to run from me. But I’m not that douchebag who left you at the altar. I didn’t do anything to you except make you come.”
Maya sighed. “I keep forgetting how blameless you are in all of this. Everything is happening around you, but it’s never about you. My bad. You’re like the eye of the storm.”
She did something theatrical with her hands that made his entire rangy body go stiff. As alarms went, that one was loud and clear—but she didn’t back down.
“Are you standing in front of my face telling me I don’t know how to take responsibility for myself?”
The way he asked that question suggested that she had better not be telling him anything of the kind. A smart woman would have backed down, happily and quickly.
Maya chose to tilt her head to one side like he was some kind of specimen in a zoo. “Why? Is that a trigger for you? I wouldn’t know, would I, because I don’t know anything about you.”
“I don’t know what you think this is, but where I come from you don’t spill your guts for a fling,” Charlie growled out at her. “No matter how hot she is in bed.”
Maya was shaking, but she couldn’t tell if it was happening inside her—or everywhere. And oddly enough, she didn’t have it in her to care any longer if he saw it. If he saw everything.
“Fine,” she said, her voice even but not remotely mild. “Then why are you here, Charlie? Why did you chase me all the way back from that bar and let yourself into my room? If this is a fling that’s gotten out of hand, why come back for more?”
He moved as if he was going to put his hands on her—and God help her, she wanted that. She thought she would commit crimes to feel those battered, tough hands on her skin again.
But he raked them through his hair instead.
And his voice was as grave as that expression on his beautiful face when he spoke again. “You want things from me that I don’t have to give.”
That should have wrecked her. Instead, she rolled her eyes.
And for a moment, she didn’t know which one of them was more shocked.
She compounded it with another sigh, this one bordering on irritated. “I’m going to go out on a limb here, but I don’t think you’ve ever been intimate with another person in your entire life. I don’t think you have the slightest idea what you have to give.”
He stared back at her, looking astonished. And darkly furious, all at once.
“Terrific. I guess this is the night for inspirational speeches. I’m a changed fucking man.”
Maya shook her head at him, while inside there was something like grief mixed in with the sadness that she knew had everything to do with this man. Charlie, particularly. Not anyone she had left behind.
“Tell me one true thing,” she challenged him. “Just one, Charlie.”
He looked at her as if she had hit him. As if she’d hauled off and landed one on his face. She imagined he would prefer that.
“You have no idea how I was raised. The kind of man who raised me. What I had to do to earn his approval. And worse, what it was like when I figured out I was good at it.”
“One true thing,” she said quietly. “Everything you just said is a story.”
“You said you were a lawyer, Maya. I don’t think you want to know what it was like to be raised by a lot of outlaw bikers. Almost one of them, but not quite. And not because I didn’t want to be, because I did. Believe me, I did. But I look the way I do. Clean me up and put a smile on my face and I can convince anyone of anything—and that made me useful. A kind of useful that wearing biker shit and getting myself arrested would ruin.” His hard mouth tightened. “My stepfather raised me up right. I ran cons.”
“One. True—”
“It wasn’t just my stepfather who thought being kind meant an ass kicking that didn’t take out an eye or a tooth. It was that whole dusty, dirty world. The club. My stepdad and his dirtbag friends, who I considered family. My mother, who’s never been anything but a pain in the ass. Some kids play cops and robbers, but they grow out of it. Not the people who raised me. Not me.”
He took a step toward her. Maya held his gaze, though he looked as close to tortured as she’d ever seen him. His blue eyes were blazing. Wild, even, with so much emotion and fury she almost couldn’t bear to look at him. Almost.
Charlie stopped before he reached her. Jerkily, as if he didn’t know what his own body was doing. And Maya had to lecture herself, harshly, not to reach out and touch him herself.
“My stepdad was killed in a bar fight a few years ago by some real nice individuals he met in prison and tried to cross,” Charlie told her in that same voice, dark and low. “And then I was really in trouble. Don’t get me wrong. Carl wasn’t a nice man. There wasn’t one shred of decency in him, he was proud of it, and no one missed him when he was gone. But he protected me in his own way. With him gone, I had to figure out how to live in that world on my own.” His blue eyes flashed, like his own kind of lightning. “It was brutal, but fine. I survived.”
“You survived, sure. But are you really fine?”
“This is what I’m trying to tell you, Maya. There’s no part of me that’s fine.” And the laugh he let out then was dark. Barbed. “And you wouldn’t care either way if you didn’t like how I look. How I fuck. You think you want this?” He took one hand and slammed it against his own chest, hard enough that the noise made her flinch. “You can’t handle what I carry around in here.”
She took a moment. She looked at the fury blazing from him, bright blue and powerful. At that set to his jaw. The way he held himself, as if he was seconds away from throwing himself into his own bar fight.
And keeping her hands to herself had never hurt her before. It had never actually hurt. “I’m not sure I’m the one who can’t handle it.”
He made that low sound that made her think of a wild thing growling. “When I say there’s blood on my hands, I mean it. Real blood, not some story one of your tight-assed lawyer friends tells in a bar to sound interesting. I’m talking about real life. Real shit. The kind of stuff that people like you need to pretend doesn’t exist so you can sleep at night.”
That was supposed to wound her, she understood. She only shook her head. “I don’t think I’m the one who’s pretending, Charlie.”
He made another noise that sounded as if it was ripped from deep inside him. It made every hair on her body want to stand on end.
“This isn’t a door you want to open, Maya. I don’t know how many ways I can tell you that.”
“Then don’t open it.” She was aware of how much she was shaking. Shivering, everywhere. As if she was lit on fire and freezing cold, all at the same time. “You’re the one who came after me. You’re the one who let yourself into this room. Or was that another accident? Something else that just happened near you while you were pretending not to notice?”
“What the fuck are you doing to me?”
That
