CHAPTER TWO

      CHARLIE TELLER WAS no stranger to beautiful women.

      He liked to consider himself something of an expert, in fact.

      And the one standing before him hit pretty much every single one of his buttons. Hot? Check. A killer body, all generous curves packed onto a lean frame? Check. Soft, dark brown skin he itched to get his hands on? Check.

      And better still, a wicked, inviting smile he could feel in his cock?

       Hell yeah.

      Charlie wasn’t a complicated man. His life had gotten a little complicated over the past year, true—but he was doing his best to combat that.

      He was here in Italy, a million miles away from everything he’d ever known. Not back in Texas, answering questions that were designed to incriminate him. One way or another.

      A year ago he had learned that the unidentified man his mother had slept with all those years ago, resulting in the pregnancy that had forced her—her words, usually screamed at Charlie while she was wasted—to marry his stepfather, introducing Charlie to a life of outlaw bikers and other rough, often desperate men, wasn’t some random drunk in a bar as Charlie had always assumed.

      Or if he was, he’d been a very, very rich one.

      Daniel St. George had been one of the world’s wealthiest men when he’d died. He’d collected beautiful women, fancy hotels and fast cars, and houses in places Charlie had never heard of before. He’d also collected bastard children wherever he went, like some kind of rich man’s we-are-the-world power trip. Charlie had found out he had half brothers in Iceland and the Pacific Islands. A half sister living in New York. All as wary of their sudden family connection as he was.

      And better by far—or less complicated, anyway—his father had left him a fancy-ass hotel in Italy and a chunk of money to go with it so he could run it.

      Given the way things were headed back home in Texas, with federal agents infiltrating his stepfather’s biker club and a lot of Charlie’s own biker-club-adjacent activities under a little too much surveillance, he’d jumped at the chance to get the hell away from a sinking ship.

      And who knew? Maybe this was his opportunity to go straight.

      It was high time for a little change in his life, he could admit that. He’d lasted a long time hurtling down a dead-end road, but he was a realist. His stepfather had been in and out of jail for most of Charlie’s life before he’d met an ugly end in a bar fight gone bad. His mother was too drunk and bitter these days to do much more than exist the same way she always had, moving from man to man in the same small, grim pool of outlaws and grifters. Last he’d heard she was in yet another biker town in the Louisiana swamp.

      Charlie had known he’d needed to get out since he was a kid. He’d been plotting out the best way to do that when Daniel St. George’s lawyers had found him. And the rich father he’d never known—and couldn’t really believe his mother had ever known, if he was honest—turned out to be an excellent exit strategy.

      Now he was a boutique hotel owner in a high-class, undeniably beautiful part of the world he never would have seen if he’d stayed in Texas. He had a new life, the new start he’d always wanted and an aversion bordering on phobia for any further complications to his newly simple and easy life.

      But he was still him.

      And the gorgeous woman smiling at him with all that appreciation in her smile and the November sun playing over her face wasn’t complicated at all.

      She made him feel simple all the way through.

      “What did you have in mind?” he asked her, letting his drawl get lazy. He stripped off his work gloves and tossed them down near the base of the fence post, then rested his hands on his hips.

      “What’s on offer?” she asked, more of that wickedness in her voice.

      And in the way she shifted so he couldn’t help but look at that swing in her hips. His mouth went dry.

      “The hotel is full-service,” he assured her. “Whatever you want, you get.”

      “I’m delighted to hear that. I have a lot of...wants.”

      She laughed when she said that, which somehow transformed it from a silly little line anyone might say into something...extraordinary.

      Charlie had the distinct impression that if he didn’t get a taste of her, it might kill him.

      “Tell me what you want,” he said, grinning when she did, like they were both caught up in the bright grip of her laughter. “I’ll make sure you get it.”

      She moved closer, and he had to lecture himself not to reach out and sink his hands into the massive cloud of curls around her head. He had to order himself not to wrap his hands around her curvy hips or pull them flush to his, right here, out in the open.

      The steep incline of the village fell away behind her, and the ocean was spread out everywhere like a deep blue witness, but all he could see was the flirty skirt she wore that showed off her lean, muscled legs and her long-sleeved shirt with a neckline that drew attention to her delicate collarbones, her firm upper arms and her plump, mouthwatering breasts.

      He took his time dragging his gaze back up to her full, lush mouth. She swept her sunglasses off her face, and then he was lost for a moment in the dark brown of her eyes, hot and direct.

      He felt it like hands all over him. He wished hers were, and who cared if they were in public.

      “I would say I want you,” she said, and there was a certain awkwardness in her words, or maybe it was in the way she stood, as if this was out of character for her. But Charlie didn’t care. “But I wouldn’t want to get you in trouble on the job.”

      She didn’t know who he was. No one had pointed him out to her yet, calling him the American boss or whatever more colorful terms they used in Italian. Capo americano, whatever.

      It had taken him and the hotel’s longtime manager, Benicio, a solid three months to figure each other out. These days, Charlie left the running of the hotel to Benicio and amused himself with the kinds of things he was good at. He’d always worked with his hands. And there was a deep, unexpected satisfaction in working on something that was his. Something no one could take from him. It felt like an indulgence to spend an afternoon thinking about nothing more than repairing a fence.

      Instead of federal wiretaps on the people he’d always considered his family, for example. Or which friends might turn state’s evidence and throw him into the middle of it because of things his stepfather had done or boasts his drunken mother had made to the wrong people. It was a relief to be able to simply do a thing without running it through the proper channels so as not to offend anyone, making sure to use a shitty burner phone instead of the technology everyone else enjoyed these days or any of the other things he’d done over the years while he’d danced up and down that gray moral and legal line that all the lawyers he’d known had called, at best, arguable.

      There was nothing gray or arguable about a