The Dare Collection 2018. Taryn Leigh Taylor

dress, put on her most delicate pair of heels and settled a luxurious cashmere wrap in a deep rose around her like a cape. It was more than enough to combat the cool December night.

      It did not, however, do much for her nerves.

      She made her way down the stairs to the piazza again—a lot more slowly than she had before, thanks to her heels—heading for the gleaming bar she’d seen in the grand hotel where she’d taken yoga that morning.

      The stairs were steep and far more treacherous on a cold night, especially given the shoes she’d chosen to wear, but it was amazing how righteous indignation fueled her. It kept her moving when she might have turned around. It burned right over the snap of the cold air, the uneven stairs and the fact she could be tucked up in her lovely suite with a paperback right this minute instead of out here...“rolling around the village,” as Charlie had called it.

      She did not want to think about Charlie the handyman, and so, of course, he was all she could think about. He could go straight to hell. She would like to send him there herself, in fact. Every time she thought about the way he’d pinned her there against the wall, then worse, made her beg...

      Well.

      Her body responded instantly and enthusiastically to even a hint of that memory, but Maya was still furious.

      She had stormed away from him again, expecting that at any moment she would feel those beautifully weathered hands of his on her again. But he hadn’t followed her. When she’d looked over her shoulder at the top of the next flight of stairs, there was nothing below her but shadows.

      And she had told herself that she was grateful for that—not disappointed or, even worse, hurt—all the way back up the hill to the hotel.

      Maya had been so grateful, in fact, that she had stewed on it for hours, while her own flesh seemed to conspire against her. She was too overheated. Too needy. She wanted all the dirty, delicious things she knew he could do to her—and she had no idea how to handle wanting like that. She’d always enjoyed sex, vanilla or otherwise. Who wouldn’t enjoy sex? Orgasms were always a delight. But she’d never hungered for a man’s touch, so wildly and deeply and insistently that she thought she might actually make herself sick if she couldn’t touch him again.

      You need to snap out of this, she’d lectured herself. Repeatedly. This is all misplaced emotion. These are feelings you have for Ethan, focused on Charlie because he’s here. That’s all.

      She was sure that must be true. Even if she’d never thought about sex and Ethan in these terms. She’d never thought something might happen to her if he didn’t touch her. She’d never felt as if she was at war with her body—as if it had its own needs and desires, regardless of what she wanted.

      Still, it didn’t make sense that she should feel this much—or anything—for a stranger she happened to have slept with repeatedly, so she told herself it was the situation. Not him.

      And the best way to make certain that was true, the way it should have been, was to do precisely what she’d told him she would. To do what she’d meant to do all along and explore her options, not settle on one man and create whole worlds around him the way it seemed she always did.

      She had never allowed herself to enjoy being single. Surely it was high time she took advantage of the fact she was entirely without ties or, here in Italy, responsibilities of any kind.

      When she got down to the piazza, she took her time walking across it, breathing in the crisp night air. The Christmas lights gleamed brightly and happily, transforming the square where she’d sat earlier. In the thick, enveloping dark with its suggestion of fog from the water, the lights shined like cheer. Hope.

      All that sparkle soothed her as she made her way across the square and ducked into the grand hotel. The hotel was one of the Amalfi coast’s most famous and beloved locations, splashed across postcards featuring glamorous people from way back when. It was known for its luxurious summers, but even here at the end of the year it was special.

      Maya slowed as she walked into the grand, soaring lobby, featuring a selection of evergreens in its center, roped with lights and gold and silver balls—far more impressive tonight, set against the dark backdrop of the windows over the ocean, than they’d seemed this morning. Pretty music played from on high and everything smelled deep green and faintly like cinnamon.

      The fact that she was here in December and that Christmas was coming hit her harder than it had before.

      So hard she was tempted to go a bit wobbly.

      Everybody feels lonely at the holidays, she told herself crisply as she skirted the massive trees and headed for the bar. She wasn’t lonely. She was on her own. They weren’t the same thing.

      Maya intended to illustrate the difference to herself tonight.

      She’d spent most of the day psyching herself up for this. According to every man she’d ever met, any woman could walk into any bar anywhere on the planet and find a man to have sex with her.

      Maya planned to put that theory to the test.

      Because as the hours after her hot, humiliating episode with Charlie had inched past, Maya had grown more and more disgusted by her own behavior.

      Not that she’d had sex with Charlie in the first place, because of course she couldn’t regret that. That had been the correct impulse, she’d decided. She’d felt something like victorious that she’d stepped off the plane and found him so quickly. No one could claim that she was broken if she was already tearing up the sheets with someone else. No one could possibly think that she was mooning around after Ethan if she was having explosive, impossibly good sex with a man who could eat the likes of Ethan for breakfast.

      And, sure, she had some concerns about how broken her heart wasn’t and how easy it was to imagine a life without the man she was supposed to have just started a whole new life with...

      But today she’d understood, with an uncomfortable level of clarity, that she had thrown herself into the Charlie thing not just because he was the most beautiful man she’d ever met—and not simply because she had no idea sex could be a driving compulsion instead of a pleasant pastime until him—but because she had been keeping a mental scorecard.

      The trouble with that was, she was the only one playing.

      Her conversation with Lorraine had brought that home. Had she expected that Lorraine might fall all over herself to assure Maya that it had all been a mistake? Had she called so that when Lorraine told her to come back—when Lorraine told her that she’d ended things with Ethan now that the horror of the wedding day and life without Maya had shown her the error of her ways—Maya could swan back to her old life? Had she imagined that Charlie could be her tit for tat when she took up her carefully plotted-out life with Ethan again?

      Was that why she hadn’t really grieved the loss of that life?

      She wanted to deny that she had ever thought such a thing, because she didn’t want to be the kind of woman who would ever consider taking back a man who had cheated and humiliated her, no matter what, but there was something in her gut that told her otherwise.

      Maya walked into the bar, all dimly lit reds and golden wood, and smiled sweetly at the bartender as she ordered herself a vodka martini. The first sip went down crisp and good, hitting her belly and warming her up from the inside out.

      Kind of the way Charlie did—but she wasn’t going to obsess about him tonight. Charlie was entirely too dangerous for the likes of her, anyway. A fling with a man like Charlie was one thing, but she hadn’t taken her own honeymoon in defiance of literally everyone she knew to tangle herself up with some other man. She could already hear the heavy sighs from her sister if she were to admit to such a thing when she got home. She knew perfectly well how Melinda would view a holiday fling with a lethal-eyed American she suspected had a less than perfectly legal background, if those functional tattoos of his were as Sons of Anarchy as she imagined.

      On the other hand, if Maya were to use the weeks she had left to give herself