LITMIR.BIZ

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him. There was no point pretending.

      Hunter had never been destined for anything but this.

       Chapter Three

      “Is this why you missed another appointment, Mr. Grant, or is this just a little bit of wallowing on a weekday night? Self-indulgence, perhaps? I hate to mention it, but it looks like self-pity.”

      For a moment, Hunter thought he was dreaming that sharp, amused voice that could belong to only one person. But he wasn’t asleep. He’d driven himself crazy on his couch for a while after speaking to Austin, and had then taken himself off to his extraordinarily expensive health club to sweat it out on the treadmill. Mile after brutal mile, until his legs felt shaky and weak. And then he’d sat in the whirlpool tub with the jets on high, pretending his mind was perfectly fucking clear.

      Zoe Brook stood there when he opened his eyes, much like one of the many apparitions he hadn’t been thinking about. She wore another impressively sleek dress today, this one in a gunmetal gray that skimmed over her lean curves and made his mouth go dry, with a long and complicated sweater over it. Her lips were red, her eyes were cool, and there was no reason at all she should be looking at him like that at eleven o’clock at night.

      “I think this confirms that you’re stalking me,” he said, instead of all the other things he wanted to say. “Do I need to call security?”

      “This isn’t stalking. This is persistence. I can understand why you’d be unfamiliar with the concept.”

      “Tomayto, tomahto,” he murmured.

      She smiled that wicked smile of hers, and he was glad the bubbles concealed the most unruly part of him from view. He stretched his arms out along the sides of the hot tub and smiled back.

      Suddenly, he was wide awake. Clearheaded, even. At last. More focused than he’d been in years.

      “I know you couldn’t possibly have missed your appointment today on purpose,” she said, in a bright and easy way at complete odds with the shrewd look she was giving him. “But I’m afraid that’s two strikes.”

      “I don’t respond well to baseball metaphors. It’s a football thing. Jets, Sharks. You know how it is.”

      “Let’s try it again, shall we? Ten o’clock on Thursday. Don’t make me come after you again.”

      “Or what?” he asked drily. “We’ll both get naked and wet?”

      A group of women walked by then, chatting idly while wrapped in towels from the locker room and completely unaware that they were interrupting something electric. Their conversation cut off abruptly when they saw Hunter lounging in the hot tub, then exploded into a frenzy of giggles when he smiled at them.

      They giggled louder, then disappeared into the sauna, where there was a sudden burst of high-pitched squealing as the door swung closed.

      “I think they recognized me,” he said.

      “Well,” Zoe said, in that prickly way of hers that made him grin. “You’re certainly recognizable.”

      He stood then, stretching his arms over his head and letting the hot water course over him, entirely too amused by the way her eyes widened at the sight of his naked torso, then dropped to the board shorts that were plastered to his thighs. He felt the way she swallowed, hard. Her blue-gray eyes traced over his skin, in a manner he was sure left fingerprints behind.

      He wanted her even more than he remembered he had in that strip club, where she’d stood out like a beacon and made him forget himself. He wanted to taste the elegant line of her neck, see what lay beneath those beautiful clothes. He wanted to see where that flush in her cheeks led, if it moved over the rest of her smooth skin and turned it that pretty blush color.

      God, the ways he wanted her. Here, now. Anywhere.

      “Why don’t we have this meeting of yours right now?” he asked, watching her narrowly. Willing her to close the distance between them, so he could touch her again. Feel that fire. She made him imagine he was alive again, and as much as he disliked what came along with that, he still found he liked the burn. “You’ve gone to the trouble to track me down in my gym in the middle of the night. You have my full attention.”

      But there were ghosts in her eyes when she dragged them back to his.

      “Not yet,” she said softly. Deliberately. “But I will. Ten o’clock on Thursday, Mr. Grant.”

      “Will I hear about this plan of yours?” he asked, somewhere between dry and amused, and his body didn’t care which, it just wanted her. Particularly when she let out that laugh. “Or will you continue to drop vague hints and not-so-veiled threats?”

      “Keep your appointment,” she suggested.

      “I like your style,” he said, swinging his leg over the side of the tub and climbing out, watching her eyes widen slightly before she controlled it. “Intrigue and drama over an appointment I didn’t make and don’t want. I appreciate the effort, Ms. Brook. I do.”

      “Just think how appreciative you’ll be on Thursday,” she said with a smile that made him think of sweet cream and oversatisfied cats.

      Hunter picked up his towel and swiped it over his face, and when he lowered it, she was gone. That shouldn’t have surprised him. Or made him laugh enough to hear the echo of it from the tile around him, reminding him of a man he barely recognized that had once been him.

      He got dressed quickly in the locker room, and then he started making some calls. He might have been a pariah, but that didn’t mean he was any less famous. People still took his calls—even in the middle of the night.

      Zoe Brook was the best, he found—just as she’d claimed. She could solve any image problem, make any kind of piggish behavior into a festival of silk purses, all without seeming to break a sweat. She was the real deal.

      “The only trouble,” Zair al Ruyi, his friend and the fourth roommate from their early Harvard days, told him from Washington, D.C., where he was currently serving as ambassador to the United States from his far-off, oil-rich sultanate, “is that she might very well chew you up and spit you out while she’s saving you from the jaws of the lion. It’s her specialty.”

      “Luckily,” Hunter said, “I make a pretty thin meal. Not much left to chew on.”

      Zair, keeper of his own dark secrets and certainly no stranger to trouble, diplomatic immunity or no, laughed.

      “She can solve any problem. Even one of yours.”

      “And you know this from personal experience?” Hunter asked, cradling his phone between his head and his shoulder as he walked out into the cold night. “Please tell me that for the first time in our entire history, you plan to share.”

      If there was anyone cagier or more private than Zair, Hunter had never met him. They’d been sophomores before Hunter had realized that when Zair made vague references to “home,” he’d meant a sultan’s palace. Or when he’d said “my brother,” he’d meant the Sultan of Ruyi.

      His old friend only laughed now, making Hunter wish things were different. That instead of chasing footballs across the past decade, he’d made more of an effort to stay connected to these first, best friends of his, more like brothers than his own, actual brother had ever been. But he’d lost that, too.

      “Whatever Zoe Brook wants with you, Hunter,” Zair said, not answering the question directly, not that Hunter would have known what to do if he had, “I’d give it to her. Because otherwise I suspect she’ll simply go ahead and take it.”

      * * *

      He met Zoe in the waiting room of her bold Columbus Circle office at precisely ten-fifteen on Thursday morning. Hunter lounged on one of the bright red leather couches as if he were in his own living room, a detail he saw her take in with a single amused glance. Her wicked

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