The Dare Collection 2018. Taryn Leigh Taylor

after another. She was out of breath when she got to the top again but exhilarated as she made her way back onto the grounds of her hotel. It loomed up before her, a deep magenta color, graceful and pretty. She admired the tiered gardens, bursting with bougainvillea and other flowers she couldn’t identify at a glance.

      Just as she admired the man working on a fence on the tier closest to her.

      He wasn’t the kind of man Maya usually found attractive—but then, it was possible she’d spent a lot of time liking things because she thought she should, not because she truly, deeply liked them. The worker before her was beautiful in the way the rocky shore here was beautiful, hard and rough and more than a little disreputable. He was stripped to the waist, though the day wasn’t overly warm, showing off a hard, muscled torso that could have been sculpted from marble. Maya’s mouth went dry as her gaze traced over the tattoos that wrapped around one bicep, trailed over one shoulder and made his wide, tough back into a work of art.

      His jeans hung low on his hips, and she spent a little longer than necessary admiring the taut curve of his ass, his powerful thighs and even the scuffed boots on his feet.

      Heat flashed through her, the first thing that had penetrated the shield of ice and temper she’d wrapped around her since Ethan had told her he was in love with Lorraine.

      Maya grabbed on to it. Hard.

      The man was sweating in the hot Italian sun, which only seemed to make his shaggy, close-cropped blond hair gleam like gold. He wore a tawny sort of beard and a pair of battered work gloves, and when he swung around to look at her as if he’d felt her standing there, she felt herself shiver into goose bumps.

      Because his eyes were as blue as the Italian sky and the sea all around them.

      But far more dangerous.

      Maya had always maintained certain standards. Her family’s expectations had always been clear and she had always aimed to exceed them. Martins were the best, attracted the best and did the best. Even Ethan had been a part of her same pursuit of excellence. He had been as driven as she was, as successful. He was everything Maya had wanted in a man, from his career to his trim, smooth runner’s body.

      The man before her did not look like he was a runner. He looked like the words rough and tumble had been created specifically for him.

      “Take a picture, babe,” the man said in the kind of American accent that did things to Maya’s insides.

      She felt...syrupy. Melting hot, like butter. She couldn’t think of anything she liked less than being called babe, especially by a stranger, but this man somehow made it feel delicious, not derogatory.

      That was the old Maya, she reminded herself. The Maya who had been left so publicly was gone. She’d died right around the time she’d had to cancel her own wedding.

      This new Maya didn’t have to worry about what was good for her. She didn’t have to concern herself with her reputation or what her parents would think. She didn’t have to care if anyone would judge her or what they might say or what her choice of man showed about her to the people who were always watching, always commenting, always looking for chinks in Maya’s armor or ways to sandbag her success.

      She had no armor here. And better still, she was the only person in Italy who knew who she was, what she’d left behind or even that she was supposed to be sad and broken in the first place.

      Fuck that.

      And fuck Ethan and Lorraine, too.

      “All right,” she heard herself say, like a random person with no baggage. She fished her mobile out of her pocket and held it up before her, smiled at him and snapped his picture. “There. Picture taken. Now what?”

      She had never sounded like that before in her life. Flirty. Suggestive.

      Slutty, a voice whispered inside her that could as easily have been Ethan as her mother.

      Another thing Maya had never been was a slut. Staring into the bright blue gaze of the gorgeously inappropriate man in front of her who didn’t know that or anything else about her, she thought that was a crying shame.

      Not that she planned to cry. About anything.

      “That depends,” the man said, and his voice was almost too much to handle. He sounded like the American South, mixed through with what she could only call bad boy, and his amused drawl made her shiver in all kinds of impossible places. “What do you want?”

      And Maya had never done an impetuous thing in her life. It was high time she started, she thought. Right here and now, with the kind of reckless behavior she would have shuddered at a few days ago.

      Because the man before her, looking at her with all those muscles and a kind of too-hot awareness in his blue eyes, might not be a corporate lawyer. But she had absolutely no doubt that he had reckless down pat.

      And Maya wanted to taste it.

      Now.

       CHAPTER TWO

      CHARLIE TELLER WAS no stranger to beautiful women.

      He liked to consider himself something of an expert, in fact.

      And the one standing before him hit pretty much every single one of his buttons. Hot? Check. A killer body, all generous curves packed onto a lean frame? Check. Soft, dark brown skin he itched to get his hands on? Check.

      And better still, a wicked, inviting smile he could feel in his cock?

       Hell yeah.

      Charlie wasn’t a complicated man. His life had gotten a little complicated over the past year, true—but he was doing his best to combat that.

      He was here in Italy, a million miles away from everything he’d ever known. Not back in Texas, answering questions that were designed to incriminate him. One way or another.

      A year ago he had learned that the unidentified man his mother had slept with all those years ago, resulting in the pregnancy that had forced her—her words, usually screamed at Charlie while she was wasted—to marry his stepfather, introducing Charlie to a life of outlaw bikers and other rough, often desperate men, wasn’t some random drunk in a bar as Charlie had always assumed.

      Or if he was, he’d been a very, very rich one.

      Daniel St. George had been one of the world’s wealthiest men when he’d died. He’d collected beautiful women, fancy hotels and fast cars, and houses in places Charlie had never heard of before. He’d also collected bastard children wherever he went, like some kind of rich man’s we-are-the-world power trip. Charlie had found out he had half brothers in Iceland and the Pacific Islands. A half sister living in New York. All as wary of their sudden family connection as he was.

      And better by far—or less complicated, anyway—his father had left him a fancy-ass hotel in Italy and a chunk of money to go with it so he could run it.

      Given the way things were headed back home in Texas, with federal agents infiltrating his stepfather’s biker club and a lot of Charlie’s own biker-club-adjacent activities under a little too much surveillance, he’d jumped at the chance to get the hell away from a sinking ship.

      And who knew? Maybe this was his opportunity to go straight.

      It was high time for a little change in his life, he could admit that. He’d lasted a long time hurtling down a dead-end road, but he was a realist. His stepfather had been in and out of jail for most of Charlie’s life before he’d met an ugly end in a bar fight gone bad. His mother was too drunk and bitter these days to do much more than exist the same way she always had, moving from man to man in the same small, grim pool of outlaws and grifters. Last he’d heard she was in yet another biker town in the Louisiana swamp.

      Charlie had known he’d needed to get out since he was a kid. He’d been plotting