Page 20

For all her fear, she wasn’t going to back down. That would be even more dangerous than the fire she was about to walk into. The moment Mattia scented weakness, it would be game over.

Her heart beating hard, she bent her head to the door. “Unless you want me to shoot you when I’m out of your eyeline, I suggest you get to your feet. We can walk to the bedroom like we did to the kitchen. You’ll get something for me to change into, and then I’ll walk into the bathroom.”

The nostrils of the nose so like a bird of prey’s twitched, the firm mouth twisting, and then he got to his feet.

For the first time since he’d removed the hood from her, she felt the mammoth size discrepancy between them. Really felt it.

The only way she could win a physical fight with him would be if she got a swift, sharp knee to his balls before he could touch her. She would have to bring him down immediately or he would snap her in two without any effort.

She stifled the swallow her throat needed to make. “Ready?”

He jerked a sharp nod.

With his armchair on the right-hand side of the door and the sofa facing it, Elvira took the first step.

The living room was square-shaped. To her left was a small round table, the chair facing away from it the one she’d been cuffed to. To her right was empty space that should be filled with a television. It was in this empty space that she edged her way to the door while Mattia edged his way to the sofa she’d just vacated.

Her steps careful, her arm steady, she backed through the living room’s threshold and into the small hallway. When her back was pressed against the wall between the kitchen and bedroom, she nodded, and Mattia performed his movements.

There was none of the amusement she’d experienced the first time they’d done this, when she’d still been brimming with glee at taking the upper hand. She still had that upper hand in theory, but something had shifted between them since that made her feel she was balancing on a tightrope.

As hard as she was concentrating, she couldn’t stop the thought that this was like a dance and that their minds were connected enough to anticipate each other’s movements before the other had even made them. Working in complete but unspoken harmony, soon Mattia was in the bedroom, which had a double bed and a wardrobe in it and nothing else, and she was standing a foot back from its threshold.

He opened the left side of the wardrobe and with the most cursory of glances, pulled out a black T-shirt.

Only when he was back at the threshold did he throw it at her. Thankfully, Elvira’s reflexes were as good as his, as she only just stopped it hitting her in the face.

Oh yes, they were evenly matched. It was only his size that put him at an advantage over her…

But she had cunning and something else. Her body.

He still hadn’t looked at it since she’d taken her top off. It was like he’d glued his stare to her face.

The bathroom was small like all the other rooms. The toilet was to the left behind the door, the sink to the right. The walk-in shower was straight on. When she’d used the toilet earlier, she’d put her gun together while taking in everything about the room. The shower worked the same as the one she’d grown up with, a simple forward-facing lever that was pulled down for the desired water temperature. Fixed on the wall to the actual shower itself was a rack with toiletries. If she was lucky, one of the bottles would be full, and she’d be able to aim the liquid contained in it at his eyes and temporarily blind him. If it was heavy enough, she might try catching him off-guard and hurtling it at his face. She would just have to play it by ear.

“That’s far enough,” she said once she’d backed into the bathroom.

With Mattia standing in the centre of the small hallway facing her, Elvira reached back with her free hand and felt for the handle to open the glass shower door, moving herself forward to make way for it. Once it was fully extended, she stepped back again and unbuttoned her jeans.

Despite the confidence she was projecting, Elvira had never removed jeans one-handed before, and she had to concentrate even harder than she had during the dance they’d just performed to snake them down her hips, taking her panties with them. The hardest part was stepping out of them. She had to use her feet to get them past each ankle and tug at them with her toes while kicking them off, all without lowering her gun or losing eye contact with the man whose gun was aimed at her.

There was no expression on his face. Nothing to show he had any awareness that she was standing barely ten feet in front of him wearing only a bra. Even when she reached behind her back to unclasp it, not so much as a muscle flickered on his face, not even the tic beneath his eye.

She dropped the bra without looking where it landed.

Standing naked in front of him was the strangest feeling. On the one hand, she’d just made herself the most vulnerable she’d been since her parents had been killed, but she didn’t feel vulnerable. She didn’t feel empowered or any of that other nonsense either – that would be crazy considering the situation – but there was a zing in her veins she’d never felt before.

Danger laced the air, a sense that the expressionless Ice Man who’d just watched her strip naked was only a breath away from snapping from the control he’d frozen himself in, and as she inhaled that danger, she suddenly imagined him striding to her with the same speed he’d done in the living room, ripping his own clothes off and pinning her against the wall, and as quickly as the image came to her, came the certainty that Mattia was imagining the same thing.

Even with the distance between them, she could see his eyes were pulsating with the same strength as her beating heart.

It wasn’t only her heart that was beating hard. The pulse between her legs was too.

Forcing herself to maintain the challenge in her stare, she cupped a breast. “Do you like what you see?” she asked huskily, putting her hand into the fire by taunting him.

The tiniest spasm flickered over his face, but he didn’t even blink. She didn’t think he’d blinked since she’d pulled her jeans and panties down her hips.

“Just take the fucking shower,” he dragged out.