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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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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...?”
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?”
He watched her swallow, hard. He watched the way her smile froze, and then the way she forced it wide again.
But what he really cared about was the way she held out her hand after a moment, sliding it into his and holding his gaze while she did.
“I would love a tour,” she said, low and a little rough.
Charlie laced his fingers with hers, enjoying the kick of heat that hummed through him at the contact. The way she sucked in a breath. Then he tugged her along behind him, skirting the bottom of the tiered gardens and terraces to duck into the little shed tucked away at the corner of the property.
“This is the best part of the hotel,” he told her as he pulled her inside. There was no light, but the ancient windows let the afternoon in through the brightly painted shutters, and it took only a moment or two for his eyes to adjust. And he liked the way the sunshine poured over her pretty face, tipped up to his. “It’s nice and private, for one thing.”
“Private is my favorite.”
And again, there was that hesitation. But it was like she heard it, too, and didn’t like it. Because she threw herself forward.
She braced herself on his chest, exhaling in a rush when her palms met his pectoral muscles. Her gaze met his, bright and intense. Then she surged up on her toes and pressed her mouth to his.
Charlie liked that.
And he liked it a lot more when he angled his mouth and took it deeper.
Hotter. Wetter.
And maybe a little bit insane.
One thing he’d learned in Italy was never to deny himself a treat, and this was no different. He found her face with his palms and then guided her head where he wanted. He took the kiss harder. Wilder.
She tasted almost too good. Sweet like honey, with a kick of something that went straight to his head like too much Jack on a long, rough night.
He growled a little bit at that. She made a humming noise in response, and then she was pushing even closer to him, pressing those lush breasts of hers into his chest.
Charlie swung her around, getting her back up against the old stone wall and levering himself against her. He ate at her mouth, demanding and dirty, loving the way she shuddered against him as she met every stroke.
But it wasn’t enough.
He picked her up, liking that she was a good, tight handful when he wrapped his arms around her ass and pulled her thighs wide. He pinned her to the wall. She wrapped her legs around his waist like they’d done this dance a thousand times, and he wedged himself there where she was softest and hottest.
And the way he kissed her went savage.
Then she made it worse, because she started to move. She rocked those hips of hers in a sweet circle, dragging her soft heat all over him, and he thought that he might actually lose it.
He reached back and pulled a condom from his back pocket, and broke the kiss.
She was panting, her mouth faintly swollen and her eyes wild, and he wasn’t sure he’d ever seen anything hotter. He fumbled between them to unbutton his jeans, pulling himself free. He dealt with the condom, then shoved her skirt out of his way, reaching between them to get a few fingers in all that melting heat.
“Oh my God,” she whispered, and he laughed at that, because it was hot. And she was hot. “You just...walk around prepared?”
He thought he might lose it at any second, that was how slick her pussy was, splayed open between him and the wall. Charlie shoved her panties to one side, then put his cock where his fingers had been, moving the tip through her folds, just to play with her.
“I’m always prepared,” he told her. “You’re welcome.”
Sure enough, she rocked her head back and arched against him, like that could make him do what she wanted.
“I should have mentioned this,” he said in a low voice, gazing down at the picture she made for him, her legs wide-open and wrapped around him. And his cock rubbing this way and that over her proud little clit. “But I like to be in charge. Does that work for you?”
She was panting. Her eyes were unfocused, but still, she laughed at that.
“Go right ahead,” she told him. “I can handle it.”
“If you say so.”
Charlie slammed himself into her, deep.
And felt her come, hot and wet and greedy, like a dream.
Maya couldn’t believe any of this was happening.
She couldn’t believe the things that had come out of her mouth. She couldn’t believe that she’d let a total stranger lead her off into a dark little shack.
But that paled in comparison to the fact that he was inside her.
Thick, huge and impossibly hard.
And more, that an orgasm clenched her tight and hard in its greedy fist, instantly.
She didn’t believe in things like this. It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real.
Men this beautiful didn’t exist, and if they did, they certainly didn’t dole out instant orgasms like candy—
But still, she shook around him, one wave crashing into another like they might go on forever. She heard the strangest, most insane noises...that it took her much too long to realize were coming from her.
A lot like a scream, but that was impossible.
This was all impossible.
She choked herself off from any further crazy noises and forced her eyes open. Then she looked down at this beautiful, dangerous stranger who was lodged so deep inside her that she thought she could feel him down into her toes.
His grin was slow and cocky.
And it made her shiver all over again.
She wrapped her arms around his shockingly hard shoulders and held on.
His rough edges were evident everywhere, and it amazed her how much she wanted to lick each and every one of them. His tattoos. His calloused hands. That physical power—when she’d only ever known financial power. She wanted to revel in it.
But she assumed that he would just go for it now, as fast as he could, because she was already taken care of. And it was only fair.
He pulled out, slow and easy, then thrust back in the same way. Like he had all the time in the world.
He did it again, slow and deep. Then that drag out again that made her head spin.
He slid a hand down to her ass, lifting her against him, which made the angle...more. More of everything. Intense and deep and too much, all...more.
He didn’t change his pace.
Maya could feel the remnants of that wallop of an orgasm dancing all along her skin, sinking into her bones, making her feel bright and wild. Time seemed to flatten out on either side of them, and the world narrowed down until there was nothing but that deep, dirty rhythm.
She was aware of everything. How strong he was, that he could hold her so easily and never break that slow, drugging rhythm of his. He smelled like salt and man, something like the sea, and she wanted nothing more than to dip her head and taste him.
But she didn’t, because that felt like intimacy, and whatever strange magic this was, it wasn’t that.
On some level, she thought that was ridiculous because he was inside her—but she couldn’t seem to hold on to the things that danced into her head and then out.
There was only that long, smooth thrust. Then the retreat. Over and over and over again.
He braced his other hand on the wall beside her face. She found herself entranced by the corded beauty of his forearm and the particular glory of all those lean muscles.
She could feel the ache in her thighs, but she didn’t care. She could feel his chest against hers as she arched into him, then away. Each brush made her nipples ache, and she wanted more. Harder. Deeper. More.
Everything—but she didn’t say that, either.
This is sex, she told herself. This is pure fucking.
And it was more than that, she knew with each thick, deep, thrilling surge inside her.
It was an exorcism.
With every thrust, she was made new.
It was her baptism, and every sacrament thereafter, as he slowly, deliberately, pounded her into madness.
But what a sweet madness it was.
“You going to come again?” It took her a moment to realize that was him, talking to her in that growly, dangerous voice that seemed to scour her body the same way he did. Rough and right. “Are you just going to hang out?”
And Maya didn’t know who she was. She never did things like this. She’d never kissed a stranger, much less fucked one up against the wall not even five minutes after laying eyes on him for the first time.
She wasn’t this person.
But maybe that was why it was easy to become as much a stranger to herself as the stranger inside her and smile at him. Wicked and flirtatious and nothing like her at all.
“You can either make me come or you can’t,” she told him, astonished at the words that came out of her own mouth. But she ran with them anyway. “How is that on me?”
“Good point,” he replied, and then everything changed.
He gripped her ass harder and lifted her away from the wall. She flowed against him, then bit her own bottom lip as he took that hand of his from the wall and brought it between them.
“Try this,” he said, his mouth against her neck, and then he did something to her clit with those big, rough fingers of his—
Maya felt like she’d been electrocuted. It was a jolt, a wild burst of light, and then everything exploded.
She was lost in the white light of it, the wild, impossible commotion, but she held on tight until he finally broke that rhythm of his and went a little wild himself.
And when he groaned out his release into the crook of her shoulder, he tipped her right back over that edge for the third time.
He staggered slightly, then caught himself against the wall again, holding her there between his hard body and the stone.
She held on for longer than she should have, maybe. Until she remembered herself.
Or if not herself, exactly, then the facts of the situation.
Total stranger. Random fuck.
Her exorcism was her own business.
She unhooked her legs from around his waist and lowered herself to the ground, shuddering a little at the low noise he made when he pulled out of her as she went.
Her skirt flowed back down over her thighs. He tucked himself away and buttoned himself up again.
And then they were just...staring at each other the way they had outside.
“Hi,” he said, with another flash of that grin of his, and a knowing kind of heat in his too-blue eyes. “I’m Charlie.”
“Maya,” she replied, and then stuck out her hand. The way she always did.
They both stared.
Slowly, with a gleam in his blue eyes that she could only call unholy, Charlie reached down and wrapped his big hand around hers. And how could that be so hot after everything they’d just done? But it was.
Charlie shook her hand. Very deliberately. Up, then down, in a slow movement that reminded her entirely too much of exactly what had happened here.
She felt too warm. Everywhere.
“Nice to meet you,” he said, his voice a low rumble and that crooked grin lodged inside her, somehow. “You want the rest of the tour?”

CHAPTER THREE (#ue80afc6d-7198-5284-8cf5-ff6e507ac2e4)
“HOW’S ITALY?” MELINDA ASKED in her concerned voice, which was exactly like her usual bossy voice, only with a nominal attempt at softness. “More to the point, how are you?”
Maya deeply regretted answering her mobile.
It was another lazy afternoon on the Amalfi coast. She sat out on her terrace in the uncertain, moody weather, wrapped in a whisper-soft throw to ward off the bite of the sea air from below. There was espresso and a selection of freshly baked biscotti and anginetti before her. She had been engaged in a rousing debate with herself—should she slip into her infinity pool, always kept comfortably warm to encourage its use even in a changeable, chilly December? Or stay where she was, tucked up cozily with a deliciously fat paperback at the ready and nothing at all to do?
She really shouldn’t have answered the phone.
“I’m fine,” she said, trying to drag herself out of the sweet daydream she’d been riding for days now, where this was her life and there was nothing for her to do but gaze at the sea, smell the flowers, watch the rain and pay no mind as one hour rolled into the next. “Good, even.”
“You don’t need to put on an act for me, Maya.”
“I’m sitting on a balcony gazing out at the Amalfi coast, which is even more beautiful than it looks in pictures. There’s no acting involved.”
Melinda heaved a sigh, and all the ugly things Maya had been doing such a good job barring from her mind since she’d left Toronto squirmed back out and crouched there in the light, disturbing and uncomfortable.
She should hang up, she thought. Right now.
But she didn’t.
Maya had spent far too many years being responsible. Available. The sort of person who suffered through whatever conversation someone wanted to start with her, regardless of whether or not she wanted to have it. She’d always assumed that was part and parcel of being a responsible adult.
Today she couldn’t recall why she’d ever thought such a thing.
“I didn’t want to bother you with this, but I thought you should know.” Her sister’s voice took on a familiar, faintly officious tone, because Melinda always functioned best when she was in charge of something. And clearly she felt she was in charge of Maya. Or what life Maya had left behind in Toronto, anyway. “Ethan is resisting moving out of the condo. He says you and he found it together, it’s as much his as yours, and you’re a single person now anyway, so why do you need all that space? I’m quoting, obviously.”
Maya didn’t want to think about Ethan. Or the condo she’d called home for the past few years despite the fact she’d seen so little of it, because she was always at work. She didn’t particularly want to think about any of the things she’d left behind in Canada. It seemed too far away. Like a bad dream she couldn’t quite shake off when morning came, but nothing real.
She’d been in Italy for five whole days now and it felt like a lifetime. As if she’d never truly existed before but had sprung into life the moment her feet hit the endless stairs that made up this village of hers high on its cliff, cascading down to the sea. What concerned her was whether or not it rained. The steepness of her chosen staircase. How many stairs she needed to walk a day to counterbalance all the marvelous food she indulged in with the same appetite and greed she’d applied to Charlie the handyman.
Every time she thought about him—and she thought about him a lot—she shivered the same way she had when he’d been inside her.
But she didn’t think her prim, proper sister would appreciate that anecdote, even if she’d felt like sharing it. Maya sat up straighter on her comfortable chaise and frowned until she remembered herself.
She’d wanted to hold on to the condo because it would irritate Ethan. Because it was the only revenge she’d been able to come up with a week ago, however small and silly. But now she was in Italy and there had been Charlie and the idea of fighting with Ethan about a condo, of all things, made her feel...tired.
She was a woman of action, she reminded herself. Not asinine little games of spite.
“You can tell Ethan he has two choices,” she said briskly, sounding like the highly trained lawyer she was. Even if that persona—her persona—didn’t seem to fit her anymore. Or not here. “He can move out and find his own little love nest for him and Lorraine. Or he can stay in the condo, but if he does, he needs to find me a different one—and not in any building where I could conceivably run into him and Lorraine. Ever.”
“Why would you let him choose a place for you to live?” Melinda sounded baffled.
“I barely live in the condo we have now. I’m always at the office.” There was something about the way she said that, so flat and matter-of-fact, that made something in Maya shake a little. She tried to shrug it off. “Either way, when I come home, it needs to be to an Ethan-and-Lorraine-free space. Feel free to quote me in return.”
There was a faint silence, and Maya could hear the far-off sounds of her former life. She could imagine Toronto in December all too well. Dark, cold and snowy.
At the moment, she couldn’t think of a single reason to return.
“Are you really going to stay there the whole month?” Melinda made a faint clucking sound. “I know you’re stubborn, but this is pushing it.”
“There’s a reason people talk about Italy the way they do, Melinda. It’s magical.”
“I’m sure it is, but it’s a fantasy world.” Her voice turned kind, and that was much harder to take. “Back here in the real world, your broken heart is waiting for you. You’re going to have to deal with it. Why would you put that off?”
Maya rubbed her free hand over her face, trying to rub away the creases in her forehead, and did her best not to sound as irritated as she felt when she spoke again. “My heart is right here in my body, thank you. It goes where I go and it prefers a lovely seaside holiday to freezing cold, horribly dark and depressing Toronto.”
And her heart didn’t feel broken. Bruised, sure. But not broken.
But she was afraid to admit it. She was afraid to say it out loud. Because didn’t that say terrible things about her?
“Maya...”
“An Ethan-free, safe space,” Maya repeated, with more calm than she felt. “If you want to help, that’s what I want.”
She sounded smooth on the phone—the way she should, she’d practiced it so much in all her years as a lawyer—but when she poked the button to end the call, she couldn’t deny that she was agitated.
Maya tossed her mobile aside. She contemplated tossing it over the balcony’s railing so she could be done with it, but restrained herself. Barely. She stood up, suddenly restless and noisy inside instead of happily lost in that same sweet Italian daydream of the past few days.
She wanted to blame her sister for that, but it was her fault for answering the phone, wasn’t it?
Maya moved over to the railing, settled her elbows against the metal scrollwork and looked down. It was a long, long way from her balcony jutting out from the highest level of the hotel to the slumbering sea far below. The village was a jumble of brightly colored buildings, houses and shops and ancient structures dating back centuries, as if someone had tossed them there against the steep cliff walls to see what stuck. It had rained yesterday and in the night, and the wind whispered of the kinds of winters she’d left behind on the other side of the world and all the things she’d left there that she didn’t want to think about. Not here. She concentrated on the scent of flowers on that same wind instead. The bursts of sunshine. The salt in the air that reminded her of Charlie.
She had seen him only once since that insane first day. And only from a distance.
He had been doing something deliciously physical down by the hotel’s big communal pool while she’d been eating in the sunny breakfast room on the main level. He hadn’t looked up, and she’d enjoyed that a little too much—because she’d been able to determine that he was not, in fact, an Italian daydream she’d had after running up all those village stairs for the first time. He wasn’t something she’d made up out of oxygen deprivation and too much cardio.
He was all too real. Mouthwateringly real, with the tattoos and those old jeans and that body.
At the table next to her, a trio of older British women had tittered among themselves, and a glance had confirmed that they were all sharing the same view. Charlie in nothing but those jeans of his, hammering away at something with a sledgehammer. She couldn’t remember what.
No one had cared.
She hadn’t seen him since. Or really, it was more precise to say she’d gone out of her way not to look for him.
Instead, she’d glutted herself on the sun when it shined, the rain when it fell so much softer and warmer than in Canada, and the sea in all its hues from blue to gray and back again. She’d read books that she found in the library off the hotel lobby. A murder mystery that had kept her up late into the night, her heart pounding. A sweet, tender romance that had made her chest feel heavy and her eyes damp, though she’d refused to give in to all that emotion. And just this morning she’d finished a detective novel, all intellectual shenanigans and arch, clever conversations.
She’d drunk enough espresso to swim her way back to Toronto. She’d eaten—Oh God, had she eaten. Fresh fruit and produce by the armful. Pasta so fresh it redefined her idea of what pasta ought to be, bearing as it did so little resemblance to the stuff she boiled in her own pot back home. Fish, cured meats of every description, olives piled high... She was in food heaven.
She was glutted and besotted, and she didn’t let herself think about the mess back home at all. When her mind strayed in that direction, she forced it back to right here, right now. This stunning stretch of coastline in the off-season that felt more and more like hers every day.
And still, when Maya’s gaze dropped down to the man standing at the very edge of the hotel property, right there next to the shed where she’d betrayed herself in every possible way and still didn’t feel the slightest shred of guilt about it, everything in her...hummed.
She had convinced herself, as one day rolled into the next and she’d had only that one sighting of him, that she’d exaggerated that rough, masculine beauty of his. That she was making it over into some kind of fantasy daydream inside her own head when he was just a man. A pretty one, but nothing more astonishing than that.
To make herself feel better, maybe. Not that she felt bad—now. But it was always possible she might feel guilty or ashamed later. It was possible she was doing what she could to minimize it before she was tempted to care too much.
But when she gazed down at him, she understood that, if anything, she kept undermining how truly—astonishingly—beautiful the man really was.
He was so physical. She wasn’t used to it. All the men in her life, from her austere father to Ethan, were...attractive enough, she had always thought, but not like this. Not so raw. Not all that leashed power and strength, which was as much the kind of energy that burned in him as it was those muscles. Or those tattoos that peeked out from the sleeves of the white T-shirt he wore. None of Charlie’s tattoos were trendy. None of them were tribal or vaguely Hawaiian. His looked particular. Specific to him, not something a tourist could pick up on a vacation somewhere. More Sons of Anarchy than generic bro.
That made them hotter.
Or maybe that was just the marvel of his biceps. His forearms. Him.
He shifted where he stood down there by the shed, then looked up. And even though a great distance and towering height separated them, Maya felt his gaze slam into her as if he was still as close as he’d been in that shed. She made a startled little noise that she knew he couldn’t hear.
And still, she was entirely too aware of the way he grinned, crooked and knowing. As if he’d heard it all the same.
She felt...giddy. Silly, almost.
Charlie looked at her for a long while. Then he tilted his head. That was all.
But it might as well have been an engraved invitation.
Maya barely remembered what it was like to date, because she never really had. She had always been too busy, too driven, too focused, which was why meeting Ethan at work had seemed so perfect. And she knew this wasn’t dating. Still, she figured the same rules probably applied. Don’t act too eager. Don’t let him see you care. The person who acts the most disinterested has all the power—
But she didn’t care about any of that. Not now, when she’d already proved exactly how overeager she was and had gotten all those orgasms as a reward.
Maya smiled, big and bright to make sure he could see it from all the way down there. And if there was a part of her that knew she was doing a face dive into this crazy thing that was as far removed from her real life as it was possible to get—
Well. Charlie the handyman was a lot sexier than a pint or five of ice cream and her own tears.
He inclined his head again, then moved out of sight, and she knew he was coming for her.
She knew it.
She pushed back from the rail, surprised to find her whole body felt weak. Shaky.
Ready, something in her whispered.
Maya headed back into her suite, draping the throw over the nearest chair and smoothing her hands over the soft denim of the jeans she wore. She didn’t look in the mirror. She didn’t want to second-guess herself.
It felt like free-falling. Like throwing herself over the side of her own balcony and letting the Italian wind pick her up and carry her wherever it wanted.
Maya wasn’t this kind of person. She plotted and planned. She thought about her future and made sure every step she took in the present led straight where she wanted to go.
She had never done anything like this in her life.
Certainly not twice.
A kind of heat washed over her then, and she knew what it was. Shame, thick and ugly. Lorraine and I fell in love, she could hear Ethan saying. All you’re doing is whoring around.
You were always so judgmental, Lorraine added, there inside Maya’s head where she lived and breathed and commented no matter how Maya pretended otherwise. Now look at you.
And when the knock came on her door, faster than should have been possible, Maya jumped.
Then stared, as if she could make the man on the other side go away with the force of her will.
But you don’t want him to go away, something in her whispered.
Maya was the one who had gone away. She had withstood the humiliation of her wedding day. She had ignored the advice thrown at her from all sides and come here. She had ignored every single instinct she’d ever had about her own behavior and she’d had sex with a stranger in a shed, of all places.
She’d already gone off the rails. Completely.
What was the point of stopping now?
She didn’t let herself think about it any further. She didn’t want the shame in her to win—because it didn’t matter what she did here. She would never do what Ethan or Lorraine had done. She would never ever have broken her promises or compromised her loyalty like that. Never.
It didn’t matter that she didn’t know what she was doing. Hell, it was a good thing she didn’t. What had knowing what she was doing, every step along the way, gotten her so far?
She crossed the floor, let out a breath that felt too hot and too shaky and maybe a little bit ugly, too, then swung open the door to let him in.
Charlie had never missed a woman in his life.
Especially not one he’d already had.
He never found himself awake at weird hours, reliving the encounter. Wondering where she was, what she was doing. Wishing they could do it all over again.
Charlie didn’t know what the hell it was about Maya that got to him.
He’d seen her these past few days, wandering around the small, vertical village. Aimlessly, to his mind. He’d seen her in the piazza, charming the locals with that smile of hers that rivaled the summers here, a comparison he hated himself for making. He’d seen her race up one staircase, then the next, her attention focused on keeping her feet on the old, uneven steps.
She’d never seen him.
She’d also never looked for him.

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