“You should think about livening it up a bit,” she continued when he didn’t speak. “Nothing too crazy, mind you. Maybe a single, solitary painting to relieve the hospital-meets-serial-killer atmosphere you have going on?”
She looked over at Hunter then, and her heart kicked at her, then started to gallop in her chest.
He still didn’t speak. He only watched her, his blue eyes darker than they should have been, darker than was possible, gleaming so brightly she nearly forgot the lack of color everywhere else. He shrugged out of his coat, letting it drop where he stood, though it didn’t strike her as carelessness. It struck her as intention.
He didn’t move that electric blue gaze from her. She wasn’t sure he so much as blinked.
It was unnerving.
It moved over her, inside her, like a blast of near-painful heat.
“Or perhaps that’s what you like,” she said, as if nothing about him got beneath her skin. As if she was utterly unmoved as she stood there, her hands on her hips and her head at an arrogant tilt, staring back at him. As if this wasn’t a skirmish that she absolutely had to win, no matter what it took from her. “Do you like to play doctor, Hunter? Is that what this is? A little operating-room style to make you feel sexy?”
His sculpted lips moved then into something far too intense to be a smile, and she fought off a shiver, remembering how they felt against hers. She thought he might say something, but he merely indicated the spiral staircase nearest her with a peremptory jerk of that iron jaw of his.
“I thought you’d never shut up in that bar,” she continued coolly, aware she was poking at him, trying to shatter the tension that had her in its grip before it ripped her in two. “And now you’ve gone completely silent? I don’t know whether to be amused or alarmed.”
“Either one works for me.”
It was a starkly male rasp of sound, scraping against her skin, insinuating itself into her blood, the very beat of her heart. The air in the cavernous apartment thinned. Then blistered.
So did she.
Zoe decided there was nothing to do but keep playing her part, and hope it would work. Because it had to work.
Because there was absolutely no way she could risk herself like this again.
She crossed the room slowly, making sure her hips rolled, making sure she used every part of her body as she moved.
An invitation. A challenge. The perfect male fantasy.
Sensual and powerful at once, the way she wanted this to be—the way she wanted to be. She watched his blue eyes narrow, watched the skin pull taut over his inhumanly beautiful cheekbones.
Desire. Need.
She told herself it didn’t matter how dry her throat was, or that the wild galloping beat in her chest set her on the razor’s edge of panic. It didn’t matter that she could feel the way he looked at her in the wet heat between her legs, in the wild flush that suffused her skin, in the aching stiffness of her nipples, in every ragged-edged breath she tried to keep him from hearing. What mattered was that she make Hunter lose his control.
She could do this. She could.
His eyes were too bright on hers, his gaze too hard, and once again, he saw things he shouldn’t. “Change your mind?”
Zoe made herself laugh, told herself the butterflies in her stomach were nothing more or less than nerves. He might have made her feel something in her office that day, in the bar during that wild kiss, in all the strange moments they’d spent together in these odd winter weeks, but that would pass. And then there would simply be getting through the night intact, so she could take charge of him again, of this, of the revenge plot she’d started hatching since before she’d escaped from Treffen, Smith, and Howell.
“Did you?” she shot back.
“That’s not going to happen,” he said, and then that smile of his went feral.
He nodded toward the stairs again. Zoe fought to keep from shaking, at least where he might see it, and forced herself to turn toward the metal spiral that rose elegantly from this floor all the way up to the top of the three levels.
Calm and easy, she chanted at herself. Be casual, yet in control. As if you do this all the time. Or at all.
Zoe climbed his stairs slowly, aware of him behind her the moment she began, like a wall of heat. A scalding furnace of male fire—and he wasn’t even touching her. She hoped he couldn’t see the shiver of gooseflesh that rose on her arms, her neck—but she heard him make the slightest, smallest sound, deep and low and satisfied, and she knew that he had.
He knew. Men like him always knew. It was what made him a predator, the kind she could feel deep in her bones, like an ache from within, as if he was using her against herself.