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Moments ticked by, and Hunter didn’t do any of the usual, expected things. He didn’t scoff. He didn’t argue. He didn’t bluster or recoil or toss insults at her head.
He simply...watched her. Studied her. Making her realize, with his intent silence, that she underestimated this man at her peril. It was unnerving. She was beginning to think he was unnerving, and she didn’t understand how he’d managed to convince the world that he was nothing but a jock—
And then he smiled, shattering the moment and making her heart flip inside her chest.
“Okay,” he said.
She was so shaken she almost stammered out her reply, and she never would have forgiven herself if she had. She sucked in a breath, fighting for control. What the hell was happening to her? What was next—tears? A child’s screaming fit on the floor? She could suddenly see the appeal of both.
“I don’t understand what that means,” she said, when she could speak calmly.
“It means...okay.”
What was that dark, hungry thing in his gaze that she could feel burrowing into her, making her edgy and something like nervous, with that clenching feeling low in her belly? What was this? By this point, any other man she’d ever had pursue her like this would have veered off into a temper tantrum—proving once and for all that what they wanted was her surrender, however they could get it.
Not her. Never her. Just the power rush of having her submit to them, one way or another.
She didn’t understand Hunter at all. It made her nervous, down deep into parts of her she’d assumed nothing could ever touch, all those dark and hidden pockets she’d thought she’d walled off and locked away for good.
“‘Okay?’” she echoed. “Are you really telling me that you, Hunter Talbot Grant III, the John McEnroe of football and the most loathed celebrity of our time, secretly harbor submissive fantasies? You—the very poster boy for chest-beating, alpha-male assholes?”
He grinned, wolfish again, every inch of him a dangerous predator, too hot and too hungry, and if she hadn’t had both her feet firmly on the floor, Zoe would have sworn her whole office was spinning all around her in jagged, drunken loops.
“Sure,” he said, with that cocky twist to his lips and a conquering gleam in his bright blue gaze. “I don’t like labels, Ms. Brook. I like to win. Does that make me submissive?”
She’d never seen a less submissive creature in her entire life.
There was no way this man—who oozed Neanderthal from his very pores, who had made a spectacle of himself and his inability to be told what to do, ever, by anyone, even when it was his job to do what his coaches told him—was capable of even the pretense of surrender.
He thought this was a game. He thought everything was a game. But that didn’t mean he’d win.
“Fine, then.” She felt the clamor in her chest, the pulse of all that heat below, but focused instead on calling his bluff, because that was all that mattered. “Then what are you waiting for? The office door is closed. Your secret’s safe with me. By all means, be beta.”
He only watched her, still and focused, wildly male and intensely demanding without saying a word. He didn’t have to speak. He emanated command and iron control from every single one of those perfectly hewn, mouthwateringly smooth muscles. From his beautiful eyes, his tough jaw. Even the way he stood there before her, formidably appealing and still too close, whispered to that tender, feminine place inside her she thought Jason Treffen had killed off years ago.
Hunter made her feel soft, and that was unforgivable.
So she snapped her fingers and pointed at the floor.
“Be a good boy, Hunter. Crawl.”
And the way he laughed then was like a lit match to a flood of gasoline, catapulting them both into a raging inferno Zoe worried—with a desperate surge of panic—would consume them both right then and there. It rolled through her, touching every part of her with flame and wonder and a kind of fear. It made her shiver. It made her want to call this off before it got any worse—
But she didn’t move. She didn’t speak. She couldn’t back down. She couldn’t let him see her consider it.
Hunter inclined his head slightly, almost regally, holding her gaze with his.
Knowing. Demanding.
Pure male challenge cloaked in all that searing blue.
“Ask and you shall receive,” he said in a voice that went straight to her head, and between her legs, and was about as far from submissive as it was possible to be.
