the hell I want. Remember that.

The last time she’d seen him had been some months ago. She’d been in a very fancy restaurant celebrating the birthday of one of her former clients, who also happened to be a heavyweight in New York politics. She’d expected to see Jason there, working the party in his usual way, and she hadn’t been disappointed.

She’d braced herself for the inevitable encounter—but he hadn’t approached her. He’d been reveling in a crowd of admirers until a young woman appeared at his side and whispered something in his ear.

Zoe had seen the way Jason let his hand rest a moment too long on the young woman’s arm. She’d seen the way he’d turned to look down at her, seen the flash of that repulsive smile of his that had made her stomach lurch from all the way across the room. She’d seen them turn toward the door, the woman stepping out to walk in front of him, so he couldn’t see her face any longer.

That face which had been a blank except for her eyes, which were dark with self-loathing and sheer, stark misery.

Zoe knew that expression. She knew. It had been like a kick to the gut, so hard she hadn’t been able to breathe, and she’d had to stand still and watch.

Then she’d felt something else—that creeping, sickening feeling that told her he’d seen her. Sure enough, when she’d jerked her gaze away from the young woman who hurried from the party and out into the fall night, Jason was watching her.

He’d held her gaze across the crowd. So arrogant. So superior. She’d clenched her fingers so hard around the stem of her wineglass that she’d left deep grooves in her own flesh. She’d worried that she might be sick where she stood.

Jason Treffen had merely smiled. Pleased, as ever. Winning, as usual.

Zoe sucked in a breath now, snapping herself back into her own bathroom. You’re safe, she told herself, again and again, until her heart rate smoothed out. She stepped into the hot water, and sank into its silken embrace until she was submerged up to her chin.

At last, it was time. The whole country was gearing up to celebrate Jason Treffen and his many years of humanitarian “service” to all, and that was where Zoe came in. It was time to take him down. It was time to hit him where it hurt. Past time.

It was time to do some winning of her own.

And Hunter Grant—who had dated Sarah Michaels back when Zoe and Sarah were both caught in Jason’s trap, who had broken that poor girl’s heart, who had flaunted another woman in Sarah’s face on the night she’d died, and that was assuming he hadn’t been doing something far worse—was going to help her do it.

Or Zoe would destroy him, too.

No matter how he made her feel.

* * *

Hunter hated Midtown with a passion.

He hated the streets crammed full of grim worker drones, so self-important and brusque. He hated the building that housed Treffen, Smith, and Howell, an architecturally uninspired black box indistinguishable from the rest of the block it stood on. He hated the press of the crowds on the streets outside. The ubiquitous hot dog vendors, the stink of the subways that rose up through the grates at his feet, the black sparkle of the listless fountain that dominated the courtyard entryway to the building and stood waterless this time of year, like a metaphor.

He hadn’t set foot in this building since the night of that terrible Christmas party ten years ago.

But he was under siege from at least three different lawsuits these days thanks to his antics, and so he’d finally agreed to meet his legal team today in this hateful place. This grand, gluttonous monument to so many lies.

Hunter knew he could very well run into Jason here. And probably would. The man’s name was etched into the wall, after all. He didn’t know what he’d do if that happened.

He knew what he wanted to do, what he should have done ten years ago: punch the smug, insufferable bastard in the face, which was only the smallest part of what Jason Treffen deserved.

Maybe it was time to make sure he got it—but, of course, that would require action.

Austin had spent the time since their ghoulish little December anniversary dinner exposing his father for the monster he was to his family. Alex had spent it plotting out ways to further make Jason pay, publicly. Austin and Alex had plans. They wanted to take Jason down and they had ideas about how to do it. Austin had already done his part. Alex was working on his.

While Hunter was avoiding the entire thing, as if that might make it go away. Along with most of the texts and calls he received from his old friends, while he was at it.

He didn’t bother scowling at his reflection in the gleaming elevator doors before him as he rocketed up toward the firm. He knew what was looking back at him. If anything, Zoe Brook had been too conservative in her rundown of his flaws.

The doors slid open, and Hunter wasn’t at all surprised to see a young woman standing there, looking sleek and polished and delighted to see him.

Looking like déjà vu.

“Hello, Mr. Grant,” she said, smiling. “I’m Iris.”

If he had to guess, he’d say she was the latest incarnation of what Sarah had been. The title had been Legal Assistant back then. But if this one was another of Jason’s girls, doing paralegal work was the very tip of the iceberg.

And that twisting, nasty feeling in his gut told him he knew exactly what that iceberg entailed, and that this girl was part of it. Up to her neck and drowning, no doubt.

One more victim he couldn’t save. How many were there now? How many more would there be before he actually did something about it? How many people could say their blind inaction had an actual body count?

“Nice to meet you, Iris,” he said, and he could hear the gravel in his voice. That banked fury, as toothless as the rest of him. He forced a smile. “Are you here to make sure I don’t get lost?”

“Mr. Treffen sent me to collect you,” Iris said. “He wanted you to drop in and say hello before your meeting.”

If she noticed the way Hunter froze, or the way his smile vanished from his face, she was too well trained to comment on it. And God help him, he didn’t want to think about Jason fucking Treffen’s training program.

“It’s this way,” she said.

But he didn’t follow her when she started to move. He stood there by the bank of elevators, wishing he was a different man.

“Mr. Grant?”

“Please tell Mr. Treffen I don’t have time to see him today,” Hunter said, his voice clipped. Because I don’t know if I’ll try to kill him with my bare hands. Or if I should try to stop myself if I do. Or if—even worse—I’ll do nothing at all. “I’m sure he’ll understand.”

Iris’s polite mask never altered. “Of course,” she said smoothly.

And Hunter let her walk away, straight back into hell, the way he’d let Sarah ten years ago. He even told himself it was better that way.

Because he made every single thing he touched that much worse.

* * *

That evening, Austin escalated to all-caps texts.

Having avoided one Treffen today, Hunter thought he’d do well to avoid the other, too. Not that it was fair, precisely, to lump the two together.

Good thing Hunter didn’t care.

The winter night had slammed down outside, dark and frigid and uninviting. It wasn’t much better inside his mausoleum of a penthouse, which seemed to loom all around him tonight, swollen black and thick with all his sins. He sat in the dark, watching SportsCenter on his laughably huge television that took up the better part of one vast wall.

He blew out a breath when Jason Treffen appeared on-screen, remembering that this was one of the reasons his old friends were so motivated to act. Now, when Jason was a few weeks away from being celebrated on national television, and every other advertisement seemed to trumpet his smiling face, as if he was running for office. Unopposed. The coverage was relentless.

Treffen, tireless advocate for women, in his first and most in-depth interview!

Treffen, defender of the downtrodden and personal benefactor to so many, opens up at last!

It was almost a relief when the regular programming returned, and one of Hunter’s former teammates—who happened to be suing him—appeared on the screen. Hunter muted him, not wanting to hear, yet again, a rundown of the ways in which his ejection from the NFL was a blessing for all concerned.

But, “He’s never been a team player,” he could see his former wide receiver say, directly into the camera, as if he knew Hunter was watching him, sound off or not. This was all part of the same song and dance that every single person in pro football had been performing since mid-December, whether they were filing lawsuits against him or not. Hunter could recite it himself, nearly word for word.

Out for himself. Not a team player. Prima donna. Waste of potential, waste of resources, narcissistic—

Blah-blah-blah.

It seemed like the perfect time, then, to call an old friend he didn’t want to talk to, to discuss a subject he still didn’t want to think about.

I know about Sarah, Zoe Brook had said. Which meant he hadn’t stopped thinking about it, no matter how little he wanted that.

“Stop texting me.” Hunter grunted into his cell phone when Austin answered—profanely, as expected. “You’re like a fourteen-year-old girl. I’m busy.”

“Busy doing what, playing hard to get?” Austin let out a short laugh. “Because last I checked, you don’t have a job.”

“I have shit to do. Didn’t realize I had to clear my schedule through a social secretary.”

“You’re sitting in your lonely bachelor pad, all by yourself, weeping over your glory days on ESPN On Demand,” Austin said disparagingly. “Aren’t you?”

Ouch. “I’ll repeat—stop texting me. When I’m tired of my glory days, you’ll be the first to know.”

“News flash, douchebag, this isn’t even about you. It was never about you.”

“Then you have even less reason to harass me.”

“Of course your reaction is to disappear.” Austin sounded exasperated. “Why am I surprised? Why did I think this time would be any different?”

“Because you’re such a giddy optimist?”

“This is what you do,” Austin said, as if he hadn’t heard Hunter’s sarcasm. “You did it ten years ago, you’re doing it now.”

“This conversation is reminding me why I don’t do girlfriends. Should we talk about where our relationship is heading? Do you feel fat? Are you going to tell me about your hurt feelings next?”

“I think you exhibited your feelings all over the football field, and the tabloids, for the past ten years,” Austin retorted. “All while keeping as far away from this cesspool as you could.”

Hunter didn’t say anything, because it was true. After Sarah’s death, he’d bailed. He’d moved out of the apartment he’d shared with Austin and Alex in New York, without a word. He’d gotten himself transferred to Dallas by the start of the next season, and he’d never had any intention of coming back to New York. Or to these old friendships that had once been more important to him than his own family.

“Do you have something in particular you wanted to talk about, Austin?” he asked now, scrubbing his face with one hand. “Or did you just want to reach out and sweet talk me? I appreciate it, I do, but next time, no need to call. Flowers would be fine. Don’t really like roses, though.”

“Is this what happens to you if you’re not playing football? Stop talking about flowers.”

“Tulips would do. I also like stargazer lilies. And the occasional hydrangea.”

He had no idea what he was talking about. But he was also smirking into the darkness all around him, which felt like an improvement. It reminded him of those long-ago days when he would have called Austin a brother.

“Did you get hit on the head today?” Austin asked. “Harder than usual, I mean?”

It only made Hunter want to talk about, say, shrubbery. Lawn ornaments. The little-known joys of vegetable gardens. He restrained himself, barely.

“I get it,” Austin said with a familiar edge in his voice, when moments ticked by and Hunter remained silent. He’d sounded much the same the last time Hunter had seen him, in some swanky bar or another, where Hunter had pretended he was the kind of man who cared about...anything. “This is the part where you hide in plain sight, right? Pretend you’re not involved? Just like you did back then?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hunter lied, and it was impossible to imagine he’d been making jokes about flowers only moments before. As if he and Austin were still close. He needed to remember that he’d lost everything the night they’d lost Sarah. Every single thing he’d ever thought was important. “I’m right here. Having this phone call, when usually, that number of stalkery texts leads straight to a court order.”

“I don’t know why I’m surprised. Is there anyone in your life you haven’t let down, Hunter? Anyone at all?”

He thought of his deeply appalled parents, who had never understood his desire to play football, much less his penchant for public scandals involving his notably bad temper and far worse decisions. His brother JP, the mogul in the making, who only shook his head at Hunter’s antics, but certainly didn’t depend on Hunter for anything. Even his younger sister, Nora, who had once looked at him with all that hero worship in her eyes, had spent all of their traditional Grant family Christmas up in Maine sighing heavily every time she’d found herself alone with him. As if his expulsion from football had finally forced even her to see him the way everyone else did.

“You should have sent a bouquet, Austin,” Hunter said now. “Much less drama and disappointment all around.”

Later, he sat in the dark, with only the television for company, and told himself he liked it that way.

He was thirty-three years old and he’d alienated every single person who’d ever meant something to him. Some men earned their lives of quiet desperation, their solitary confinement. An empty house, an abandoned life, another long winter all alone.

Zoe Brook was kidding herself: there was no rehabilitating him. There was no point pretending.

Hunter had never been destined for anything but this.

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