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“I’m not fighting,” she said, in a tone that suggested he was a raving lunatic.
Hunter rubbed his hands over his face, then sat down, too, not far from her but certainly not as close as he would have liked. There was too much boiling inside him, too big and too dangerous, and all of it so painful and unbalanced and extreme he didn’t know what to do with any of it.
“Of course you’re not,” he muttered, and instead of indulging his usual fight-or-fuck response to adversity the way he’d have preferred, he just looked at her. “Why don’t you tell me this plan of yours? I think it’s time for the great unveiling, don’t you?”
She was quiet for a moment, and Hunter was too aware of the way his heart pounded so damned hard, how his breath felt caught in his chest. Loud. Constrained. Zoe shifted slightly where she sat, and he wanted it to be nerves. He wanted her to feel some of what he did.
“The plan is that you expose Jason Treffen. Show the world who he really is.” She gave him that small, sharp smile again, still lacking the bite and sparkle of the Zoe he knew. “Right before his big interview that will cement him in the public imagination as a saint forevermore.”
“Why would anyone listen to me?” He was proud of his calm, reasonable tone. “I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention, but I’m not exactly considered the poster boy for truth and justice these days.”
“That’s why you’re perfect.” She seemed to relax slightly as she ticked off his selling points on her fingers, one after the next. “Your reputation is already shot, so it’s not as if Jason can threaten you with the loss of it. You’re hated, in fact, so what will it matter if people hate you more? But you also have intimate knowledge of the man going back more than a decade, which means that if you speak out long enough and loud enough—and into the right ears, which is where I come in—you’ll eventually be heard.” She smiled again. “And meanwhile, the fact that you’ve spent all this time quietly doing good works in the wake of your expulsion from the NFL without attempting to benefit personally from any of it will, of course, play heavily in your favor.”
“And here I was beginning to think you were making it up as you went along.”
She shrugged. “I told you I knew what I was doing.”
But he couldn’t help thinking about how she’d have said that last part if she wasn’t as switched off and distant as she was now, and it thudded inside him, the loss of her sharp, knowing smirk. Of that amused glint in her cool gray gaze.
He wanted her back.
“I was hoping you were going to these lengths because you had designs on my fine body. It happens. Sometimes, as you saw, it even happens at the gym. Or in libraries.”
“Maybe you didn’t hear me before,” she said, much too softly, her gaze dark and tormented on his. “I wasn’t being metaphoric. I was an escort. I sold myself. To men. For money.” Each sentence was a short, harsh bullet. “Why would you keep flirting with me now? This is usually where I get paid. That’s what whore means.”
And Hunter recognized what he saw in her, then. What she was doing.
That almost-warm, near-laughter in her voice, encouraging him to join in the horrible joke. That sharp, pointed boldness, throwing the worst thing she could think of out on the table like that. And all of that terrible anguish beneath.
Oh, yes. He knew this routine. So well he could taste it like bile in his own throat.
He knew terrible guilt when he saw it. He knew self-loathing and that deep, debilitating shame. He knew this game. He’d been playing it for years, and with far less reason.
But he also knew Zoe.
“How do you want to be paid?” he asked lazily, and she jerked against the sofa, her breath leaving her in an audible rush. “Cash? Credit card? An exchange of gifts and services?”
She looked as if he’d hit her again, and harder this time. “Very funny.”
“Let’s be clear, Zoe. I don’t think anything that’s happened since you came downstairs this morning is funny. Not in the least. I asked you a question.”
“About payment.” She’d gone still. Pale.
He thought that was probably progress, though it felt like broken glass inside him, shattering over and over again.
“Sure.” He held her gaze, hard. Until she let out a long, shaky breath, temper and agony, and he felt it like nails across his chest. “Name your price.”
“Stop.” Small, but certain.
