she had accepted that. She had enjoyed it, even. If asked, she would have said that it was one of the things she loved about their relationship. They were so logical. So rational. Even when things got emotional, they managed to talk their way to an equitable solution.
Things she hadn’t done with Ethan, for example, included yelling at him in the street. Engaging in sexual acts in public when anyone might happen upon them at any time. She had never begged Ethan for anything.
Ethan had never made her come over and over, ignoring her when she said she couldn’t and making her body do things she’d never imagined it could.
Again and again.
It was as if Ethan was a cold, gray rain. And Charlie was sunlight.
And there was no pretending, now, that she didn’t know the difference between the two.
Ethan wanted her to come back to Canada so he could argue her into compliance with whatever rational, self-serving plan he had in his head. About how Maya would slip into the role of ambassador for Ethan’s relationship with Lorraine, smoothing over all the rough edges socially and professionally, and making it all okay. Ushering him into the future he wanted, just with someone other than Maya at his side.
Would she have done it? If she hadn’t met Charlie, would she simply have tucked her tail between her legs and run back home to do Ethan’s bidding now?
But she already knew the answer, nauseated as it might make her.
She was a Martin. And Martins did not behave irrationally. They were not motivated by emotion. They did what was expected of them and, whenever possible, exceeded those expectations.
She swiped through to her parents’ most recent message and lifted the phone to her ear again.
“Everyone is sympathetic, of course,” came her mother’s frosty tones. “But surely it’s time to handle the fallout and put your spin on it. It would be a shame if Ethan and that Lorraine were left in the position to have the final word on this mess. You must see that. Hiding away with your head in the sand never solved anything.”
Maya wanted to laugh at that the way she’d laughed at everything else today, but couldn’t quite get there.
Her heart was kicking at her again, because her immediate instinct was to leave her mobile tucked away, out of sight, again. And to run back out to that bed, crawl into it and lose herself in the sweet, shattering oblivion that Charlie offered.
But she was kidding herself.
Her life in Toronto wasn’t going away, no matter how little she wanted to think about it here. She would have to go home soon enough, and when she did, there would be no big brawny American with all that danger stamped in his bones, just waiting to make her feel new. And alive.
Maya had claimed she wanted the truth. And he’d given it to her.
She could do no less than give herself the same courtesy.
And the truth was that Charlie terrified her.
He made her feel safe, sure, in a way that no one else ever had. Certainly not her frostbitten parents, who were forever disappointed in her. Or her sister, who always wanted to fix her. Or Ethan, who had seen her only in terms of a valuable merger. Things that were so obvious to her now she didn’t understand how she’d failed to see them before.
But she knew color now. All the rowdy, boisterous color of the Amalfi coast. The shock of the flowers, the serene self-possession of the pastel houses.
And all that Italian sun, even in the dark of December.
She knew better now, and that was a gift.
Maya could never go back to the life she had before, and she knew that however painful this had all been, that was a gift, too.
Outside the window, the sky was beginning to lighten. Pinks were creeping in, hinting at the blue day to come.
Christmas was coming. The year was ending.
And Maya wasn’t in any way the person she’d believed she was when she’d come here. The person she’d imagined she was all these years—the person she’d worked so hard to become.
Charlie had forced her to see herself.
And this was what she knew now. She couldn’t be with a man like Ethan, so self-absorbed, so consumed with making the best argument no matter what, so convinced that he could monologue her into submission. She didn’t want a life that was all compromise in such a cynical, deliberate way. She didn’t want all those external markers. The right address. The right law firm. The impeccable pedigree.
None of the things she thought mattered had saved her from the humiliation of her wedding day. None of her successes had made her parents proud of her. Nothing she’d achieved had made Ethan love her or made Lorraine loyal.
But here on the Amalfi coast she’d abandoned everything she’d thought was true about herself. She’d had sex with a stranger. She’d gotten loud and dirty, publicly. Her attempt to prowl for more casual sex in a bar hadn’t ended the way she’d thought it would, but she’d tried. She’d acted like someone else’s daughter, for once. Someone who didn’t care about appearances. Someone who would throw herself at a man she’d thought was a caretaker. A handyman.
She had let her libido lead her. And this was where it had led her.
To sex so raw and shattering that she’d forgotten her own name.
Intimacy so ferocious and all-consuming that she was still reeling, halfway into a panic attack.
Charlie was the antidote to Ethan. That was clear.
But she’d convinced herself that she was in love with him, and that was insanity.
It had been one thing when she’d believed that he was a shiftless laborer who’d ended up in Italy by accident. It had been easy then to sink into all the things he made her feel without worrying about what they meant or what repercussions those feelings could have.
It had been easy to imagine herself in love with a man she had known with a bedrock certainty she would leave behind forever when she left this place.
But Charlie wasn’t a lackadaisical drifter, blown from here to there and back again as the whim took him—a kind of life Maya couldn’t imagine or understand. He was one of the St. George heirs. He was a profoundly wealthy man. And he was powerful in ways that had nothing to do with that danger stamped all over him, but everything to do with the world Maya knew best.
There had been no possibility that she could really, truly get serious about the man she’d thought he was—and she knew exactly what that said about her.
But now...he’d come after her. She had dared him to be real and he’d more than met that challenge.
And the truth was, she thought as she stared out the window as dawn snuck its tendrils over the ocean, she hadn’t been with Ethan by accident.
Maya didn’t know what to do with real. With raw.
With emotional and physical intimacy—not just the shared life two
