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Undone
CAITLIN CREWS
She’s been a very good girl…Now she’s learning to be bad!Ditched at the altar for being boring in bed, prim lawyer Maya Martin goes on a solo Amalfi Coast honeymoon with one goal in mind: proving her ex wrong!And when she meets tattooed, hard-bodied Charlie Teller, he seems just the man for the job – he’s so hot it’s criminal! This Christmas, Charlie will help Maya unleash her wild side…over and over again!
She’s been a very good girl...
Now she’s learning to be bad!
Ditched at the altar for being boring in bed, prim lawyer Maya Martin goes on a solo Amalfi Coast honeymoon with one goal in mind: proving her ex wrong! And when she meets tattooed, hard-bodied Charlie Teller, he seems just the man for the job—he’s so hot it’s criminal! This Christmas, Charlie will help Maya unleash her wild side...over and over again!
USA TODAY bestselling and RITA
Award–nominated author CAITLIN CREWS loves writing romance. She teaches her favourite romance novels in creative writing classes at places like UCLA Extension’s prestigious Writers’ Program, where she finally gets to utilise the MA and PhD in English Literature that she received from the University of York in England. She currently lives in the Pacific Northwest, with her very own hero and too many pets. Visit her at caitlincrews.com (http://caitlincrews.com).
Undone
Caitlin Crews
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ISBN: 978-1-474-07148-2
UNDONE
© 2018 Caitlin Crews
Published in Great Britain 2018
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
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www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Contents
Cover (#ufc025a9c-1558-5691-b277-7b8bfd945fb8)
Back Cover Text (#u1b874fe0-9f89-58b2-937d-31f005cbf7fe)
About the Author (#uf1b17ba1-9a9d-572f-8e94-5bd9bf479a56)
Title Page (#uac57739d-82e1-5dbe-840a-ad5ef9056f29)
Copyright (#u658cdd3b-effe-5094-8c38-cade09a6e74d)
CHAPTER ONE (#ub96fcd2b-c163-5b84-b924-228d0f925765)
CHAPTER TWO (#ufdaf374e-7f48-5d23-b676-9db584d4b83e)
CHAPTER THREE (#u62b5435e-ee3a-56b3-a57d-0ce19242c9ad)
CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#ue80afc6d-7198-5284-8cf5-ff6e507ac2e4)
EVERYONE WARNED HER not to go to Italy.
They said it was a bad gut reaction that she would regret, bitterly.
“It will be like a funeral march,” Maya Martin’s older sister, Melinda, had asserted, her familiar body vibrating with the force of her outrage that her sister had been treated so shabbily. Maya could relate. She had been in a constant state of outrage—or maybe it was fury, possibly covering up something like grief—ever since Ethan had made his ugly little announcement and ruined all of the plans Maya had made. For her wedding and her life. “You can’t possibly take your own honeymoon trip alone. It will make you crazy.”
“More crazy than being left at the altar? Almost literally?” Maya had retorted, standing there with her hair and makeup exquisite and ready for the ceremony her father had canceled after it became clear Ethan couldn’t be reasoned with. “Because that’s hard to imagine.”
Melinda had made a face. But the facts were simple and incontrovertible.
Ethan, who Maya had been set to marry that very day, was not in love.
Not with Maya, anyway.
“We’ve always been best friends before we were anything else,” he had said, in his usual warm way, his hazel eyes bright and clear, not tormented. That part had seemed significant later. “Haven’t we?”
Maya had been sitting in the pretty silk bathrobe she’d bought for precisely that purpose: getting ready the morning of her wedding. Her hair was finally done. Her makeup was pristine and perfect for photos. She’d been about to step into her lovely white dress when Ethan had talked himself past her mother and sister, even though everyone knew it was bad luck for the groom to see the bride before the ceremony and the Martins were nothing if not sticklers for convention.
Everyone was correct. It was very bad luck.
“Of course we’re best friends,” Maya had said, feeling warm and happy, shot straight through with sweetness.
It made her feel sick now.
She hadn’t seen it coming. She’d been thinking about how she and Ethan had started together at the same Seven Sisters firm in Toronto after their articling placements. They’d worked on cases together. They’d grown closer and closer. Eventually, all those late nights and weekends had led to more. A year after that, they’d moved into a condo in chic, trendy Yorkville together. When Ethan had proposed six months later, it had seemed like the next, perfect, logical step.
Maya’s life had always gone according to plan. As a Martin, Maya had been expected to excel from her earliest days in Toronto’s tony Lawrence Park neighborhood, through her prelaw studies at McGill in Montreal, straight on to law school at the University of Toronto, a plum articleship with one of her father’s impressive friends and into her current place as a senior associate at one of Canada’s best law firms.
Ethan fit right in. He was successful, ambitious and attractive. Their life together was filled with shared interests, from work to working out, the odd minibreak when schedules allowed and a very clear focus on how to build the perfect future together.
Maya and Ethan made sense. It was that simple.
“I know I can tell you this, though the timing is off,” Ethan had said that morning. He’d come to sit next to her on the sofa in her suite at the Four Seasons in Yorkville with its view out over the city. He’d taken her hands in his, his thumb brushing the cushion-cut halo diamond from Birks he’d placed there himself when he’d proposed at one of their favorite restaurants. “I’ve fallen in love, Maya.”
She still hadn’t gotten it. She’d been focused on the plan. The future they’d carefully plotted out together over dinners and on long runs. First they would both make partner at their top-tier law firm. Only when that was nailed down would they move to a tony suburb, like Rosedale or Lawrence Park, to start their own family and continue the cycle of Martin excellence. Martins were lawyers, doctors like Melinda, professors like their cousins or CEOs like their father. Their lives were duly glittering because they worked hard and excelled at everything they did.
So Maya had only sat there, smiling softly at the man she’d expected to marry, practice law with, make babies with and glitter with, because Martins didn’t suffer hideous public humiliations. Martins didn’t make mistakes.
“Neither one of us meant it to happen,” Ethan was saying in that engaging way of his that helped him win cases. “Both Lorraine and I feel sick at how this will hurt you, but we were powerless. People fall in love sometimes, even if it’s inconvenient.”
Maya had finally stopped smiling then, when he’d said her oldest friend’s name. “What? Lorraine?”
“In time,” Ethan had said in that plummy, confident voice that was half the reason Maya had been so enamored of him in the first place, “we think you’ll agree that this is actually for the best.”
What happened after that was a bit of a merciful blur.
There were guests waiting—family and friends from all over Canada and abroad—but Maya’s father had dealt with that in his severe way that brooked no argument or follow-up questions.
There was the dress that Maya and her mother and sister had picked out together, exactly the kind of fairy-tale gown Martin girls deserved to wear. Maya had tried on the winner while her mother had looked proud for once and Melinda had smiled, no doubt remembering her own triumphant wedding. Maya was carrying on the Martin family tradition of marrying well and living better, and the dress was a beautiful indulgence to mark the occasion.
She had secretly loved that dress and not because it “set the right tone,” according to her chilly mother. She had imagined herself wearing it, sweeping down the aisle and then dancing the night away at the reception, with all that white surrounding her like a gift.
Now she wanted to burn it.
The details were fuzzy, once it was clear that Ethan was deadly serious, that he couldn’t be talked out of it, that he was really, truly calling off his own wedding a few hours before the ceremony.
But what Maya really remembered were the things Ethan had said when he had stopped pretending to worry about Maya’s feelings. When he made it clear, at last, that he hadn’t worried about Maya’s feelings in a long while—or, possibly, ever.
“Come on, Maya,” he had thrown at her, his lip curling into a sneer that made him look like a complete stranger. The kind of stranger who might sleep with his fiancée’s best friend and call off his own wedding. “You like your sex boring and vanilla, and that’s fine. That’s your right. But ultimately, I’m not willing to shackle myself to someone who can’t satisfy my needs.”
“Your needs?” Maya had been on her feet by then. They’d been going around and around for hours, though the damage had already been done. She’d thrown his ring at his head like the cliché she’d never dreamed she’d become. Papa had made the announcement in the chapel, filled already with their friends, their families and, most embarrassingly, their business associates. “What does that mean, Ethan? Lorraine pretends to like anal? She indulges your heretofore-unknown foot fetish? Or, let me guess, she dresses up like a little girl and calls you daddy. Is that what you like? Because you told me you liked a grown woman, not an overgrown child whose life is and always will be a disaster of her own making.”
“I understand your childish need to swipe at me,” Ethan had said with great dignity, as if he had the moral high ground. “I deserve it, I suppose. But I won’t allow you to talk about Lorraine like that.”
That hadn’t helped.
But it wasn’t until Ethan had slunk out, under direct physical threat from Maya’s normally icy-cold mother, that the Lorraine part really sank in.
Lorraine had been Maya’s roommate at McGill. Maya had tended to her through all the emotional upheavals Lorraine had suffered over the years, from the jobs she’d lost to the relationships she’d sabotaged. Maya had given Lorraine a place to sleep when she’d been evicted, had given her money when she was short and had gotten in more fights with Ethan than she could count over what he’d called her “obsession with that albatross around your neck.” Maya had even made Lorraine her maid of honor over her sister, because she’d thought her fragile, thin-skinned friend would have had a breakdown otherwise.
“I don’t want her to feel left out,” Maya had told Melinda, who was older than Maya by four years and had witnessed many Lorraine fits and breakdowns over the years. “You know how destructive she can be.”
The truth was, even Maya hadn’t known Lorraine was this destructive.
What made it worse was that Melinda had understood, even though Maya had been her maid of honor when Melinda had married Edward years ago. And now Maya was left to feel as horrified about that decision as every other one she had ever made concerning Lorraine.
She honestly didn’t know which part of the equation made her feel more ill. Ethan. Lorraine. Or her own unforgivable blindness.
“I think the worst thing you can do right now is run off by yourself somewhere,” her mother had said much later that terrible day, when Maya seized on the Italy thing like the lifeline it was. Mother had reverted to her usual crisp, icy demeanor, as if nothing untoward had happened—or nothing she couldn’t arrange to her satisfaction, eventually. “What you need to do is come home. You can stay with your father and me until we figure out how best to handle this.”
Maya had still been wearing her wedding hair, because nothing short of a tornado could make the elaborate coiffure move. She’d changed into jeans and a T-shirt long before so she could wear something other than her fancy wedding lingerie while she canceled everything. And do things like talk to the guests who had come so far to see a wedding that would never happen.
She had been humiliated. Furious. So much of both that she couldn’t see a path through it. She couldn’t imagine how she ever wouldn’t tremble with all that rage and horror.
But what she hadn’t been, she’d realized with a sick sort of lurch deep inside as the day edged into evening on that late November day she already wanted to forget, was as heartbroken as she surely should have been.
Maybe that was why it was a little too easy for her to slip into her usual mode as one of her firm’s rising stars.
As an attorney she was decisive. Correct. And never ever emotional.
Exactly the Martin daughter her parents expected her to be.
“I’m not going to move out of my condo or slink off back home to my parents,” she said, the decision coming to her in a flash. A flash that she knew would irritate Ethan, which made it even better. She was standing in the corner of the hotel suite—the honeymoon suite, of course, just to salt the wound—staring out at Toronto there at her feet. Like it was mocking her. “If Ethan wants to run off with Lorraine, he’s welcome to do so. That will involve him moving out, not me. And I would rather he do that when I’m not around.”
“If that’s what you want,” her mother said in an overly patient way, as if Maya was acting irrationally. It set Maya’s teeth on edge, but she’d already done more yelling today than she had in years. Maybe ever. She wasn’t going to give in to the urge for more when all it did was make her throat hurt. “But I don’t see what good it will do you to run off to a foreign country—”
“We booked a month’s holiday on the Amalfi coast,” Maya said, with the bedrock certainty deep inside her that she thought might be entirely made of fury and rage. “It will be the first vacation I’ve taken since law school. Yes, it was supposed to be our honeymoon. But I’m not giving it up just because Ethan turned out to be an asshole.”
No one had supported this decision. Melinda had argued against it. She’d recruited her engineer husband to do the same. Her parents had been deeply opposed, nearly frigid in their distaste for Maya’s plan. Everyone had argued at her, yet had shied away from addressing the elephant in the room—which was that clearly her decision-making was faulty.
Maya had stuck to her guns, faulty or not. She needed to go away. She needed to put as much distance between this debacle and whatever was on the other side of it. She needed to figure out a new path, a new plan, and she couldn’t do that here in the wreckage of the old.
She had flatly refused to see Lorraine. She had declined the opportunity to speak to Ethan further when he’d reappeared outside the hotel suite. She’d had her father inform him that she would be using both the plane tickets they’d booked and the hotel—a charming boutique hotel in the exclusive St. George portfolio—and he could take the opportunity of her absence to remove himself and all evidence of his existence from their condo.
Papa had reported back that Ethan hadn’t taken the news well, just as Maya had hoped.
And Papa had allowed himself a slight smile while he’d shared that with the family, which was as close to violence as Maya’s stern, dignified father had ever gotten to her knowledge.
The great thing about her decision to leave Toronto, she reflected the following evening when she was at cruising altitude over the Atlantic Ocean with an empty seat next to her, was that no one was there to stare at her and ask her how she felt. About anything. She was just another woman on a plane, blessedly anonymous and with no reason to die of her own embarrassment.
She landed in Frankfurt on Monday morning, then transferred to another flight down into Naples in Italy. By the time her taxi delivered her to the cliffside town on the Amalfi coast where she’d be spending the next month suspended over the glorious Tyrrhenian Sea, she was dead on her feet.
She hardly noticed her surroundings. She had the faintest notion of crisp, white walls and a pink-and-blue sunset beyond the lobby, but it took all her energy to focus on the chic, smiling woman behind the front desk.
“You are booked into the honeymoon suite, signora,” the woman said in charmingly accented English. “Yet you appear to be traveling alone...?”
