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Which was a good thing, because Hunter was enough to worry about. Even—especially—when he was “behaving.”
Zoe had spent a lot of time researching what the tabloids called The Hunter Effect. Now she got to watch it in action as he unleashed it in a relatively restrained way on the Manhattan social circuit, exactly as she’d planned.
“Must you smile like that at every woman who looks at you?” Zoe asked impatiently as she tried to keep from rolling her eyes at the logjam of admirers who all but cooed at him as he swaggered by in white tie at the annual Viennese Opera Ball to benefit Carnegie Hall, held in the distinctly elegant Waldorf Astoria. In a sea of resplendent creatures, he seemed to glow that little bit brighter—his notoriety be damned.
“That’s how I smile, Zoe.”
“You have several DEFCON levels of a smile and if you don’t downgrade to a more manageable one right now, you’ll cause a riot.”
“I like riots.”
“What a surprise. But we’re going for restrained and under-the-radar elegance tonight, not a brawl. I know it’s a stretch.”
Hunter turned that riotous smile on her, then. It was a bone-melting, slumberous affair. Lazy blue eyes, that curve of his confident mouth, and that stunning physique dressed so beautifully it nearly made the photographers weep as they took his picture again and again. Zoe pretended that what shook inside her, hard and long, was simple hunger. She’d missed dinner.
“Put it away,” she told him, and then let out a long-suffering sigh, as if he bored her.
She wished he did. More every day.
But even when he wasn’t smiling so seductively, he was formidable. A force of personality and presence and, much as it pained her to admit it, breathtaking to watch in action. Zoe dragged him to a hospital to minister to terminal patients, where he spent two solid hours reading to a pair of little boys who gazed at him as if he hung a new moon with every word. She took him to a lunch to benefit libraries, where he so thoroughly charmed the dour, otherwise matronly librarians in question that he made them all blush and then giggle as those girls had in his gym that night when he’d been wearing much less.
“He’s a bad, bad man,” one of them told Zoe in an undertone, fanning herself theatrically.
“That is the literal truth,” Zoe replied testily. She smiled, hoping that might play off her unprofessional show of pique, but the the other woman only laughed.
“It’s that sparkle in his eyes,” the librarian confided. “Like he wants you to be in on the joke. How can you help but forgive him everything?”
How indeed?
It raised the question: How had he managed to turn the entire country against him? Because the more time Zoe spent with him, the more she understood that his terrible reputation, his tantrums and his scandals, must all have been deliberate.
She even said as much on a snowy afternoon in Prospect Park out in Brooklyn, where Hunter “happened by” to build snowmen with a particularly photogenic group of schoolchildren.
“You can charm anyone you meet without even trying,” she said flatly as they trudged back across the field, their boots crunching into the icy layer hidden beneath the fluffy new snow. “So why go to all the trouble to become so universally hated?”
“Total commitment,” he said at once in that smirky way of his. “That’s how I roll.”
“I’m serious.”
He wore a fleece hat tugged low on his forehead and a scarf pulled high around his neck, and that still failed to soften the impact of his bright gaze. It seared into her, warming her up from within, making her forget the cold, the snow, the long walk. Making her forget for a long, dizzying moment that she needed to keep this fire contained or it might destroy what was left of her.
Reminding her that so much of what she saw was an act and this Hunter, of the direct blue gaze and that surprisingly somber cast to his mouth, was more likely the real one.
God help her.
“A better question would be, given that I am so despised, how do you think these sappy photo ops of me in obviously staged poses with a hundred rosy-cheeked little cherubs is going to play?” he asked.
“Accidentally,” she replied, and told herself she wasn’t unnerved by all that sudden focus.
“I don’t know what that means.”
“You will. The good news is that I know exactly what it means.”
He looked at her again, long and deep, and she wondered why she didn’t incinerate on the spot, and who cared how cold it was? She thought for a moment he might say something else, and she braced herself. She didn’t know why. There was something about the dark scrape of naked tree branches behind him, the gray sky above, the snow falling all around him like a message. Like something she didn’t want to examine too closely. But he only shoved his hands into the pockets of his coat, bent his head against the wind and kept walking.
