The Dare Collection 2018. Taryn Leigh Taylor

But it wasn’t as if she thought she was misunderstanding him.

      She ordered herself to view this—him—as a revelation.

      An opportunity to spend time with a man who was completely outside her usual wheelhouse.

      Maya took stock of the food herself. It was more of the same simple-yet-delectable fare she now associated with Italy, and she was surprised to feel her own stomach go hollow and greedy in anticipation.

      For a long while, neither one of them spoke. And Maya found herself fascinated—or maybe the word she wanted was compelled—by how intimate this was. First, sex like that, so untamed and wild. And now food, shared half-naked, which made it all feel sensual.

      As if this was the foreplay they hadn’t quite gotten around to before.

      Either time.

      “Aren’t you going to get in trouble?” she thought to ask as she feasted on pasta dressed in a simple olive oil. Tart olives, and light perfectly grilled fish. “Won’t that man report back that you’re up here? Obviously not doing...whatever it is you do?”

      “I’ll be fine.”

      “Does the hotel not have rules about staff mixing with guests?”

      Charlie sat back in his chair then, that big sculpted body of his looking more relaxed. But it put Maya on alert.

      He even smiled, but still, she suddenly felt like prey.

      Not, she was forced to admit a moment later while her heart kicked at her madly, that feeling like prey was necessarily a bad thing.

      “I know women like to talk after sex,” he said.

      She eyed him. “Is that a woman thing? I thought it was a human thing.”

      “I’m not opposed to it,” he drawled, as if he hadn’t heard what she’d said. “But is this really the topic you want to cover?”

      Her cheeks felt hot and she lifted her chin a little, ignoring the way that same heat seemed to roll over her. It should have been embarrassment or some cousin to that kind of humiliation at her own awkwardness, but everywhere the heat touched her it turned out she didn’t feel embarrassed at all.

      She felt a whole lot more like greedy. Like she wanted to glut herself on him, one way or another, whether the blunt instrument was his cock...or him.

      And somehow she managed to hold on to that feeling while harnessing the part of her that had been known to decimate opposing counsel at depositions.

      “Okay. You sound American. How did you come to be a handyman at a St. George property on the Amalfi coast?”

      “I’m very handy.” He grinned when she frowned at him. “Sometimes jobs fall in your lap.”

      “Do they? That hasn’t been my experience.”

      “You don’t seem like you have a whole lot of experience.”

      Her frown deepened. “If you’re talking about sex, I don’t have a lot of experience with random strangers. I’ve never viewed that as a bad thing. And as far as jobs go, they’ve never fallen in my lap. I plotted them out, then pursued them to the best of my ability.”

      With single-minded focus, sacrificing everything she could if it would help her get where she wanted to go. But she didn’t say that, because she already sounded like she was in a job interview.

      Charlie laughed. At her, in that low charged way that told her too many things about him. Chief among them that he wasn’t that worried about finding work. Not the kind of work that had always been the center of Maya’s life.

      “That doesn’t sound like any fun.”

      “A career isn’t supposed to be fun. It’s supposed to be a career.”

      “You have to ask yourself what the point of all that crap is. Why do it at all? Because someone told you that you were supposed to?”

      Maya felt strongly that, given the slightest provocation, the strange sensation in the back of her throat could turn into a scream. At him.

      And she didn’t need to fully understand the inherent danger he wore in that hard and rangy body of his to know he wouldn’t like that very much. She knew she certainly didn’t want to become the kind of woman who made scenes. Her parents had raised her to be calm and collected in the face of any and all provocations. Maya figured a departure from her usual reserve was allowed on her wedding day. But giving in to it now would mean she’d turned into someone else entirely, surely.

      “You don’t strike me as one of those follow-your-bliss hippies,” she managed to say in a perfectly even voice. Or close enough, anyway. “Are you?”

      “Not at all.” He shifted and she told herself he was uncomfortable, though she suspected that was nothing but wishful thinking. “I had what you might consider a career. I wouldn’t call it fun. It required loyalty. Commitment. But when the chance came to do something else, I took it.”

      “That doesn’t sound a whole lot like loyalty.”

      She knew she wasn’t imagining it then, when his smile went dangerous.

      “You might want to be careful questioning a man’s loyalty. Where I come from, people take shit like that seriously.”

      Maya should have been more concerned. Worried that this stranger might react in a way she didn’t like. They were in a hotel, yes, but the walls were thick and it was the off-season. There was nobody nearby. If she yelled for help, would anyone hear her?

      Yet in the next moment, she realized she wasn’t afraid of him. She recognized that she ought to have been, but she wasn’t. She still felt that temper inside her. She still felt that odd scrape at the back of her throat.

      But she had always been more afraid of setting off Ethan’s temper—because he was so sensitive, so easily wounded, so quick to take offense—than she was now. When she didn’t need anyone to tell her that Charlie was a far more formidable man than her ex.

      “I’m not questioning your loyalty,” she said, aware that something had shifted in her. She couldn’t put a name to it. She only knew that there was emotion attached to it, and she could feel it at the backs of her eyes. “I’m questioning loyalty itself. Everyone claims they want it. But who actually lives up to that kind of ideal?”

      That ended up more raw than she’d intended.

      “Some people live their life by their loyalty,” Charlie said in a low voice, as if he felt that same shift in him, too. His blue gaze made her ache when it met hers. “I spent most of my life keeping old promises. I expected to keep right on doing that until the day I died.”

      Something occurred to her. She had to fight to keep her expression blank. “Is that your way of telling me you’re married?”

      His bark of laughter surprised her, but it also cleared the air. The tightness between them—or maybe it was only in her—eased as he sat back again, looking relaxed again.

      “Hell no. I’m not married. I’ve never been close.” He nodded at her left hand. “Divorced?”

      Maya lifted her hand, frowning down at the dent that showed all too clearly where her ring had sat.

      “Almost married,” she said.

      She waited for it to hit her. For any of those ugly things that her conversation with her sister had stirred up to come back, and harder.

      But instead, she kept her chin high and it didn’t hurt the way she’d expected it to.

      His eyes gleamed. “It didn’t take?”

      “He decided he liked my maid of honor better. On the day.”

      She couldn’t read the expression she saw on his face then, there a moment and then gone. But she liked the way his mouth curved in one corner. “Dumbass.”