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There was always a price.
But for a little while, with his mouth like a searing, addicting flame against hers, she pretended otherwise. She pretended she didn’t know better. She pretended there was nothing at all but him. This kiss. This frantic heat, the way she rocked against him and made them both sigh. The fire that shouldn’t have existed in the first place.
Nothing at all but him.
God help her, but she couldn’t seem to stop.
“Your place,” she said then, tearing her mouth from his.
He blinked up at her, his hands gripping her bottom, holding her in a way that might get them arrested should a staff member stick his or her head through the gauzy curtains of their little nook.
“What?” His voice was thick.
“You want to fuck me, don’t you?” Her throat was harsh with all that longing, and her determination to keep from sobbing out her need.
She could control this. She would control this.
He blinked, and his clear eyes became unreadable again. “Is that a trick question?”
“I’d prefer not to attract the attention of local law enforcement,” she said coolly, moving back and up in a single sleek movement. She held his gaze as she smoothed her dress back into place. “So. Your place?”
It was only sex. And it was the only way she was going to break this spell.
She couldn’t risk letting him chase her any further. He was too intuitive, shockingly. He saw too much. She had to stop being surprised by that, and start taking the appropriate steps to counter it.
All she had to do was let him catch her. He’d be bored before he pulled out, the way he always was with all his little starlets and models-slash-actresses the tabloids tallied up each year, and this taut little dance of theirs would be over.
She could hide again—and stay hidden. And then she could use him the way she’d planned she would, to help take Jason Treffen down, with none of this extraneous heat.
All she had to do was survive the night.
“Well?” she asked. It was a taunt. A dare. “Don’t tell me, after all this, that you’re nothing but a tease. I’ll be devastated.”
“Oh,” he said softly, a hint of sensual menace in his tone, “I’m not a tease.”
“Is this not romantic enough for you?” She smirked at him. “Do you need a card? Some flowers?”
She didn’t understand that smile he gave her then, heart-stopping and intense. Just as she didn’t understand the way her breath caught when he stood.
“It never hurts,” he said, his voice low, as if he was talking about something else. As if this was a line or two of poetry and he was reciting it to win her favor. “I enjoy gardenias. And the occasional sunflower, but only in moderation. They’re so gaudy.”
The way he looked at her then, at her breasts and her belly, at her legs and then back again, hurt. It all hurt. She felt raw. Undone.
But she knew she had to do this.
So when he extended his hand with an oddly taut sort of look in his eyes and a kind of fierceness in his expression as he looked down at her, as if he was holding himself back from taking her right there where they stood, Zoe told herself this was the only way—it was—and took it.
* * *
She strode into Hunter’s immense apartment, staring imperiously around her as if she wasn’t the least bit impressed by its three vast levels so high above Wall Street, its spiral stairs, stunningly high white walls and dizzying views showing lower Manhattan in every direction.
Zoe stopped in the middle of the sunken, sterile living space, pivoting around in a circle as she unbuttoned the dramatic, thickly lined cape she’d worn against the winter cold. She eyed the gargantuan television set flat against one wall, the crisp corners of the scrupulously modern sectional that could have seated Hunter’s entire previous football team, and the total lack of anything even hinting at Hunter’s personality.
No photographs. No books. No art to relieve the white sheen of the walls. Not even the collection of trophies and sports memorabilia she would have imagined must be ubiquitous for a man with his résumé. No pulse. A robot could have lived here. Maybe this was who Hunter really was, she told herself: empty and barren. Nothing more than a very expensive, very chilly shell.
She didn’t know why everything inside her rebelled at the thought—but it was time to lock such unhelpful thoughts away and do what she must.
“It looks like you live in a morgue,” she said, tossing her cape onto the sofa with flourish. Her dark, inky blue cape was the only splash of color in the entire, sprawling penthouse, and it made her feel edgy. Some kind of restless, as if that simple fact—as if all of this—held meaning she was afraid to look at too closely.
