Scandalize Me

“I wouldn’t brag that you kiss the girls and make them cry, Mr. Grant,” she replied at once, the only person he’d ever met who was so cheerfully immune to him. He told himself the way that made him feel—that jostling inside him, scraping at him from the inside out—was happy. Perfectly fucking happy. “There are words for men like that, and some of those words come with jail time.”

“Are we going to sit here all day?” he growled.

She only laughed and started to open her door, leaving Hunter to jerk his attention away from her smart-ass mouth and heave himself out of the low-slung car before he did yet another thing he’d regret.

Zoe exited with far more grace, seeming wholly unperturbed by the fact her jet black boots sported high, wicked heels and the parking lot beneath them was more ice than asphalt. And then she sauntered toward him. There was no other word for it. She was a menace, he was hard, and he was deeply and utterly disgusted with this whole situation. With himself.

Was this really an improvement over numb?

“Why do you great big men insist on driving these tiny little cars?” she asked. He was coming apart at the seams while this infuriating woman was chatting as if she was at a boring cocktail party and she’d decided to grit her teeth and be polite to him. “You practically have to lie down to get in it. Surely with all the money you have at your disposal you could find a sports car that you actually fit in.”

“I like fast cars,” he said. “And the faster they are, the smaller they are. It’s simple aerodynamics.”

In a minute he’d be beating his chest like an ape. Or doing exactly what he wanted to do, what he’d effectively warned her he might do, which was drag her off to the nearest cave with his hands sunk deep into that glossy swing of her dark hair.

And then. And then.

But she was laughing at him. Arch. Aloof. And still he wanted her.

“Just follow me, please,” she said with all of that infuriating calm. “And try not to trip over anything while you’re busy looking down your nose at how the simple folk live.”

“Can you really just...walk in?” he asked when she threw open the heavy door to the school and ushered him through it with an incline of her pretty head. “Shouldn’t there be guards or something?”

“This isn’t the kind of place where the community rallies around and demands security measures at the high school,” she said, her tone slightly more icy than before. “It’s more the kind of place where meth use is on the rise, everyone drinks their considerable troubles away in the depressing local bars, and the only thing you can possibly do to survive is get out. But then, very few people manage to do that.”

“Thank you so much for bringing me here,” he said, not even trying to contain his irritation. “Nothing I enjoy more than—”

“This is where Sarah came from,” Zoe said, her voice like a knife through the quiet hallway. Hunter thought he turned to stone, or maybe he only wished he had. Zoe’s cool gaze searched his, and there was a kind of dark heat there he didn’t recognize—but she blinked it away. Then treated him to that edgy, demanding smile. “This is the high school she went to. She was valedictorian that year. That’s how she got into Harvard. Did you know that?”

He knew parts of it. But there was a terrible foreboding gripping him then, like a hard hand on his throat, and he didn’t want to have this conversation. He didn’t want any part of this. He didn’t want to know more than he already did.

“No,” he said. “I didn’t.” Because that was close enough to the truth.

“How long were you two together?”

“You could at least try to keep the judgment out of your tone.”

She laughed, a hollow sound. “That was me trying.”

“Try harder,” he suggested. He eyed her for a minute. “Or find a different ghost to keep throwing in my face.” He didn’t understand the multitude of shadows he saw cross her face then. He didn’t want to understand, much as he didn’t want to ask the next question. But he did. “Are you going to tell me how you knew her?”

Zoe didn’t answer, and the coward in him was relieved. She started walking and he wanted to leave, there and then. He wanted nothing to do with this sharp, edgy woman who hid her softness so deep, much less those dark things he’d seen in her storm-tossed eyes. Nothing about her—nothing about this—would lead him back to numbness, and that was the only thing he knew how to do. The only thing he wanted.