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“He never could,” he whispered, shattered.
“Then why won’t you...?”
But she didn’t finish. Maybe she couldn’t.
And this time, Hunter wasn’t thinking about sex. He didn’t care who was in charge and he wasn’t thinking about playing games at all. He cared only about that look on her face, that matching hole in his heart. He was thinking only and entirely about Zoe.
He sank down to his knees again, right there on the frigid sidewalk, never taking his gaze from hers, giving her everything.
If she wanted it.
“I don’t want you to beg,” he told her, watching her face contort with the sobs she was fighting to keep back, the tears that had already betrayed her. “But I will, if you want. You can have anything you want from me, Zoe. All you have to do is ask for it.”
She didn’t ask. Instead, she moved forward. She wrapped herself around him, sinking her hands into his hair, and then kissed him.
Salt and sweet.
As if she already knew the answer.
As if he was a hero after all.
* * *
Zoe took him back to her apartment. Her sanctuary, where no one was ever allowed inside.
He stood in the center of her living room, starkly male, entirely Hunter. He seemed bigger than he had on the street—consuming all of the available oxygen without even seeming to try. The air around him seemed to hum, alive and electric, the way it always did. She felt too bright, too exposed, actually shaking with the effort to keep from flipping out—demanding he leave or, worse, collapsing in a jittery heap on her own floor. Instead, she pulled him down to the couch and climbed on top of him.
“This is consent,” she whispered.
“That’s all I need,” he replied, and then, finally, he touched her. His warm, strong hands on her face, streaking down her back to cradle her hips. “You idiot.”
“Don’t call—”
“Zoe.” He pulled her closer, and she was already melting. Already quivering. “Shut up.”
And when she did, he claimed her.
He made her feel more than alive. White hot and glowing. He showed her—with his hands, his lips, his mouth and his fine body—that she was anything but ruined. That she could never be ruined. Again and again, until she was limp and he was hoarse and they could only hold each other, dazed.
When he’d made his point one more time, emphatically, she lay sprawled on top of him, bare skin to bare skin, stretched out across her bed. Breathing in that crisp, intoxicating scent of his, her head tucked in the crook of his neck. The closest she’d felt to safe in as long as she could remember—and she let herself pretend. In the dim light in her bedroom. In his arms.
That things like this could last. That this was real, when she knew better.
Tonight, she pretended.
“You okay?” he asked, and she realized she must have made some noise. She nestled closer, as if she was any other woman in the arms of her lover. As if that was possible.
“Demons exorcized,” she murmured against his skin, and the funny thing was, in the glow that seemed to surround them then, she almost believed it.
And that was when Zoe understood what was happening to her. What had already happened. She hadn’t imagined it could happen, so she’d never bothered to protect herself against it.
But it all made a dizzying, insane kind of sense. Her wild, ungovernable attraction to this man, when she’d been shut down to attraction for more than ten years. The fact she’d let him get to her the way he had, turning the tables on her in her own office. That he’d left a mark on her and she hadn’t hated it. The fact she’d concocted a reason why she had to sleep with him. The fact she’d told him what had happened to her, and had only been hurt that he might not want her afterward.
Not that her secret was out. Not that she’d exposed herself. But that he might think less of her.
She’d been head over heels for Hunter Grant since the moment she’d clapped eyes on him.
How had she failed to recognize that until now?
“You’ve spent the past decade wallowing in self-pity,” she said, the words tumbling out before she could think them through, sharp and accusatory.
But he was Hunter. So he only laughed.
“I have,” he agreed, too mildly. “As you’ve helpfully pointed out approximately nine thousand times. A day.”
She pushed herself up so she could frown at him. “All that fighting and carrying on, the bimbo parade—what was that?”
“My punishment,” he said quietly, and the look in his eyes made her ache inside. “And not half of what I deserved.”
