He never expected that week in Haiti to be anything special, but it was special, unbeatable in fact.

He knew it was a week he would never forget because he knew in his heart, he was sure, that one week was all it took for him to fall hopelessly and completely in love with her.

"What are you reading?" he had asked the first time he spoke to her as he took a seat next to her on the front steps of the old church that they would be calling home for the week along with hundreds of other volunteers on their trip to help victims of the earthquake in Haiti.

"A book," she stated simply not bothering to look up from its pages or into his baby blues.

He had liked the idea of a challenge, of a competition. After all, he was an athlete. Although having to work for the attention that he so regularly was afforded in Pittsburgh as Maxime "Superstar" Talbot was something new to him, but it was a risk he was very willing to take. He was determined to prove he wasn't the "womanizer" his reputation made him out to be.

Throughout that whole week he had been blatantly flirting with her whenever he got the chance. It was like a game. Much to her embarrassment, but it provided the perfect ammo that her sorority sisters needed for some light hearted teasing.

But she had been paying attention, but that wasn't something she was going to let on to him. She had been paying attention to all his silly jokes and wise cracks and to his uncanny ability to put a smile on the face of every person he came across, especially those kids. To that accent, that smile, and those mischievous blue eyes…

Every night she'd sit outside and read before she decided to go to bed. Every night he'd sit beside her flirting with her and trying to see if he could get that smile of hers that he had grown to love so much to make an appearance.

She thought she was doing a good job of playing hard to get. He knew he was doing a good job of seeing through her act.

"You know you'd make a terrible actor," he had said to her one particularly humid night near the end of the week.

"Oh yeah? Why's that?" she asked looking up from her book and into those bright blue eyes that seemed to always stand out, even now, as the light outside was becoming scarce. She was trying to play it cool and keep up her 'hard to get' act which was becoming harder to do every time she was around him.

He leaned in close, "maybe if you were better at pretending to be hard to get, I would be better at believing you, eh?" he whispered in a raspy voice that seemed to make his accent stand out even more to her and a blush to make its way across her cheeks.

In her mind, she was telling herself to think fast, come up with some type of clever excuse about how she wasn't playing hard to get, that this was who she was. There was no use...

His eyes scanned across her face, from her eyes to her lips, back up to her eyes again and before she knew it his lips were on hers cautious at first, but they had quickly become more aggressive, more needy.

She felt like she could've walked on water. That's what his kisses did to her, what they still did to her, now, a year later.

"Hé bébé," he greeted as he stretched out next to her on the couch of his South Side condo.

"Max Hey, ¿cómo estás?" she replied with a smirk. If he was going to speak to her in a language she couldn't speak, she was going to speak to him in a language he didn't speak, just to play hard to get.

He let out a laugh wrapping an arm around her and pulling her close.

"What would I do without you?" he asked aloud.

"Are you implying you can't live without me?" she smiled.

"Oui, that's exactly what I'm implying," he said pressing a kiss to her temple.