It was scary to be just Evangeline, scary to be so exposed, but deep inside, she yearned for someone to see beneath the layers and value her.
As soon as she found out Matt wasn’t that someone, she’d be out the door.
In record time, she shut the lid on her second suitcase and zipped it. She had packing down to a science.
As she carried the suitcases down the marble staircase to Vincenzo’s first floor, one of his buddies who’d passed out on the couch stirred. Franco. Or maybe it was Fabricio. He sat up and blearily evaluated her as he scrubbed his jaw.
“Eva. Didn’t know you were here.” A night of hard drinking slurred his accented English almost unintelligibly. He zeroed in on the suitcases. “Leaving already?”
“Yeah. Tell Vincenzo I said later.”
“Wait. Do my show this week.” He lifted his chin. “Milano Sera will treat you well.”
She took in his too-handsome face and two-hundred-dollar haircut that not even a night of couch surfing could ruin. Now she remembered him. Franco Buonotti. He was the host of a late-night talk show on an Italian network. He’d bugged her a couple of times before to do an exclusive with him.
“I don’t think so.”
“Aww. Not even for me?” He batted his eyelashes, and she almost snorted.
Italian playboys were so not her type—she was more into blue-eyed blonds Regardless, she hadn’t broken her silence on the botched surgery in six months and didn’t see a reason to change that now.
“Not even.”
She escaped to the haven her blue-eyed blond had offered.
Upstairs in Matt’s bedroom, she unpacked her clothes and arranged them in the empty spots he’d cleared for her in the closet and dresser. Unable to resist, she opened a drawer to finger his shirts. Very few of his items lay folded inside or hanging in the closet. He traveled as light as she did. But then, neither of them had a permanent home.
Oddly, seeing their clothes mixed felt very permanent. It shouldn’t have put a smile on her face.
Matt ordered lunch to be delivered, and the soup grew cold because they were too busy talking to eat. He was transparent and genuine, and his willingness to share covered her tendency not to. He never ran out of stories, and she forgot to be wary by the middle of the afternoon.
That’s when Milano Sera’s host intruded on her haven. Matt answered a knock at the door, and she glimpsed the too-handsome face of Vincenzo’s friend through the crack.
“I’ll take care of it,” she told Matt and shooed him away from the door. “I already said no.”
“Cara, no one says no to me.”
He’d cleaned up and squeezed his impressive build into tight Dolce & Gabbana jeans and a distressed T-shirt. That kind of sexy might work on tittering schoolgirls, but Evangeline couldn’t titter to save her life.
“Yet I did. This is a private home. Please respect that.”
She shut the door in his face and turned to see Matt watching her.
“Sales guy?” he asked with raised eyebrows. “What was he selling? Ice to Eskimos?”
And somehow he pulled a smile from her. Matt’s talents were amazing. “He hosts a talk show on an Italian network and wants me to do an interview.”
“Badly, I guess, to chase you here.”
“I’m sorry he bothered us.” She sighed. “It was a nice idea, to block out the world. Unfortunately, the world tends to camp out on my doorstep.”
With it came the intrusion of Eva...and a reminder of all the reasons she’d latched onto the suggestion of a place to hide. If she knew the answers to the questions, interviews might not be so hard.
Her phone beeped, as if to underscore the point. Like an idiot, she checked it to see an apology text from Vincenzo. Well, that was something, at least.
Matt took the phone from her fingers and tossed it on the credenza to his left without checking his aim.
“Hey, the world may come to you, but you don’t have to answer to it.” He swept her hand into his, holding it tight. “No rules at Palazzo D’Inverno. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”
“Thanks.” It was therapeutic to have someone validate her choices.
He pulled her to the couch and settled them both into it comfortably. The sun was low enough in the sky to cast a glow over the whitewashed building opposite the palazzo.
His fingers tangled in her hair, and she experienced the deepest sense of harmony she’d experienced in a long while. Maybe the deepest ever.
“You drove an Escalade?” she asked in a blatant attempt to change the subject. “Really?”
It seemed too domestic for a guy who liked to throw rules out the window.