Undone

by Caitlin Crews

  And she was already so soft. Melting and spinning, but the rough, perfect thrust of him inside her gave her a kind of focus. She didn’t have to think—maybe she couldn’t think—but she could lose herself in the demanding rhythm.

  It was like disappearing and yet staying fully present, all at the same time.

  She dropped her head, surrendered and let him take them both wherever it was he wanted to go.

  Maya expected that he would find his pleasure quickly. What she didn’t expect was that the way he pounded into her—such an intense, delicious battering that stirred up too many sensations she couldn’t count or name—would stir her up all over again.

  She almost didn’t believe it. But he was so deep, so sure, hard and intense. And before she knew it, that greedy fist—red-hot and wild—was crushing her all over again.

  And this time, as he groaned out his own release deep into her, she shattered into a thousand pieces and cried out his name as she fell.

  * * *

  When she woke up, it was to find herself all alone, sprawled across her bed at a careless angle. Maya pushed herself up to sitting position gingerly, feeling much the way she had the other day after the shed.

  Used, everywhere.

  In the most wonderful possible way.

  Outside her windows, cloud cover had moved in over the water, but she liked it. She didn’t miss the sun, not when she felt so bright within.

  Maya sat for a moment with all that light inside her, telling herself that it was temporary. It would fade. Nothing this good could stay.

  Still, she held on to it as long as she could.

  She stretched, long and luxuriously. Then she crawled across the mattress, swung her feet to the ground and didn’t bother to cover herself as she padded toward her washroom and that huge tub with its sea views she’d been meaning to try—

  But she stopped dead as she passed the doorway that led into the main room and saw Charlie.

  Still here.

  He was damp from what she assumed was a shower, a towel knotted low at his hips, and he was accepting a rolling room-service cart from one of the hotel staff members.

  The room-service man didn’t look up. He didn’t glance around or notice that Maya was there in the other room. He didn’t seem to realize Maya was there at all, but Charlie did.

  That impossible blue gaze of his flicked to her, then away. He signed something, exchanged a few words in Italian, then let the man out.

  “Did you want to give him a show?” Charlie asked after he’d closed the door and took his time turning back to her. His smile was crooked and echoed deep inside her, instantly getting that fire going when Maya would have sworn it had burned all it could. “We can call him back.”

  “No, thank you.” She sounded prim and repressed, as if she wasn’t standing there naked. “I’m not really a performer.”

  “Are you sure?” That wicked gleam in his eyes made her shiver. “So far, I’m a fan.”

  “I didn’t expect you to still be here.”

  Maya hadn’t meant to blurt that out. Not so...baldly, with such obvious recklessness.

  It hung there in the air between them.

  And she fully expected him to overreact. But he only studied her as if she was the one who didn’t make sense and might blow up at any moment. “Why not?”

  Maya didn’t want to excavate the different layers of the dark things in her gut. What she’d left behind, but worse than that, what she still carried with her. She didn’t want to look at any of it. Not when she could look at him instead.

  She cleared her throat. “I didn’t realize it was that kind of thing.”

  And maybe she had the dim notion that he would be abashed at that. Had she wanted him to be? But it didn’t matter, because all he did was grin wider.

  “It can be any kind of thing you want it to be, babe.”

  “Can it be a thing where you don’t call me babe?”

  “Right now it’s a thing where I’m hungry,” he said, no hint of anything like shame anywhere on his beautiful body, much less that gorgeous face.

  Maya was still naked, and that suddenly felt very different from before. When they’d been in the shed, her skirt had dropped down and it was as if nothing had happened. She’d clung to that as she’d walked away, reeling.

  This was much more...obvious. Vulnerable, maybe.

  And she had the distinct impression that he knew it.

  That was why she made no move to cover herself, though she wanted to. She stayed where she was, watching as Charlie rolled the cart over to the table in the corner, then settled himself down, as if he had every intention of sitting there, watching the sea and having a snack.

  And very much as if she wasn’t there at all.

  What surprised her was the kick of temper that wound through her at that. As if this wasn’t new. As if this was an old fight between people who knew each other.

  Get a grip, Maya, she ordered herself.

  She decided temper required clothing, so she swept up the throw she’d left on a chair earlier. And wrapped it around herself as she slipped into a seat at the table.

  “What did you order?” she asked, as he removed the big silver covers from a selection of plates and then slid them into the center of the table.

  “Food.”

  There was laughter in his blue gaze, and Maya still didn’t know why her heart was kicking at her as if they were in a fight. She hardly knew this man. And sure, the sex had left her reeling and fragile all over again, but he wasn’t doing anything. A monosyllable just made him a man.

  The kind of man she’d read about in books or seen on television shows, because the men she knew never said one word when they could rattle off fifty instead. The men she knew had never missed an opportunity to pontificate. At length.

  Charlie had said less in the time she’d known him than any man she’d ever known before had said in the first five minutes of their acquaintance. But it wasn’t as if she thought she was misunderstanding him.

  She ordered herself to view this—him—as a revelation.

  An opportunity to spend time with a man who was completely outside her usual wheelhouse.

  Maya took stock of the food herself. It was more of the same simple-yet-delectable fare she now associated with Italy, and she was surprised to feel her own stomach go hollow and greedy in anticipation.

  For a long while, neither one of them spoke. And Maya found herself fascinated—or maybe the word she wanted was compelled—by how intimate this was. First, sex like that, so untamed and wild. And now food, shared half-naked, which made it all feel sensual.

  As if this was the foreplay they hadn’t quite gotten around to before.

  Either time.

  “Aren’t you going to get in trouble?” she thought to ask as she feasted on pasta dressed in a simple olive oil. Tart olives, and light perfectly grilled fish. “Won’t that man report back that you’re up here? Obviously not doing...whatever it is you do?”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Does the hotel not have rules about staff mixing with guests?”

  Charlie sat back in his chair then, that big sculpted body of his looking more relaxed. But it put Maya on alert.

  He even smiled, but still, she suddenly felt like prey.

  Not, she was forced to admit a moment later while her heart kicked at her madly, that feeling like prey was necessarily a bad thing.

  “I know women like to talk after sex,” he said.

  She eyed him. “Is that a woman thing? I thought it was a human thing.”

  “I’m not opposed to it,” he drawled, as if he hadn’t heard what she’d said. “But is this really the topic you want to cover?”

  Her cheeks felt hot and she lifted her chin a little, ignoring the way that same heat seemed to roll over her. It should have bee
n embarrassment or some cousin to that kind of humiliation at her own awkwardness, but everywhere the heat touched her it turned out she didn’t feel embarrassed at all.

  She felt a whole lot more like greedy. Like she wanted to glut herself on him, one way or another, whether the blunt instrument was his cock...or him.

  And somehow she managed to hold on to that feeling while harnessing the part of her that had been known to decimate opposing counsel at depositions.

  “Okay. You sound American. How did you come to be a handyman at a St. George property on the Amalfi coast?”

  “I’m very handy.” He grinned when she frowned at him. “Sometimes jobs fall in your lap.”

  “Do they? That hasn’t been my experience.”

  “You don’t seem like you have a whole lot of experience.”

  Her frown deepened. “If you’re talking about sex, I don’t have a lot of experience with random strangers. I’ve never viewed that as a bad thing. And as far as jobs go, they’ve never fallen in my lap. I plotted them out, then pursued them to the best of my ability.”

  With single-minded focus, sacrificing everything she could if it would help her get where she wanted to go. But she didn’t say that, because she already sounded like she was in a job interview.

  Charlie laughed. At her, in that low charged way that told her too many things about him. Chief among them that he wasn’t that worried about finding work. Not the kind of work that had always been the center of Maya’s life.

  “That doesn’t sound like any fun.”

  “A career isn’t supposed to be fun. It’s supposed to be a career.”

  “You have to ask yourself what the point of all that crap is. Why do it at all? Because someone told you that you were supposed to?”

  Maya felt strongly that, given the slightest provocation, the strange sensation in the back of her throat could turn into a scream. At him.

  And she didn’t need to fully understand the inherent danger he wore in that hard and rangy body of his to know he wouldn’t like that very much. She knew she certainly didn’t want to become the kind of woman who made scenes. Her parents had raised her to be calm and collected in the face of any and all provocations. Maya figured a departure from her usual reserve was allowed on her wedding day. But giving in to it now would mean she’d turned into someone else entirely, surely.

  “You don’t strike me as one of those follow-your-bliss hippies,” she managed to say in a perfectly even voice. Or close enough, anyway. “Are you?”

  “Not at all.” He shifted and she told herself he was uncomfortable, though she suspected that was nothing but wishful thinking. “I had what you might consider a career. I wouldn’t call it fun. It required loyalty. Commitment. But when the chance came to do something else, I took it.”

  “That doesn’t sound a whole lot like loyalty.”

  She knew she wasn’t imagining it then, when his smile went dangerous.

  “You might want to be careful questioning a man’s loyalty. Where I come from, people take shit like that seriously.”

  Maya should have been more concerned. Worried that this stranger might react in a way she didn’t like. They were in a hotel, yes, but the walls were thick and it was the off-season. There was nobody nearby. If she yelled for help, would anyone hear her?

  Yet in the next moment, she realized she wasn’t afraid of him. She recognized that she ought to have been, but she wasn’t. She still felt that temper inside her. She still felt that odd scrape at the back of her throat.

  But she had always been more afraid of setting off Ethan’s temper—because he was so sensitive, so easily wounded, so quick to take offense—than she was now. When she didn’t need anyone to tell her that Charlie was a far more formidable man than her ex.

  “I’m not questioning your loyalty,” she said, aware that something had shifted in her. She couldn’t put a name to it. She only knew that there was emotion attached to it, and she could feel it at the backs of her eyes. “I’m questioning loyalty itself. Everyone claims they want it. But who actually lives up to that kind of ideal?”

  That ended up more raw than she’d intended.

  “Some people live their life by their loyalty,” Charlie said in a low voice, as if he felt that same shift in him, too. His blue gaze made her ache when it met hers. “I spent most of my life keeping old promises. I expected to keep right on doing that until the day I died.”

  Something occurred to her. She had to fight to keep her expression blank. “Is that your way of telling me you’re married?”

  His bark of laughter surprised her, but it also cleared the air. The tightness between them—or maybe it was only in her—eased as he sat back again, looking relaxed again.

  “Hell no. I’m not married. I’ve never been close.” He nodded at her left hand. “Divorced?”

  Maya lifted her hand, frowning down at the dent that showed all too clearly where her ring had sat.

  “Almost married,” she said.

  She waited for it to hit her. For any of those ugly things that her conversation with her sister had stirred up to come back, and harder.

  But instead, she kept her chin high and it didn’t hurt the way she’d expected it to.

  His eyes gleamed. “It didn’t take?”

  “He decided he liked my maid of honor better. On the day.”

  She couldn’t read the expression she saw on his face then, there a moment and then gone. But she liked the way his mouth curved in one corner. “Dumbass.”

  “That was my take,” Maya agreed. “But we were talking about you.”

  “You were talking about me. I don’t talk about me. Call it a habit.”

  “I’ve already broken all kinds of habits since I came to Italy,” Maya said with a cheerfulness that should have felt forced. She was surprised to discover that it didn’t. “It’s fun. You should try it.”

  He stretched his legs out in front of him, leaning back farther in his chair. “There’s not much to tell. What you see is what you get.”

  “Oddly, I doubt that.”

  “I’m a simple man.” He grinned. “Feed me, fuck me, and I’m good.”

  Maya grinned back. “Then this must be a tragedy for you. I’m pretty sure you did the fucking. Then you went ahead and ordered the food, too. Maybe you’re not quite so simple after all.”

  She wasn’t sure he’d laugh at that, and he didn’t make a noise, but she could see it there in all that blue.

  “I think you’re looking for complications, babe. This is Italy. Everything is simple here, if you can afford it.”

  “Simple is what I’m after.”

  “Good.”

  And Maya had the strange notion that she’d just agreed to something, though she couldn’t have said what.

  Charlie stood, then helped her to her feet, though she didn’t need the help. She assumed he knew that. She didn’t say anything as he tugged her along after him, leading her out to the infinity pool tucked there on the edge of her balcony, promising views of nothing but sky and sea forever.

  He stripped off his towel, showing off that impossibly perfect butt of his. Then, while she was still trying not to swallow her own tongue, he waded in, and there was a part of her—the part that was used to men who quizzed her in every possible scenario, the better to negotiate what they both wanted out of anything from a take-out order to a life together—that was astonished that this man simply got naked and assumed that she would follow him.

  But maybe he assumed it because that was what a woman did when faced with the perfection of his naked body. She dropped the throw she’d wrapped around her and found her way into the warm, inviting caress of the water.

  And for a long while, they floated there, as the weather turned grim all around them. It didn’t seem to matter. If there was a better place to wait out the storm than tucked up in warm wa
ter with a man so big and so imposing, she couldn’t imagine where it would be.

  They clung to the edge together, their arms brushing, and it felt a lot like healing.

  Maya didn’t say that out loud, either.

  Until suddenly they weren’t brushing up against each other. Charlie turned, pulling her over him. She straddled his lap, her knees on the slick tile bench beneath the surface of the water. And she couldn’t help the moan that escaped her lips as he slid inside her. Still stretching her, so thick and hard.

  “Shit. I left the condoms inside,” he muttered.

  “I’m on the pill,” she offered.

  Another thing she never thought she’d say. Not to a man she hardly knew, who was already so deep inside her that she couldn’t seem to keep herself from clenching around him, then releasing, over and over, as if she could create her own rhythm that way.

  He muttered something and she thought he was going to get up and go—

  But instead, he wrapped his arms around her and surged deep inside her.

  His gaze locked to hers, and she didn’t know what was hotter: the fierce, possessive look on his face or the way he filled her.

  And as he moved her, taking control and guiding her body instead of letting her rock herself against him, it began to rain.

  The rain was cold, little shocks against her too-hot skin, but Maya didn’t care.

  He moved slowly, almost tenderly, though she knew better than to say something like that out loud. Or any of these things she kept thinking about this man whose last name she didn’t know. And hadn’t asked.

  There was nothing but the sloshing of the water in the pool and their breathing. The patter of the rain against the stone buildings and, far off, bells ringing out the time.

  And it was too much to hold his gaze like this, because she didn’t know what he could see in her. Maya didn’t feel simple at all. She felt split wide-open, naked and vulnerable, but she couldn’t seem to stop. She couldn’t look away.

  She had no idea what it was that gripped her—and him—so that every sensation felt sacred.