But there was a ringing, then. He scowled, looking around for the sudden noise, but it was nowhere to be found. Not until he remembered that he carried his own set of obnoxious alarms around with him now.
It was his phone. Making that irritating sound it made when it was trying to connect with a video call. Something Charlie—who had been using shitty burner phones for most of his adult life as a matter of course, because he’d always preferred to be untraceable—found horrifying.
“Better get that,” Maya said quietly. “I’m sure it’s much more important than a boring conversation with a woman you fucked a few times and don’t plan to bother with.”
She stepped back then, and he had a choice. He could either keep a hold of her, grabbing for her in a panic, or he could man up and let her go.
He let his hands drop. His fucking phone kept ringing.
And she looked at him like she had already disappeared back to wherever she’d come from to ruin his life in the first place.
“Maya,” he said again, hardly recognizing his own voice.
“Keep taking comfort in the fact you never actually lied to me directly,” Maya suggested in that soft, devastating way of hers. “I’m sure that if you think about it long enough, you’ll find a way to make it true. Liars always do.”
And he had to take that, like a kick in the face, as she wrapped that ridiculously soft, pink thing around her again and set off.
Like she was the one cutting this thing off, the way he should have done after that afternoon in the shed. The way he had done, always, before she turned up at the bottom of his property and turned his supposedly brand-new, much-better life upside down.
His phone stopped ringing. Charlie muttered out a curse, still watching as Maya walked away from him, her hips swaying like they were keeping time with the heart attack he kept having.
But in the next moment, the wailing from his phone started up again.
He yanked the damned thing out of his pocket and scowled at the screen, still not sure how he’d ended up toting one of these things around when he’d been perfectly happy with ancient flip phones whose only purpose was a quick call. And then, because he knew they would be relentless until he answered, he hit the button to accept the call.
The two faces he had never seen before a year ago—and now saw entirely too often—stared back at him from his phone.
“Aloha, bitch,” came a loud, booming voice that belonged to his half brother Jason Kaoki, from far off on an island in the Pacific somewhere. “Did someone lock you in a crypt, brother?”
“I’m outside,” Charlie bit off, already moving back toward the hotel and stepping into the lobby of the grand hotel.
As he moved toward a more private area, he could see Jason on his screen with no shirt, his too-long dark hair scraped back wet, suggesting he’d been surfing the way he claimed he liked to do every morning. There were palm trees dancing around in the sun behind him and ocean in the distance. The other half of his screen was a whole lot colder. A cavernous stone room, empty and stark, that reminded him of a spacious prison. And his other half brother, who was actually called Thor. Thor Ragnarsson, who ran their late father’s luxury sex hotel up in Iceland, which made Charlie feel frostbitten just thinking about it.
This was his first winter after a lifetime in Texas and he found it much too chilly, here on the coast of Italy where everyone assured him the weather was mild. Or maybe he was the chill, frostbitten down into his bones by a woman who hadn’t looked back when she’d walked away from him.
“Better now?” Charlie asked, sitting down by a fireplace in a part of the lobby that had been made to look like a comfortable sitting room. Or the kind of library that would normally have made him feel itchy, because he was a man who did things. Sitting around reading made him antsy. But tonight, all Charlie cared about was that no one else was there. “This isn’t our usual time for a call. Is there a hotel emergency somewhere? That I need to care about?”
His tone made it clear he couldn’t imagine what “a hotel emergency” would have to do with him, unless it was his hotel.
“Are you wearing a suit, brother?” Jason’s voice was taunting, his wide grin wicked. “Look at that. Spend long enough in Italy and a man turns into a baller. Can’t even help it. And after claiming the funeral was the only time he’d ever put one on.”
“I was at a monthly meeting of local businessmen,” Charlie bit out. “I guess I am one. Why are you talking about my clothes? You want to come over here and braid my hair? Brother?”
Jason let out one of his booming laughs that had likely served him well during his short career playing pro football. But Charlie kept his eyes on Thor, who was blond and blue-eyed like Charlie, but there was no dirty in Thor’s Scandinavian blond. And his Viking blue eyes were glacial.
More glacial by the second, in fact.
“If we can return to matters of business,” Thor said in that icy way of his, “it appears that our half sister has fulfilled the terms of the will.”
Their heavily tattooed half sister, who Daniel St. George had messed with from beyond the grave. Bold, take-no-prisoners Angelique Masterson from New York City, with her dyed black hair and bright blue eyes. Unmistakably a result of yet another run-of-the-mill affair, and yet the only one required to jump through hoops to get her inheritance.
“You’re going to have to remind me what that means,” Charlie said now, making his drawl a little heavier than necessary. “And also why I should care.”
“It means she hooked herself the big fish,” Jason replied. He lounged back in whatever chair he was sitting in, looking lazy and amused.
“Correct.” Thor still sounded icy, Charlie thought, but maybe there was a hint of something like a smile lurking around the older man’s mouth. Maybe. “She achieved her objective. The hotel property in the kingdom of Sadat is now officially hers. And so, too, will our dearly departed father’s estate present her with her quarter.”
“Why does this require an emergency call in the middle of the night?” Charlie asked. “This feels like it could be an email. One I could ignore, because I have shit to do.”
Jason laughed at that. Thor only arched an eyebrow.
“I assure you, I have no intention of wasting your precious time, Charlie. Our next call is set for Friday, as usual. Angelique will be on it. That is the purpose of this call. To prepare you.”
“I don’t need preparation,” Jason said, as if it was all a big joke. But then, that was the way he said everything. And given the way he was holding off developers who wanted to turn the island he’d inherited into yet another strip mall—singlehandedly, from all the reports Charlie was required to listen to every week as part of the thousands of things he’d signed at the will reading—he used it to hide behind. Charlie could relate.
But he didn’t want to relate to these men who were family by blood, but who he’d met exactly once.
“Meanwhile, I still don’t care,” he said gruffly. “Two sisters. Twelve sisters. Or just the one. Makes no difference to
