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“Keep walking,” he said, “and I’ll prove any number of things.”
She believed him.
Zoe turned away, panic mixing with that terrible excitement inside her.
She started up the stairs again, but something had changed. Everything felt brittle, now. Taut. Fragile. Or she did. She ignored it all resolutely, gritting her teeth and peeling her dress down as she climbed. Inch by inch she took it off, slowly revealing herself to him as she took the last curve of the spiral that delivered her directly into the master bedroom that sprawled across the entire top level of the penthouse.
Where she couldn’t help herself. She stopped dead.
It was like a chapel. The room was three sides glass and a huge steeple of even more glass above, arching up high over the dark wood floors and the central altar at the heart of it: his bed. It sat on a black dais raised a farther three wide steps up from the floor, massive and commanding, sleek and somehow primitively masculine all at once.
There was nothing else. There was only that carnal bed and the crisp winter night on all sides, just there on the other side of the glass, making her feel almost as if she had vertigo—as if she’d tipped over the side of the world and was free-falling straight out into the sky.
Zoe thought wildly of cavemen and their pallets, wolves and their dens, as if Hunter really had dragged her off by her hair to this place, where the only color at all was on that bed, a pile of rich browns and deep reds that made her think of furs. Of sex and unwavering, irrevocable possession. Of the kind of brands that didn’t mark the skin, but left scars all the same. Of a thousand things she shouldn’t—didn’t—want.
Of course she didn’t.
But deep inside her, she felt shivery and too hot, a trembling and a liquid kind of weakness. The urge—the need—to simply spread herself out before him like a sacrifice to whatever ancient, unknowable deity it was who commanded this stark room, who understood the things that moved in her. That yearning to surrender and the longing to let go, to submit to whatever he might do to her however he might do it because she’d like it, too. That unprecedented desire to give in, at last, as if that meant safety instead of unbearable risk.
She wasn’t afraid of him, she realized in a blinding flash of painful, shocking insight. She was afraid of herself. She was terrified of the things she wanted, that she’d never known she could want until right now.
But this wasn’t about want. It was about revenge.
“Your groupies must love this room,” she said, to remind herself of reality. Who he was, what this was.
He laughed, a low rumble of sound that she felt like a caress. “The groupies don’t make it past the first floor. I have some standards.”
Zoe let her dress fall to her feet before she could think better of it—and because she didn’t want to think about the implications of what he’d said. She kicked the dress aside, moving briskly toward that huge, staggeringly male bed, pretending with all her might that it didn’t get to her. That it was simply a bed.
That he was only a man.
This is only one night, she reminded herself. A handful of hours, at most, even if Hunter hadn’t kissed her in that bar like a man who would rush through this, or anything else. Anyone could handle one night.
She knew that better than most.
“I suppose this will do,” she said then, her voice clipped. Strained with all her false courage. She tried to wrench back the control she’d claimed she wanted so badly, thinking that might at least contain some of the damage. “Let me tell you how this works. I think I’ll have you start on your knees again, facing the—”
“Zoe.”
She didn’t want to stop, but she did. She didn’t want to turn to face him, but she did that, too. She had to do it. She had to prove he wasn’t getting to her. She had to make sure he knew exactly how little this was affecting her—
But when she looked at him, it was like a blow. Hard and swift. Ruthless. She swayed on her feet again and for a terrifying moment thought she might actually topple over—but she caught herself.
Hunter looked like a stranger. Or more like himself, perhaps, than he’d been in all the time she’d known him, which made that terrifying longing creep through her again, then spread out, taking root deep inside. He was so powerful, so male. Strong and sure and focused on her with that brilliant, consuming heat. The city on the other side of that expanse of glass, the lights and bridges stretching out in all directions, swirled away and became part of that fire in his gaze, stamped hard on his face.
