didn’t like him.
‘I lost my focus for a second,’ Hunter conceded, ‘and Pedro took his chance.’
Hunter made it sound like he had lost rather than that they had won and Matteo felt Abby tense beside him.
‘Don’t worry about him,’ Matteo said, without looking over to her. ‘You know you won.’ He then listened as a reporter asked Hunter a question.
‘What about your reaction after the race? You seemed pretty angry.’
‘Ha.’ Hunter shrugged and then spread his hands, holding his palm to the sky. ‘I guess I’m not used to it...’ And then he put down his hands and looked straight over to Matteo as he spoke on. ‘I tend to get there first.’
Matteo didn’t know that he had hackles till then, yet he felt them rise and he watched as Hunter’s gaze moved to the woman who stood beside him.
‘That was for me...’ Abby said and Matteo frowned because her voice was slurred.
His newly discovered hackles were still up and Matteo put an arm around Abby.
‘It’s okay.’ He didn’t know what was going on but he could feel Abby’s distress and he tried to reassure her.
But all she could hear was Wah-wah-wah...
The rest of what Matteo said she lost.
There was a roaring in Abby’s ears and her chest felt closed and she could feel that her lips were tingling.
‘I can’t breathe...’ she gasped.
‘Abby...’ Matteo said, but then she lost track of his deep smoky voice again and she made one last desperate plea.
‘Don’t let Hunter see me like this.’
Matteo got her out of the press conference and to a horrid plastic seat, where he sat her down and told her to cup her hands over her face. ‘You’re having a panic attack.’
He was just calm.
On the outside.
Matteo never let anyone glimpse his fear.
He went over to a guy who was walking past and tipped the man’s burger into his hand and returned to Abby with the paper bag. ‘Breathe into this...’ Matteo said and he just kept on talking in his lovely deep voice and telling her she would soon be okay. ‘It will pass soon,’ he assured. ‘My sister Natalia gets them and they pass. I promise.’
He just sat with her the entire way through it. Abby was sweating and white and her eyes were wide open and looking into his as she breathed in and out of the paper bag and then moved it aside.
‘He lost,’ Abby said and, with a sinking feeling, Matteo knew, he just knew, that they weren’t talking about Hunter losing the race today.
Matteo felt sick; he actually did but he just looked back at her.
‘He lost a race...’ Abby said. She could not do it in full sentences. ‘I was ending it. We’d only gone out a few times. We’d never...’
And he didn’t know what to say.
‘He got so angry.’
Matteo just didn’t know what to say.
‘I told my father. He said not to report it.’ She shook her head. ‘You see, I was drunk...’
And now Matteo did know what to say.
It was his first rule.
‘Then he should have seen you safely home.’
‘I was in his hotel room.’
No, he would not let her go there.
‘Then he should have checked into another or put you to bed and slept in the chair,’ Matteo said. ‘There’s no excuse for what he did.’
‘It was so violent.’ Abby relived it just for a second and she watched Matteo blink, not once but three times, and then he responded.
‘He should have treated you like glass,’ Matteo said.
‘It was my first time...’
‘Crystal glass, then,’ Matteo amended. ‘And that was not your first time—that’s not sex.’
‘It’s the only sex I know.’
And then her panic came back because they were coming out of the press conference. ‘He can’t see me like this.’
Yet she couldn’t stand.
‘What if we look like we were having an intimate moment—is that okay?’ Matteo gently checked and she nodded.
He just wrapped her in his arms and she saw the yellow leather of Hunter walking past and she heard the increasing thud, thud, thud of Matteo’s heart and his breathing firing into rapid. Abby felt the tension in him and she knew that Matteo wanted to drop her and run and do what her father should have all those years ago.
For her sake he didn’t.
But then, at the last moment, when he recalled Hunter’s “I tend to get there first” line, Abby felt the rip of tension in him.
‘Please don’t,’ Abby begged when she felt him move to run but then his arms came tighter around her.
‘I won’t.’
He wanted to though.
Matteo now could barely breathe.
Abby could feel him struggle to contain himself. Matteo even with a hangover in fierce heat did not break a sweat, yet he was swimming in adrenaline and his shirt was drenched and his breathing was coming fast and shallow.
‘I might need to borrow that paper bag...’ Matteo said.
Still he could make her smile.
And she waited for the questions to start but when her breathing was normal and she peered out from his chest, the only thing Matteo asked was if she wanted some water.
‘Please.’
He went off to a vending machine and got her a drink and Abby drank it down thirstily, and Matteo was right; the panic had passed.
‘Better?’ Matteo asked.
‘Much,’ Abby said, though she was now incredibly embarrassed at what she had told him.
‘So, where do you want to go now?’ Matteo asked.
‘Go?’ It was the last thing she’d expected him to ask her but Matteo squatted down in front of her and looked right at her when, embarrassed by her revelations, she could barely now look at him.
‘We’re still
