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Maya stared back at her. She had been traveling for close to twenty-four hours, all told. She had suffered the greatest humiliation of her life and she wasn’t sure she’d even scratched the surface of processing that. She had lost her closest friend and her fiancé in one fell swoop, and the real tragedy was that they hadn’t died in a freak accident. She couldn’t mourn them when they’d betrayed her.
They were both quite alive, apparently perfectly happy, and had each other to lean on.
It was Maya who had to deal with the mess they’d made, alone.
All that and the Venetian mirrors behind the front desk reminded her that she had left her hair in its wedding style, tamed into an elegant chignon that twenty-four hours of airplanes and airports hadn’t so much as dented.
She moved her glare from that hair—a walking monument to her humiliation that she was going to have to deal with as soon as possible—to the poor woman standing at the desk, waiting patiently for her answer.
“It will just be me,” she said.
And offered no further explanation.
After a beat, the woman nodded. “Of course, signora.”
Maya followed the porter up several sets of stairs that felt like an assault on her already overexhausted system, then down a graceful, soothing hallway. He threw open the doors at the far end, then ushered her into a set of airy, sweeping rooms, bright white with blue accents, and sunset views at every turn.
She saw the sea before her and the darkening sky above. It was beyond pretty, but she couldn’t really take it in. When the doors finally closed behind her, she threw herself across the four-poster king bed in the bedroom, fully clothed, and slept like the dead.
And when she woke up the next morning, she was in Italy, a world away from Toronto.
That was the good news.
The bad news was that she hadn’t imagined the debacle of her wedding day. There was no ring on her finger any longer, and she frowned down at the place it had been and the dent that was still in her skin. She took herself off to the washroom, scowled at herself in the mirror and applied herself to a long, restorative shower and then returning her hair to its natural state. When it was finally the cloud of black curls around her face that she preferred, springy and free and big, she padded back out to the main room. Then, at last, she pushed her way through the French doors onto the balcony that ran the length of her suite.
And only then, overlooking the stunning, impossible stretch of blue before her that was the Gulf of Salerno rolling into the Tyrrhenian Sea and on to forever on this crisp late November morning, did she take a real, deep breath.
Then another. And another, until she started to feel, if not herself, something other than the prickly ball of horror and humiliation she’d been since Saturday.
Ethan had always been obsessed with itineraries, so the first thing Maya did after a restorative espresso or three was wander out into the ancient village clinging vertically to the side of the steep cliff. With no clear idea of where she was heading or what she ought to do. She wandered down old, uneven stone staircases hewn into the side of the mountains until she found the rocky shore. Then she wandered up again, moving from shop to shop. Some were closed in deference to the off-season, but she had no trouble finding a place to sit and have another espresso with a pastry she couldn’t name but tasted like heaven. She spent the morning basking in the Italian sunshine, worrying not at all about the top-ten-sights-to-see lists that Ethan would have brandished before them, forcing them to march quickly from one to the next for fear that they might miss out.
And it was while she was having a peaceful lunch, on a terrace overlooking the village and the sea and more cliffside villages in the distance with clouds rolling in, that she took a good hard look at what remained of her life.
Her father had given Ethan a week to move out. When she returned to Toronto, Maya planned to live in the condo they’d found and chosen, with all the locks changed and no trace of him around to remind her what an idiot she’d been. A better person would want to talk to him at some point, she thought as she stared out at the rolling blue waves. A good, decent person would try to find a little empathy in her somewhere, surely, for two people she had loved for years.
Maybe not today. But someday.
Maya didn’t think she had it in her. She had yet to cry more than a few appalling tears of rage when she’d been fighting with Ethan. When she’d still imagined she could argue him to the altar.
But she hadn’t really cried, and that felt a lot like proof that he had been right to leave her. Wouldn’t a normal person cry in a situation like this? Shouldn’t she have been lying in the crucifixion position in a dark room somewhere? For weeks?
Had she brought all of this on herself?
But she couldn’t really grapple with that, it turned out. Because the one thing that kept tumbling around and around in her head was the fact he’d called her boring in bed. Repeatedly. There had been a comment about preferring her vibrator to a flesh-and-blood man. And he’d followed that up by calling her “boring and vanilla,” again, when he’d been the one who’d had all those rules. The showers they had to take before sex and after, the scheduling, the places she could and couldn’t touch—
She suspected that the emotional wallop of what had happened, and so spectacularly, would land sooner or later.
But Maya had always been a woman of action, not feelings. She couldn’t do anything about the embarrassment she’d suffered or what waited for her when she got back to Toronto after New Year’s. She couldn’t fix what Ethan and Lorraine had broken.
What she could do, however, was address the boring-sex allegation to her own satisfaction. She’d always thought the sex they’d had together was fun, if not as frequent as they both claimed to want—yet did nothing to change. Before Ethan, she’d always liked sex, like anyone else. It was never as ruin-your-life, scream-for-mercy crazy as movies and books and Lorraine always claimed it ought to have been, but that was life, wasn’t it? Always a bit duller in practice than in imagination.
But she had no intention of Miss Havisham-ing herself. That was letting Ethan win, and she refused to allow that to happen. She was going to prove to herself that if there had been someone boring in their bed, it hadn’t been her.
Maya decided then and there that she was going to go out and have all kinds of sex that the fastidious Ethan she’d thought she’d known would have found revolting.
Her life was already ruined, but who knew? Maybe she’d learn that screaming for mercy was a lot more fun than it sounded.
It certainly wouldn’t be boring.
There was an extra little swing in her step when she headed back up the cliffside, following one long, medieval staircase after another. She was out of breath when she got to the top again but exhilarated as she made her way back onto the grounds of her hotel. It loomed up before her, a deep magenta color, graceful and pretty. She admired the tiered gardens, bursting with bougainvillea and other flowers she couldn’t identify at a glance.
Just as she admired the man working on a fence on the tier closest to her.
He wasn’t the kind of man Maya usually found attractive—but then, it was possible she’d spent a lot of time liking things because she thought she should, not because she truly, deeply liked them. The worker before her was beautiful in the way the rocky shore here was beautiful, hard and rough and more than a little disreputable. He was stripped to the waist, though the day wasn’t overly warm, showing off a hard, muscled torso that could have been sculpted from marble. Maya’s mouth went dry as her gaze traced over the tattoos that wrapped around one bicep, trailed over one shoulder and made his wide, tough back into a work of art.
His jeans hung low on his hips, and she spent a little longer than necessary admiring the taut curve of his ass, his powerful thighs and even the scuffed boots on his feet.
Heat flashed through her, the first thing that had penetrated the shield of ice and temper she’d wrapped around her since Ethan had told her he was in love with Lorraine.
Maya grabbed on to it. Hard.
The man was sweating in the hot Italian sun, which only seemed to make his shaggy, close-cropped blond hair gleam like gold. He wore a tawny sort of beard and a pair of battered work gloves, and when he swung around to look at her as if he’d felt her standing there, she felt herself shiver into goose bumps.
Because his eyes were as blue as the Italian sky and the sea all around them.
But far more dangerous.
Maya had always maintained certain standards. Her family’s expectations had always been clear and she had always aimed to exceed them. Martins were the best, attracted the best and did the best. Even Ethan had been a part of her same pursuit of excellence. He had been as driven as she was, as successful. He was everything Maya had wanted in a man, from his career to his trim, smooth runner’s body.
The man before her did not look like he was a runner. He looked like the words rough and tumble had been created specifically for him.
“Take a picture, babe,” the man said in the kind of American accent that did things to Maya’s insides.
She felt...syrupy. Melting hot, like butter. She couldn’t think of anything she liked less than being called babe, especially by a stranger, but this man somehow made it feel delicious, not derogatory.
That was the old Maya, she reminded herself. The Maya who had been left so publicly was gone. She’d died right around the time she’d had to cancel her own wedding.
This new Maya didn’t have to worry about what was good for her. She didn’t have to concern herself with her reputation or what her parents would think. She didn’t have to care if anyone would judge her or what they might say or what her choice of man showed about her to the people who were always watching, always commenting, always looking for chinks in Maya’s armor or ways to sandbag her success.
She had no armor here. And better still, she was the only person in Italy who knew who she was, what she’d left behind or even that she was supposed to be sad and broken in the first place.
Fuck that.
And fuck Ethan and Lorraine, too.
“All right,” she heard herself say, like a random person with no baggage. She fished her mobile out of her pocket and held it up before her, smiled at him and snapped his picture. “There. Picture taken. Now what?”
She had never sounded like that before in her life. Flirty. Suggestive.
Slutty, a voice whispered inside her that could as easily have been Ethan as her mother.
Another thing Maya had never been was a slut. Staring into the bright blue gaze of the gorgeously inappropriate man in front of her who didn’t know that or anything else about her, she thought that was a crying shame.
Not that she planned to cry. About anything.
“That depends,” the man said, and his voice was almost too much to handle. He sounded like the American South, mixed through with what she could only call bad boy, and his amused drawl made her shiver in all kinds of impossible places. “What do you want?”
And Maya had never done an impetuous thing in her life. It was high time she started, she thought. Right here and now, with the kind of reckless behavior she would have shuddered at a few days ago.
Because the man before her, looking at her with all those muscles and a kind of too-hot awareness in his blue eyes, might not be a corporate lawyer. But she had absolutely no doubt that he had reckless down pat.
And Maya wanted to taste it.
Now.
CHAPTER TWO (#ue80afc6d-7198-5284-8cf5-ff6e507ac2e4)
CHARLIE TELLER WAS no stranger to beautiful women.
He liked to consider himself something of an expert, in fact.
And the one standing before him hit pretty much every single one of his buttons. Hot? Check. A killer body, all generous curves packed onto a lean frame? Check. Soft, dark brown skin he itched to get his hands on? Check.
And better still, a wicked, inviting smile he could feel in his cock?
Hell yeah.
Charlie wasn’t a complicated man. His life had gotten a little complicated over the past year, true—but he was doing his best to combat that.
He was here in Italy, a million miles away from everything he’d ever known. Not back in Texas, answering questions that were designed to incriminate him. One way or another.
A year ago he had learned that the unidentified man his mother had slept with all those years ago, resulting in the pregnancy that had forced her—her words, usually screamed at Charlie while she was wasted—to marry his stepfather, introducing Charlie to a life of outlaw bikers and other rough, often desperate men, wasn’t some random drunk in a bar as Charlie had always assumed.
Or if he was, he’d been a very, very rich one.
Daniel St. George had been one of the world’s wealthiest men when he’d died. He’d collected beautiful women, fancy hotels and fast cars, and houses in places Charlie had never heard of before. He’d also collected bastard children wherever he went, like some kind of rich man’s we-are-the-world power trip. Charlie had found out he had half brothers in Iceland and the Pacific Islands. A half sister living in New York. All as wary of their sudden family connection as he was.
And better by far—or less complicated, anyway—his father had left him a fancy-ass hotel in Italy and a chunk of money to go with it so he could run it.
Given the way things were headed back home in Texas, with federal agents infiltrating his stepfather’s biker club and a lot of Charlie’s own biker-club-adjacent activities under a little too much surveillance, he’d jumped at the chance to get the hell away from a sinking ship.
And who knew? Maybe this was his opportunity to go straight.
It was high time for a little change in his life, he could admit that. He’d lasted a long time hurtling down a dead-end road, but he was a realist. His stepfather had been in and out of jail for most of Charlie’s life before he’d met an ugly end in a bar fight gone bad. His mother was too drunk and bitter these days to do much more than exist the same way she always had, moving from man to man in the same small, grim pool of outlaws and grifters. Last he’d heard she was in yet another biker town in the Louisiana swamp.
Charlie had known he’d needed to get out since he was a kid. He’d been plotting out the best way to do that when Daniel St. George’s lawyers had found him. And the rich father he’d never known—and couldn’t really believe his mother had ever known, if he was honest—turned out to be an excellent exit strategy.
Now he was a boutique hotel owner in a high-class, undeniably beautiful part of the world he never would have seen if he’d stayed in Texas. He had a new life, the new start he’d always wanted and an aversion bordering on phobia for any further complications to his newly simple and easy life.
But he was still him.
And the gorgeous woman smiling at him with all that appreciation in her smile and the November sun playing over her face wasn’t complicated at all.
She made him feel simple all the way through.
“What did you have in mind?” he asked her, letting his drawl get lazy. He stripped off his work gloves and tossed them down near the base of the fence post, then rested his hands on his hips.
“What’s on offer?” she asked, more of that wickedness in her voice.
And in the way she shifted so he couldn’t help but look at that swing in her hips. His mouth went dry.
“The hotel is full-service,” he assured her. “Whatever you want, you get.”
“I’m delighted to hear that. I have a lot of...wants.”
She laughed when she said that, which somehow transformed it from a silly little line anyone might say into something...extraordinary.
Charlie had the distinct impression that if he didn’t get a taste of her, it might kill him.
“Tell me what you want,” he said, grinning when she did, like they were both caught up in the bright grip of her laughter. “I’ll make sure you get it.”
She moved closer, and he had to lecture himself not to reach out and sink his hands into the massive cloud of curls around her head. He had to order himself not to wrap his hands around her curvy hips or pull them flush to his, right here, out in the open.
The steep incline of the village fell away behind her, and the ocean was spread out everywhere like a deep blue witness, but all he could see was the flirty skirt she wore that showed off her lean, muscled legs and her long-sleeved shirt with a neckline that drew attention to her delicate collarbones, her firm upper arms and her plump, mouthwatering breasts.
He took his time dragging his gaze back up to her full, lush mouth. She swept her sunglasses off her face, and then he was lost for a moment in the dark brown of her eyes, hot and direct.
He felt it like hands all over him. He wished hers were, and who cared if they were in public.
“I would say I want you,” she said, and there was a certain awkwardness in her words, or maybe it was in the way she stood, as if this was out of character for her. But Charlie didn’t care. “But I wouldn’t want to get you in trouble on the job.”
She didn’t know who he was. No one had pointed him out to her yet, calling him the American boss or whatever more colorful terms they used in Italian. Capo americano, whatever.
It had taken him and the hotel’s longtime manager, Benicio, a solid three months to figure each other out. These days, Charlie left the running of the hotel to Benicio and amused himself with the kinds of things he was good at. He’d always worked with his hands. And there was a deep, unexpected satisfaction in working on something that was his. Something no one could take from him. It felt like an indulgence to spend an afternoon thinking about nothing more than repairing a fence.
Instead of federal wiretaps on the people he’d always considered his family, for example. Or which friends might turn state’s evidence and throw him into the middle of it because of things his stepfather had done or boasts his drunken mother had made to the wrong people. It was a relief to be able to simply do a thing without running it through the proper channels so as not to offend anyone, making sure to use a shitty burner phone instead of the technology everyone else enjoyed these days or any of the other things he’d done over the years while he’d danced up and down that gray moral and legal line that all the lawyers he’d known had called, at best, arguable.
There was nothing gray or arguable about a fence. Either it was fixed or it wasn’t.
And this woman didn’t know he was the owner of this hotel. Charlie could tell from the way she held herself and the clothes she wore that she was high-class. Much higher class than a dirtbag from the Texas dust. She had diamonds in her ears, another one on a delicate chain around her neck, and everything on her curvy body was sleek and quietly expensive. She wasn’t dripping with over-the-top, conspicuous wealth the way so many people were around these world-renowned cliffside beach towns—film stars and European royalty and all the rest who flocked to the Amalfi coast because some Kennedy had done the same way back when.
This woman was fancy.
And she thought he was a handyman.
That delighted Charlie all the way through.
“What the owner doesn’t know won’t hurt him,” he drawled. Then he held out his hand, daring her. “Want me to give you a tour?”
