Читать книгу The Dare Collection 2018 - Taryn Leigh Taylor - Страница 18

MAYA WOKE UP in a panic, as if she’d had a bad dream.

But if she’d been dreaming, she couldn’t remember about what.

Her heart careened around in her chest, her skin felt clammy and she could hardly manage a full breath. She squinted at the clock on the bedside table, certain that it would be the dead of night. But it was one of the long, dark mornings this time of year, and somehow the fact that it was a new day and yet still so dark made her...shiver.

Then again, maybe that had more to do with the way Charlie was sprawled next to her in the big bed, taking up more than his share of room on the mattress.

She wanted to curl into him. She wanted to bury her face in his chest, feel his heavy arms around her and let him make her feel safe again—

But she couldn’t let herself do that. Because she knew she would wake him up if she touched him, and he would see that she was losing it, and the very idea of that made her heart beat faster and her throat feel tighter.

A sob, trapped in her chest like some kind of time bomb, threatened to break free.

And Maya couldn’t have that, either.

She eased herself over to the edge of the bed, then rolled out of it, expecting her body to react to that much movement after the night she’d had. Expecting to feel twinges, little pulls or scrapes, instead of...the strangest feeling that suffused her from head to foot. As if she was lit up with something too bright to contain.

It didn’t make sense.

Charlie had turned her inside out, with an intensity and a deliberateness that made her knees feel weak. He had taught her things about herself that made her shiver all over again, just remembering.

He had taken control of her in so many delicious ways that she was surprised she’d survived it. But maybe the real truth was that she hadn’t. She felt like ash. She was charred straight through, waiting for the faintest breeze to blow her away.

Her heart was still kicking at her like it wanted out of her chest. She couldn’t breathe. And looking at the impossible, sculpted beauty of the big hard man sprawled across her bed made her...weak.

She made her way across the bedroom in the dark, carefully stepping over the shoes she’d thrown on the floor last night. Once she made it to the washroom suite, she eased her way inside and gently, carefully closed the door behind her. Then she stood there, her back against the door and her heart hammering at her, as if something was chasing her.

Maya stood there for a long time. Until her feet grew so cold against the tiled floor beneath her that she could feel the chill of it climb up her calves. When she pushed away from the door, she felt older, arthritic, as if the force of whatever panic this was had aged her immeasurably.

The funny thing was, she believed it.

She’d thrown her clutch on the washroom counter when she’d stormed into the room last night, and she moved over to it now, unclipping it so she could pull her mobile out and scroll through her notifications.

There were several voice mails from her parents’ house phone and individual mobiles, but she didn’t need to listen to them. She could feel their cool disapproval of her choices from across the world and knew exactly what they’d say. That they were disappointed that she hadn’t risen to the occasion and shown her mettle as a Martin should.

They would have shown her the same frozen disappointment if she’d ever, say, gotten a bad grade in school or made a scene in public. Not that she’d ever dared do either one of those things.

Her sister had moved on to text messages:

Ethan is not cooperating. He insists he needs to talk to you, personally. Please advise.

Maya waited for that familiar rage to sweep through her again. That deep, comprehensive fury at the man she was supposed to be married to right now that had been keeping her aloft all this time. But it was gone. And the room it had taken up inside her was filled with that brightness...and its matching panic.

She knew why. The why was out there in her bed, fast asleep, beautiful and golden and capable of making her body sing like some kind of celestial instrument only he knew how to play. He’d proved it again and again.

But she had spent these weeks secure in her anger and she hadn’t spared a thought for what might wait there on the other side of it. A different kind of grief, maybe. For the life she had thought she would be living by now. The life she and Ethan had built, one conversation and goal at a time, year after year...

A life she not only didn’t want any longer but couldn’t imagine how she’d ever wanted.

That thought felt slippery and treacherous. She slid a hand over her own chest as if that could soothe her poor heart.

Maya hadn’t understood how black-and-white her world was—and always had been—until she’d come to Italy. Or how gray her emotions were, or the sex she’d had was, until she met Charlie and he’d turned her inside out.

Now the colors were too bright.

And there was no pretending that she could go back. Not to the life she’d left behind in all those embarrassing wedding-day pieces. She wasn’t the same person whose wedding had been canceled in such a humiliating fashion.

Maybe you were never that person, a voice inside her suggested.

But that kind of heresy made her entire life some kind of sick joke, didn’t it? And the notion that might very well be true only made it harder to breathe.

Maya moved farther into the rambling washroom suite that was larger than the dormitory room she’d lived in with Lorraine a lifetime ago. She made her way to the huge, dramatic bathtub that was perched in the big arched window, offering a view—by day—of the patchwork, pastel quilt of ancient buildings stuck to the side of the steep hills and the beautiful stretch of the sea beyond.

She climbed into the tub and sank down into it, not minding at all that it was dry and it was too dark outside to see much more than the lights and the suggestion of the water, far below. She felt as if she was in some kind of cocoon, tucked up and safe from the world.

Or maybe the truth was, simply, that she felt safe here. That was what Italy—and Charlie, if she was honest, and maybe mostly Charlie—had done for her. And it wasn’t until she had started to feel that remarkable sense of safety that she’d truly understood how deeply unsafe she’d felt for most of her life, in a variety of ways. And with just about everyone she knew.

But that was a breakdown for another time.

Right now, she needed to clean up her own mess.

She swiped her phone open, found Ethan’s number and hit the button.

The phone rang and rang. It only occurred to her that it was after midnight in Toronto—long past Ethan’s preferred bedtime, since he liked to rise at 4:30 to get his run in every morning before work—when she heard the fumbling noise that suggested he was picking up his phone from the nightstand.

“Do you know what time it is?” Ethan demanded, his voice thick and annoyed, and Maya could picture him perfectly. He would be scowling, his eyes even more bleary than usual without his glasses on. His dark hair would be standing straight up and his jaw would be rough.

She waited for a wave of regret to crash over her. Longing, maybe. Yearning, despite the likelihood that he wasn’t alone in that bed they’d picked out together.

But all she felt was a kind of soft sadness.

“I beg your pardon, Ethan,” she said crisply, the way she might in a fractious deposition. “Is it inconvenient for you to talk to me now? It’s obviously very important to me that your convenience take center stage here.”

“That’s not what I meant.” Now he sounded aggrieved. “For fuck’s sake, Maya. You really are making this harder than it has to be.”

“Out of curiosity, how hard do you imagine something like this ought to be? Is there a certain level of reaction you would find acceptable, under the circumstances? Am I allowed to react at all? I’m guessing not. Because—and correct me if I’m off base—I suspect it’s possible that you don’t like being so clearly and inarguably in the wrong.”

She heard a sound like a sigh—even more aggrieved than before, which she would have said wasn’t possible—and a faint clattering noise that she knew was Ethan fiddling around on the table beside the bed for his glasses.

And maybe because she could picture it all so clearly, as if she was standing in the corner of the bedroom herself, Maya knew she didn’t want to go back to that condo. Not even if Ethan removed himself. She didn’t want to live there, surrounded by so many ghosts of a life that would never happen. Not to mention, though she couldn’t hear another person, she was sure he was sharing that bed—and the couch and the soft rug in the den and God knows which other surfaces—with Lorraine. She had to assume they had been sneaking around in her home for some time.

Which meant Maya could never touch anything in it again.

That notion might have hurt her before. And then made her angry, because who didn’t prefer a little spurt of righteous anger to the pain that lay beneath it? But today she could hardly muster more than a shrug.

“You want to hurt me. You want to punish me. I get it.” Ethan actually sounded self-righteous, she realized. As if he saw himself as the victim here—and more, wanted to be the victim.

It should have made her furious. Instead, she wanted to laugh.

And instead of gulping that strange urge down because it was unseemly, she...let herself laugh.

At him. And better yet, unapologetically.

“I don’t want to hurt you, Ethan.” She wasn’t sure that was true. She didn’t want to actively cause him pain, maybe, but she doubted she would work too hard to keep from smiling should karma catch up with him. “And I think we both know that the life you’ve chosen is punishment enough.”

“If that’s meant to be another nasty little dig at Lorraine, you should know straight off I won’t allow it.”

“Good to know.” She was sure he could hear the way she rolled her eyes, and she was fine with that, too. “I’m not being unkind when I point out that the smooth, easy life you always claimed you wanted? That’s not going to happen. Whether you stay together or don’t, you’ve chosen a roller coaster.”

“I don’t expect you to understand.” Ethan was using that fussy, offended voice that, once upon a time, had made her wish that she could do anything at all to solve whatever the problem was. And she usually had.

But that was the old Maya. The black-and-white, rule-following Maya, locked away in all that gray.

“The funny thing is, I do understand,” she told him, in the spirit of some generosity that she couldn’t have named if her life depended on it. “I wish the two of you could have handled this better. Not left me at the altar, for example. But I understand.”

It was the greatest gift she was capable of giving, here in the run-up to a Christmas she’d imagined would be very different. But it was a time for forgiveness and grace, if she was capable of it. She was surprised to find she was.

And she knew it would have been impossible even twenty-four hours before.

But Charlie had shown her what true power was and where it waited deep inside her, if she dared surrender to it.

She had dared. And Maya felt like a different person in the aftermath.

One who might be a little shaky, sure, but one who was capable of giving gifts to those who least deserved it.

So, naturally, Ethan ruined it.

“Of course you don’t understand,” he retorted, in that superior voice of his that she’d used to think was cute. Because it reminded her how smart he was, how accomplished, how successful. Today she just thought he sounded like a dick. “You don’t know what it’s like to truly love someone like this. I don’t expect you to. But the problem is, you hiding out in Italy is making things awkward for us.”

She ran her tongue over her teeth. “What a nightmare. Heaven forbid you feel awkward.”

If he heard her sarcasm, he ignored it. “There’s friction at work. You know what it’s like in the firm when there’s any hint of scandal. And your sister is hounding me day and night about selling the condo.” He let out a baffled sort of laugh. “It doesn’t make any sense. Why would you want to live here?”

“I hardly know where to begin with any of that.”

“You need to come home, Maya. Sulking in Italy isn’t solving anything. We need to put on a good front for the partners, as soon as possible, before they start jumping to unfortunate conclusions about our dependability.”

Maya was shaking her head at the darkness on the other side of the window before her.

“That sounds like a you problem, if I’m honest.”

“Don’t be childish, please. It demeans us both. I’m talking about our careers.”

“And somehow, I don’t think I’m the one demeaning anything. What good front do I need to put on? I’m the one who was left at the altar.” She made her voice as bland as possible. “All I have to do is put on a brave face and I’m the heroine of this story. Your road is a little rougher, I’m afraid.”

“I’m aware of the optics,” he snapped at her. “That’s why we need to do this together.”

“The last thing we did together was plan a wedding. You’ll understand if I’m less interested in joint projects from here on out.”

“This is what I’m talking about. This childishness. Who is that helping?”

“You’re going to have to rehabilitate your image on your own,” Maya said coolly. “But if it makes you feel any better, I’m sure you’ll quickly discover that no one really cares that much about your personal life. I can assure you that I certainly don’t. In fact, I would prefer to never hear about your personal life or your deep and abiding love, ever again.”

“I knew you wouldn’t understand.” He sounded lofty then. Like some kind of martyr to love.

It was maddening.

Maya’s temples were pounding, and she pressed the fingers of her free hand against her forehead, urging herself not to give in to the wave of temper.

“Here’s the thing, Ethan. You and I both know that the only thing you will ever love is yourself. Luckily, Lorraine is more or less the same. And I’m sure you’ll do wonderfully together.”

“I already told you I won’t tolerate your nasty asides.”

“I think we both know that you don’t care about me, my feelings or anything else, or none of this would have happened.”

A funny thing happened when she said it that way. Out loud. Stark and matter-of-fact. And to him. Especially when he didn’t argue. It put the years they’d spent together into order. It highlighted all the things she’d told herself were just a part of a long-term relationship—one that greatly resembled her parents’ businesslike arrangement.

I don’t want to be my parents, she admitted to herself. They were as cold as a Canadian winter, frozen straight through, and she’d tasted fire now. She’d burned alive—and she liked it.

She felt free and sad at the same time. Unmoored. “Let’s be clear about why you’re really stonewalling my sister. It would be inconvenient for you to relocate. That’s why you don’t want to leave the condo. Not because it has any sentimental value to you and not even because you’re trying to hurt me, somehow. Because you would have to care to do that.”

Ethan sighed. “If I’m such a sociopath, why did you want to marry me?”

“A question I’m sure I’ll spend the rest of my life grappling with,” she shot right back. “But today, happily, that’s one more thing that’s not my problem. If you want the condo, you need to buy me out. And if I were you, I would think long and hard about lowballing me, as I know you’re going to try to do.”

“This is ridiculous. I’m not going to play these adolescent games with you in the middle of the night. We’ll talk when you get back from Italy.”

And impossibly, laughably, he hung up.

He hung up on her.

For a long moment, Maya didn’t move. She sat where she was, her mobile in her hand, staring at the screen in disbelief.

But then something shifted inside her.

It had something to do with the glorious way Charlie had taught her how to surrender. To move into the things she feared or wanted, or both at the same time—and discover who she really was on the other side of it.

Her heart kicked at her at that, but she couldn’t think about him yet. Not quite yet.

She thought about what she knew instead. All those grays, the black-and-whites and Ethan in the middle of it, so certain that she would do as he wanted.

Because she always had.

She had been more dedicated to the idea of their perfect life together than she had been to him, personally. They had rarely fought, because there was nothing to fight about. Maya had always done that math and come up with the same conclusion. Keeping their busy, glossy life running smoothly had been her priority. Always. If she hadn’t been sure about something, Ethan would argue her into it. He would sit her down, lay out his argument and treat her like a recalcitrant jury.

And she had accepted that. She had enjoyed it, even. If asked, she would have said that it was one of the things she loved about their relationship. They were so logical. So rational. Even when things got emotional, they managed to talk their way to an equitable solution.

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?

Maybe 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.