Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty Six
Elsa
I’m going to die.
I’m going to die, and the headline is going to be humiliating.
How am I supposed to survive the weekend trapped in the apartment with Antonio? How can I survive without losing my mind, my dignity, or my grip on the rules I wrote?
I try to focus on the laptop in front of me instead of the display on my apartment floor.
Of course, I knew I was going to be spending a lot of time with him, but why didn’t I consider the weekend when I would literally be trapped in here with him day and night?
At least during the week, we’d had some time apart.
Somehow, some way, Antonio Conti managed to get himself into one of the unused offices close to mine. It’s how he’s been “monitoring” my movements without being in my office with me.
I don’t know how.
What I do know is that the morning after he got here, he watched me walk through the front door of Northstar…
Then he was in my office waiting for me by the time I got up there. He told me he’d be in the empty office two down from mine. That he already had surveillance set up in my office. Cameras this time, yes, but not microphones. As if he anticipated my objections to confidentiality being violated.
Then, at the end of the day, he was outside the building waiting for me.
I have no idea how he did it, how he avoided security, or anyone noticing him. I’m not sure I want to know.
But he did it all week, and today is Friday.
I’m nearly done with work and just have a few more things to sort out before shutting down for the weekend. But, like an idiot, I decided it would be easier to get them done in the apartment.
Well, easier for Antonio, really.
So, I shut down early at work, packed up my laptop, and brought it home.
The moment we walked into the apartment after work, Antonio’s phone rang, so I peeled off to take a shower. Enjoy some quiet alone time. Because my brain felt like sandpaper and my nerves were raw.
I heard snippets of his conversation before hopping in the shower—some Italian, some English. It was the kind of tone that someone used when talking to family.
But, when I finally came out, hair damp, skin clean, and my most comfortable, unimpressive clothes on—no shorts since that first night—he was off the phone.
And doing push-ups.
In the middle of my apartment.
I stopped walking for a second, my hand tightening on the laptop against my side, because the sight of him made heat pool between my legs. It took everything in me to walk across the room and to the kitchen table calmly, like I was unaffected.
I’ve gotten no work done since I sat down.
Because Antonio is doing push-ups, and it’s frying my brain all over again.
He’s in a fitted T-shirt and dark athletic pants, because of course he is, and his body moves with that controlled strength that makes me want to moan in need. He lowers, chest close to the floor, then pushes back up on the tips of his fingers like gravity is optional for him.
His breathing is steady.
Mine is not.
I shouldn’t be watching. I know I shouldn’t be watching. I can feel the heat crawling up my neck like my body wants to betray me in all sorts of fun ways.
But I can’t help it. He looks so damn good.
And I feel bad.
Because he hasn’t been able to get to a real gym since he’s been here, and that’s my fault in a way. I can’t exactly take him into my building’s gym. No one is supposed to know he’s here. That was the whole point—the whole agreement.
The first day, he checked in with the front desk. Then he walked back out and came back in with his two duffel bags discreetly.
Now he’s a secret.
My secret.
That thought is definitely doing some dirty things inside me.
I shift my eyes back to my laptop and pull up the last of the work I need to finish—emails, a report draft, loose ends I refuse to let hang over my head into the weekend.
If I can just finish it, if I can just shut my brain down and get it done—
Maybe I can survive this.
Antonio’s breath wooshes out softly as he pushes up again.
I keep my eyes on the screen.
I type.
I do not look up.
Because if I look up, I’m going to notice the flex of his arms, the way his shirt pulls across his back, the way sweat starts to darken the collar at his throat.
And I cannot afford to notice.
Usually, I can avoid this.
Usually, he works out when I’m in the shower, or I find an excuse to be in my bedroom, or I pretend I suddenly need to take out the trash or reorganize a drawer.
But today he was on that call, and he hadn’t even started by the time I was done showering, and then he dropped to the floor like he’d been waiting for the moment I had no escape.
So now I’m stuck.
My fingers hover over the keys for a second. I swallow. My throat is dry.
I force myself to type again, harder this time, as if aggression will make it easier to handle.
These were my rules.
No touching. No flirting. No pet names. No kissing. Normal.
Normal.
I bite the inside of my cheek and keep my eyes on the laptop.
Because I will not let him know how much this is affecting me.
How much I miss when he calls me dolcezza.
I will not.
Even if my brain is still chanting—
I’m going to die.
How am I going to survive this?
He finishes the set like it’s nothing, holds at the top for a beat, then drops his knees and sits back on his heels.
I pretend I don’t exhale like I’ve been holding my breath.
He wipes his forearm across his forehead, then he shifts again to lie back on the ground. He bends one leg, plants his shoe against the ground, and straightens his other leg. Then he…
God Almighty.
He lifts his hips in a slow, controlled motion in a single-leg glute bridge before lowering slowly.
You have got to be fucking kidding me.
He does it again, and I nearly moan out loud.
Slow up. Slow down. Like he’s got all the time in the world and no idea he’s committing a felony in my living room.
I can practically feel him pumping that big cock inside me, nice and slow.
I’m so wet I could slide right off this chair.
I need to be done with work. I need to be done now.
My eyes snap to my laptop so hard I nearly give myself whiplash.
I start typing an email I don’t need to send to anyone, fingers moving on pure muscle memory while my brain is busy screaming.
Rules, I remind myself, my rules.
Except my body doesn’t care about rules. My body is watching the line of his thigh tense, the way his shirt shifts at his waist.
He has to be doing this on purpose.
I don’t look.
I look again when he switches legs.
My email refreshes, and I see a new one show up in my inbox out of the corner of my eye. I look, and my stomach drops.
For one second, my fingers go cold.
My eyes skim the sender again, like it might change if I blink.
It doesn’t.
I stop breathing.
Antonio’s shoes scuff lightly on the floor as he shifts positions again, and the sound scrapes across my nerves.
“Antonio,” I say quietly.
His head lifts instantly. The workout stops mid-rep like someone flipped a switch.
“What is it?” he asks, already rising.
I point at my screen with a hand that’s not altogether steady. “I just got an email from Bellandi Operations.”
“Don’t open it,” he snaps, even though he’s already told me not to open emails from them.
“I haven’t,” I snap back, then immediately regret it.
He crosses the space quickly and comes up behind my chair.
And then he leans over the back of my chair, one hand braced on the top edge, the other planted on the table near my laptop like he’s caging me in.
He’s close enough that I can smell him.
Not cologne. Not soap.
Light sweat and heat and him.
The clean, sharp scent of a man who just pushed his body hard in my living room.
My pulse trips.
My mouth goes dry.
There are tiny droplets on the skin at his throat, along the edge of his collarbone where the shirt has darkened slightly. His chest rises and falls, and I can see the flex in his arm where it holds his weight on the table.
It takes quite literally every ounce of willpower not to lean in and bite him right on that bicep like I’ve lost my damn mind.
I grip the edge of the table instead.
My body and mind are at complete odds with each other.
Focus. Bellandi. Email.
“Touching base on next steps,” he murmurs, reading the subject. His breath brushes my ear as he reads over my shoulder, and I hate that I feel it like a touch.
“Should I open it?” I whisper.
“Not yet,” he says and pushes away from the table. Much to my regret. “Let me make sure.”
He crouches by the duffel and pulls out a second laptop—older, thicker, nothing like the sleek one he has sitting on the coffee table—along with a short cable and a small black dongle.
“This one doesn’t touch your network,” he says, businesslike. He sets it on the table and sits next to me, opens it, and the screen boots into a plain interface that looks nothing like a normal desktop.
I stare. “What is that?”
“A clean sandbox,” he says, fingers moving fast. “Isolated environment. If there’s a malicious attachment or a booby-trapped link, it tries to bite this machine, not yours.”
He glances at me. “And before you ask—yes, Bellandi can absolutely put a payload in a ‘harmless’ PDF or hide it behind a link. So we don’t click it without precautions.”
He taps a few keys, then points at my laptop. “Forward it to this address.” He rattles it off once, then adds, “Don’t open it. Don’t preview it. Just forward.”
My hands hover over the keyboard.
“Once it’s in here, I’ll pull the headers, see where it actually came from. Then I’ll detonate any attachments in the sandbox and run a scan. If it tries to call out to anything, I’ll see it.”
My fingers tremble as I hit Forward, too careful not to let it open or preview.
“Done,” I say, and my voice comes out too thin.
Antonio doesn’t answer right away. He’s already typing, jaw tight, gaze locked on his screen like the rest of the apartment has ceased to exist. A few lines of text flash. He makes a low sound under his breath.