“You had to come all the way to Italy to find someone to fuck you right. Now you don’t know what to do with yourself, do you?”
“I told you. I can handle myself just fine.”
He dropped his head down close to her. “But you don’t want to, Maya. Do you?”
She made a ragged sound, equal parts sob and frustration.
“You want to dump all your feelings all over me, that’s fine. But this is the price. It’s easy enough to get my hands on you, sure. You can depend on it if you shoot your mouth off. But if you want me to make you come? You’re going to have to beg.”
It was like he jolted her with electricity. He could feel it go through her, a wild, intense current that charred him, too.
Her breath sobbed out of her. “I don’t beg.”
He leaned closer, then ran his teeth over her neck, grinning when she broke out in goose bumps. “Then don’t.”
When she turned back toward him, dislodging his mouth and no doubt looking to throw up more walls between them, he claimed her mouth again. This kiss was even dirtier than the ones that had gone before. He knew he tasted like her, so he took the kiss wetter. Harder.
Until she was shaking, everywhere, and making low little sounds in the back of her throat.
“Beg me,” he ordered her against her mouth.
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.
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