Fifth Avenue Box Set: Take Me\Avenge Me\Scandalize Me\Expose Me by Maisey Yates & Caitlin Crews & Kate Hewitt

Author:Maisey Yates & Caitlin Crews & Kate Hewitt [Yates, Maisey & Crews, Caitlin & Hewitt, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature & Fiction, Romance, Contemporary, Series, Harlequin Presents
ISBN: 9781460382509
Amazon: B00Q25UY1W
Publisher: Harlequin Presents
Published: 2015-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

She was playing with fire.

But in the weeks that followed, Zoe convinced herself she knew what she was doing. That it was a controlled blaze. That she had it under control. That those strange things that had wound so tightly between them, dark and bright at once even in a high school hallway, were a figment of her imagination and anyway, weren’t anything to worry about.

Which was a good thing, because Hunter was enough to worry about. Even—especially—when he was “behaving.”

Zoe had spent a lot of time researching what the tabloids called The Hunter Effect. Now she got to watch it in action as he unleashed it in a relatively restrained way on the Manhattan social circuit, exactly as she’d planned.

“Must you smile like that at every woman who looks at you?” Zoe asked impatiently as she tried to keep from rolling her eyes at the logjam of admirers who all but cooed at him as he swaggered by in white tie at the annual Viennese Opera Ball to benefit Carnegie Hall, held in the distinctly elegant Waldorf Astoria. In a sea of resplendent creatures, he seemed to glow that little bit brighter—his notoriety be damned.

“That’s how I smile, Zoe.”

“You have several DEFCON levels of a smile and if you don’t downgrade to a more manageable one right now, you’ll cause a riot.”

“I like riots.”

“What a surprise. But we’re going for restrained and under-the-radar elegance tonight, not a brawl. I know it’s a stretch.”

Hunter turned that riotous smile on her, then. It was a bone-melting, slumberous affair. Lazy blue eyes, that curve of his confident mouth, and that stunning physique dressed so beautifully it nearly made the photographers weep as they took his picture again and again. Zoe pretended that what shook inside her, hard and long, was simple hunger. She’d missed dinner.

“Put it away,” she told him, and then let out a long-suffering sigh, as if he bored her.

She wished he did. More every day.

But even when he wasn’t smiling so seductively, he was formidable. A force of personality and presence and, much as it pained her to admit it, breathtaking to watch in action. Zoe dragged him to a hospital to minister to terminal patients, where he spent two solid hours reading to a pair of little boys who gazed at him as if he hung a new moon with every word. She took him to a lunch to benefit libraries, where he so thoroughly charmed the dour, otherwise matronly librarians in question that he made them all blush and then giggle as those girls had in his gym that night when he’d been wearing much less.

“He’s a bad, bad man,” one of them told Zoe in an undertone, fanning herself theatrically.

“That is the literal truth,” Zoe replied testily. She smiled, hoping that might play off her unprofessional show of pique, but the the other woman only laughed.

“It’s that sparkle in his eyes,” the librarian confided. “Like he wants you to be in on the joke. How

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