3. Lindsay #2
“What are you doing here, princess?”
And it’s the use of the nickname that does it. It’s somehow both mocking and endearing.
I feel myself relax in his presence. He’s the devil’s gatekeeper, and yet I let my guard down. Because I’ve had a trying couple of weeks and for once I just want to not be.
My eyes flicker to his lips and I’m surprised by just how much I want to kiss him. I’m suddenly overwhelmed with need. Then I blink, and the urge disappears.
I remember who I am and who he is, and despite the smile and the deceptive kindness, I know without a doubt that staying here with him won’t end well.
“Leaving,” I say, and before he can respond, I’ve already slid off the stool.
I don’t look back. If I look back, I’ll stay, and staying is a catastrophically bad idea that I refuse to entertain.
I make it through the glass doors of the bar before another body crowds me, wrong smell, wrong face, wrong everything. A man, middle-aged, reeking of vodka and cigarettes, leering.
“Hey beautiful. Don’t you look lonely.”
“Excuse me,” I say flatly, stepping to the side.
He steps with me. “Come on, don’t be like that.”
I’ve handled men like this in courtrooms, in parking garages, in the elevator of my father’s building at fourteen years old. I square my shoulders and open my mouth to eviscerate him, and then he’s gone.
Not gone. Down on the floor, choking, one hand around his throat. Matteo Vitale stands in front of me with the same infuriating calm on his face, except for his eyes. His eyes are black with something feral.
He advances.
“Hey.” I grab his arm. Nothing. “Vitale.”
Still nothing.
I step directly in front of him, one hand raised to his jaw. The touch seems to reach somewhere the words didn’t. He stills. Those dark eyes find mine and whatever’s burning in them shifts—controlled, banked, put away.
He looks at me for a long second.
Then he wraps a hand around my wrist and pulls me away from the scene.
I should wrench my hand back. I don’t.
He walks us to the far end of the corridor before releasing me, and I find my back against the wall with him standing entirely too close. But this isn’t like before, when the drunk man had me cornered. This is different.
I’m not afraid of Matteo Vitale right now, and that’s the most frightening thing about this entire evening.
His breathing is evening out. Mine isn’t.
“You didn’t need to do that,” I say.
“I know.”
“I was handling it.”
“I know that too.”
He says it without condescension, which somehow makes it worse. I look up at him and find him already looking at me.
Not like he’s assessing weakness, not like he’s running calculations. Just looking. Like I surprised him and he hasn’t finished deciding what to do about it.
I hate him. I need to remember that. I have spent years building a case to dismantle everything he’s spent his life constructing.
“You should go,” I say, and I make sure it comes out even.
“I should,” he agrees. He doesn’t move.
Neither do I.
The silence between us has a texture to it now, which is thick, charged, and deeply inconvenient.
“This is a terrible idea,” I say, and I am absolutely talking about the elevator I’m about to get into.
Something shifts in his expression. Not a smile exactly. An acknowledgment.
“Yes,” he says simply.
I push off the wall and walk toward the elevator. I hear him follow.
The elevator doors close.
Neither of us has pressed a button yet.
I stare at the panel. He stares at me.
I can feel that specific brand of attention that I’ve been unsuccessfully pretending not to notice all night.
“I want to be clear about something,” I say to the panel.
“By all means.”
I turn to face him. “I don’t like you.”
“I know.”
“I’m not going to drop the case.”
“I’m not asking you to.”
“And this,” I gesture between us, at the charged and stupid air in the elevator, “doesn’t mean anything. It means I’ve had a long month, and you’re attractive in a deeply irritating way, and I’m making a decision that I get to make. Clear?”
He tilts his head slightly. “Crystal.”
“Good.”
I press the button for the penthouse.
The elevator starts to move, and Matteo Vitale says nothing, does nothing, just stands there looking at me, carefully controlled.
That control is what does it. The fact that he’s not reaching for me. Not smirking. Not taking.
I cross the distance myself.
I grab the lapels of his jacket and I kiss him. Not softly, not tentatively, but hard, angry, like I’m trying to win an argument we haven’t had yet.
He goes still for a second. And then his hands find my waist and he kisses me back with the same energy I brought, and it’s a lot. My back finds the elevator wall. His mouth is hot and demanding and he tastes like beer and restraint coming undone.
I bite his lower lip, hard enough to make a point.
He pulls back just far enough to look at me.
“There she is,” he says softly, like he’s been waiting for this version of me since the bar.
I hate that it makes me want to do it again.
“This is a really, really bad idea,” I say.
“I’ve had worse.”
“I don’t doubt that for a second.”
I hook my fingers through his belt loops and walk backward, toward the oak door of my room, watching his face as I do.
I’m watching for the smugness, the victory, the proof that this is exactly what he engineered.
It’s not there. He looks… undone. A precise man coming apart at the seams and aware of it and continuing anyway.
The fact that Matteo Vitale, who controls everything, looks like he’s surrendering something makes me want him more.