The Dare Collection 2018. Taryn Leigh Taylor

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 people could build out of habit and goals.

      It had been so much easier to feel persecuted. To be the victim, yet again. To wrap herself in her own self-righteousness, her own martyrdom, and console herself yet again that she was the one who loved and was lied to, even here in Italy where she’d gone to heal from the last betrayal.

      She’d gotten a lot of mileage out of that, hadn’t she?

      But then Charlie had made her grab that headboard. And he’d taught her a very deep lesson about the reality of surrender. About what real meant in practical terms. About her own power and her own need.

      Over and over.

      Maya put her hands over her mouth to stifle the huge sob that had been lurking in her chest since she’d woken up in such a panic.

      She was in love with him. God help her, she’d fallen hard, and she didn’t have the slightest idea how to crawl back out of that pit.

      But none of that mattered, because the only love she knew how to give was shallow. If she’d loved Ethan deeply, or at all, she would have been broken now. Not...imagining herself in love with someone else. Not capable of arguing with Ethan on the phone as if they were debating where to get takeout. Not able to think about forgiveness for him or Lorraine ever, and certainly not so soon. How many times did she need to prove this to herself before she believed it?

      Maybe the truth was that she was nothing but a sad, gray puddle reflecting bright colors she could see but not touch. But Charlie...

      Charlie was like an ocean.

      And Maya needed to get the hell out of here before she drowned.

       CHAPTER ELEVEN

      TORONTO WELCOMED MAYA back with a bitch of a snowstorm, just in case she might have forgotten where she lived.

      It was like a very cold kick in the gut. But then, leaving Italy had been a lot like peeling off her soul with her fingernails and then leaving the best parts of it behind, so what was a little Canadian weather next to all that?

      She hadn’t waited for Charlie to wake up. It was more accurate, in fact, to say that she had snuck around to make sure he wouldn’t. She’d thanked her lucky stars that she was a light packer, because it was easy to throw her things together in the dark. She’d done it in a hurry, as if that drowning she feared so much was imminent.

      She’d been hurrying down the old stone stairs toward the hotel lobby before she could think twice. And she’d been in a taxi headed for Naples before daylight had really broken over the sea.

      Hurry, something in her had urged. Hurry.