Not Your Concern

Liam had been reclining against the back of his chair. He rose, both hands in the pockets of his suit trousers, and stopped in front of Zena. She sat upright, her gaze dropped to the floor at her feet. The small, pretty face that could not quite hide its worry was, to his eye, rather a pleasure to look at. For a moment he regarded her from above, arrogance plain on his face.

"You never said he had a fiancée."

She lifted her eyes as she spoke. The manner was courteous, but the accusation coiled inside it was plain enough to catch. Liam's brow tipped up. A fiancée? Dane has a fiancée? Who the hell fed her that bullshit.

"Dane told you that? That he has a fiancée?"

He tilted his head, studying her as if he were waiting on the answer. Meeting those sharp eyes, made to cow a person, Zena drew a small, steadying breath.

"I ran into Miss Eva Lambert and Mr. Hunter at the restaurant where I work."

"Ah..."

Eva. Still letting those pretty lips spill schemes without a second's hesitation. Liam's mouth curved, playful, and he offered no explanation at all. The defeat staining her face handed him a sadistic satisfaction.

"Telling me to seduce a man who already has someone. That was too much."

He said nothing.

"I... I can't."

Rather bold. Liam had to swallow the laugh rising in his mouth. Anxious as the voice was, the way she still pressed what she meant to press was interesting.

"Why not?"

Zena tightened her grip on the backpack strap lying across her thighs. Then, as if the words themselves were distasteful to hold in her mouth, she lowered her voice.

"Because you shouldn't. A thing like that... it isn't something you're supposed to do."

"Ten million dollars hanging on this, and you're weighing right against wrong. Must be nice, having that kind of leisure."

"Or else I've grown comfortable enough that you feel free to act spoiled."

Looking down at her flustered face, Liam drew up one corner of his mouth.

"You don't actually think every sugar daddy in the world is unmarried, do you? Men who keep a sugar baby entirely apart from their wives are everywhere."

It was the truth. Men who settled expensive gifts and a stable life on their wives, then brazenly took a sugar baby along on business trips, were common as dirt. There was no reason a man should not have both at once—a wife to give him a respectable home and heirs, and a young mistress to feed a warped appetite.

"Fiancée or wife, it isn't your concern. Once he's had what he wanted and the contract runs out, it's over. That's all the relationship is."

Zena found nothing to answer with. Her lips only parted and closed.

Liam, who had been enjoying the anxiety on her face, turned away. He took something from the stack of documents at the edge of the desk, came back, and held it out. Zena stared at the papers extended toward her, then opened lips that had been pressed shut.

"This is..."

"What do you think."

The first page alone, dense with legal language, was enough to tell her the papers concerned the charges being brought against Ryan.

The cold delivery was enough to drop Zena's shoulders in an instant. She had come here half expecting Liam Carlson to play it this way. Even so, faced with documents dropped in front of her like a bomb, she could not manage to stay composed.

"That's too cruel."

"A man pays for what he's done. Don't paint me as the cruel one when I'm the victim."

Liam lowered his eyes and watched unease spread across Zena's face.

"You looked ready to do anything to save your friend. In the end, someone else's trouble stays someone else's trouble. Sacrificing yourself to save a friend was too much to ask after all. Wasn't it?"

"That's not true! I did everything I could, and he didn't budge. I swear."

The weak voice, spilling out like an excuse, carried a desolate tremor. Anyone listening would have heard the resignation soaked through every word.

"Everything you could?"

One of Liam's brows rose, barely. Hands still buried in his pockets, he bent at the waist until his face was near enough for his breath to touch her.

"The standard for one's best is awfully relative, you know."

Watching her avoid his eyes, Liam laughed without a sound. Who was she going to seduce, looking like this? And yet he knew, by instinct, that this little lamb carried something particular in her—the makings of a femme fatale who could turn a man into a fool.

"You were handed a mission to seduce a heavyweight like Dane Hunter. Surely you didn't walk in with nothing prepared."

"That isn't the sort of thing you can prepare for."

A small, cowed sigh slipped through her slightly parted lips. Liam straightened without hurry, crossed to the sofa opposite her, and sank deep into it.

"There is no set method to seduction. But—"

"A man comes undone before a woman who arrives at the right moment, carrying something that fills what he lacks."

He went on in a theatrical register, as if he were delivering a lecture.

"So. Enlighten me. What tremendous effort did you pour into catching Dane Hunter's eye?"

The expression on Dane's face as he crossed the building lobby was colder than usual.

A fall at the Dubai site that day had killed one laborer and injured two. A death on a project under his charge was never a pleasant feeling. And that was not all. Last night he had taken a call from his father, Patrick Hunter.

Dane lengthened his stride, his face gone colder still. Keep Senator Lambert sweet, and he'll shove me into a wedding hall by force if he has to.

More irritating by the day. That word of it had reached the family home before a few hours had even passed meant only one thing. The moment he dropped her at the hotel, she had called under the pretext of checking in, and made a thorough show of how hurt she was.

Dane clicked his tongue. Until now he had tolerated Eva's imperious manner out of regard for their fathers' relationship. Each time he faced her, he filled his head with other thoughts and offered her at least a perfunctory courtesy, precisely because he had foreseen a nuisance of this kind.

He had kept that up all this time. So why, of all days, had he reacted so sharply yesterday? He had turned it over through the night and all of today, and arrived at a single reason.

A woman who, from the first moment, had made no secret of her frivolous aim—finding a sugar daddy—and who had nonetheless kept needling at his nerves with a gaze that unsettled a man, strangely. He could dimly tell that the woman named Zena had something to do with the calm he had failed to recover even after leaving the restaurant.

Why? Of all the people in the world, why was he carrying around a woman of that vulgar sort, out hunting a sugar daddy? He forced the edged mood down, rounded the corner, and stopped dead.

His sharp jaw tilted. His gaze locked, completely, on the figure standing blankly in the corridor before the elevators.

Clothes that could not have been more ordinary. Hair left long and loose. She stood rooted, as if her feet were tied, chewing her lip, lost in thought. Long lashes cast down over pale skin made her look, somehow, like a lost puppy. The wildflower freshness of her sat a long way from any gold digger wandering in search of a moneyed mark.

The sculpted line of Dane's brow drew faintly inward. Yes. It is this woman. He admitted it to himself, reluctantly.

She lifted her head on a sigh, and her face went rigid. She had recognized the man standing a few steps off. Dane closed the distance at an unhurried pace and stopped before her. As he drew near, Zena's chin tipped up of its own accord. A dry, woody cologne caught at the tip of her nose. Her body went taut in an instant, but the chance to pretend she had not seen him and flee was already gone.

"Miss Zena."

The eyes that traveled over her, up and down, stung.

"Why are you here?"

For a moment, words failed her. The mere fact that he remembered her name sent her heart thudding. Zena's expression turned distinctly unnatural.

A fine suit, tailored close to a solid frame. A silver tie that caught the light, and an elegant pin. Even the costly watch that showed itself in glimpses at his cuff. There was not a single imperfect corner to Dane Hunter. Eyes, scent, voice, clothes—this man had a gift for setting every sense she possessed on edge.

"I'm asking what business brought you here."

The brief silence was awkward enough to choke on. Perhaps it was the sheer difference in their sizes. He was not threatening her, and yet simply facing him seemed to press the air down around her. She had come all the way inside someone else's company; she could hardly claim she had been passing by. Nor could she admit she had come to see Liam Carlson. Zena fixed her unsteady eyes somewhere past his shoulder.

Watching the woman keep her mouth shut, Dane's eyes thinned. Gloom clung to her expression. He could see the tension knotted into the fingers gripping her bag strap. He did not know why, but he found it difficult to look away from her. He regarded her in silence a moment longer, then spoke.

"Did you come to see me."

Even as he thought there was no particular reason she would seek him out, he could not produce another.

"No."

The denial came quickly. As she turned her head to escape his eyes, the pale nape of her neck caught his gaze and held it.

"Then?"

A face without a trace of makeup. Ordinary clothes, a backpack in hand—she looked every inch the typical student. Of every version of her he had met, this was, without question, the one that looked youngest. His eyes stuck on the red of her lips, stark against that wan face. Absurdly, he felt the blood quicken in his chest.

"I came on other business. I'm on my way out, so you needn't concern yourself."

Zena swept a hand over the back of her neck, pretending it was nothing. Her face burned, hot enough to scorch. Before anyone else she might not have cared, but in front of this man her shabby appearance weighed on her. She knew far too well what the gaze Dane Hunter turned on her meant. From the furrow in his brow, he was displeased to find her in his building.

Even after she left the suite, that voice seemed to strike her ear as vividly as if he were still speaking. This was the man who had said those things, and then had his fiancée press a lavish tip into her hand like alms. He had not needed to mock her so openly. Her pride was past wounded. It was dead. Meeting his eyes was more than she could do.

Dane pulled his gaze from the woman's face, where it had lingered far too long, and spoke.

"Your hand."

"It's fine. You don't need to concern yourself."

Zena's mouth hardened. She covered the injured hand with the other, as if hiding something unsightly. It made no sense, and yet the feel of his hands tending the wound still seemed to linger on her skin.

"You didn't have to give me money, too. You shouldn't have."

The more she spoke, the more her heart stung. No longer able to bear Dane's eyes, she dropped her gaze and tried to brush past him. Their clothes grazed, lightly.

"What do you mean by that."

The voice reached her, cutting through the air, and her faltering steps stopped.

"It's nothing. I'm sorry about last time. We won't be seeing each other again."

She turned her head slightly aside and answered in a businesslike tone. Then she slung the backpack she had been clutching over her shoulder and moved quickly toward the exit.

A breath left Dane as he followed her retreating back, the sound of air going out of something.

The first time they met, she had set about seducing him as if she meant to melt him where he stood. The second time, strung tight with nerves, she had taken his attention anyway. And now what came off her was a clear, bright aversion, aimed straight at him. The shift in her stance every time he saw this woman was astonishing.

His eyes followed the long hair swinging with her stride, the narrow waist, the full curve of her hips. He could not see her face, and still that prim, closed look seemed to present itself. When he realized he was watching her walk away as if spellbound, something in his gaze changed.

Damn.

Five minutes after she stepped off the bus and started walking, Zena's feet stopped.

The place Luke shared with his roommates was a basement bachelor apartment in an old detached house. Bass pounded through the walls. She seemed to have found the right one.

After leaving Hunter & Carlson Castle, she had scrolled through her phone and sent Luke a text. She had never meant to go to the party, but the bleakness of her mood had changed her mind. The moment she said she would come, he sent back a cheering emoji and the address.