a perfectly even voice. Or close enough, anyway. “Are you?”
“Not at all.” He shifted and she told herself he was uncomfortable, though she suspected that was nothing but wishful thinking. “I had what you might consider a career. I wouldn’t call it fun. It required loyalty. Commitment. But when the chance came to do something else, I took it.”
“That doesn’t sound a whole lot like loyalty.”
She knew she wasn’t imagining it then, when his smile went dangerous.
“You might want to be careful questioning a man’s loyalty. Where I come from, people take shit like that seriously.”
Maya should have been more concerned. Worried that this stranger might react in a way she didn’t like. They were in a hotel, yes, but the walls were thick and it was the off-season. There was nobody nearby. If she yelled for help, would anyone hear her?
Yet in the next moment, she realized she wasn’t afraid of him. She recognized that she ought to have been, but she wasn’t. She still felt that temper inside her. She still felt that odd scrape at the back of her throat.
But she had always been more afraid of setting off Ethan’s temper—because he was so sensitive, so easily wounded, so quick to take offense—than she was now. When she didn’t need anyone to tell her that Charlie was a far more formidable man than her ex.
“I’m not questioning your loyalty,” she said, aware that something had shifted in her. She couldn’t put a name to it. She only knew that there was emotion attached to it, and she could feel it at the backs of her eyes. “I’m questioning loyalty itself. Everyone claims they want it. But who actually lives up to that kind of ideal?”
That ended up more raw than she’d intended.
“Some people live their life by their loyalty,” Charlie said in a low voice, as if he felt that same shift in him, too. His blue gaze made her ache when it met hers. “I spent most of my life keeping old promises. I expected to keep right on doing that until the day I died.”
Something occurred to her. She had to fight to keep her expression blank. “Is that your way of telling me you’re married?”
His bark of laughter surprised her, but it also cleared the air. The tightness between them—or maybe it was only in her—eased as he sat back again, looking relaxed again.
“Hell no. I’m not married. I’ve never been close.” He nodded at her left hand. “Divorced?”
Maya lifted her hand, frowning down at the dent that showed all too clearly where her ring had sat.
“Almost married,” she said.
She waited for it to hit her. For any of those ugly things that her conversation with her sister had stirred up to come back, and harder.
But instead, she kept her chin high and it didn’t hurt the way she’d expected it to.
His eyes gleamed. “It didn’t take?”
“He decided he liked my maid of honor better. On the day.”
She couldn’t read the expression she saw on his face then, there a moment and then gone. But she liked the way his mouth curved in one corner. “Dumbass.”
“That was my take,” Maya agreed. “But we were talking about you.”
“You were talking about me. I don’t talk about me. Call it a habit.”
“I’ve already broken all kinds of habits since I came to Italy,” Maya said with a cheerfulness that should have felt forced. She was surprised to discover that it didn’t. “It’s fun. You should try it.”
He stretched his legs out in front of him, leaning back farther in his chair. “There’s not much to tell. What you see is what you get.”
“Oddly, I doubt that.”
“I’m a simple man.” He grinned. “Feed me, fuck me, and I’m good.”
Maya grinned back. “Then this must be a tragedy for you. I’m pretty sure you did the fucking. Then you went ahead and ordered the food, too. Maybe you’re not quite so simple after all.”
She wasn’t sure he’d laugh at that, and he didn’t make a noise, but she could see it there in all that blue.
“I think you’re looking for complications, babe. This is Italy. Everything is simple here, if you can afford it.”
“Simple is what I’m after.”
“Good.”
And Maya had the strange notion that she’d just agreed to something, though she couldn’t have said what.
Charlie stood, then helped her to her feet, though she didn’t need the help. She assumed he knew that. She didn’t say anything as he tugged her along after him, leading her out to the infinity pool tucked there on the edge of her balcony, promising views of nothing but sky and sea forever.
He stripped off his towel, showing off that impossibly perfect butt of his. Then, while she was still trying not to swallow her own tongue, he waded in, and there was a part of her—the part that was used to men who quizzed her in every possible scenario, the better to negotiate what they both wanted out of anything from a take-out order to a life together—that was astonished that this man simply got naked and assumed that she would follow him.
But maybe he assumed it because that was what a woman did when faced with the perfection of his naked body. She dropped the throw she’d wrapped around her and found her way into the warm, inviting caress of the water.
And for a long while, they floated there, as the weather turned grim all around them. It didn’t seem to matter. If there was a better place to wait out the storm than tucked up in warm water with a man so big and so imposing, she couldn’t imagine where it would be.
They clung to the edge together, their arms brushing, and it felt a lot like healing.
Maya didn’t say that out loud, either.
Until suddenly they weren’t brushing up against each other. Charlie turned, pulling her over him. She straddled his lap, her knees on the slick tile bench beneath the surface of the water. And she couldn’t help the moan that escaped her lips as he slid inside her. Still stretching her, so thick and hard.
“Shit. I left the condoms inside,” he muttered.
“I’m on the pill,” she offered.
Another thing she never thought she’d say. Not to a man she hardly knew, who was already so deep inside her that she couldn’t seem to keep herself from clenching around him, then releasing, over and over, as if she could create her own rhythm that way.
He muttered something and she thought he was going to get up and go—
But instead, he wrapped his arms around her and surged deep inside her.
His gaze locked to hers, and she didn’t know what was hotter: the fierce, possessive look on his face or the way he filled her.
And
