Scandalize Me

A great big fucking success, and what she really hated him for, she thought then, was that he’d made her feel whole and new only to turn around and make it clear that she’d never be anything but broken. It was the truth, but that didn’t make it any easier to bear.

She leaned forward and propped her elbows on the table, as if this was a casual chat among friends.

“Hunter assures me that he was never one of the many johns Jason pandered to and then blackmailed,” Zoe said, almost sweetly. She smiled, and she watched both Alex and Austin closely. “What about you two?”

Chapter Nine

As introductions went, it was explosive, Hunter thought, as she’d no doubt intended.

Zoe sat there so calmly beside him, looking perfectly at ease, as if she discussed prostitution and blackmail and human perversity every night of the week. As if he hadn’t seen the scars of her past alive and bright on her face in his own living room only yesterday. As if it had all happened to someone else.

“My mother is finally divorcing my father,” Austin said, once Zoe looked more convinced than not that he and Alex weren’t monsters. “I’m happy to say I helped her reach that decision and that I’m representing her. If I had my way I’d leave him bloody and beaten on the courtroom floor, but I’ll settle for taking as much of his money as possible.”

“Must we choose?” Zoe asked coolly.

Hunter had never admired anybody more.

“You need to tell this story, Zoe,” Alex told her then, his voice intense. He leaned forward. “The call girls. The blackmail of all those clients. The world needs to know the truth about him.”

“I agree,” Zoe said, collected and cool, as always. “But I can’t do that.”

“You must know that first-person, witness, victim testimony—”

“I was his victim for too long,” she said so smoothly it took a moment to feel the edge in it, the blade. “I won’t do it again.”

It was quiet for a moment, a hush over their table while the rest of the club glittered and murmured all around them. Austin’s expression was even darker than usual, while Alex only studied Zoe, as if looking for a way past that smooth wall of hers. Good luck with that, buddy, Hunter thought, but shifted closer to her, in case he tried.

“I understand where you’re coming from,” Alex began, as if he was choosing each word carefully.

“Do you think so?”

That time her voice was so light, so very nearly buoyant, that it took them all a minute to understand that it was a gut punch. Then to feel it.

“I wish I could impress upon you—” Alex began again.

“Enough.” Hunter didn’t know he meant to speak until he heard his own voice. It was an implacable command, barked out as if he was still the quarterback who expected his orders to be followed immediately.

Alex looked at him, then back at Zoe. He didn’t look happy, but he nodded.

“Why don’t we talk strategy?” Zoe asked, sounding utterly unruffled, but Hunter knew her now. He saw her.

Her pulse betrayed her in that hollow at her neck, the hand she held in her lap—beneath the table where only he could see it—was balled into a tight fist, and the leg she’d crossed over the other was too taut, too stiff.

And Hunter despaired of himself, because even now, even here, he wanted her.

If he was a better man, he wouldn’t, surely. Not now. He would simply protect her the way she should have been protected from the start. If he could, he would have kept her safe from vermin like Jason Treffen in the first place. He would have saved her. Instead, he was part of the problem. He was disgusted with himself.

Zoe was outlining the same plan she’d shared with him, in her usual concise way. Hunter had no doubt that it would work, eventually. He believed she was as good as she said she was. But he didn’t want the slow build, the right word placed delicately in the right ear. He wanted swift, decisive action.

He wanted Jason cut down and cut off. Now.

“It’s not enough,” he said when she was done. Zoe took a breath before she looked at him directly, and her gaze was too dark on his, as if he’d hurt her. But he couldn’t seem to help that, and what he wanted to do would help more, in the end. “It turns into an extended battle for public opinion, possibly allowing him to win.”

“He won’t,” Zoe said, a frosty edge to her voice.