Scandalize Me

“He might. Why allow the possibility?”

“Because in addition to all your other well-documented skills, you’re now an expert on PR?” she asked in that sharp tone that he found he still loved, even when it lacerated him. “Oh, no. Wait. That’s me.”

“I keep telling you, it takes a tremendous amount of skill to climb to the many heights I have and fall straight down from each and every one of them.”

“Keep calling it a skill if that makes you feel better.”

“You don’t know Jason as well as we do,” he said, trying to pull the others back into the conversation, aware that they were watching the interchange between him and Zoe a little too closely for his liking.

“And you don’t know him the way I do,” she said, fierce and hollow at once.

Hunter inclined his head, conceding the point.

“But wrecking his reputation isn’t enough. He’s already lost his family, thanks to Austin. Alex is plotting his downfall in the media. There’s something better you and I can do. That only we can do.”

She shifted so she could really look at him then, and Hunter forgot where they were. Who was sitting with them, watching all of this. But he didn’t care. Not when there was a storm in those dark gray eyes of hers, seeing things in him he’d never been able to hide. Not from her.

“This from the man I found in a strip club,” she said softly. Harshly. A kill shot, he understood. “Who wanted to do absolutely nothing but marinate in his own self-pity for the rest of his life.”

Austin laughed. Alex winced. And Hunter was obviously as slow as he sometimes acted, because it was only then he realized that she was very, very angry with him.

Hunter made himself breathe in slow, then let it out slower. As if he was back on the football field. He blocked everything else out. The blow she’d just delivered with such deliberate precision. That awful, betrayed look in her eyes. The noise from the bar around them, the clinking of expensive glasses and the muffled sounds of Manhattan high life on all sides. He shunted it all aside and focused solely on the goal: Jason Treffen.

“Do you want to win this argument or do you want your revenge?” he asked her, straight and simple. “Because you have to choose.”

He watched her bite something back, then blink, as if maybe she’d forgotten where they were too. That fist, tucked away in her lap, tensed.

Later, he promised her silently. He’d deal with this later, whatever this was. When they didn’t have an audience. When he could dig in a little bit and see what was happening in the middle of that winter storm he could see raging inside her. When he could figure out a way to kiss her again without being one more thing she had to recover from. Her lips flattened into a line, but she didn’t argue further.

“I like it,” Alex said when Hunter laid out his plan in all its quick and dirty simplicity. But they all looked at Zoe.

Who made them wait, of course. One beat, then another. That fist clenched hard, then she released it and folded both hands before her on the table.

“That might work,” she said.

Grudgingly, Hunter thought, but she said it.

“It will work,” Austin said with a short, bitter laugh. “Good job. He won’t see it coming.”

“I’m banking on it,” Hunter said. “That and the fact his vanity won’t allow any other outcome.”

“Which puts him right where I want him.” Alex grinned.

He met Hunter’s gaze, and for the first time in years, Hunter didn’t look away first. He didn’t change the subject, crack a joke, put on his Hunter Talbot Grant III act and play the clown. He didn’t pretend this man didn’t know him—the real him he’d only just begun to understand he’d buried with Sarah.

Alex’s grin broadened.

“I remember this Hunter,” he said quietly, and then he reached over and clinked his glass against Hunter’s. He looked at Zoe as if he had her to thank, then back toward Hunter as though they’d never been anything but close. “I like this Hunter. Welcome back.”

* * *

He caught up with her at the corner outside, where Zoe was forging straight on through the intersection toward union   Square as if she couldn’t get away from him fast enough.

“Are you running away from me?” Hunter demanded, forgetting that he was trying not to upset her. The look she threw at him assured him that she wasn’t making any such attempts.

“I am walking, not running,” she said icily. “To a northbound avenue, where I will hail a taxi. Then I will instruct it to drive the hell away from you.”