Caitlin Crews - Scandalise Me

It was a shot through the heart. Unerring and lethal.

Zoe Brook smiled again, wider than before.

“Ten o’clock,” she told him while he stood there like a dead thing, as he was certain she’d intended. Her amused drawl in place and that cool fire in her eyes that reminded him of the sea outside his family’s rambling cottage high on the Maine coast, where he’d seen this precise shade of dangerous gray at Christmas. And that rawness in him that grew the more she looked at him and saw nothing but the dark and terrible things he’d done.

Hunter preferred himself empty. At least then he knew who he was.

She reached over and pressed a business card into his hand. “Don’t be late.”

And when she walked away, he stayed where she left him, as surely as if she’d cut him off at the knees.

As if there was nothing left of him but shattered pieces. Shadows and lies where his bones should have been. Ruins of the man he’d never been.

* * *

This is the life you made, he told himself when he finally pushed his way out of the club into the cold, crisp February morning some time later, the slap of winter harsh against his face.

Hunter hailed a cab out on the frigid avenue and then stared out the window as Manhattan slid by on the jerky trip back toward his soulless, minimalist penthouse that towered above Wall Street: the perfect crypt for the walking dead, he’d thought when he’d bought it a few months back.

After all, he’d been the one to punch that smug referee in the face in December in the middle of a hotly contested call; he’d known what he was doing and he’d known what was likely to happen when he did it. He simply hadn’t cared enough any longer to bother restraining himself. His whole career had been an exercise in pushing limits. He’d been benched, fined, reprimanded. He’d once told a reporter that he wanted to see what it took to be ejected from the NFL altogether—and as he’d finally proved, he hadn’t been joking.

“And behold,” he’d told two of his three college roommates with his typical self-aggrandizing swagger at their depressing annual dinner, before their odd vigil had become even more upsetting than it usually was with an anonymous letter and a host of unsavory accusations he didn’t want to think about.

He’d shown off his scraped knuckles with the pretense of great pride, fooling neither of the men who had once known him so well, but that was how they’d rolled for years. Big smiles. Great stories. A howling abyss within.

Or maybe that was him.

“I am a success in all I do,” he’d said, grinning widely at Austin Treffen and Alex Diaz as if they were all still eighteen years old and bursting with hopes and dreams and grand ideas about what their lives would be. Instead of what they actually were. What they’d let themselves become in these years of silence. Bought and paid for. Complicit. “As ever.”

But he didn’t want to think about Sarah Michaels, especially now that Zoe Brook had thrown her in his face. He’d been avoiding it since the night she’d died, but fate and that damned letter Austin had slapped down on the table that night in December had intervened.

Ten years ago, Hunter had suspected that Sarah had betrayed him after their three intense years of dating, from college into their first year of life in New York City. That, he’d thought, was why she’d broken up with him back then. He’d believed guilt over her behavior had led her to take her own life that awful night, and he’d never forgiven himself for his role in her decision. That he’d been terribly wrong about her had been clear after she’d died, and that had been bad enough. But the letter Austin had received had suggested it was so much worse than that—so much more—

Hunter didn’t see how he could live with what he knew now. With himself, for not knowing it then.

He was a heartless, soulless man, he knew: blind and selfish to the core. He’d wasted his life as if he’d been on a mission to do so from the start. He’d disappointed his family, his friends, both football teams he’d played for in his career, all of his fans. He’d squandered each and every gift he’d ever been given. He’d let the only girl he’d ever loved walk away from him, straight into the hands of a monster, and he hadn’t noticed anything but his own pain and jealousy.

And he knew these were the least of his sins.

Because he still remembered every moment of that night ten years ago, at the annual Christmas party at Austin’s father’s law firm. How Sarah had come to him with all that dark pain on her face and he had liked it.

Can I talk to you? she’d asked. Please?

Maybe later, he’d said, making such a show of not caring, of hardly paying attention to her. This is a big night.

It was about time she’d felt some of what he was feeling, he’d thought. He’d liked that she looked lost and scared and tentative, all things Sarah Michaels had never been. He’d assumed that she was finally recognizing what a huge mistake she’d made in breaking up with him. He’d thought it was so ironic that he’d been entirely faithful to Sarah even though he was the professional athlete—that she’d been the one to cheat on him, and with Austin’s father, no less.

He’d been so smugly certain he was the victim. So self-righteous that Sarah had done this terrible thing and he—out of respect for who she’d been back in college, he’d told himself piously—had opted to keep it to himself. Because he was such a great guy.

And because he was all things petty, because he’d thought that shattered look on her face—all about him, he’d been so certain—wasn’t quite enough, he’d taken the whole thing a step further and asked the bimbo he’d been parading around on his arm to marry him, right there in the middle of the Christmas party in all of the elegance and old-money sparkle Treffen, Smith, and Howell claimed as its own.

He’d watched Sarah leave the room as the champagne was popped, looking small and beaten, and all these years later he was still ashamed of how deeply satisfied he’d felt then. He’d had no idea that that would be the last time he’d ever see her. That he’d spend the rest of his life wondering if, had he known he’d never lay eyes on Sarah alive again, he might have done something differently.

One shade up from sociopathic, Zoe Brook had said. She had no idea how right she was.

Then again, if she knew about Sarah, maybe she did.

* * *

Zoe didn’t take a full breath until she shut her apartment door late that night, cutting herself off from the world at last. She tugged off her boots in her entry hall and padded barefoot into the apartment that ambled over the whole of the third floor of a prewar brownstone on the Upper West Side.

She let herself breathe in deep as she moved through the living room with its commotion of bright colors, letting her Tough Bitch Mask drop away. Here at home, she was someone else. Here, she was the Zoe she might have been.

The Zoe who hadn’t been ruined.

She moved into her bathroom as she stripped out of her work clothes, headed for the pretty claw-footed tub perched on the black-and-white checkerboard tiled floor. She turned on the water and poured in a sachet of her favorite bath salts, letting the lavender scent work on her.

There was more Jason Treffen in her head than usual tonight, and it made her edgy.

Her interaction with Hunter Grant this morning hadn’t helped. The thing was, she’d wanted to touch him again, standing there in the middle of a strip club, of all places. She’d wanted to touch him, and that didn’t make sense. Not for her.

Her skin felt itchy. New. As if it wasn’t hers any longer. And that strange notion threw her right back into the past.