Kitabı oku: «The Dare Collection 2018», sayfa 8

The rain started then, little drops that felt like a tickle, but she didn’t move.

She remembered their first day at university. When all the hubbub had subsided, they were left alone in the room they were expected to share for a year. Maya could see Lorraine as she’d been back then as if she was standing before her all over again. Lorraine had been almost gangly then, though Maya could see that only when she looked at old pictures. At the time she’d thought Lorraine was beautiful, so enviably skinny where Maya was curvy, with the long, straight black hair and dark olive skin of her Persian father and light green eyes of her French-Canadian mother.

This is going to be great, eighteen-year-old Maya had promised the stranger before her, who had struck her as terrified. Maybe she’d made that up, too. Maybe she’d caused all of this from the start. We’re going to be best friends.

And they had been, which wasn’t to say they’d always gotten along. Some years, Maya had wondered if they only even spoke anymore because she had made that proclamation. Maya had followed the path that had always been laid out so carefully before her. Lorraine had...drifted. Maya had remembered their first day a thousand times since then, sometimes with nostalgia, sometimes with irritation. She’d wondered what would have happened if they’d been placed with other first-year roommates instead of with each other.

But today, on a rainy afternoon in a tiny fishing village in Italy, the memory made her nothing but sad.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” Lorraine said again.

“It doesn’t matter what you meant,” Maya replied. “Because you did.”

And that grief was too much in her voice, so she ended the call. She waited until she was sure her knees wouldn’t give out on her, and then she stood. The rain was coming harder now, but there was a part of her that welcomed it. Rain on her head felt...right, somehow. She ran her espresso cup back into the café, then found herself outside again, and she couldn’t tell if the rain was in her face or if her eyes were blurred for a different reason.

She half walked, half ran for the little tunnel dug out beneath one of the buildings, this old village like a labyrinth built vertically, twisting and turning and piled high on itself. She plunged herself into the shadows, only to find that escaping the rain didn’t make her able to see any better.

Maya let out a sound she didn’t want to admit she could make, then picked up her pace. She kept her head down, telling herself that people had cried on these stones since the days of the Roman Empire. Her grief over one or two relationships that had ended terribly—and all at once—was nothing compared to the things others must have cried about here.

Not that it helped.

And when she nearly slammed into a person coming in the opposite direction, she tried to duck around and lunge for the rainy, gray daylight a few feet away—

But he caught her.

And she knew it was Charlie in the same second she came up hard against his chest.

The last thing in the world she wanted to do was let someone look at her. Especially this beautiful, lazy, entirely too relaxed, American handyman she never should have met, much less touched.

“You look a little too serious for someone who’s supposed to be on vacation,” he said, the low rumble of his voice reminding her of a motorcycle or one of the Italian sports cars that took the winding roads through these villages much too fast. She could feel it inside her, like an earthquake.

It made her eyes blur even more, and she didn’t know which one of them she hated more just then, her or him. Maya swiped at her eyes and focused on Charlie, scowling at him.

He was too beautiful. He wore a leather jacket against the weather and looked like something out of an old movie with his perfect mouth, that golden beard over his perfectly sculpted chin and the rain making his blond hair both darker than usual and brighter where the gray light caught it.

“This is an accidental vacation,” she threw at him, that scream in her throat making her voice harsh. “It was supposed to be my honeymoon. He broke the news that he wanted my best friend instead while there were already guests waiting in the chapel. I decided that was humiliating enough and came here. Where sometimes I can’t tell if it’s raining on me or if I’m grieving something that obviously wasn’t real in the first place.”

His grip got tighter. His eyes blazed, the blue almost too bright and fierce. Then his mouth firmed into a hard line.

“Sounds like you had a lucky escape,” he said, and then he very carefully released her and took a step back.

And as betrayals went, especially lately, this one hardly made the list.

But something inside Maya snapped. She actually felt it crack and was amazed he didn’t comment on the fact she was now ripped wide-open right there in front of him.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and there was no modifying her voice. There was no containing this or making it sound calm when it wasn’t. “Is that more information than you wanted? Am I too much? Too intense?”

“It’s not my business.”

“I just made it your business.”

Charlie’s gaze went glacial. “Maybe if you go lie down or hang out in that pool of yours for a while, you’ll feel better.”

She laughed at that, a wild, unhinged sort of sound, and it was amazing how little she cared that she was making a spectacle of herself out here where anyone could happen by and see it. “Really? You think a nap is going to make me forget my called-off wedding and the fact the two people who were supposed to love me the most in the entire world were betraying me behind my back for who knows how long?”

He held his hands up in a gesture of surrender that, on him, looked like an invitation to further aggression. Maya doubted he’d ever surrendered to anything in his whole life. Something she would have said about herself, too—until now. Because there was something about Charlie that made her question her own strength. There was something about him that made her want to pile all her problems—and herself—on his big, strong shoulders and let him carry it all.

She’d never felt that way about Ethan. They had called their relationship a partnership and they’d both taken the egalitarian nature of it very, very seriously. She had expected Ethan to take care of himself while she did the same.

The fact she was imagining things she’d never known she wanted about a man who very obviously wanted nothing to do with her unless she was naked just made her...a little insane, maybe. Or more insane.

“Do what you want, Maya” was all he said.

“This is not my problem” was written all over his face.

And Maya, who prided herself on her control under all circumstances and had made that control the foundation of her entire life, lost it.

“Forgive me for ruining all the lazy, easy sex with no conversation. What a buzzkill.” Her voice was scathing. “Don’t worry, I get it. You’re perfectly happy to fuck me silly, but heaven forbid I admit I have a feeling. I understand that’s terrifying even when it isn’t about you.”

He was still studying her in that predatory, watchful way of his that should have made her nervous. But if it did, she didn’t care. “None of this is about me.”

Maya laughed again, and this laugh was even worse than the one before, wild and obviously, inarguably upset. “You’re absolutely right, Charlie. It’s not. You’re nothing but a quick route to oblivion, and really, I’d rather chug a bottle of vodka. It has more emotional intelligence, and guess what? The hangover is a hell of a lot more fun.”

And she wheeled around, tears nothing but a memory though her temper was racing through her like wildfire, and tried to put as much distance between her and her latest mistake as quickly as possible.

CHAPTER SIX

HE SHOULD HAVE let her go. Charlie knew it without question as she started away from him, all that mess and fury visible in every sweet line of her body. It was like some kind of blazing neon sign, telling him to stay the hell away from her.

Those were the kind of gut feelings that had kept him alive after his stepfather’s death, when he no longer had the old man’s protection back there in his very rough part of Texas. He’d learned fast to always, always pay attention to his gut.

In the case of Maya, his gut was clear. He needed to walk away.

So there was absolutely no reason that he should have found himself lunging after Maya as she stormed off, out of the old tunnel beneath the church and up an ancient stairway that rose steeply between two pastel pink buildings.

He caught up to her on the next uneven landing and didn’t think it through. Maybe he was beyond thinking, too bound up in all this rage—and this had to be rage, because he wouldn’t let it be anything else—that churned in him with no acceptable outlet. This wasn’t Texas. He couldn’t pick a fight with the wrong fool in a dangerous bar to let off a little steam. He couldn’t follow the worst of his impulses, not here in this tiny little tourist town where his reputation had to stay more in line with the hotel than his own bad decisions.

And still he spun her around, backing her up against a wall that had been right here since long before there was anything called Texas.

“Don’t you throw your shit at me,” he growled. “I didn’t leave you at the altar or anywhere else.”

But she wasn’t smiling back at him the way she always had been before. Not today. Her eyes were stormy and dark, and she tipped up her chin like she thought she could fight him.

It amazed him how much of him wished she would try.

“I think we both know it’s only a matter of time.”

“We had sex, Maya. I don’t know about you, but that’s not exactly revolutionary for me.”

“Then go have more,” she invited him, her voice like acid straight down his back. “You’re the one chasing people down and manhandling them because you don’t like a little dose of reality in the middle of your nonrevolutionary sex.”

“You didn’t seem to mind how I handled you before. If that’s changed, all you have to do is say so.”

“Don’t worry, Charlie.” And her voice was too bright. Too sharp. “I don’t expect anything from you. You’re just some guy who works with his hands and thinks that makes him special. What do I even know about you?”

“Not a goddamned thing.”

She leaned forward, and she was smiling again. Not nicely. “I know you like to smile because you think that if you do it enough, no one will notice all the other things going on in there. I know you think that sex and emotion aren’t connected, and if you fuck enough, you won’t feel. I know that you talk about loyalty, but only in the past tense. And that’s fine. You don’t owe me or anyone else a thing.”

Charlie agreed with her. He didn’t owe her anything. She still didn’t know who he was. He liked it that way. There was no reason whatsoever he should feel like she’d sucker-punched him.

He couldn’t explain why he had his hands on her shoulders. Why he was leaning over her, somehow unable to just let go and walk away. The way he knew he should.

“You really think you’re going to shame me into doing what you want?” he demanded, his face much too close to hers.

“It wouldn’t occur to me that shame was something you were even remotely familiar with.”

“I didn’t ask you for anything. You were the one who approached me.”

“Right, yes. You were a poor innocent handyman, trying only to do your job half-naked in the sun, when the big bad lawyer stormed in from Canada and forced you—”

Charlie didn’t think he moved. He didn’t mean to move. But one hand left her shoulder and found its way to her jaw, and then he was tipping her head back. He didn’t like anything about the situation, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself.

And he couldn’t seem to make himself let go.

They were all alone on the landing, the staircases above and below them empty this late in the year and the shutters closed tight against the cold. There were echoes in the distance. The sounds of footsteps, the odd muscular car engine and the bells from the church. But all Charlie could really hear was his own breath, the clatter of his heart inside his chest and what felt like a drumbeat in his cock.

Most people had the good sense to keep their distance when he had a temper on.

But Maya held his gaze like she was the one daring him. He could feel that she was trembling, a light fluttering beneath his fingers, but there was nothing but fire when she stared back at him.

He tried to keep it calm, but his own voice sounded rough, there in the narrow space between old, high buildings. “You keep poking at something you don’t understand, Maya, and you’re not going to like the response you get.”

She continued to glare straight at him as she lifted up her hand, slowly extended two fingers and then poked him in the chest.

Hard.

“You’re not very smart, are you?” he asked, his voice soft with menace, and he could see the shiver she fought back.

“I always thought I was very smart, actually, but I apparently left my brain on the plane when I landed in Italy.”

She angled her head to one side as she stared up at him, as if she didn’t care at all that he had his hand right there on her face and her back to the wall.

And then she proved how little she cared when she poked him again. Harder.

“I’m not your bottle of vodka, Maya. You’re not going to like this hangover.”

“You know what I like most about vodka?” she asked, her eyes glittering. “It doesn’t talk.”

And Charlie was...undone.

He didn’t know what the hell he was doing. He couldn’t remember the last time someone had challenged him, not without firepower and half an army at their back, anyway. Certainly not a woman.

And he didn’t want to feel a thing, because he didn’t do feelings and he certainly didn’t do this. He didn’t want anything she was hurling at him to hit its mark and the fact it might have was a problem he should have been off fixing. With prejudice.

But it was like he didn’t have a choice.

He crushed his mouth to hers, right out there in the open. Anyone could run up the stairs or come down from above, but he didn’t care the way he knew he should have now that he was all respectable. And known. And the things he did might actually affect the lives of the people who worked for him.

Responsibility pissed him off. And somehow made him harder, too.

He slanted his mouth over Maya’s, letting the addictive taste of her flood through him. She was sweet and spicy and intoxicating, and he’d been boned before he started.

Because she threw him off balance. She made him do things he never did. He didn’t know why he’d left the hotel today. Only that he’d seen her run off down the stairs, and when she hadn’t come back hours later, he’d set out looking for her while pretending that wasn’t exactly what he was doing.

And when he’d found her, she hadn’t smiled at him the way it turned out he really, really liked her to do. She’d shown him what was beneath that smile instead, and he didn’t know whether he wanted to punch the stone behind her head, fly to Canada to punch her ex or, better yet, slam his own head against the nearest wall until he snapped out of whatever spell this was.

But with her mouth beneath his, he understood that this was what he’d wanted all along.