And maybe she had been expecting him. Because when she looked at Charlie standing there on the inside of her door, his blue eyes brilliant and the hint of exertion making his cheeks ruddy, she felt a whole mess of things.
But none of them was surprised.
“Now you’re just letting yourself into hotel rooms?”
“It’s my hotel, Maya. I have the key. I have all the keys.”
He sounded even more dangerous than usual. It made something in her tip over, then hum.
But she thought she’d rather die than let him see that. “I shouldn’t have to tell you that the owner of a St. George hotel should not be breaking into a guest’s room. That’s not the sort of thing you’re going to want to put in your brochures.”
“What is it you think I’m keeping from you?” He threw it at her, and he sounded different than he had down in the village. More dangerous, yes. But also more raw, if that was possible. “This whole song and dance about how I’m lying to you is bullshit.”
“I’m somehow unsurprised that’s your take.”
“You’re always running from something, Maya. That’s how you got here, isn’t it? Well, now it must be time to run from me. But I’m not that douchebag who left you at the altar. I didn’t do anything to you except make you come.”
Maya sighed. “I keep forgetting how blameless you are in all of this. Everything is happening around you, but it’s never about you. My bad. You’re like the eye of the storm.”
She did something theatrical with her hands that made his entire rangy body go stiff. As alarms went, that one was loud and clear—but she didn’t back down.
“Are you standing in front of my face telling me I don’t know how to take responsibility for myself?”
The way he asked that question suggested that she had better not be telling him anything of the kind. A smart woman would have backed down, happily and quickly.
Maya chose to tilt her head to one side like he was some kind of specimen in a zoo. “Why? Is that a trigger for you? I wouldn’t know, would I, because I don’t know anything about you.”
“I don’t know what you think this is, but where I come from you don’t spill your guts for a fling,” Charlie growled out at her. “No matter how hot she is in bed.”
Maya was shaking, but she couldn’t tell if it was happening inside her—or everywhere. And oddly enough, she didn’t have it in her to care any longer if he saw it. If he saw everything.
“Fine,” she said, her voice even but not remotely mild. “Then why are you here, Charlie? Why did you chase me all the way back from that bar and let yourself into my room? If this is a fling that’s gotten out of hand, why come back for more?”
He moved as if he was going to put his hands on her—and God help her, she wanted that. She thought she would commit crimes to feel those battered, tough hands on her skin again.
But he raked them through his hair instead.
And his voice was as grave as that expression on his beautiful face when he spoke again. “You want things from me that I don’t have to give.”
That should have wrecked her. Instead, she rolled her eyes.
And for a moment, she didn’t know which one of them was more shocked.
She compounded it with another sigh, this one bordering on irritated. “I’m going to go out on a limb here, but I don’t think you’ve ever been intimate with another person in your entire life. I don’t think you have the slightest idea what you have to give.”
He stared back at her, looking astonished. And darkly furious, all at once.
“Terrific. I guess this is the night for inspirational speeches. I’m a changed fucking man.”
Maya shook her head at him, while inside there was something like grief mixed in with the sadness that she knew had everything to do with this man. Charlie, particularly. Not anyone she had left behind.
“Tell me one true thing,” she challenged him. “Just one, Charlie.”
He looked at her as if she had hit him. As if she’d hauled off and landed one on his face. She imagined he would prefer that.
“You have no idea how I was raised. The kind of man who raised me. What I had to do to earn his approval. And worse, what it was like when I figured out I was good at it.”
“One true thing,” she said quietly. “Everything you just said is a story.”
“You said you were a lawyer, Maya. I don’t think you want to know what it was like to be raised by a lot of outlaw bikers. Almost one of them, but not quite. And not because I didn’t want to be, because I did. Believe me, I did. But I look the way I do. Clean me up and put a smile on my face and I can convince anyone of anything—and that made me useful. A kind of useful that wearing biker shit and getting myself arrested would ruin.” His hard mouth tightened. “My stepfather raised me up right. I ran cons.”
“One. True—”
“It wasn’t just my stepfather who thought being kind meant an ass kicking that didn’t take out an eye or a tooth. It was that whole dusty, dirty world. The club. My stepdad and his dirtbag friends, who I considered family. My mother, who’s never been anything but a pain in the ass. Some kids play cops and robbers, but they grow out of it. Not the people who raised me. Not me.”
He took a step toward her. Maya held his gaze, though he looked as close to tortured as she’d ever seen him. His blue eyes were blazing. Wild, even, with so much emotion and fury she almost couldn’t bear to look at him. Almost.
Charlie stopped before he reached her. Jerkily, as if he didn’t know what his own body was doing. And Maya had to lecture herself, harshly, not to reach out and touch him herself.
“My stepdad was killed in a bar fight a few years ago by some real nice individuals he met in prison and tried to cross,” Charlie told her in that same voice, dark and low. “And then I was really in trouble. Don’t get me wrong. Carl wasn’t a nice man. There wasn’t one shred of decency in him, he was proud of it, and no one missed him when he was gone. But he protected me in his own way. With him gone, I had to figure out how to live in that world on my own.” His blue eyes flashed, like his own kind of lightning. “It was brutal, but fine. I survived.”
“You survived, sure. But are you really fine?”
“This is what I’m trying to tell you, Maya. There’s no part of me that’s fine.” And the laugh he let out then was dark. Barbed. “And you wouldn’t care either way if you didn’t like how I look. How I fuck. You think you want this?” He took one hand and slammed it against his own chest, hard enough that the noise made her flinch. “You can’t handle what I carry around in here.”
She took a moment. She looked at the fury blazing from him, bright blue and powerful. At that set to his jaw. The way he held himself, as if he was seconds away from throwing himself into his own bar fight.
And keeping her hands to herself had never hurt her before. It had never actually hurt. “I’m not sure I’m the one who can’t handle it.”
He made that low sound that made her think of a wild thing growling. “When I say there’s blood on my hands, I mean it. Real blood, not some story one of your tight-assed lawyer friends tells in a bar to sound interesting. I’m talking about real life. Real shit. The kind of stuff that people like you need to pretend doesn’t exist so you can sleep at night.”
That was supposed to wound her, she understood. She only shook her head. “I don’t think I’m the one who’s pretending, Charlie.”
He made another noise that sounded as if it was ripped from deep inside him. It made every hair on her body want to stand on end.
“This isn’t a door you want to open, Maya. I don’t know how many ways I can tell you that.”
“Then don’t open it.” She was aware of how much she was shaking. Shivering, everywhere. As if she was lit on fire and freezing cold, all at the same time. “You’re the one who came after me. You’re the one who
let yourself into this room. Or was that another accident? Something else that just happened near you while you were pretending not to notice?”
“What the fuck are you doing to me?”
That was torn out of him, too, his expression anguished. His tone worse.
She shouldn’t have laughed. But she couldn’t seem to help herself. “I’m not doing anything to you. I’m just trying to see you. Call me crazy.”
He moved then, a big rangy predator, and she knew she should have been terrified. She should have screamed. Run. Done something—anything—to save herself from the man who advanced on her with all that barely leashed ferocity.
But instead, she melted.
And when he swept her up against him, plastering her body against that ridiculously well-cut suit he wore, he gripped her shoulders in his big hands and bared his teeth directly in her face.
And that didn’t scare her, either.
On the contrary, she felt it like fire, delicious and intoxicating. It swept through her, lighting her up everywhere it touched.
“I don’t have any truth to tell you, Maya,” he told her, up close and practically bristling with all that power and fury he carried around inside him. “The man I used to be died in Texas, and it’s better all-around if you leave him buried there. There’s not one part of who he was that matters now. Here in Italy I own a hotel I wouldn’t have been able to afford to stay in a year ago. I go to business meetings with men who would never have acknowledged my existence. I’m a goddamned upstanding member of society.”
“I don’t think you believe that, either.”
He let out another one of those noises that rolled through her like a storm.
And then his mouth was on hers.
By now she expected the kick of it, that wild passion that flattened her and exulted her. She expected the impossible glory of his mouth on hers, the sheer, shaking madness of it.
This time, as his tongue plundered hers, he set his hands on either side of her face. To hold her still, she thought—
But then his mouth gentled. The kiss changed.
She wouldn’t call it soft. There was nothing about this man that was soft.
Still, she felt tears well up behind her eyes as he kissed her, again and again, not as if he wanted to toss them off an edge of a cliff, but almost as if...
But she didn’t dare use words like cherish, not even in her own head.
“I was conning men out of their money when I was ten years old,” Charlie said against her mouth. “No one trusts a thing I say, not even me.”
And it was the agony in his voice that made all that emotion she was fighting flood her eyes and start down her cheeks.
“Charlie...”
“Don’t trust what I say,” he told her, his voice gritty and things in his gaze she was afraid to name. “Trust this.”
He bent, then swept her up into his arms, carrying her like some kind of fairy-tale princess as he moved across the room. Out of the light, into the dark bedroom, where she hadn’t bothered to turn on the lamps. He didn’t, either. He lay her down on the wide bed as if she was indescribably precious to him, and then he crawled there next to her.
And she thought she knew him. She expected the rough beauty of his hands streaking over her, hard and wild. The kick, the magic, of that mad rush to the finish.
But instead, he stretched there beside her, turned her toward him and touched her as if he had never seen a woman before.
His blue eyes were bright. His expression was something like grave.
He helped her out of her clothes and shrugged out of his. Then he took his time, moving like some kind of prayer in the hushed, dim light, as if he was worshipping every square inch of her.
It was like a dream. The slide of skin against skin. The scrape of his teeth, his beard. The bright fire every time he tasted her with his mouth.
Until finally he settled himself between her legs. He made an approving noise and then slid his hands beneath her, lifting her to him like an offering.
And when he licked his way into her pussy, she lost it. She tumbled end over end, rolling over and over and over again as if she might not stop. Ever.
She didn’t know if she was breathing or sobbing, or both. It was possible she was laughing, and she couldn’t tell. It was all too much. She was already weak and out of her head when he climbed up beside her again, sat up in the center of the mattress and then pulled her over to straddle his lap.
It wasn’t the first time she had taken him this way, but this was different.
His gorgeous cock reared up between them, hard and thick and satiny soft, and he let out a shaky breath when she wrapped her hands around it. But this was no time to play, not when he had his gaze fixed on her like that. As if he had been blind all his life until this moment and only now could he see.
As if the only thing he could see was her.
She knelt up, using both hands between them to guide the thick head of his cock to her entrance. Then, relying on the way he gripped her around the waist, she sank down over him. She took him into her in a rush, reveling in that deliciously deep stretching as her body made room for him. Or tried to.
And this, too, felt like an act of worship.
She couldn’t tell which one of them moved. She only knew that together they flowed over each other, into each other. She saw something in his face that she couldn’t put into words, but she felt it. With every slick, deep thrust of his body into hers, she knew it.
She became it.
Over and over and over again.
And maybe he had lied about a thousand things, but this was the truth.
She knew it the way she knew the span of her hips, the jut of her breasts. She knew it as if it was already a part of her, bone and sinew, need and longing.
She lost track of how many times she tumbled over one cliff only to find a steeper one, a wilder fall.
Until he flipped them both over, coming over her in the dim light that felt like a caress, pounding himself into her at last.
And calling out her name when he fell, like a vow.
Hours could have passed after that. Or mere moments. Maya would never know.
She was off somewhere, then she was back, and Charlie’s hard, beautiful arm was her pillow.
She didn’t know how she knew he was awake, only that he was. She drew a circle on his skin with her finger, then laughed at her own display of sentimentality.
“I’m sorry,” she said, breaking the quiet.
“What did you do now?”
She smiled at that, there against his side where he couldn’t see. “Your childhood doesn’t sound like a lot of fun.”
Another man might have shifted in the discomfort of that. Charlie went still.
“Was yours?”
“No,” Maya said, surprising herself, because she’d never said that out loud. She would never have dared say that out loud. And she kept going. “Now that you mention it, it really wasn’t any fun at all.”
Charlie made a low, rumbling sort of sound that she decided to interpret as encouragement.
“My parents are the coldest people I’ve ever met,” Maya told him, the words spilling out of her, as if there was a fissure inside her she could no more contain than she could stop the flow of lava from a volcano. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen them touch each other. I know I’ve never seen a hint of affection from either one of them toward anything or anyone. As far as I can tell they have a business arrangement. And they raised my sister and me to be perfect little vice presidents of the family firm. Cold. Focused. All achievements, no excuses. That’s the Martin way. My wedding was the only time I’ve ever seen them show anything even resembling emotion.”
Charlie didn’t say anything, but she knew he wasn’t asleep. More than that, she knew he was listening to her.
And
it occurred to her that for all the endless conversations she’d had with Ethan, he had never truly sat there and listened to her. He had always been far too busy strengthening his own arguments.
How had she never seen that when it mattered?
“I worked so hard to meet their expectations for me. I spent my entire life trying to succeed enough to get their approval. But the truth is, I don’t think they know how to be happy with anything. Certainly not with me.”
“That’s what kids do,” Charlie said at last, and his hand moved to the back of her head, his fingers gripping her curls and making her feel safe, somehow. “You try to live up to what’s in front of you. It’s the only thing you know.”
“Here’s something I know you don’t want to hear,” she said into the dark, because he made her feel safe and the fact that he could told her things about her whole life she would have given anything not to know. “I think the first real thing I’ve ever felt in my life is you.”
“You’re right,” he growled down at her, shifting then so he could look at her face. “I don’t want to hear it.”
But he didn’t let go of her. He rolled with her instead, coming over on top of her and pinning her to the bed.
“I wanted to fuck a beautiful woman in a shed, because I could,” he told her, his gaze fierce and challenging, and she should have been disgusted, surely. But instead, she was thrilled. “Instead, I got you. I don’t like real, Maya. It’s not who I am. I told you, I was raised to run cons. Not to get real.”
She knew she should say something. She should do something about the way her heart was pounding, as if it was telling her to run.
But he was shaking his head at her, and there was something in that blue gaze of his that made her pussy ache, even while it made her feel all those things she shouldn’t feel. Cherished. Safe.
He reached down to pull her hands up and over her head.
“I didn’t want real, but here we are.” His mouth went dangerous. Maya shivered. “Now we’ll see how real you want to get.”
Undone Page 11
