Scandalize Me

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.

Chapter Three

“Is this why you missed another appointment, Mr. Grant, or is this just a little bit of wallowing on a weekday night? Self-indulgence, perhaps? I hate to mention it, but it looks like self-pity.”

For a moment, Hunter thought he was dreaming that sharp, amused voice that could belong to only one person. But he wasn’t asleep. He’d driven himself crazy on his couch for a while after speaking to Austin, and had then taken himself off to his extraordinarily expensive health club to sweat it out on the treadmill. Mile after brutal mile, until his legs felt shaky and weak. And then he’d sat in the whirlpool tub with the jets on high, pretending his mind was perfectly fucking clear.

Zoe Brook stood there when he opened his eyes, much like one of the many apparitions he hadn’t been thinking about. She wore another impressively sleek dress today, this one in a gunmetal gray that skimmed over her lean curves and made his mouth go dry, with a long and complicated sweater over it. Her lips were red, her eyes were cool, and there was no reason at all she should be looking at him like that at eleven o’clock at night.

“I think this confirms that you’re stalking me,” he said, instead of all the other things he wanted to say. “Do I need to call security?”

“This isn’t stalking. This is persistence. I can understand why you’d be unfamiliar with the concept.”

“Tomayto, tomahto,” he murmured.

She smiled that wicked smile of hers, and he was glad the bubbles concealed the most unruly part of him from view. He stretched his arms out along the sides of the hot tub and smiled back.

Suddenly, he was wide awake. Clearheaded, even. At last. More focused than he’d been in years.

“I know you couldn’t possibly have missed your appointment today on purpose,” she said, in a bright and easy way at complete odds with the shrewd look she was giving him. “But I’m afraid that’s two strikes.”