Scandalize Me

But she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t make herself do it any longer, and while she knew what that made her, she couldn’t seem to stop this.

“I wasn’t aware you were attending this gala,” Hunter said after a moment, when it was clear she wasn’t going to say anything to him. His gaze was blue and knowing and it almost took her down to her knees. She almost let it. “Do you know my sister? Nora, this is Zoe Brook. She manages my PR.”

Zoe smiled, shook hands with his pretty, innocent sister, who had no idea who she was touching, and wanted to die.

“Can I talk to you?” she asked him, with an urgency she wasn’t sure she managed to conceal.

Hunter arched a brow. “Here? But the dancing’s just started, and I wouldn’t want to abandon my sister to all these vultures.”

He was teasing her, she thought. This was ripping her apart where she stood, this was harder than she’d imagined anything could be, and he was teasing her.

“Leave Nora to me,” Zair said with a certain dark gallantry that would have piqued Zoe’s interest, had she been capable of such things at a moment like this.

“Nora is a fully functioning human being, thank you,” Nora herself interjected, but Zoe couldn’t tear her eyes away from Hunter, and he only laughed.

And then it was a blur. He led her across the great room, dodging all the people who wanted to stop him to say a few words, smiling and laughing as if he was having the time of his life—

Until he ushered her through a door into a smaller gallery, blocked off from the main event with canvases stacked three-deep against the wall.

And when he looked at her then, she saw he wasn’t happy or carefree at all.

The blue in his eyes burned her. His mouth was in that flat, hurt line she remembered much too well, and he looked at her as if the things he wanted to say to her were fighting to get out.

But he didn’t say a word. He waited.

“You seem to spend a lot of time with your sister these days,” she said in a panic, because she didn’t know how to do this.

“Someone once pointed out to me that she is, in fact, fairly impressive for a twenty-four-year-old.”

Then he continued to do nothing at all but watch her.

He looked too good. He looked like Hunter. He wore a sleek dark suit tonight, and oozed power. And safety. And the look he was giving her made her heart thud too hard inside her.

And he deserved so much better and she wasn’t sure she cared.

“You paid the firm for our—for Daniel’s services,” she said.

“Is that why you’re here? To discuss accounting?”

“I told you it was pro bono,” she gritted out.

“I pay my bills, Zoe. Always. You can take that as a meaningful metaphor if you like.”

She thought he might say something else then, but he still merely stood there, big and forbidding. Waiting. He shoved his hands in the pockets of his trousers and his blue eyes bored into her, and she knew she had to do this.

Before she talked herself out of it. Before she lost her nerve.

It was the most selfish act of her life, and he was looking at her as if he knew it, and she understood that if she was any kind of good person or ever wanted to be, if she cared about him at all, she would turn around and leave him. That doing that before had been the right thing to do. She knew it.

But she couldn’t bring herself to move.

“Hunter,” she whispered, trembling as if she was freezing cold and more scared than she’d ever been in her life, “I think I’ve made a terrible mistake.”

He didn’t crack. He didn’t even bend.

“You think or you know? And which mistake are we talking about, Zoe? I’ll need specifics.”

* * *

She shook as if he’d hit her, and Hunter wanted nothing more than to go to her. To pull her close, feel the press of her against him, assure himself she was real and here, safe instead of standing in front of him with all of that fear so stark and clear on her pretty face, as if she was terrified of him.

Of this, he figured, and he couldn’t make it easy on her. He couldn’t help her. She had to do it herself.

“This isn’t easy,” she whispered.

His brave, beautiful Zoe, with nightmares in her eyes.

“Tell me one thing that is,” he said as if he didn’t give a shit. “One thing that matters that’s even a little bit easy.”

“Does this matter?” she asked, and the vulnerability in her voice then almost made him relent—but he couldn’t do it.