JUNE FADED, TURNING into a sweet, golden July that seemed to stretch on into forever.
Maybe he only wished it could.
Stefan had never spent much time contemplating the seasons. They marched on, one after the next, and what mattered was surviving what they wrought. Summer had simply been warmer than the bitter winters, but life had carried on the same. The less said about his childhood the better. Ditto the army. And since then, he’d been far too busy catapulting toward his dark future to spend any kind of deliberate time in the light.
But this summer he was in Prague. The only place on the planet that he had ever viewed not just as an escape, but as safe. It was where his grandmother had showed him that there was more to life than his father’s heavy fist.
And now, fittingly, Prague was where he and his Indy were finally coming to terms.
I’ll give you a month, she’d said that first afternoon. When she’d left him but come back, looking jittery and wide-eyed and still somehow stubborn.
Still stubborn, even as she’d surrendered.
Even as she gave him what he wanted, she did it her way.
He’d thought again of a splash of red in a dark alley. And how quickly, how irrevocably, this woman had happened along and changed everything. It was a good thing he had always been a practical man, or he might have been tempted to tear down a wall or two. With his bare hands, just to feel them fall.
Anything to feel as if he could control the things he felt for this woman. As if he could control himself the way he always had before her.
But he had a month. And Stefan intended to use it.
Let me guess, she’d said that first afternoon, when all he’d done was gaze at her, victory and something that felt too much like relief pounding through him. You require nudity at all times. Blowjobs morning, noon, and night. Is that the kind of intensity you have in mind?
It is never a bad place to start, he’d said, already amused. As I think you know.
She had already told him that not indulging in her usual behavior, out there where she could have lovers eating from her hand with a single glance, was a statement of her intent. But Stefan didn’t think he was the only one who thought that really, when she crossed the terrace to kneel down at his feet, then held his gaze while she took him into her mouth again, that it was a new set of vows.
And for the first few days, it was enough to simply have her near. To know that there would be no renegotiation come the dawn. That she had promised him a month and that meant she wouldn’t sneak out when he was on his run or while he was dealing with the inevitable phone call.
Not that she struck him as the type to sneak anywhere. But then, before her, he hadn’t been the type to worry about what a woman might be doing. Or about anything at all save getting richer and staying in one piece.
“I thought you walked away from your business,” she said when he finished one of those calls, standing out in the dusk and testing himself. Not looking back into the house to see what she was doing. Not checking to make sure she was where he’d left her.
He supposed that was trust. Or a gesture in its direction. And in him, trust was a muscle that had atrophied long ago—but for her, for them, he would work on it.
Stefan had been cooking Indy a traditional Romanian dinner when the call had come in. He walked back in now, something in him shifting—not quite uncomfortably—at the sight of her standing there at his stove. The kitchen was warm and bright, filled with the scents of his childhood, and Indy there in the middle of everything. She was barefoot, wearing those cutoff shorts that he had become a little bit obsessed with. Her hair was tied in a big knot on the top of her head, letting him look at her elegant neck and her shoulder blades beneath the airy tank she wore. Her bracelets sang small, happy songs every time she moved.
He felt his heart beat harder in his chest, the way it did now.
And he knew that two years ago he would have called what surged in him then a kind of horrifying neediness. He would have found it unpardonable. A weakness. He would have tried to excise it with his own fingers, if he could.
But that had been before. Before she’d walked into his world and knocked it straight off its axis.
“I walked away from my major business, yes,” he replied. “The part that would be frowned upon by any number of law enforcement agencies.”
“Then why are you still taking business calls?”
Once again he was struck by the fact she simply sounded interested. Not trying to score any points. Not building toward some kind of agenda. Just interested in him as a person.
And only when he acknowledged how rare that was could Stefan also admit that he liked it. That he wasn’t sure how he’d lived without it all this time.
“I always intended to retire from the more dangerous part of my business eventually,” he told her, and opted not to share how difficult that had turned out to be. It was clear to him that if he’d stayed in any longer than he had, exiting would not have been possible—and he didn’t like that at all. He’d always imagined himself in control of the things he did. “I only expedited the process. I am sure I told you this.”
She looked over her shoulder at him, laughter in her gaze. “I guess I didn’t realize you had a legitimate arm of whatever had you gun slinging in an alley in Budapest.”
Stefan went over to the stove and took the wooden spoon from her hand, nudging her away from his pot. “My money is perfectly legitimate. And as you know, money invested wisely makes more money.”
“That’s what you do? Invest?”
“Isn’t that what you do?”
“I travel all over the globe, wherever my mood takes me,” she said airily. “My investments fuel that lifestyle, sure, but so do the jobs I take when I want some cash. But what about you? What do you like to do?” She lifted up a hand when he started to answer that. “Don’t say me. You had a whole life before you met me, Stefan. And in the years since. What is it you actually like?”
Another question no one had ever asked him. A question he’d hardly dared ask himself some years, because how could it matter what he liked? He had needed to focus on surviving, like it or not.
“Art,” he said, without letting himself brood about it.
And he cautioned himself against putting too much weight on the fact that he’d never told anyone that before. His grandmother was the only person in his life who might have been interested in such things—but she had been a stoic, stern woman. It had never been her way to chatter idly.
Still, he found himself looking sideways to see what Indy’s reaction might be. Would she laugh? His heart kicked at him. Would she laugh at him?
He had never put himself in this position before. Where another person’s opinion could hold so much weight.
The truth was, he did not care for the feeling.
But all she did was nod, looking off across the room. When he followed her gaze, he saw that she was looking at a bold piece he’d bought years ago in Cluj, known for an avant-garde art scene to rival Bucharest’s claims of being Romania’s artistic capital. He’d had it installed here in this house, his cathedral to what could be.
What could be—and now was.
“All the art you have in this house is beautiful,” she said, moving that dreamy look of hers to him. “Interesting and confronting and lovely. Is that why the rooms are so airy here? So that the art is what’s seen?”
“I spent most of my life in dark, desperate places,” Stefan told her, and his voice was rougher than he would have allowed it to be for anyone else. But this was Indy. And he could hardly demand her vulnerability if he wasn’t prepared to share his own, could he? “My mother did her best to make the places we lived feel more like a home, but my father always ruined it. Any extra money we had went to his debts or his drink. After she died, there was no point bothering.”
“I’m surprised you remembered art existed at all,” Indy said softly.
“Art is not something a person forgets.” He scowled down at his pot, this sentimental meal from one of the few good moments of his childhood, as if only just noticing that there was no part of what he was doing here tonight that wasn’t emotional. But he couldn’t seem to stop himself. “The perfection of a finely drawn line. A pop of color that changes everything. I saw pieces I liked over the years and had them sent here, telling myself that one day I would come here, live here, and have them all around me all the time. But that day never seemed to come any closer. Then I looked up from an ordinary evening of the typical darkness in my life, and there you were. All your fine lines and a splash of red in the night. I knew you were art, too.”
He snuck a look at her and found her gazing back at him, her lovely eyes filled up with tears.
Stefan could tell that she was trying out this intensity thing, as he’d asked her to do, because she didn’t dance away. She didn’t start singing, or change the subject, or move closer so she could put her mouth on him and distract them both. He almost wished she would. Instead, Indy let him see her respond. React.
All those emotions he knew she would have said she didn’t possess. Right there in her eyes like the finest chocolate.
“My grandmother left me her flat down Old Town when she passed,” he told her, because he couldn’t seem to stop. Maybe he didn’t want to stop. “It was filled with art. Maybe she was why I never forgot the power in it. I bought this house before she was gone, but it wasn’t until then that I began to make it mine. Even if I only made it here once a year, if that, I knew it waited here. I knew that I could come, walk these rooms, and let the art I’d chosen make me believe I was a different man. A better man. I told myself it didn’t matter how far off one day was. For a long time, knowing this was here was enough.”
Indy drifted close and bumped him with her shoulder, a kind of unconscious gesture that about laid him flat. Because it was the antithesis of any of the ways they touched. It wasn’t sex. It wasn’t the prelude to sex. It didn’t have anything to do with sex at all.
But it was intimate.
And even though Stefan was the one who’d confidently thought he’d already done all the changing necessary, he felt something in him crack wide open.
“It seems like you do have a home after all, then,” she’d said quietly, her eyes shining. “That’s not a small thing, is it?”
And he didn’t know how to tell her than nothing that happened between them, or because there was a them at all, had ever been small.
But later that night, after he’d tied her up so she didn’t have access to her usual bag of tricks, then made her sob and scream until he was satisfied that she didn’t have a single thought in her head without his name on it, Stefan lay in the dark with the soft weight of her in his arms and wondered what he would do if a month was not enough.
Because he did not think that any place would soothe him now, not when he knew how much better it was when she was here. Lighting up already bright rooms with that smile of hers, making the world stop again and again while she did it.
He knew it did no good to worry about the future. There was only now.
July continued on.
Some days he bossed her around, because he could. Because it made both of them hot.
“I think, foolish girl, that I will have you naked today,” he would say.
Sometimes she grinned wickedly and looked thrilled at the notion. Other days she had different reactions, not all of them positive. One morning she scowled at him, blinking the sleep out of her eyes while she did it.
“Why do you call me that? Maybe I should call you foolish man. Would you like that?”
“You can call me whatever you like,” he told her. “But you will always be my very own foolish girl, who wandered into the dark and brought me out into the light.”
And he watched, sprawled there beside her in the bed they shared, while she melted at that.
“Well.” Her voice was grumpy, but her eyes were bright and shining. “I guess it’s okay then.”
“Naked,” he reminded her.
Because naked days were all about power and surrender and all the marvelous things a man with his imagination—and the wicked delight she could never repress for long—could build between them.
“I thought you’d be like that all the time,” she panted one night, after the kind of naked day that left her so limp and boneless that he’d had to carry her upstairs, bathe her with his own hands, then put her to bed.
He did not mind these tasks, to be clear.
“Like what?” he asked.
“You know. The way you are on naked days. All the rules. All the kneeling. I assumed you’d demand to be called Master Stefan or something and go crazy with nightly spankings and all the rest of that stuff.”
He was amused. He was stretched out, propping himself up on one arm, toying with a strand of her hair while he looked down to that heart-shaped face of hers that only grew more beautiful. When surely that should have been impossible. “Is that what you want?”
“Sometimes,” Indy replied, grinning up at him. “And sometimes not.”
“You do not like a steady diet of anything, Indiana,” Stefan said in a low voice, because he knew. And sometimes she was not in the mood to hear all the things he knew. He tugged on the lock of her hair, gently enough. “You thrive on variety. But then, so do I.”
“You’re the one with a big house full of art. You must like some steadiness in your diet.”
He smoothed his hand over her face, her soft cheeks, where heat from her bath still lingered.
“I like you, foolish girl,” he said, though he knew he should not have. “Have I not made that clear?”
She smiled at him, though he thought he saw shadows in her gaze. “I’m not really a dietary staple. I’m more of an occasional dessert.”
“I like dessert, too,” he offered.
But she laughed and ran a hand over his chest, then down over his ridged abdomen. “Do you?”
The days passed. Stefan watched her, closely. He expected her to show signs of claustrophobia. To act as if it was sheer torture to stay in one place, with one man, for so long. He wasn’t sure she’d ever tried before. He anticipated that she would make it clear she was doing him a favor.
And yet, as one week became another, and another, if Indy was restless she failed to show it.
“I asked my father about happiness,” she told him one afternoon. “I wanted to know if he was as happy as it seems he is.”
They sat in the shade outside, beneath a trellis draped in blooming roses. He was working on his laptop while she curled up beside him, reading a book in between her dips in the pool. Not naked, sadly. It seemed the tiny little bright yellow bikini she wore was, apparently, one of the surprising number of items she’d managed to roll up and stick in that tiny pack of hers.
“I never needed to ask my father such a question,” he had replied, not looking up from his screen. “I already knew the answer. It was his fist, preferably connecting with my face.”
“I guess I can understand that,” she said with a quiet ferocity. “Because I’d very much like to plant my fist in his face. And imagining it makes me happy.”
He looked up then, entertained and touched in equal measure that his carefree, relentlessly nonjudgmental Indy had it in her to sound so bloodthirsty. Much less on his behalf.
“He died as he lived, never fear,” Stefan assured her. “As we all must.”
Indy had her book open in her lap and she turned it over then, frowning at him. “In a way, that’s what my father said. But how can you tell if you’re living life the way you should be?”
“There is no should. There are only the choices you make in each moment, strung together to make a day. A week. And sooner or later, a life that is the sum of its parts.”
There was the sound of the breeze rustling through the trees. Lawn mowers growled in the distance while up above them, birds sang and bees hummed. But Indy didn’t return to her reading.
“The thing is,” she said after a moment, haltingly, “I never saw myself in competition with Bristol. It was so important to her that she be the smart one. And if she was the smart one, then I got to be the pretty one.” She blew out a breath. “For a long time, that was all I really wanted.”
“I’ve seen your sister,” he said, though Indy knew that already. She called her sister daily and had told him, with glee, that she was responsible for her sister becoming girlfriend to Lachlan Drummond, the billionaire who couldn’t seem to keep his face out of the tabloids. The same tabloids that featured Indy’s sister, now—and that she liked to brandish at him. “Whether she is smarter or not, I couldn’t say. But she is also pretty. Surely you both know this.”
“She’s gorgeous, obviously. Hello. She’s my sister.” She smiled while she said that, but it faded. She toyed with the spine of her book. “It seems silly now. But for some reason, back when we were kids, it seemed absolutely crucial that we choose. We had to make sure that there was always a critical and obvious distance between us. Bristol disappeared into her books. And I...”
For a moment it seemed as if she didn’t intend to go on.
“And you?” Stefan asked.
To his surprise, she flushed slightly. “I did what I always do. I flitted around from group to group. I was everybody’s best friend, but they were never mine. I kissed all kinds of boys, even before my fateful relationship with Jamie Portnoy.” She shook her head. “If anyone had asked, I would’ve sworn on a stack of Bibles that I was a born extrovert.”
He had a sense of where this was going now, but he only waited, sitting back to better watch her lovely face as she spoke. And to enjoy the way she used her hands as emphasis, drawing pictures in the air.
Stefan wanted to tell her that already, she had bloomed here. That the frenetic edge to her was gone, because she didn’t have to plan her quick escape. Because living as they were, only the two of them in this house, it was impossible to maintain any kind of performance. He had seen her in all kinds of moods. The ones she would cheerfully admit as well as the ones she pretended she didn’t have. He’d held her when she sobbed at a movie, then pretended she hadn’t. He held her when she sobbed out her pleasure, then gave it back to him tenfold.
They woke every morning tangled around each other, as if in sleep they instinctively wanted nothing but to get closer.
Indy had not retreated from any of this. She had not run.
“But for weeks now,” she was saying, frowning at the roses, “I’ve been here. With you and all these books. I think I forgot how much I like to read. And how, if things had been different, I might have liked to disappear into books, too.”
“I’m glad,” he said, and meant it. ”You should.”
She shifted, turning her body so she could hold his gaze. “But I was really good stripping, Stefan.”
He laughed. “This I believe.”
“It was fun. And I mean really fun. Maybe partly because I was actually paying for college, and saving, and doing something illicit at the same time. You may not know this about me—” and her eyes sparkled as she gazed at him “—but I really do kind of love it when people try to shame me for the things I enjoy.”
“Shame does not sit well on you, Indiana.” He wanted to reach for her, but checked himself. Because once again, this was not a sexual moment. He felt something more like sacred, and he was determined that he would honor it. “I am glad of that, too.”
And she didn’t have to tell him that they were only his, these moments that were all the more intense because they were not about sex. He could feel it in his bones.
“I stopped going to classes in college because I liked them too much.” Her voice was solemn, then, as if she was making a painful confession. Her eyes lost some of that sparkle. Stefan still waited. “I was getting an A in one class, so I made sure to skip out on the final because it was half my grade. And I had already made my choice, hadn’t I?” She searched his face for a moment. “How did you know that? Because you knew that, didn’t you?”
“I suspected.”
“No one else has ever thought there was anything more to me than a good fuck,” Indy said, her voice hardly above a whisper. “Not even me.”
He picked her up then. He hauled her into his lap and held her there, smoothing one hand over her damp hair and then holding her face tipped up to his so there could be no evasion. No hiding.
“There is much more to you than that,” he told her, his voice nearly a growl. He reached between her legs, beneath the damp scrap of her bathing suit, and found her molten hot. Swollen with need, as always. “Your pussy is one of the great wonders of this world, Indiana. But it is only an addiction because it’s yours.”
He stroked her, playing with her slippery folds and circling her clit until she moaned.
She bucked against him, her breath feathering out. “I’ve spent my whole life hiding, but you saw right through me. I still don’t understand how.”
“You understand.”
Stefan held her clit between his thumb and forefinger, pinching it in time with her pants. When she moaned again, he twisted his wrist and plunged two fingers deep inside her clinging heat.
“You called me into the light,” he growled. “But I found you in the dark. We fit together, two halves of a whole. There was no possibility that you could ever be anything but exactly who you are, not if this was to work. Beautiful, yes. Uninhibited and remarkably sexy, always. I will never get enough of you but even if this—” and he sped up the rhythm of his thrusting fingers, loving the way she clung to him, her fingers digging into him, her eyes half closed “—went away, even if I could never fuck you again, it would change nothing.”
“Bullshit,” she whispered.
He pulled his hand away, then laughed when she glared at him.
“Who do you want to be, Indy? It’s no longer a choice you made as a child. It doesn’t matter how you spent your years. We are here now. What do you want to be here?”
She was breathing heavily, her gaze something almost like hostile as she stared back at him—but Stefan knew that had more to do with the fact he hadn’t let her come.
“I will tell you what I know in only these short weeks,” he said. “You have spent no time at all maintaining your online life. I never see you huddled in a corner, scrolling through your phone, certain you’ve missed something. You seem genuinely happy. Maybe the trouble is that you don’t believe it.”
He saw her sit with that. And saw, too, that she didn’t like the weight of it.
“The trouble,” she said solemnly, “is that you are not inside me.”
“You know how to fix that,” he growled at her.
And when she went to straddle him, he turned her around. She pulled her bikini to one side as she wriggled against him, arching her back as he pulled out his cock so he could slam himself inside her.
For a moment the sheer wonder of it swept over him. Her too, he knew. They both paused, reveling in that impossible fit.
She might think it was this house. His art collection, or this new, pretty life he’d made for himself. But Stefan knew the truth.
His home was her.
But that wasn’t something he intended to tell her. Not yet. He wrapped one arm around her middle, holding her as he began to pound into her. He turned her head so he could take her mouth, because there weren’t enough ways to taste her.
There never would be. Not in a lifetime.
Maybe more.
And then he showed her what he could not put into words, and fucked them both home.