Because the truth was, she didn’t want a random man in a bar. She wanted him. But surely there was something wrong with her for that. Surely she should want to prowl, totting up her numbers and having healthy, no-strings sex with as many men as possible, the way she kept reading women her age were meant to do.
She scowled at him. “You don’t get to decide. I’m not a possession.”
“Maybe not.” Charlie shrugged. “But I’m possessive.”
“Really.” She didn’t believe him. Or maybe she wanted to believe him a little too much. “Is that a thing you do? You have sex and then get all possessive? Does that happen a lot?”
He did something that made his eyes glitter even more and sent something like chills shuddering down her back. Except she wasn’t the least bit cold.
“I’m not generally a possessive guy when it comes to women,” he said after a moment, his voice gruff. And she had the distinct impression he was as overwhelmed and furious about it as she was. But no—that was a story she was telling herself. That was what she wanted to see, not what was real. “But for you, I’m willing to make an exception.”
“Lucky me.” She held his gaze and tried to look like the sexually liberated woman she should have been but never had been. “But I think I’ll pass.”
She wanted to sweep off somewhere—possibly to the washroom to have a cry—but she couldn’t move without exposing herself to the whole bar. And he settled into his stance, even widening it a little. Effectively trapping her.
He didn’t have to say a word. He just...kept her right there, her pulse a disaster and that blazing fire too hot and wild inside her.
“You can go straight to hell,” she threw at him.
“I can guarantee you I will,” Charlie said. There was a different note in his voice then, tangled through with what she might have called sorrow or self-disgust, if he’d been someone else. “But we’re not debating what’s going to happen to me when I’m gone. We’re debating what you’re going do with that tight little pussy while you’re here.”
Maya should have been appalled that he was speaking to her like that. That he was using such vulgar words. And she was horrified, certainly—but at herself.
She made herself look all the way up the acres of his chest, despite the fact he was dressed like a captain of industry instead of a handyman, which should have confused her more than it did. “I have no intention of entering into another relationship, though I’m sure you wouldn’t use that word. And if I did, it certainly wouldn’t be with you.”
“Sure.” His crooked grin was much too smug. “That’s why, every time you see me, you get so wet.”
“That was before you threw me up against a wall in the middle of the village.”
His grin got even cockier. “You were soaking wet then. I bet you are now, too. Should we check?”
Her breath shuddered through her. Out of her. He was electrifying—because he wasn’t anything like the men she knew, all of them as worried about public perception as she’d been. Charlie wasn’t like them. He wasn’t like her.
Maya had absolutely no doubt that if he wanted to, he would go right ahead and get his hands on her—right here in this high-class bar—in a way that would get them both arrested.
And the craziest part was she didn’t think she’d do a single thing to stop him.
“Charlie...” she managed, breathing out his name like it was a prayer.
His blue eyes were so bright they hurt. She held her breath.
“There you are,” came a plummy, rich voice that hailed from the British Isles. “I thought you’d run for the hills after that tedious exercise.”
Maya blinked, confused. An expression she couldn’t read crossed over Charlie’s face. He muttered something she couldn’t hear, so there was no reason it should pierce the wall of her chest and make her heart ache.
The same way she ached when he stepped back to a respectable distance.
“So sorry to butt in,” the man standing there beside Charlie said in the same merry way. “Your man raced off after yet another disgracefully boring business-owner’s dinner and I confess I followed, grateful to get away. I have no idea why they insist on boring us to death, as if the taxes aren’t sufficient to that purpose.”
Maya gaped up at the man, dressed in another gloriously bespoke suit that whispered of the kind of wealth and consequence that could afford that level of artisanal tailor. Exactly as Charlie’s did.
Something kicked in her at that. Something she didn’t want to face.
“I beg your pardon,” the round-faced British man continued, smiling down at Maya. “I’m Sebastian Fawkes-Morton, owner and proprietor of a far more modest establishment than the glorious hotel our Charlie owns. What I would give for his view!”
Maya stared up at Charlie, pieces she hadn’t wanted to put together slamming into place. His presence here, dressed like that. His total unconcern about his job. His nonchalance about ordering food into a guest’s room where he’d been lounging about half-naked.
As she gazed at him, he watched her, his expression daring her to get it. To make the logical connection.
“Hold on a moment,” she heard herself say from very, very far away. As if she was trapped in another dressing room, hair and makeup exquisitely prepared for another wedding that would never take place. “The hotel. You own it?”
Charlie’s eyes had never been so blue. Beside him, the man let out a whoop and surely risked death by pounding Charlie on the back.
“This is one of the long-lost St. George sons, my dear!” he crowed, putting the final nail into the situation. It felt like he was hammering it directly into Maya’s head. Because everyone knew about the late Daniel St. George and the hotels—and wealth—he’d left to the sons he’d never met. The kind of wealth that made it deeply, breathtakingly humiliating that she’d ever believed Charlie was any kind of handyman. “That hotel is his birthright!”
CHARLIE HAD SEEN all kinds of bad shit in his time. Things he could never scrub from his head no matter how he tried. Nasty old nightmares that came out in the dark sometimes and kept him awake. Of all the things that he liked about leaving his life in Texas behind him for good, cutting down on scenarios that left that kind of dank residue inside of him ranked pretty high.
But he couldn’t remember any of those tonight. Because the look on Maya’s face as she stared back at him, his identity no longer a secret, was the thing that was going to haunt him forever.
He had liked Sebastian well enough before this, but as the man kept braying on, Charlie thought he might actually have to kill him.
St. George this, St. George that—Charlie barely heard him because Maya had gone too still. He watched her gaze darken, stormy and shocked and something much worse. Much too close to betrayed. He watched, frozen himself though he would have denied it, as she swallowed. Visibly.
And when she stood from her bar stool, gathering that soft cloud of pink around her, he could see that her hands were shaking.
The last time his heart had beat this hard he’d had a gun in his face.
“If you’ll excuse me,” she said in a perfectly smooth voice. But it wasn’t her voice. Not the one he recognized. “I have to get back.”
She aimed the same smile at him that she threw Sebastian’s way. Blank. Absent.
As if she was