shirt. ‘I can have a little rummage through your underwear drawer while I’m there!’
She handed over her room card and Matteo headed out to the elevators.
He wanted her to stay, yet he didn’t want to push, Matteo thought as he pressed the button for the tenth floor.
And then, as the elevator stopped at the eighteenth floor and Hunter stepped in, Matteo changed his mind.
He wanted Abby in his room and the thought that she might be here, in this elevator dressed in her robe and alone with Hunter right now, had Matteo holding his breath.
He leaned back on the brass rail of the elevator as Hunter stared ahead and Matteo’s eyes never left his face.
Yes, Hunter knew who he was, Matteo knew, because he could see a muscle flickering in his cheek and the tension was near boiling point.
He could take him here now, Matteo thought.
Wipe him out of any chance of racing tomorrow, but Abby would hate that, he knew.
She wanted to beat him herself, in her own way.
The elevator stopped at the tenth floor, only Matteo didn’t get out; he didn’t want Hunter to even have a hint that this was Abby’s floor.
The doors closed again and it was then that Hunter spoke.
‘Problem?’ Hunter asked because Matteo’s stare could blister paint.
‘Just the smell,’ Matteo answered and then, as the elevator opened, when Matteo knew he should just let Hunter go, instead he offered a very choice word.
Hunter stiffened but he didn’t turn around; instead he carried on walking but there was a dangerous, unchecked energy between them and Matteo could feel his heart thumping as he pressed floors five through to twelve and the elevator started moving again.
Matteo got to Abby’s room.
The turn-down service had been and there was a chocolate on her pillow and it was all calm but his heart still thumped in his chest and so he poured a glass of water and took a drink.
Abby had told him that they always stayed at different hotels.
He closed his eyes and tried to tell himself to calm down. They were in the same profession, Matteo said to himself. Of course their paths would cross.
The self-talk didn’t reassure.
Matteo went to the wardrobe and pulled out a top and a skirt and then he went to her underwear drawer. Next he went over to the bed and wrote a silly note and left it on her pillow, then back up to his suite he went.
One look at his face and Abby knew something was wrong.
‘Here.’ He handed her her clothes; he was about to suggest that she get changed and then he would walk her down, or maybe that it wasn’t such a good idea for her to be staying at this hotel and that they could switch, but the long sentence sort of shrunk into three words.
‘Stay here tonight.’
‘Matteo?’
‘Hunter’s here.’
‘There was a problem with security and so they...’
‘No, no...’ Matteo wasn’t buying it for a moment. ‘Did you really think he was just going to let you take him down without a fight, Abby? Did you think, when you were hatching your master plan, that Hunter was just going to sit back and let you beat him?’
‘It’s not going to happen again,’ Abby said.
‘I’m not saying that it is,’ Matteo said. ‘But you’ve stirred up a hornet’s nest and he’s angry.’
‘Did you say anything?’ Abby demanded.
‘He knows that I know what happened.’
‘What did you say to him?’ Abby shouted. ‘Matteo, you didn’t do...’
‘I didn’t do anything,’ he snapped. ‘He already thought I knew at the press conference. I just let him know tonight that I did. Abby, that guy swaggers around... I swear that he’s going to do whatever it takes to mess with your head.’
‘He’s already messed with Pedro’s,’ she admitted.
Matteo was right, Abby realised—it was no accident that Hunter was here.
‘Stay,’ Matteo said. ‘I’m not going to try anything.’ And then he shouted, nicely if that was possible, ‘I just want you in my bed with me!’
‘Matteo, you’re not always going to be around,’ Abby pointed out.
But he was the master of instant fixes. ‘Let’s just get through tonight.’
Matteo was shaken, in a way that he never had been about another.
Sex really was the last thing on his mind tonight.
It wasn’t anything to do with that.
In fact, for Matteo, it was more concerning than that, because when he stripped off and got into bed, he just needed her skin beside his.
Abby stood there as Matteo stripped off.
Completely.
She guessed it wouldn’t enter his head to get into bed any other way.
She could ask for pillows between them, or get into bed, her robe tied and her reluctance evident, only she wasn’t reluctant.
It was her feelings for Matteo that scared her.
Not him.
She took off her robe and got in beside him and he switched off the light and just rolled into her.
He kissed her shoulder, the back of her hair and he ran a hand the length of her thigh and to her waist and then the thump, thump of his heart slowed and Abby lay there, listening to him sleeping with his hand resting on her stomach.
Abby slowly acclimatised to the feeling of sharing a bed with someone. She kept waiting for his hand to move, or for Matteo to change his mind about not trying anything. But Matteo was sleeping the sleep of the dead and so she found out what it was like to be held naked through the night with no expectation.
It was possibly the nicest gift of all and in that moment her world was the nicest place.
In the dark, next to him.
AT FIRST ABBY thought that she had jolted awake but then realised that the movement had come from Matteo.
He was still asleep but Matteo just had the familiar sensation of falling.
Only
