Things she hadn’t done with Ethan, for example, included yelling at him in the street. Engaging in sexual acts in public when anyone might happen upon them at any time. She had never begged Ethan for anything.
Ethan had never made her come over and over, ignoring her when she said she couldn’t and making her body do things she’d never imagined it could.
Again and again.
It was as if Ethan was a cold, gray rain. And Charlie was sunlight.
And there was no pretending, now, that she didn’t know the difference between the two.
Ethan wanted her to come back to Canada so he could argue her into compliance with whatever rational, self-serving plan he had in his head. About how Maya would slip into the role of ambassador for Ethan’s relationship with Lorraine, smoothing over all the rough edges socially and professionally, and making it all okay. Ushering him into the future he wanted, just with someone other than Maya at his side.
Would she have done it? If she hadn’t met Charlie, would she simply have tucked her tail between her legs and run back home to do Ethan’s bidding now?
But she already knew the answer, nauseated as it might make her.
She was a Martin. And Martins did not behave irrationally. They were not motivated by emotion. They did what was expected of them and, whenever possible, exceeded those expectations.
She swiped through to her parents’ most recent message and lifted the phone to her ear again.
“Everyone is sympathetic, of course,” came her mother’s frosty tones. “But surely it’s time to handle the fallout and put your spin on it. It would be a shame if Ethan and that Lorraine were left in the position to have the final word on this mess. You must see that. Hiding away with your head in the sand never solved anything.”
Maya wanted to laugh at that the way she’d laughed at everything else today, but couldn’t quite get there.
Her heart was kicking at her again, because her immediate instinct was to leave her mobile tucked away, out of sight, again. And to run back out to that bed, crawl into it and lose herself in the sweet, shattering oblivion that Charlie offered.
But she was kidding herself.
Her life in Toronto wasn’t going away, no matter how little she wanted to think about it here. She would have to go home soon enough, and when she did, there would be no big brawny American with all that danger stamped in his bones, just waiting to make her feel new. And alive.
Maya had claimed she wanted the truth. And he’d given it to her.
She could do no less than give herself the same courtesy.
And the truth was that Charlie terrified her.
He made her feel safe, sure, in a way that no one else ever had. Certainly not her frostbitten parents, who were forever disappointed in her. Or her sister, who always wanted to fix her. Or Ethan, who had seen her only in terms of a valuable merger. Things that were so obvious to her now she didn’t understand how she’d failed to see them before.
But she knew color now. All the rowdy, boisterous color of the Amalfi coast. The shock of the flowers, the serene self-possession of the pastel houses.
And all that Italian sun, even in the dark of December.
She knew better now, and that was a gift.
Maya could never go back to the life she had before, and she knew that however painful this had all been, that was a gift, too.
Outside the window, the sky was beginning to lighten. Pinks were creeping in, hinting at the blue day to come.
Christmas was coming. The year was ending.
And Maya wasn’t in any way the person she’d believed she was when she’d come here. The person she’d imagined she was all these years—the person she’d worked so hard to become.
Charlie had forced her to see herself.
And this was what she knew now. She couldn’t be with a man like Ethan, so self-absorbed, so consumed with making the best argument no matter what, so convinced that he could monologue her into submission. She didn’t want a life that was all compromise in such a cynical, deliberate way. She didn’t want all those external markers. The right address. The right law firm. The impeccable pedigree.
None of the things she thought mattered had saved her from the humiliation of her wedding day. None of her successes had made her parents proud of her. Nothing she’d achieved had made Ethan love her or made Lorraine loyal.
But here on the Amalfi coast she’d abandoned everything she’d thought was true about herself. She’d had sex with a stranger. She’d gotten loud and dirty, publicly. Her attempt to prowl for more casual sex in a bar hadn’t ended the way she’d thought it would, but she’d tried. She’d acted like someone else’s daughter, for once. Someone who didn’t care about appearances. Someone who would throw herself at a man she’d thought was a caretaker. A handyman.
She had let her libido lead her. And this was where it had led her.
To sex so raw and shattering that she’d forgotten her own name.
Intimacy so ferocious and all-consuming that she was still reeling, halfway into a panic attack.
Charlie was the antidote to Ethan. That was clear.
But she’d convinced herself that she was in love with him, and that was insanity.
It had been one thing when she’d believed that he was a shiftless laborer who’d ended up in Italy by accident. It had been easy then to sink into all the things he made her feel without worrying about what they meant or what repercussions those feelings could have.
It had been easy to imagine herself in love with a man she had known with a bedrock certainty she would leave behind forever when she left this place.
But Charlie wasn’t a lackadaisical drifter, blown from here to there and back again as the whim took him—a kind of life Maya couldn’t imagine or understand. He was one of the St. George heirs. He was a profoundly wealthy man. And he was powerful in ways that had nothing to do with that danger stamped all over him, but everything to do with the world Maya knew best.
There had been no possibility that she could really, truly get serious about the man she’d thought he was—and she knew exactly what that said about her.
But now...he’d come after her. She had dared him to be real and he’d more than met that challenge.
And the truth was, she thought as she stared out the window as dawn snuck its tendrils over the ocean, she hadn’t been with Ethan by accident.
Maya didn’t know what to do with real. With raw.
With emotional and physical intimacy—not just the shared life two people could build out of habit and goals.
It had been so much easier to feel persecuted. To be the victim, yet again. To wrap herself in her own self-righteousness, her own martyrdom, and console herself yet again that she was the one who loved and was lied to, even here in Italy where she’d gone to heal from the last betrayal.
She’d gotten a lot of mileage out of that, hadn’t she?
But then Charlie had made her grab that headboard. And he’d taught her a very deep lesson about the reality of surrender. About what real meant in practical terms. About her own power and her own need.
Over and over.
Maya put her hands over her mouth to stifle the huge sob that had been lurking in her chest since she’d woken up in such a panic.
She was in love with him. God help her, she’d fallen hard, and she didn’t have the slightest idea how to crawl back out of that pit.
But none of that mattered, because the only love she knew how to give was shallow. If she’d loved Ethan deeply, or at all, she would have been broken now. Not...imagining herself in love with someone else. Not capable of arguing with Ethan on the phone as if they were debating where to get takeout. Not able to think about forgiveness for him or Lorraine ever, and certainly not so soon. How many times did she need to prove this to herself before she believed it?
Mayb
e the truth was that she was nothing but a sad, gray puddle reflecting bright colors she could see but not touch. But Charlie...
Charlie was like an ocean.
And Maya needed to get the hell out of here before she drowned.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
TORONTO WELCOMED MAYA back with a bitch of a snowstorm, just in case she might have forgotten where she lived.
It was like a very cold kick in the gut. But then, leaving Italy had been a lot like peeling off her soul with her fingernails and then leaving the best parts of it behind, so what was a little Canadian weather next to all that?
She hadn’t waited for Charlie to wake up. It was more accurate, in fact, to say that she had snuck around to make sure he wouldn’t. She’d thanked her lucky stars that she was a light packer, because it was easy to throw her things together in the dark. She’d done it in a hurry, as if that drowning she feared so much was imminent.
She’d been hurrying down the old stone stairs toward the hotel lobby before she could think twice. And she’d been in a taxi headed for Naples before daylight had really broken over the sea.
Hurry, something in her had urged. Hurry.
If she slowed down, she would stay.
Maya didn’t let herself look back.
She’d flown to Rome, then got herself on the first flight she could find back to Toronto.
And all the while, her heart had kept hammering at her. That same panic had gnawed at her, not lessening in the least the farther away she got from the man who made her feel...too much. Much too much.
When she’d landed in gray, listless Toronto, it had been easy to convince herself that everything that had happened in Italy had been a kind of daydream. Something gauzy that couldn’t hold up against the grim approach of a long Canadian winter.
“I’m glad you finally came to your senses,” her sister said sternly when Maya turned up at her door. “I understand you had a shock, but it’s as if you’ve lost your mind these past few weeks.”
“Maybe I did lose my mind,” Maya agreed.
But she didn’t think she meant it in the way Melinda did. The truth was that she’d shut off her mind for a change, or Charlie had, and it was amazing how many things her body had found to teach her.
She knew better than to say something like that to her distressingly unimaginative and unromantic sister.
Instead, she set about the practicalities of separating her life from Ethan’s, because every day she remained linked to him felt like torture. And she didn’t really care if that seemed dramatic. She needed him unconnected to her by any means possible.
The snow was coming down hard and she was hideously jet-lagged, but she thought it was absolutely perfect timing to swing by the condo the morning after she arrived. Very early that morning. She let herself in with her key, letting the front door slam shut behind her. Then she walked into the center of the space she had so carefully curated to reflect the up-and-coming couple she and Ethan had been meant to be.
Looking around, it felt like she was standing in a hotel room. Or a stranger’s house. A place that had nothing to do with her and never would. She took a deep breath in and realized that it even smelled...off. Not like hers.
It didn’t take long for the two of them to emerge, looking sleepy and something like scared when they came out of the bedroom to find her waiting there in her own damned kitchen.
“Are you crazy?” Ethan demanded.
Maya smiled. “I own half of this condo, Ethan. I’m not crazy. I’m home.”
She was pleased she’d taken a little extra time with her appearance this morning. She had been trying to erase the signs of her international flight more than she’d been attempting to impress her ex, but no matter why she’d done it, it felt better to be dressed well. She knew she looked sleek and sophisticated, polished to a cool shine, while Lorraine’s hair was a tangled mess and Ethan blinked like an owl from behind his glasses.
“If you want to yell at us, just yell at us,” Lorraine said.
Bravely, as if she was prepared to suffer whatever was necessary for her great and abiding love.
Maya rolled her eyes as she unwrapped her scarf from around her neck. “I don’t want to yell at you. What would be the point? I have no desire whatsoever to play into this forbidden-love, martyr fetish you two think you have going on. Let’s be practical, please. You want to stay in this condo? Make me an offer.”
Lorraine looked as if she might cry but refrained. Ethan, on the other hand, glared.
This was the part where she usually backed down, she knew. Where she offered an apology to ease the tension and then started agreeing to things.
But she wasn’t that Maya anymore. She stared right back at Ethan until he was the one to look away. Then they sat down at the breakfast bar and started negotiating.
And a few hours later, they’d hammered out a deal.
When Maya staggered back out into the snow already blanketing her hometown and showing no signs of stopping, she let the cold shock her system, even bundled up against it as she was.
This is good, she told herself sternly. You need to freeze. You need to put out that fire however you can.
And over the next few days that was exactly what she did.
She stayed in her sister’s guest room while she arranged for her things to be moved out of the condo and put into storage. She searched for new apartments online and, when the storm let up, toured them in person. She talked for a long time on the phone with the managing partner at her law firm and found it a whole lot easier to smooth things over than she had expected it to be. Of course she and Ethan could work together, and seamlessly. Of course there would be no “unfortunate romantic blowback” on the firm. Of course everything could carry on as it always had, because that was what the firm wanted most. But then, Maya didn’t want revenge. She didn’t want anything from Ethan. She wanted to move on from him as if he had never happened.
And in the meantime, she had to figure out how to live in the black-and-white world she’d created for herself when inside she still felt wild and raw with color. Bleeding with it. Dreaming in Technicolor at night and waking up with tears on her cheeks, a weight where her heart should have been and that terrible, aching fire between her legs.
It didn’t help that it was the darkest part of the year. She tried to lose herself in the Christmas lights that fought off the night, telling herself they were a promise that the sun would return. That she would, too, if she held on long enough.
Sometimes she even pretended she believed it.
But she’d returned to Toronto. She had chosen to resume her real life—the one that had nothing to do with staggering Italian vistas or a man who roamed about the cliffs of the Amalfi coast like a lion in blue jeans. That meant she couldn’t hide from her responsibilities, and this time of year was all about duty and putting on a brave face no matter her internal battles.
She had two parties to attend and no interest in either one of them. There was the law firm’s annual holiday party, where no one had originally expected her to make an appearance because she’d been supposed to be off on her honeymoon. But of course, they all knew she was back by now. They would whisper if she didn’t show up with a calm smile on her face, exuding the sort of competence that was expected of her.
After all, she was supposed to be a high-powered attorney. That meant she was expected to be unflappable—and what better way to prove it than this?
As if that wasn’t enough, there was also her parents’ annual Christmas Eve party, where she would also need to parade about in front of so many of her parents’ friends and business associates, all of whom had been sitting in that chapel waiting for a wedding that didn’t happen.
She would have to somehow spin her failure into triumph, her personal mess into strength—because she was a Martin. That was what was expected.
But as Maya
lay there in the guest room in Melinda’s tastefully stark and minimalist house, accented with important investment art, she honestly didn’t know if she had it in her.
And she realized it was the first time in all her life that she hadn’t simply assumed that she could do whatever was expected of her, somehow. If she worked hard enough. If she extended herself. If she was too afraid of the consequences to fail.
It all left a sour taste in her mouth, if she was honest.
But if she had intended to shirk her duties, she would have stayed in Italy with the only man—the only person—she’d ever met who could make her forget herself entirely.
And delightfully.
She had come home to Toronto, so she dressed for her company party with exquisite care even though she would have preferred to stay in bed with the covers over her head like the teenager she’d never been. She chose a sparkling gown that skimmed over her curves but showed almost nothing. Because there was a power in restraint.
And she needed to assure everyone she knew that despite what had happened, she had all the power.
She practiced her chilly, faintly pitying social smile all the way over in her taxi. It was an expression she had learned at her frosty mother’s knee and intended to employ with impunity tonight. After all, it was up to her to show how deeply unbothered she was by the wreckage of her personal life. It was up to her to act as if she was the one in control, no matter that she was the one who had been left at the altar.
It didn’t surprise her in the least that the first people she saw when she walked into the firm’s self-consciously glamorous party, up there on its glittering top floor with views all over Toronto, were Ethan and Lorraine.
Looking significantly more pulled together than the last time she’d seen them, half-asleep in the condo.
“Let me guess,” Maya said as she handed over her coat at the door. “You decided to wait for me. So we could make a calm, amiable entrance together.”
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