The Dare Collection 2018. Taryn Leigh Taylor

it like a punch. “I don’t understand how people can have as much sex as we have and share absolutely no intimate details about themselves, so really, I should thank you. You’ve taught me something.”

      He felt like he was ripping wide-open, and he panicked. There was no other word for it. If he could have shoved the pieces of himself back into place, he would have. But he didn’t have the slightest idea where to start—or any idea how she’d done this to him in the first place—so he scowled at her instead.

      And he didn’t know how his hands made it to her shoulders. Not to punish her. To touch her, because he had to touch her. He thought he might die if he didn’t touch her, and that was one more thing he didn’t want or understand or need.

      But touching her just made it worse, because he wasn’t inside her.

      “I don’t share the details of my life with anyone.” The words sounded like they came from far away. He was only dimly aware he’d said them. “That’s not personal, Maya. That’s who I am.”

      “There’s a difference between reticence and lying. Guess which side you fall on.”

      “I never actually told you a lie.”

      “What’s funny is that I understand why that’s the hill you want to die on.” She shifted then, tipping her face into his. He wanted to grip her harder, drag her closer—but he didn’t. There was too much knowledge in her dark gaze. “Keep ranting on about a technicality and you won’t have to have the discussion about why. Because why is the scary part. Why might actually force you to be intimate with someone for five seconds of your adult life. And of course we can’t have that.”

      “You don’t know the first thing about me.”

      “You’re right. I don’t. And whose fault is that?”

      He didn’t understand why all those shattered pieces of him seemed to rattle around inside him, slicing him into shreds. And he definitely didn’t understand why he was just...standing here. Letting this happen.

      Why he’d chased her out here to keep letting her get under his skin.

      She wasn’t wrong. He had no interest in that why.

      But here he was, opening up his mouth and talking anyway. When he used to pride himself on his ability to say as little as possible.

      “I already told you more than most people know,” he said, the words torn from a place inside him he hadn’t known was there. “My mother met Daniel St. George in a bar in Houston during the brief window of time she wasn’t propping up bars out in the dirt, which is where she raised me. One night, that was all it took, and here I am. Not that the rich asshole stuck around to help or, you know, say hello. All these years later, I had fancy lawyers up in my face, offering me a hotel in Italy and the means to run it. Are you satisfied now? You already had most of that information. Are we going to pretend that you’re actually upset that I’m not a broke loser moonlighting as a janitor?”

      Her lips twisted into something that bore no resemblance at all to her beautiful smile, which landed on him like one more gut punch.

      “Right. Now I’m mercenary as well as stupid and overstepping.”

      He made a sound that could only be described as a growl. “I don’t know what you want from me.”

      Maya didn’t growl. But the look on her face made him feel as if she had.

      “News flash, Charlie. I don’t know what I want from you, either. I don’t know what I want at all. I never pretended otherwise. And therein lies the difference between you and me.” She leaned in. “I’m not pretending.”

      “Maya...”

      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