mother.
This is going to be great, eighteen-year-old Maya had promised the stranger before her, who had struck her as terrified. Maybe she’d made that up, too. Maybe she’d caused all of this from the start. We’re going to be best friends.
And they had been, which wasn’t to say they’d always gotten along. Some years, Maya had wondered if they only even spoke anymore because she had made that proclamation. Maya had followed the path that had always been laid out so carefully before her. Lorraine had...drifted. Maya had remembered their first day a thousand times since then, sometimes with nostalgia, sometimes with irritation. She’d wondered what would have happened if they’d been placed with other first-year roommates instead of with each other.
But today, on a rainy afternoon in a tiny fishing village in Italy, the memory made her nothing but sad.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” Lorraine said again.
“It doesn’t matter what you meant,” Maya replied. “Because you did.”
And that grief was too much in her voice, so she ended the call. She waited until she was sure her knees wouldn’t give out on her, and then she stood. The rain was coming harder now, but there was a part of her that welcomed it. Rain on her head felt...right, somehow. She ran her espresso cup back into the café, then found herself outside again, and she couldn’t tell if the rain was in her face or if her eyes were blurred for a different reason.
She half walked, half ran for the little tunnel dug out beneath one of the buildings, this old village like a labyrinth built vertically, twisting and turning and piled high on itself. She plunged herself into the shadows, only to find that escaping the rain didn’t make her able to see any better.
Maya let out a sound she didn’t want to admit she could make, then picked up her pace. She kept her head down, telling herself that people had cried on these stones since the days of the Roman Empire. Her grief over one or two relationships that had ended terribly—and all at once—was nothing compared to the things others must have cried about here.
Not that it helped.
And when she nearly slammed into a person coming in the opposite direction, she tried to duck around and lunge for the rainy, gray daylight a few feet away—
But he caught her.
And she knew it was Charlie in the same second she came up hard against his chest.
The last thing in the world she wanted to do was let someone look at her. Especially this beautiful, lazy, entirely too relaxed, American handyman she never should have met, much less touched.
“You look a little too serious for someone who’s supposed to be on vacation,” he said, the low rumble of his voice reminding her of a motorcycle or one of the Italian sports cars that took the winding roads through these villages much too fast. She could feel it inside her, like an earthquake.
It made her eyes blur even more, and she didn’t know which one of them she hated more just then, her or him. Maya swiped at her eyes and focused on Charlie, scowling at him.
He was too beautiful. He wore a leather jacket against the weather and looked like something out of an old movie with his perfect mouth, that golden beard over his perfectly sculpted chin and the rain making his blond hair both darker than usual and brighter where the gray light caught it.
“This is an accidental vacation,” she threw at him, that scream in her throat making her voice harsh. “It was supposed to be my honeymoon. He broke the news that he wanted my best friend instead while there were already guests waiting in the chapel. I decided that was humiliating enough and came here. Where sometimes I can’t tell if it’s raining on me or if I’m grieving something that obviously wasn’t real in the first place.”
His grip got tighter. His eyes blazed, the blue almost too bright and fierce. Then his mouth firmed into a hard line.
“Sounds like you had a lucky escape,” he said, and then he very carefully released her and took a step back.
And as betrayals went, especially lately, this one hardly made the list.
But something inside Maya snapped. She actually felt it crack and was amazed he didn’t comment on the fact she was now ripped wide-open right there in front of him.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and there was no modifying her voice. There was no containing this or making it sound calm when it wasn’t. “Is that more information than you wanted? Am I too much? Too intense?”
“It’s not my business.”
“I just made it your business.”
Charlie’s gaze went glacial. “Maybe if you go lie down or hang out in that pool of yours for a while, you’ll feel better.”
She laughed at that, a wild, unhinged sort of sound, and it was amazing how little she cared that she was making a spectacle of herself out here where anyone could happen by and see it. “Really? You think a nap is going to make me forget my called-off wedding and the fact the two people who were supposed to love me the most in the entire world were betraying me behind my back for who knows how long?”
He held his hands up in a gesture of surrender that, on him, looked like an invitation to further aggression. Maya doubted he’d ever surrendered to anything in his whole life. Something she would have said about herself, too—until now. Because there was something about Charlie that made her question her own strength. There was something about him that made her want to pile all her problems—and herself—on his big, strong shoulders and let him carry it all.
She’d never felt that way about Ethan. They had called their relationship a partnership and they’d both taken the egalitarian nature of it very, very seriously. She had expected Ethan to take care of himself while she did the same.
The fact she was imagining things she’d never known she wanted about a man who very obviously wanted nothing to do with her unless she was naked just made her...a little insane, maybe. Or more insane.
“Do what you want, Maya” was all he said.
“This is not my problem” was written all over his face.
And Maya, who prided herself on her control under all circumstances and had made that control the foundation of her entire life, lost it.
“Forgive me for ruining all the lazy, easy sex with no conversation. What a buzzkill.” Her voice was scathing. “Don’t worry, I get it. You’re perfectly happy to fuck me silly, but heaven forbid I admit I have a feeling. I understand that’s terrifying even when it isn’t about you.”
He was still studying her in that predatory, watchful way of his that should have made her nervous. But if it did, she didn’t care. “None of this is about me.”
Maya laughed again, and this laugh was even worse than the one before, wild and obviously, inarguably upset. “You’re absolutely right, Charlie. It’s not. You’re nothing but a quick route to oblivion, and really, I’d rather chug a bottle of vodka. It has more emotional intelligence, and guess what? The hangover is a hell of a lot more fun.”
And she wheeled around, tears nothing but a memory though her temper was racing through her like wildfire, and tried to put as much distance between her and her latest
