wanted to put together slamming into place. His presence here, dressed like that. His total unconcern about his job. His nonchalance about ordering food into a guest’s room where he’d been lounging about half-naked.
As she gazed at him, he watched her, his expression daring her to get it. To make the logical connection.
“Hold on a moment,” she heard herself say from very, very far away. As if she was trapped in another dressing room, hair and makeup exquisitely prepared for another wedding that would never take place. “The hotel. You own it?”
Charlie’s eyes had never been so blue. Beside him, the man let out a whoop and surely risked death by pounding Charlie on the back.
“This is one of the long-lost St. George sons, my dear!” he crowed, putting the final nail into the situation. It felt like he was hammering it directly into Maya’s head. Because everyone knew about the late Daniel St. George and the hotels—and wealth—he’d left to the sons he’d never met. The kind of wealth that made it deeply, breathtakingly humiliating that she’d ever believed Charlie was any kind of handyman. “That hotel is his birthright!”
CHARLIE HAD SEEN all kinds of bad shit in his time. Things he could never scrub from his head no matter how he tried. Nasty old nightmares that came out in the dark sometimes and kept him awake. Of all the things that he liked about leaving his life in Texas behind him for good, cutting down on scenarios that left that kind of dank residue inside of him ranked pretty high.
But he couldn’t remember any of those tonight. Because the look on Maya’s face as she stared back at him, his identity no longer a secret, was the thing that was going to haunt him forever.
He had liked Sebastian well enough before this, but as the man kept braying on, Charlie thought he might actually have to kill him.
St. George this, St. George that—Charlie barely heard him because Maya had gone too still. He watched her gaze darken, stormy and shocked and something much worse. Much too close to betrayed. He watched, frozen himself though he would have denied it, as she swallowed. Visibly.
And when she stood from her bar stool, gathering that soft cloud of pink around her, he could see that her hands were shaking.
The last time his heart had beat this hard he’d had a gun in his face.
“If you’ll excuse me,” she said in a perfectly smooth voice. But it wasn’t her voice. Not the one he recognized. “I have to get back.”
She aimed the same smile at him that she threw Sebastian’s way. Blank. Absent.
As if she was already back across the ocean, tucked up in freezing cold Canada. As if nothing had ever happened between them, which was what he should have wanted.
Instead, Charlie felt like he was running for his life when he knew perfectly well he was standing still. Maya was so elegant, so composed, and he hated it. She pivoted around on one of those heels that did things to her legs he wanted to get down on his knees to taste and started for the door.
“Hold that thought,” Charlie growled at Sebastian, finally shutting up the other man midway through a long lecture on the life and times of Daniel St. George, who had somehow found himself in a bar in Houston, Texas, long enough to make Charlie all those years ago. Back when Charlie’s mother had been young and hot instead of beaten down and bitter.
Charlie set off after Maya, not really caring if the entire village and half the Amalfi coast saw him chasing after a woman for the first time ever. All he cared about was that he caught up to her—and he didn’t want to ask himself why that was.
He already knew he wouldn’t like the answer.
He caught up to her out in the hushed hotel lobby, with its piped-in music and designer fragrances. He skirted the over-the-top Christmas trees, the kind of thing that usually put his teeth on edge given how little holiday cheer he’d experienced in his time, but he couldn’t bring himself to care about that now.
“Maya.”
His voice was a command. He didn’t bother to pretend otherwise.
And still, he was surprised when she obeyed.
She turned slowly, as if she wanted to torture him with the perfection of her figure. All those lean, stacked curves, enough to make his mouth water and his hands twitch of their own accord.
But he wasn’t dumb enough to pretend he couldn’t see the fury in her dark eyes when she fixed them on him.
“I have no one to blame but myself,” she said, her voice somehow thick and crisp at once. Not loud enough to disturb the self-conscious fanciness of this lobby but pointed enough to slice him in half. “What handyman lounges around for half an afternoon and a whole long night with a guest? Or answers the door half-naked when he orders room service? Or orders room service in the first place? There were red flags all around that I guess I ignored.”
“I didn’t lie to you.” He sounded much rougher than he should have. But he wasn’t planning to think on that, either. “I never told you I was a handyman. You assumed it all on your own.”
“You let me assume it,” she fired back. But then shook her head, cutting herself off. She even slashed her hand through the air. “It doesn’t matter. You and I both know that you could have told me the truth. You didn’t want to. And it only makes you more of a liar.”
“It’s not a secret,” he growled, and maybe the reason he was so pissed off by this was because there was a part of him that knew she had a point. He’d liked that she didn’t know who he was. Even back in Texas, he hadn’t been anonymous. He’d liked the novelty. But he didn’t like defending that choice. “Everyone in this village knows I own the hotel. You would have known it, too, if you bothered to look. My face is in the brochure sitting on your living room table.”
She let out a laughing sort of sound that contained absolutely no humor. Charlie drew closer to her, his hands at his sides—not in fists, though he was pissed enough, and not on her, either, which was what he really wanted.
“You know what? I’ve already had this conversation,” she said, with another one of those laughs that weren’t laughs. And this time when she shook her head, it was very clearly at him. Not at herself. “I’m not having it again.”
“The fact that you made an assumption about me is not my problem,” he heard himself saying, like he was arguing the point.
Maya made a sniffing sound, dismissive and rude. “Okay.”
And she didn’t wait for him to react to that. She turned around again, setting off at a much faster clip than before.
Charlie’s jaw hurt, and he realized he was gritting his teeth like he wanted to break them all off. And his hands had stopped pretending to be civilized, curled into fists he knew were useless in this. Unless he wanted to punch himself in the face.
He didn’t understand what was happening inside him, because he hadn’t lied. Not directly. He’d let her think what she wanted to think—how was that on him?
His heart
