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“I don’t.” It was automatic. And much too fast. “And this isn’t a ploy.”
He considered her. “Or I can just do what I usually do. You’ll huff and puff and call me all kinds of names. Neanderthal, cretin, asshole, whatever.”
“I believe the word you’re looking for is misogynistic.”
“That, too. Not that it’s true. Not that you think it’s true, either, but far be it from me to get in the way of your wishful thinking. We’ll end up in the same place either way.”
His gaze dropped then, tracing over her cheeks, her mouth. Moving lower, and spreading that terrible heat wherever it touched, as potent as if he’d used his hands. The places his fingers had brushed her skin, all along her inner thighs, burned red hot. And made her glad the wide expanse of her desk was between them now.
She realized then that she didn’t know if she’d push him away if he came close again, and that was the most terrifying realization she’d had so far.
“This isn’t ‘huffing and puffing,’ Mr. Grant,” Zoe told him as icily as she could. “The truth is, I don’t find these displays of yours at all attractive.”
Hunter stared at her for a long, dark, infinitely tense and dangerous moment, until there was no pretending her cheeks hadn’t flushed even redder than before, or that he couldn’t see that flagrant evidence right there before him, like a flag.
Showing him what a liar she was.
She was only happy he couldn’t feel that bite of his the way she could, throbbing and kicking at her, telling her a thousand things she didn’t want to know, and all of them a story of her own appalling weakness.
“Yes, Zoe,” he said then, in a mocking little murmur that echoed inside her like a terrible shiver, the ruin of her right there in the gleam of those too-blue eyes, the perilous curve of his mouth. “I think you do.”
* * *
“So you hate him,” her coworker Daniel said later that afternoon, scowling across the office’s snug kitchenette in the wake of Zoe’s ill-advised and bad-tempered little rant on the topic of Hunter and his many image problems. To say nothing of his personal problems. To say nothing of her problems—though she hadn’t mentioned that part. Much less the mark he’d left on her, like evidence. “I hate him, too. The entire world hates him. I believe his own team burned him in effigy at the Super Bowl halftime show. So why, may I ask, are you taking him on as a client?”
You, Zoe noted. Not the we he usually used. Daniel was making a point.
“I don’t like him,” Zoe said carefully, trying—too late—to modify her tone and hide her panic, “but it’s not personal. I just don’t like football.” She let out a small laugh and decided she really didn’t need coffee after all. “That’s not even true, technically—I don’t know anything about football.” Except that her grandfather had treated it like his religion, had made the entire house his place of worship—and woe betide anyone who diverted his attention from his television screen, at any point during the endless football season. “I’ve managed to make my entire adult life a sports-free zone, in fact.”
“Do we need this kind of challenge?” Daniel asked, tightly. His gaze was filled with accusation and temper. “Did you come up with a new mission statement? Take the most reprehensible human beings around and see if you can make them soft and cuddly and suitable for public consumption?”
“He has a temper and some impulse-control issues,” Zoe replied, furious that Daniel was goading her into defending Hunter Grant. Even more furious that she was actually doing it. “He got fired from his job because of some anger-management issues. That makes him slightly less reprehensible than, say, child molesters? Terrorists? Don’t you think?”
Daniel only stared at her, a mulish set to his jaw, a light she didn’t want to acknowledge in his gaze.
“Problem?” she asked. As mildly as she could.
“I don’t like the way he looks at you,” Daniel said. Too fast, as if he’d been wanting to say it since he’d dropped in to discuss a few campaign logistics with the two of them in Zoe’s office earlier. While Zoe had sat there pretending to be professional with a freaking hickey on her thigh and Hunter had done nothing but smirk. “And I really don’t like the fact you don’t seem to mind the way he looks at you.”
This was her fault. She’d walked right into this, and Zoe bit back a sigh as he glared at her, slipping her right hand up to her opposite shoulder and squeezing hard against the tension there that made her neck feel as unyielding as rebar. Daniel had been her first hire when she’d started her own company four years ago, an easy choice to make after knowing him since her earliest days in PR.
