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Again, she laughed.
‘You are such...’ She just laughed again. ‘I wasn’t expecting to go out for dinner, okay? I do know I’m badly dressed.’
‘For who?’ Matteo shrugged.
He was relaxing to her.
Oh, she was on edge, Abby knew, yet somehow Matteo was relaxing to her.
‘What happened to your eye?’ she asked.
‘I came off a horse,’ he said. ‘That’s how I dislocated my shoulder. I’m supposed to be wearing a shoulder strap.’
‘So, why aren’t you?’
‘I lost it.’
‘Oh.’
He was so incredibly handsome and she felt incredibly drab.
‘I could stop by my hotel and get changed,’ Abby offered, still a little worried that she was way underdressed.
‘No need.’
It was, however, Matteo thought, a seriously nice restaurant they were heading to. Seriously, seriously nice but thankfully he’d been here with the sheikh and had lobbed enough tips these past days that he knew they’d give him a welcome smile as they walked in.
But he didn’t want her to be uncomfortable.
‘We could go to Majlis Al Bahar...’ Matteo glanced over and he saw her nervous swallow. ‘I’m not getting romantic,’ he reassured, because it was possibly the most romantic restaurant on earth. ‘It’s just that the dress code is more casual and,’ he added, ‘I kind of want to try it.’
‘No,’ Abby said. ‘The hotel’s fine.
So his hotel it was.
‘Table for two,’ Matteo told the maître d’ and such was his confidence that, of course, no one turned a hair and they were shown to their seats.
Her glasses off, those disgusting jeans tucked away, she really was beautiful, Matteo thought. Her eyes were an intense green and thickly lashed and she was the first woman he had ever sat in a restaurant with who wore not a trace of make-up.
He knew what she’d look like in the morning, Matteo thought. Then he reminded himself that he wasn’t here for that and so he looked from Abby and out to the view of the Arabian Gulf. ‘I love it here,’ he admitted. ‘I didn’t expect to, then again I had no real idea what to expect.’
‘I haven’t seen much of it,’ Abby said. ‘We only got here yesterday...’
Matteo was astute enough to frown. ‘So how is Pedro doing with the heat?’
She liked that he understood that it mattered.
‘A few days more to acclimatise would have been nice,’ Abby admitted.
‘Is Pedro as temperamental as the press make out?’ Matteo asked.
‘More so.’ She sighed. ‘I can’t blame him though. He’s an amazing talent.’
‘You’ve given him a very early break,’ Matteo said, remembering that Pedro had just turned twenty-one and had been nineteen when Abby had taken him on. ‘Shouldn’t he still be doing the dinky tracks in a go-kart?’
Abby smiled but it was a guarded one. ‘He’s going to be amazing—he
already is.’
