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.