TOWEL
Charlotte
We’re in D.C. again.
Matt finished our last tour early and he requested a new expedited schedule, which I’ve worked on the whole night.
He said he’d meet me at his suite at The Jefferson, which he used tonight when two members of his detail informed us that his home was too swarmed with paparazzi.
Late in the morning, I knock on his suite door.
I primp my hair and then chide myself.
Stop primping, Charlotte!
I expect to find Carlisle here, but when Wilson opens the door and allows me in, I find only silence.
I wander past the living room with my printout in hand.
I freeze as Matt steps into my line of vision, his large body appearing in the open double bedroom doors.
He’s wearing nothing but a white hotel towel draped around his hips, his skin gold and smooth.
God help me.
The towel is hanging so dangerously low I can see the V at his hips. He’s got long legs with muscled thighs and calves, hair-dusted and tan. He’s also barefoot.
His hair is wet from a shower and slicked back, revealing his strong forehead and perfect features to their best advantage. Though he looks amazing in clothes, “amazing” cannot even begin to capture the complete athletic perfection of his shape and form and muscles. Every single muscle is defined and flexed hard.
And those incredible arms . . . the bulging biceps as he lifts the small towel he has in his fist and runs it over his hair to dry it.
He tosses the towel aside and runs his fingers through his hair as he turns his attention to me. “Did you get it done already?”
Oh.
Yeah.
THAT.
“Charlotte.” Chocolaty eyes begin twinkling, and my entire body flushes as I realize he clearly notices me gaping, his hair looking haphazard and even sexier as he props those glasses on his nose and reads.
I’ve tried to shift the next engagements so that our field team has time to arrive on the bus, but I can’t help that flying always gets us in earlier—even though Matt hates wasting time waiting.
“This pushes us back a day,” he says.
He groans in displeasure, and inside me, I feel a deep, instinctive, visceral tightening of my belly muscles at the sound. Not just my belly. My sex grips too. Even my chest seems to constrict. All of that in reaction to that very male, very sexy sound.
Reminding me too much of sex. Between Matt Hamilton and me.
“I’m sorry, Matt, I’m just . . . I can’t figure out how to get the rest of the team there on time to fit in another big speaking engagement. Maybe something small—”
“Hey. It’s all right.” He slaps the folder shut and eyes me. Can he tell I hardly slept? His gaze softens. “I should take you somewhere. Treat you to breakfast and coffee.”
I bite my lip.
Matt’s eyes darken.
I release it.
“I wouldn’t say no to a big vanilla coffee.”
“Let’s do it.”
I feel myself flush because—it sounds too much like a date.
“We can’t!” I laugh. “I can’t even stay here for more than a few minutes for fear of them watching us even more.”
He sits, and his thick thighs are revealed by the towel. “I’m sorry. I can’t really blame them for being obsessed with you,” I add.
He looks at me.
All I can think of are his hands on me. My hands creeping under the towel. Fingers touching his chest. And that big, heavy cock of his.
Wow. Did I just think that?
What is happening to me?
“Come kiss me.”
Matt seems to read my mind.
Startled by the command, I laugh and bite my lower lip. “What?”
“I said, come kiss me. I’m the one who should be nibbling on that lip.”
I take one step forward, Matt’s eyes darkening as he watches me.
There’s a knock on the door. Followed by the sound of a room key. I quickly take back the one step forward I took.
Carlisle and Hessler join us.
Carlisle dives straight into business after a brief, “How’s our American prince today?” and a wink in my direction. Matt heads into the bedroom, to change I suppose.
“I should go.”
Matt steps out in slacks, buttoning up a blue shirt. “No. I’ll take you home.”
“No, it’s okay. I’m meeting a friend actually for a croissant and a catch-up—it’s three blocks away. And her birthday is coming up; I promised to make it. I’ll be home later. Call if you need me.”
I hurry outside, then check the time and head to my favorite coffee bar near Women of the World. I wait there for my friend Larissa. She arrives ten minutes late, and all that time, I’m sort of mad at myself for physically responding to Matt as hard as I do.
I’ve tried so hard to be focused on work and my career. Why do I need to be falling for the man I work for?
I exhale when I spot Larissa hurrying across the restaurant, trying to push America’s Prince off my mind.
We end up doing coffee, then shopping, and then drinks.
“So what’s it like working for that god?” she asks me, lowering her voice as we sit at the bar of one of our favorite cafés. “No. Really. Tell me—I’m dying to know.”
“It’s exhausting,” I say.
Please, god, don’t let my expression give anything away.
That I want him.
That, miraculously, he wants me.
That we’ve slept together.
That I still don’t want it to end and I’m pretty sure because of the proprietary way he looked at me at his hotel room, neither does he.
As I sit there lying through my damn teeth, I realize that for the first time in my life, I’m doing something that I shouldn’t.
I realize how uncomfortable it is to have a secret. To want to scream something to the world but at the same time, want nothing more than to protect it. Have the world never, ever touch any part of this precious secret of yours.
For nobody to ever know your weakness has a name, and a heartbeat, and a very famous face.
“I would kill for just one day in that campaign, Charlotte. I mean, Matt Hammy! Is he as gorgeous in person as they say he is?”
“More so,” I groan, rolling my eyes.
I divert the attention to her new boyfriend, and thankfully, that’s the end of my Matt Hamilton conversation.
If only it were that easy to steer him out of my every thought.
* * *
By the time I reach my apartment that night, I’ve had too many coffees mixed with alcohol. The exhaustion is weighing on me and there’s a pain in my temples when I step off the elevator to my floor. A figure sits by my door, a large figure. In a blue cap.
Matt.
Scrumptious.
Hamilton.
“I needed to get away. Mind if I crash here for the night?” A devilish light glimmers in his eyes, and his lips tug at the corners when he notices the shock on my face.
Inside, I’m babbling and stumbling.
How did he shake off the press?
I’m pretty sure Wilson must have kept the coast clear for him to escape unnoted, but . . . oh my god, Matt is at my apartment door.
My mother would die that he’s at my “shitty” little apartment.
I open my door with shaking hands, letting him inside, worrying she might be right. He’s looking around with a frown, and suddenly my worries multiply, and I grab his hand and try to distract him.
“I have a big bed. Come on,” I whisper.
“You really shouldn’t live here all alone,” he says, frowning deeply at me.
I smile and tug him toward my room—swaying my hips until that catches his attention.
He follows quietly, his eyes taking me in now, instead of my apartment.
I kick off my shoes and lie down on my bed, wondering why he’s not at The Jefferson Hotel with a do not disturb sign on the door. Why he’s here. I catch him glance around my bedroom and at my window, a look of protectiveness in his eyes, but when his eyes return to me and he sees me here—lying in my bed, sort of panting, waiting—his gaze shifts. It becomes partly tender, partly hot, and that alone gives me a hint of why he’s here.
Plus knowing his staff never really lets him rest, I suspect the moments with me are his only rest times—the only times he truly disconnects.
“Was your place really swarmed tonight again?” I ask.
“Yeah, but it always is.”
He speaks casually.
He kicks off his shoes, tosses his cap aside, and stretches out on the bed next to me, both of us on our sides, up on one elbow, facing each other. He smiles and reaches out to run his index finger down my cheek. “Couldn’t stay away. Wanted to see if you got safely home.”
“Or just wanted to see me,” I whisper.
“Yes.”
Suddenly, he shifts over me, and I’m on my back, with Matt’s big body on top of mine.
He’s stroking his hand up my arm, his thumb caressing my skin, his weight the best feeling in the world next to . . . sex with him.
“Do you really want to spend the night here?” I ask, breathless, rubbing my toes along the sides of his bare feet. “I’m sure your bed is so much more comfortable. Or the one at the hotel. I’m babbling, aren’t I? I just . . .”
He’s nodding slowly, looking at me.
“It’s surprising to see you here,” I finally admit.
“A good surprise?”
It takes me a while to admit it, but I do. Nodding. “A good surprise.”
“Are you done?” he asks, curling his hand beneath my hair to lift my head up a few inches. His eyes are impossibly dark as I continue to nod.
I swallow, then smile and raise my head a little higher. I don’t have to lift it too far. Matt closes the distance between his lips and mine, and I’m being kissed for the first time on my own bed. Little as it is.
“We should get you a safer neighborhood, and a better apartment,” he says, nibbling my jaw.
“No,” I say, canting my head back to give him access.
“Why?” He eases back.
“Because there’s no we here. I’m not your kept woman.”
He pulls back and his eyebrows pull together. “You work for me.”
“I’m underneath you right now, Matthew.”
He smiles, shakes his head chidingly, then eases back to eye me as he smooths a hand to brush my hair back.
“I like how real you are, Charlotte. The way you stand up for yourself, and the way you stand up for others. I like how honest and hardworking you are. How sweet you are.” He captures my lips between his, brushing his hand along my forehead again, looking into my eyes.
“Can you blame me for wanting to protect you? I never thought I’d meet a woman like you. That pushed all of my buttons like you do. I want you against any hard surface available and I want to shield you from everything at the same time. I never expected you. And I didn’t expect you now.”
It takes a few seconds to find my voice. “Did you really believe you’d never meet anyone who would be herself with you?”
“Most worry too much about putting up a front they believe matches mine.”
“I don’t.”
“I know. Which makes you rarer than anything to me. So precious.” His voice thickens as he expresses his appreciation.
I grab his jaw and kiss him, and Matt grabs my hands and pins them over my head, kissing me, softly but with an underlying urgency and force. And then I’m getting disrobed and taken, in a bed I’ve always slept on alone, by the only man I’ve ever really wanted and the only one I can’t really ever have. Not if he wins this.
But I take what I can get, moaning softly beneath his kiss as his roaming hands move over me.