He moved his hand from between her legs, but only so he could find his way beneath the waistband of her yoga pants again. He found his way to her pussy, stroking his way into her slick folds. He traced patterns in and around her, skidding around her clit without ever touching it, until her hips were rising to meet him again while she thrashed, arching out from the wall in a bow, making the kind of helpless sounds that went straight to his dick.
“Beg me, Maya.” And his voice was harsher now. “I can do this all day. You look like it might kill you.”
She fought herself. He could see the struggle in her as her breath heaved hard enough to make her breasts move. But every time she let out one of those glorious, needy pants, her pussy got wetter.
“Please,” she said finally, as if the words were torn out of her. “Please, Charlie...”
His smile was merciless. “Please, what? Be specific.”
“Please,” she moaned again. “Please make me come. Please.”
He claimed her mouth. He ate at her as he twisted his wrist and drove his fingers deep inside her, pressing his thumb hard against her greedy little clit. She went stiff in the next second, then wild, rocking herself against his hand as she broke apart.
But he didn’t stop. He kept driving into her, throwing her from one shuddering, melting, clenching crisis straight on into another one. Until she was limp, so boneless that he thought that if he took his hand away from the wrists he still held pinned above her head, she might collapse into a ball at his feet.
He did it anyway. Slowly. Carefully, so when she did sag, it was into his chest.
He didn’t know what swelled in him as she breathed raggedly against his chest, only that the soft weight of her made him ache. Even as his cock was so hard against the fly of his jeans that he was surprised he hadn’t legitimately hurt himself.
This was supposed to teach her a lesson. So Charlie didn’t understand why he was the one who felt torn into pieces.
But he didn’t do anything but hold her, for what felt like a long, long time.
Eventually he felt her stir against him. She blinked as she opened her eyes, then focused on him.
There was a beat.
Then Maya shoved at his chest and he let her do it for a moment, just in case she thought that she could ever move him if he didn’t want to go. Then he stepped back, narrowing his eyes when she shoved at him again, harder.
That time not to move him, because he’d already moved. But just to slap at him, which was new. Most people didn’t dare insult him with a slap.
“Congratulations,” Maya threw at him, because she obviously wasn’t worried about pissing him off. Did he like that about her? Was that what his insatiable cock was trying to tell him? “You know how to use a woman’s body against her like a Neanderthal.”
He smirked. “Is this where you use big, fancy words to put me in my place? Better hurry up and remind me that you’re the fancy lawyer and I’m the lowly handyman. Wouldn’t want me to get ideas above my station.”
She shook again, but he was pretty sure this time it was temper. “You’re the one who told me I wasn’t very smart. Why would a dumb person’s vocabulary threaten you? And what does your job have to do with it?”
“You don’t threaten me at all.”
He threw that out there, but he didn’t need the echo of his own words bouncing back at him from the old stones to let him know what a liar he was. He could feel it. He had the threat of her all over him. It was like her taste, intoxicating and maddening. He was still hard and pissed and he didn’t know what to do when everything inside him was so messed up. When she’d done it.
And somehow, the fact he was hiding who he was from her seemed to sit on him funny.
“Of course you’re not threatened.” The curve on her lips was much too smug, and she actually rolled her eyes. At him. “Thank you for this object lesson in how not to behave. I made the mistake of thinking we had a connection. When what we had was sex. I appreciate the clarification.”
He glared at her. She smiled.
“But don’t worry, I’m not going to inflict my inconvenient emotions on you again. I’m more than happy to run along and find someone else to not threaten. Maybe a lot of someone elses.”
He didn’t know how to handle that defiant tilt to her chin then. Not when his hands weren’t on her. Worse, he thought she knew it.
“First you were going to punish me by making yourself come. Now you’re going to what? Roll around the village until you find someone else to do it for you?”
“Why not?” And this time her smile was bright and sweet and made him want to break apart the stone walls all around him with his own hands. “I owe you an apology. I walked straight from my wedding into you and had the bad taste to bring all those yucky feelings with me. Thank you for pointing that out to me. You don’t have to worry yourself about any sexual escapades I might feel I need to undertake as a newly single woman. You’ve already done your part.”
That smile of hers took on an edge Charlie could feel slice straight into the center of him, lodging in his gut and his cock and making his jaw ache.
Making all of him ache, if he was honest—and he didn’t particularly want to be honest.
About anything.
She leaned forward a little, like she wanted nothing more than to take that knife and shove it in deep.
“Godspeed, Charlie,” she said, in a sweet, light voice that very clearly told him to go fuck himself.
Which he was considering.
And this time when she walked away from him, he didn’t follow her.
CHAPTER SEVEN
MAYA SET OFF that night with a whole lot more trepidation than she intended to let show.
The ancient stairs littering the village—so charming and picturesque by day—were a lot more difficult to navigate in heels. Still, she forced herself to do it. Very, very carefully. She’d slicked herself into a little black dress, put on her most delicate pair of heels and settled a luxurious cashmere wrap in a deep rose around her like a cape. It was more than enough to combat the cool December night.
It did not, however, do much for her nerves.
She made her way down the stairs to the piazza again—a lot more slowly than she had before, thanks to her heels—heading for the gleaming bar she’d seen in the grand hotel where she’d taken yoga that morning.
The stairs were steep and far more treacherous on a cold night, especially given the shoes she’d chosen to wear, but it was amazing how righteous indignation fueled her. It kept her moving when she might have turned around. It burned right over the snap of the cold air, the uneven stairs and the fact she could be tucked up in her lovely suite with a paperback right this minute instead of out here...“rolling around the village,” as Charlie had called it.
She did not want to think about Charlie the handyman, and so, of course, he was all she could think about. He could go straight to hell. She would like to send him there herself, in fact. Every time she thought about the way he’d pinned her there against the wall, then worse, made her beg...
Well.
Her body responded instantly and enthusiastically to even a hint of that memory, but Maya was still furious.
She had stormed away from him again, expecting that at any moment she would feel those beautifully weathered hands of his on her again. But he hadn’t followed her. When she’d looked over her shoulder at the top of the next flight of stairs, there was nothing below her but shadows.
And she had told herself that she was grateful for that—not disappointed or, even worse, hurt—all the way back up the hill to the hotel.
Maya had been so grateful, in fact, that she had stewed on it for hours, while her own flesh seemed to conspire against her. She was too overheated. Too needy. She wanted all the dirty, delicious things she knew he could do to her—and she had no idea how to handle
wanting like that. She’d always enjoyed sex, vanilla or otherwise. Who wouldn’t enjoy sex? Orgasms were always a delight. But she’d never hungered for a man’s touch, so wildly and deeply and insistently that she thought she might actually make herself sick if she couldn’t touch him again.
You need to snap out of this, she’d lectured herself. Repeatedly. This is all misplaced emotion. These are feelings you have for Ethan, focused on Charlie because he’s here. That’s all.
She was sure that must be true. Even if she’d never thought about sex and Ethan in these terms. She’d never thought something might happen to her if he didn’t touch her. She’d never felt as if she was at war with her body—as if it had its own needs and desires, regardless of what she wanted.
Still, it didn’t make sense that she should feel this much—or anything—for a stranger she happened to have slept with repeatedly, so she told herself it was the situation. Not him.
And the best way to make certain that was true, the way it should have been, was to do precisely what she’d told him she would. To do what she’d meant to do all along and explore her options, not settle on one man and create whole worlds around him the way it seemed she always did.
She had never allowed herself to enjoy being single. Surely it was high time she took advantage of the fact she was entirely without ties or, here in Italy, responsibilities of any kind.
When she got down to the piazza, she took her time walking across it, breathing in the crisp night air. The Christmas lights gleamed brightly and happily, transforming the square where she’d sat earlier. In the thick, enveloping dark with its suggestion of fog from the water, the lights shined like cheer. Hope.
All that sparkle soothed her as she made her way across the square and ducked into the grand hotel. The hotel was one of the Amalfi coast’s most famous and beloved locations, splashed across postcards featuring glamorous people from way back when. It was known for its luxurious summers, but even here at the end of the year it was special.
Maya slowed as she walked into the grand, soaring lobby, featuring a selection of evergreens in its center, roped with lights and gold and silver balls—far more impressive tonight, set against the dark backdrop of the windows over the ocean, than they’d seemed this morning. Pretty music played from on high and everything smelled deep green and faintly like cinnamon.
The fact that she was here in December and that Christmas was coming hit her harder than it had before.
So hard she was tempted to go a bit wobbly.
Everybody feels lonely at the holidays, she told herself crisply as she skirted the massive trees and headed for the bar. She wasn’t lonely. She was on her own. They weren’t the same thing.
Maya intended to illustrate the difference to herself tonight.
She’d spent most of the day psyching herself up for this. According to every man she’d ever met, any woman could walk into any bar anywhere on the planet and find a man to have sex with her.
Maya planned to put that theory to the test.
Because as the hours after her hot, humiliating episode with Charlie had inched past, Maya had grown more and more disgusted by her own behavior.
Not that she’d had sex with Charlie in the first place, because of course she couldn’t regret that. That had been the correct impulse, she’d decided. She’d felt something like victorious that she’d stepped off the plane and found him so quickly. No one could claim that she was broken if she was already tearing up the sheets with someone else. No one could possibly think that she was mooning around after Ethan if she was having explosive, impossibly good sex with a man who could eat the likes of Ethan for breakfast.
And, sure, she had some concerns about how broken her heart wasn’t and how easy it was to imagine a life without the man she was supposed to have just started a whole new life with...
But today she’d understood, with an uncomfortable level of clarity, that she had thrown herself into the Charlie thing not just because he was the most beautiful man she’d ever met—and not simply because she had no idea sex could be a driving compulsion instead of a pleasant pastime until him—but because she had been keeping a mental scorecard.
The trouble with that was, she was the only one playing.
Her conversation with Lorraine had brought that home. Had she expected that Lorraine might fall all over herself to assure Maya that it had all been a mistake? Had she called so that when Lorraine told her to come back—when Lorraine told her that she’d ended things with Ethan now that the horror of the wedding day and life without Maya had shown her the error of her ways—Maya could swan back to her old life? Had she imagined that Charlie could be her tit for tat when she took up her carefully plotted-out life with Ethan again?
Was that why she hadn’t really grieved the loss of that life?
She wanted to deny that she had ever thought such a thing, because she didn’t want to be the kind of woman who would ever consider taking back a man who had cheated and humiliated her, no matter what, but there was something in her gut that told her otherwise.
Maya walked into the bar, all dimly lit reds and golden wood, and smiled sweetly at the bartender as she ordered herself a vodka martini. The first sip went down crisp and good, hitting her belly and warming her up from the inside out.
Kind of the way Charlie did—but she wasn’t going to obsess about him tonight. Charlie was entirely too dangerous for the likes of her, anyway. A fling with a man like Charlie was one thing, but she hadn’t taken her own honeymoon in defiance of literally everyone she knew to tangle herself up with some other man. She could already hear the heavy sighs from her sister if she were to admit to such a thing when she got home. She knew perfectly well how Melinda would view a holiday fling with a lethal-eyed American she suspected had a less than perfectly legal background, if those functional tattoos of his were as Sons of Anarchy as she imagined.
On the other hand, if Maya were to use the weeks she had left to give herself the kind of Christmas gift all the magazines she pretended not to read—unless she was in a doctor’s office—told her she should want to give to herself.
No-strings sex. With as many men as took her fancy. Because she was a third-wave feminist and sex positive and whatever else she was supposed to be these days. The truth was, she’d never had time to while away her days worrying too much about her love life.
Maya had always focused on one man at a time, because how could she be expected to juggle all her work and school commitments and date a variety of them? She’d had two boyfriends in college. Another for most of law school. And then Ethan. She felt confident she knew everything there was to know about the particular joys of sex with intimacy, inside the bounds of a committed relationship.
At some point today, it had occurred to her that dumping all her feelings on Charlie was a knee-jerk reaction based on those experiences. Emotion was something people in intimate, committed relationships did—it was the point, she’d always thought—but this trip wasn’t about that.
This was her time to do things she hadn’t done with her newfound independence. And the one thing she’d never done was joyfully and deliberately slept around. By choice and design.
If the debacle with Lorraine and Ethan had taught her anything, it was that she needed to take a step back from intimacy and commitment and focus a little more on honesty, excellent sex and her own damned self.
And that meant she was going to have to learn how to pick up men in bars.
A fancy hotel bar in a faraway Italian hotel in the middle of the off-season, festooned with Christmas lights and featuring a suggested dress code at the door, seemed like the perfect place to practice.
After all, Maya had a certain stature back in Toronto. If she was going to start going out on the prowl—as Lorraine had always called it, she thought with a wince—she would have to figure out how best to do that in ways that could never come back to haunt
her in the light. She would have to learn how not to embarrass herself or, worse, her firm. Or worst of all, her family. That meant she had to be careful how she went about things and certainly couldn’t use one of those dating apps. The very thought made her shudder.
This would have to be her new normal.
She swirled her drink in her hand, letting her gaze move around the dimly lit space. How hard could it be? She’d never propositioned a man before in her life, but she’d done that already this vacation, too. Charlie hadn’t been wrong. She was the one who had started things between them. She was the one—
If all you’re going to do is sit here thinking about Charlie, you’re defeating the purpose, she snapped at herself.
She applied herself to the task the way she would with any other project. She’d overheard her colleagues talking about how, when they went out to bars, apparently all they had to do was set foot inside and they were besieged by all kinds of men. “Beating them off with a stick” was the phrase she’d heard, more than once.
Maya swiveled around on the bar stool, waiting for the siege. Assuming a little encouragement wouldn’t go amiss, she smiled anytime she caught a man’s eye when he wasn’t sitting with a woman or a family. There was that one in the corner who was fiddling with his drink in a way she liked, his eyes hooded and his lips full as he looked back at her, like every Italian fantasy she’d ever had without realizing it. There was the older gentlemen at a nearby table, exuding a distinguished, authoritative air, who kept pausing in his conversation with two other far more portly and even older men to look at Maya appreciatively. And yet one more, entirely too young for her, who was nonetheless offering her a cheeky, suggestive grin from farther down the length of the bar.
Was it that easy? Did she simply...choose one? Because if it was that simple, it suggested to her that she’d simply failed to notice male interest for most of her life. Not, of course, that interest led to sex—but maybe that was the point all the men she’d known had been making. If she wanted it to turn from eye contact into sex, it could. And wasn’t that revolutionary?
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