Scandalize Me

“I don’t respond well to baseball metaphors. It’s a football thing. Jets, Sharks. You know how it is.”

“Let’s try it again, shall we? Ten o’clock on Thursday. Don’t make me come after you again.”

“Or what?” he asked drily. “We’ll both get naked and wet?”

A group of women walked by then, chatting idly while wrapped in towels from the locker room and completely unaware that they were interrupting something electric. Their conversation cut off abruptly when they saw Hunter lounging in the hot tub, then exploded into a frenzy of giggles when he smiled at them.

They giggled louder, then disappeared into the sauna, where there was a sudden burst of high-pitched squealing as the door swung closed.

“I think they recognized me,” he said.

“Well,” Zoe said, in that prickly way of hers that made him grin. “You’re certainly recognizable.”

He stood then, stretching his arms over his head and letting the hot water course over him, entirely too amused by the way her eyes widened at the sight of his naked torso, then dropped to the board shorts that were plastered to his thighs. He felt the way she swallowed, hard. Her blue-gray eyes traced over his skin, in a manner he was sure left fingerprints behind.

He wanted her even more than he remembered he had in that strip club, where she’d stood out like a beacon and made him forget himself. He wanted to taste the elegant line of her neck, see what lay beneath those beautiful clothes. He wanted to see where that flush in her cheeks led, if it moved over the rest of her smooth skin and turned it that pretty blush color.

God, the ways he wanted her. Here, now. Anywhere.

“Why don’t we have this meeting of yours right now?” he asked, watching her narrowly. Willing her to close the distance between them, so he could touch her again. Feel that fire. She made him imagine he was alive again, and as much as he disliked what came along with that, he still found he liked the burn. “You’ve gone to the trouble to track me down in my gym in the middle of the night. You have my full attention.”

But there were ghosts in her eyes when she dragged them back to his.

“Not yet,” she said softly. Deliberately. “But I will. Ten o’clock on Thursday, Mr. Grant.”

“Will I hear about this plan of yours?” he asked, somewhere between dry and amused, and his body didn’t care which, it just wanted her. Particularly when she let out that laugh. “Or will you continue to drop vague hints and not-so-veiled threats?”

“Keep your appointment,” she suggested.

“I like your style,” he said, swinging his leg over the side of the tub and climbing out, watching her eyes widen slightly before she controlled it. “Intrigue and drama over an appointment I didn’t make and don’t want. I appreciate the effort, Ms. Brook. I do.”

“Just think how appreciative you’ll be on Thursday,” she said with a smile that made him think of sweet cream and oversatisfied cats.

Hunter picked up his towel and swiped it over his face, and when he lowered it, she was gone. That shouldn’t have surprised him. Or made him laugh enough to hear the echo of it from the tile around him, reminding him of a man he barely recognized that had once been him.

He got dressed quickly in the locker room, and then he started making some calls. He might have been a pariah, but that didn’t mean he was any less famous. People still took his calls—even in the middle of the night.

Zoe Brook was the best, he found—just as she’d claimed. She could solve any image problem, make any kind of piggish behavior into a festival of silk purses, all without seeming to break a sweat. She was the real deal.

“The only trouble,” Zair al Ruyi, his friend and the fourth roommate from their early Harvard days, told him from Washington, D.C., where he was currently serving as ambassador to the United States from his far-off, oil-rich sultanate, “is that she might very well chew you up and spit you out while she’s saving you from the jaws of the lion. It’s her specialty.”

“Luckily,” Hunter said, “I make a pretty thin meal. Not much left to chew on.”

Zair, keeper of his own dark secrets and certainly no stranger to trouble, diplomatic immunity or no, laughed.

“She can solve any problem. Even one of yours.”

“And you know this from personal experience?” Hunter asked, cradling his phone between his head and his shoulder as he walked out into the cold night. “Please tell me that for the first time in our entire history, you plan to share.”