STEFAN EXPECTED HER to crawl directly onto his lap to work her magic the way she knew best, but she didn’t.
Instead, Indy seemed to relax, though he didn’t believe it for second. Still, she sat differently, still curled up in the chair opposite him. His T-shirt seemed to grab at her, or almost let go to show more skin... And he suspected there wasn’t a lot his Indy didn’t know about the way her body moved, how it looked from all angles, and what those things meant.
She shook her hair out of its braid so that it fell all around her in a silken, heavy mass of dark waves. The smile she aimed at him rivaled the summer sun above them. And then she dug into her breakfast at last, looking for all the world as if she was totally unaware of the pretty, sexy picture she made.
Stefan knew better.
He would wager that Indy March knew exactly the effect she had on him. On anyone and everyone, but right now, just him. She sat there naked with only his T-shirt on, her hair wild from the last time he’d had his hands in it, eating with such relish it became a sensual act when she licked her fingers. Looking totally unselfconscious, though he knew better.
It wasn’t that she was calculated. He wouldn’t accuse her of that. She was far too generous with her body, her responses, her need. It was more that she was aware.
The thing was, he liked it. His cock liked it more.
She had slept in late, which wasn’t surprising after her travel the day before—not to mention the night they’d had. He had gotten up with the sun, as was his custom no matter what kind of night had gone before. It had long been a way he had exercised control over a life that had sometimes seemed to be forever careening where it wished.
One of the only things life with his father had taught him.
He had gone for a long, looping run through this quiet neighborhood, the kind of place he couldn’t have imagined well enough to dream about back when he thought his father was the whole of the dark, unkind world. Stefan had pushed himself, trying to clear his head of all that need and passion...if only to prove he could.
As always, he had failed.
Indy had still been asleep when he’d returned, curled up in a soft ball in the center of the bed he’d put to use in a hundred different creative ways, all night long. Her face had been hidden by a thick curtain of her hair, so he had brushed it back, sighing a little at the curve of her cheek. The way she looked so serious as she slept, a far cry from the laughing, flickering creature she was by day.
Mi-ai intrat în suflet, he’d said, because he knew she couldn’t hear him. And even if she could, he would not translate the Romanian phrase for her.
Because she did not need to know that she had entered his soul. Become a part of him.
No matter what happened.
His chest had ached enough that he’d found himself tensing, and he’d left her there as he’d showered and dressed, then had gone about his day as if it were any other. As if he hadn’t been aware that she was finally here, in this house, where he’d pictured her a thousand times.
Stefan had never trafficked much in imagination. His father’s backhand had taught him the folly of expectation early, a lesson he had taken to heart. But when it came to Indy, he found himself indulging in the kind of what-ifs that he knew better than to entertain.
The man he’d been two years and one day ago would not have recognized him now.
He chose to take that as a good thing.
A very good thing, as men who lived as he had often found themselves dead.
Whatever else happened, he told himself now, he would always be grateful that an unexpected vision in the form of this foolish, beautiful girl had appeared before him in that alley. Then led him out.
Because it had been in the dismantling of his various operations that he’d truly seen how much the cancer of it all had spread. It was possible that had he not pulled out when he had, he would have found himself incapable of it later.
That would mean, among other things, that this house would have stood empty. That he would never have discovered what it was like to wake up in a place he loved, a place where no one would show up at his door uninvited, bringing their ugliness and violence with them. That he would never have known what it was to sit high above Prague on a summer afternoon, across from a beautiful woman with the wind in her hair.
That he would never have known this.
It would have been a loss worth grieving, though he never would have known what he’d missed. Somehow, that made it worse.
He sat back in his chair. He enjoyed the sun on his face. He waited to see what his Indy would do next.
After she finished with her coffee and breakfast show, she sat back and stretched. Stefan noticed with great appreciation how her hard nipples showed against the soft fabric of his shirt. As if she knew it, Indy pulled the T-shirt off, shooting him one of her liquid, sparkling glances as she got up. Then she sauntered over to the edge of his pool, pausing for a moment at the edge.
Appreciation wasn’t a strong enough word to describe his reaction to seeing her there above the deep blue water, naked and lush and perfect, a better monument to Prague than all the statues on the Charles Bridge down below.
Indy tossed back her hair, then dove in deep. He stayed where he was, watching as she swam beneath the water, sleek and sure.
She surfaced, slicking her hair back, and then smiled at him as she floated there, another vision. This one drenched in light.
“Don’t you want to join me?”
He only smiled. “I prefer to watch.”
And he got why she’d said she wasn’t like other girls. She didn’t pout as many would. She didn’t try to cajole him. She shrugged as if it didn’t matter to her if he did or didn’t join her, then turned and went back to her swimming as if that was what she’d wanted all along.
Stefan understood why she had a trail of lovers behind her, a battalion or two at least, each and every one of them determined to pin her down.
But he wasn’t concerned about that. Because he knew what all of them didn’t. He knew the truth of her. He’d seen it.
And even if he hadn’t, she’d come back to him.
Proving, whether she cared to admit it or not, that the intensity between them had wrecked her the same way it had him.
Stefan almost felt bad for her. Because he had changed his entire life to make it here. To find himself sitting on this terrace today. He had the feeling that she’d spent the same two years frozen, waiting, which meant she had yet to change the way he had.
He couldn’t wait to taste it.
And he meant it when he told her he would rather watch her move through the water, slippery and sure. That was what he did, settling back in his chair and enjoying the sun, the sky. Prague below and the scent of flowers in the air. It had been a long road and yet if this was the reward, Stefan thought he would walk it again a thousand times.
Indy took her time, floating for a long while in the clear blue water of the pool. Sending the message that she’d forgotten he was there, which he assumed was the point. When she was done she swam to the side and lifted herself up, displaying that easy grace of hers that he found spellbinding. Still. Then she made her way toward him, fully and unapologetically naked. And she smiled as she walked toward him.
“You don’t look like you’re having fun,” she said.
“Do I not?”
She didn’t answer him with words. She shifted to kneel down before him, dripping wet and gloriously naked, her hair in a sodden tangle as she reached forward and helped herself to his cock.
Stefan was only too happy to let her have it.
And as she set to work licking all around the thick head, then wrapping her hands tight around his shaft—one on top of the other—he wondered, idly enough, if she actually knew how manipulative she was. Or if she truly believed that this was all in aid of the kind of fun she thought she liked. Most men would be putty in her hands at the spontaneous skinny-dipping. Much less after she got finished turning him inside out with that wicked mouth of hers.
But then, Stefan doubted very much that she’d ever met a man like him before. That was why she was here, wasn’t it? He was perfectly capable of coming down her throat with a groan and still being just as much of a problem for her when he tucked himself away again.
“You keep staring at me,” she said mildly when they were back in the kitchen some time later that afternoon. She had gone upstairs to shower off the pool and to dress in another flowy, shapeless sort of dress that made him think of fairytales. It allowed her to pad around the villa in bare feet, her hair around her like a cloud, looking ethereal and making him long to eat her up in one bite. “As if you’re waiting for me to turn into a frog right before you.”
“Not at all,” Stefan replied. “I would prefer you stay in your current form. Frogs are not so appealing.”
He had poured them both a small glass of ţuică and had tossed his back as he set about frying eggs to put on the bowls of his grandmother’s tochitură for a late lunch, a thick pork stew that reminded him of her few visits when she would command the kitchen, ignore his father, and cook. Indy was sipping at hers, not his favorite way to consume his favorite plum brandy, imported from Romania with his own two hands. But he noticed she avoided the counter where he’d laid her out the night before and tucked that away as a little bit of ammunition. Maybe she should make sure to keep her wits about her.
“I’m thinking about the way you handle men,” he said as she took another sip. “It makes me wonder where you learned this. Was your father a man you felt you needed to handle?”
She laughed, as he’d expected she would. “This sounds like another one of these very deep conversations you always want to have at the strangest times.”
He watched as she tossed back the rest of her ţuică and hid his smile. “If it is too painful for you, I understand.”
“My father is the most decent man in the world,” she told him, her dark eyes flashing. “There’s nothing painful about it. He’s solid. He loves my mom and his daughters and that’s that. He works hard, fishes whenever he can, and still dances cheek to cheek with all the women in his life. That being the three of us. He didn’t require handling. He doesn’t.”
“Who then?”
He took the bowls over to the table that sat in the small nook off the kitchen, sunny like the rest of the house, this one with windows that let in the green and the gardens. And he was not surprised that she trailed after him.
“Is this because I sleep around a lot?” she asked, sounding ever-so-faintly bored. “I have to have daddy issues?”
“You’re not required to have daddy issues, no.”
“Good. Because I don’t. And to be honest with you, I don’t really have any other issues. It’s amazing how easy life is when you make the conscious decision to...make it easy.”
He waved her to a seat and took his. “It is not that you have a lot of sex. It’s the rest of this thing you do. All day I have been debating whether it’s a deliberate manipulation or, instead, an innate understanding of how to smooth over a moment with sex.” Stefan studied her response to that, but indicated the food he’d made. “Eat.”
She did not eat. She stared back at him, looking thrown, which he found he enjoyed. “I don’t think I do either of those things.”
“Do you not? And yet if I were to take a poll of people who know you, what would they say?”
“I live in the moment, Stefan. I don’t spend a lot of time calculating possibilities or manipulating people. Or worrying what other people think about me. That’s all gross. I just do what feels right.”
“Innate it is, then. Fascinating.”
“I’m sorry if this is disappointing for you.” Indy sounded sweet then, yet the glittering light in her gaze was anything but. He liked her fierceness. He wanted to bathe in it. “I realize that men really, really want me to have some kind of deep inner wound only they can heal. With their penises. And I hate to break it to you but I really just like a lot of fun and a lot of sex. The end.”
Stefan could have told her that while that might have been true in her past, it wasn’t now. Because if it was, she never would have showed up in Prague. She never would have come back to him.
Because what happened between them in Budapest was the most intense thing that had ever happened to Stefan. And his whole life had been intense. None of it, before her, in a way he would call good. If what Indy said was true, her life had been a monument to avoiding intensity—meaning, she could have continued doing that. She could have very easily stayed in New York.
But she hadn’t.
And if she didn’t understand that yet, all he could do was sit back and enjoy the show while she came around to the truth. He intended to do just that.
“Tell me how you lost your virginity,” he said, picking up his utensils. “Let me guess. It was fun.”
“Yes, it was fun,” she said, her soft eyes gleaming. “He was an older boy, scandalously. I was a freshman in high school and he was a senior. Do you have freshmen and seniors here? Or... In Romania, I guess?”
“We have American television, Indiana,” he said dryly. “So it is all the same.”
“We dated a long, long time,” she said with a laugh. “Meaning, most of the fall semester. He wanted to do it and I finally told him it was fine as long as it felt good. And it did.”
“In the backseat of a car, I can only hope. What could be more American?”
“It was the backseat of a car!” She sounded delighted. “A Chevy, no less. It didn’t really hurt—he made it fun as promised, and that, I’m afraid, is how I began my downward spiral into the fallen woman you see before you today.”
He waited as she tucked in happily to her meal, but the silence dragged on.
“Do you want to know how I lost my virginity?” he asked.
“Not really.” She glanced up at him, her dark eyes laughing. “It doesn’t have the same resonance, does it? When and how girl gives away her V card is a clue, isn’t it?”
“Or a story.”
“Don’t be naïve, Stefan,” she said, waving her hand in the air so the spoon she held gleamed in the light. He tried to remember if anyone else had ever called him that. But of course they hadn’t. But his pretty little bulldozer charged straight on. “For men, who cares? The only reason it would be relevant would be if you were still a virgin. Otherwise, it’s assumed that men shed their innocence the way a caterpillar sheds its skin, then carry right on.”
“I am not a virgin,” he said, not sure if he was amused or...something else. “In case you wondered.”
“I didn’t. Now you think you know things about me, don’t you? When what you know is that I gave it away when I was fourteen. But that’s not the shocking part.” Indy paused, waiting for him to ask. When he didn’t, she rolled her eyes. “The shocking part is that I don’t regret it, and it wasn’t a horrific experience. Maybe I was always destined to be a whore.”
“The sounds like a lot of baggage, does it not?”
“It’s not my baggage,” she said, with another one of those light, airy laughs. “I slept with Jamie Portnoy in the backseat of his father’s Chevy because I wanted to. And even then, there were people who wanted to shame me for that decision. Because it turned out Jamie was a bragger. So I broke up with him and then I told even more people than he had. Why should I be embarrassed?”
And he thought he understood, then. She wasn’t pretending. It was all unconscious. She hadn’t needed to handle her father, maybe, but an older boy who had bragged about her and the people he’d told. She’d taken what could have been shame and called it fun, and he believed she felt that. It wasn’t a put-on.
It wasn’t quite real joy, either.
But this was about fun, he reminded himself. Or her attempt to convince him that fun was what they were having here. What he really wanted from her could wait.
After they ate, she played music from her mobile and danced around the kitchen. She made him laugh and once she did, she climbed into his lap, reached between them, and worked his cock deep inside her. And then sang along to the song that was playing as she rocked against him, until they both came in the same swift rush.
That was how it went. Light, airy.
She took a nap in the early evening, flushed and warm in that bed upstairs while he tended to business concerns that couldn’t wait. Later, after she woke, he drove them down into Prague so they could walk through Old Town and sit in one of the restaurants opened up to the summer night. In public, where there was no possibility that she could revert to nakedness or sex when she wanted to change the subject.
That it also tortured him was worth it, because he could see—as the color climbed her cheeks and her eyes got brighter—that being forced to simply sit there and talk to him was driving her crazy.
“Have you been to Prague before?” he asked sedately when she looked as if she might be considering starting a scene to divert his attention.
“I came through twice during my two years of travel,” she said, squirming in her chair. Stefan knew full well that she was wet and ready. And more, that the prospect of this long dinner stretching before them was sending her over the edge.
Good. He hoped it did. He doubted Indy would be any quieter than that famous movie scene.
“Only twice? Some people would stay here forever if they could.”
“I would always think I’d found the perfect place,” she said, her smile taking on a slight edge. “Every place I go, I’m sure it’s the one. But then I go somewhere else. I meet someone else. And I fall in love all over again.”
He opted not to take the bait. “So nowhere is home, then?”
She squirmed again, taking a long pull from her water glass. “I guess when I think of home I still default to Ohio, but it’s not really my home. It’s my parents’ home. My sister and I vowed we would get out as soon as we could, and we did. And I haven’t lived there in a million years. I complain when I have to go back, the way I do every Christmas. But still. You say home, and that’s still what I think.”
“What makes it home?”
Indy sighed, and he thought he could see the very moment she remembered that she didn’t like to share anything but her body. “Do you have a home?”
“No,” he said. “I grew up in various Romanian cities. Bucharest, mostly. But none of the places I lived were home. I don’t fall in love with places.”
“That makes me sad.” She was tracing patterns on the side of her water glass. Around them, tourists talked loudly, languages blending together on the warm night air. “That’s the whole point of travel, as far as I am concerned.”
“But I did not travel as you did.” His smile was harder, then. “Flitting about the globe, finding myself in questionable pop-up clubs in dark, dangerous cities. This was not available to me.”
“Budapest isn’t all that dangerous.”
“There is no place in the world that is not dangerous if you are a pretty, careless girl,” he retorted. “As you discovered.”
But she only rolled her eyes at him. “The world is the world. I refuse to live in fear. If you assume goodness, most of the time, goodness is what you’re going to get.”
“That or guns to your head when you walk down the wrong alley.”
Indy shrugged. “That’s my case in point. A gun really was to my head and yet here I am, wined and dined in beautiful Prague for my trouble.”
“I think you know better.”
“What about you?” she asked, her dark gaze on his with more heat than he thought she meant to show him. “If the world is so dangerous, surely you should be walking around with an armed guard.”
“Not in the Czech Republic. It is not necessary.” Stefan didn’t quite smile. “There are some places it would not be wise for me to go, and so I will not go to them. But I am the reason pretty young things should not venture into alleys in the first place. I am not afraid of the world so much as it is afraid of me. And rightly.”
She studied him. “I can’t decide if you want me to be afraid of you or if you just like boasting about how mad, bad, and dangerous you are.”
“I think you should be afraid of me, Indiana,” he said quietly. “And I do not boast.”
“You’ve never seemed particularly dangerous to me. Sorry. I feel like I would have seen it by now.”
“But that is where you are wrong,” Stefan told her. “It is you who are in the most danger.”
For a moment, her gaze clung to his.
But then she waved her hand, picked up her menu, and let that roll away too, as if what he’d said was sheer nonsense. Maybe she wanted it to be.
He knew better.
After they ate and left the restaurant, she took his hand. She linked her fingers with his in a gesture that he told himself felt as foolish as the rest, but he didn’t disengage. Then she led him out into the cobbled streets of Old Town Prague, tugging him along through the crowds until they became a part of the same great energy of the ancient city on a clear summer night, like so many before them. Like everyone around them.
“Should we pretend to be tourists?” she asked, smiling up at him outside Prague Castle.
“I have never been a tourist.”
He looked down at her, still holding his hand like they were anyone. As if he were a regular person like all the other men he saw around him tonight. Soft, unwary. Was it that simple? Change his life, shed his old skin, and become what he had never let himself imagine he could?
With her fingers threaded in his, he almost believed it.
He wanted to believe it, and maybe that was worse.
“Then there’s no time like the present,” Indy declared. “We can be tourists right here.”
Stefan let her tote him along with her, walking the length of the Charles Bridge and then back again. He posed for the inevitable photographs. He even smiled winningly as they took them, which made her nearly cry with laughter.
“What? Even I know you must smile in these things.”
“Yes, Stefan,” she murmured, standing on her tiptoes to adjust the angle of her mobile. “You’re a regular old selfie-taking fool like everyone else. It’s obvious.”
And she was still laughing, later, when instead of following him back to where he’d parked his car so they could drive back to his villa, she tugged him into a dark alley. Then let her smile go wicked as she melted against him.
“Is this the real truth?” he asked her gruffly as he leaned back against the nearest wall and let her sprawl against his chest. “You cannot keep out of alleyways?”
“Let’s call it symmetry,” she whispered back.
And she wanted it fun and light. Flirty and fun.
But he didn’t.
Stefan kept it slow. He lifted her up and wrapped her around his body, then pinned her back against the wall so he could hold her there and take his sweet time.
He drew it out, teasing and tempting her, so that by the time he moved between her thighs she’d been shuddering on the edge instead of tipping over into her sugarcoated orgasms.
That was why he eased inside her, slow and sure. Filling her but never quite giving her what she needed to make it over that cliff.
And he fucked her like that, slowing down every time she tensed against him, until she was beating at his shoulders with her fists. Glaring at him, her eyes damp with her sensual misery.
“This is supposed to be fun,” she hissed at him.
He smiled and slowed down even more. “Maybe this is fun for me, Indiana.”
By the time he finally let her come, she had to bite her own fist to keep from alerting half of Prague to their illicit behavior.
When she tried to put a little distance between them as they walked back to the car at last, he didn’t allow it. He pulled her tight, wrapping his arm around her shoulders, and kept her close. Making sure she could feel the heat in him just as he could feel it in her.
As if it marked them both.
When they got back to the villa he did the same thing all over again, but this time stretched out in that wide bed upstairs until she was nothing but a sobbing, writhing, begging mess.
And in the morning when she wouldn’t meet his gaze he fed her, fucked her again, and when she made a move to leave once more, only smiled at her.
“Surely not,” he said. But lazily, as if he didn’t care one way or the other, which made her eyes darken, there where she was sitting cross-legged on the bed. “You had your fun. Surely it’s time I had mine.”
“You already had your fun,” she flared at him, pausing in the act of braiding her hair again to glare at him. “Ruining mine in the process.”
“You seem ruined,” he agreed. “But not in the way you mean, I think.”
“Whatever. I told you, this is supposed to be—”
“Fun, yes.” He lifted a brow. “I never thought I’d see my foolish girl, unafraid to walk into dark alleys and take her chances with questionable men... Afraid.”
“Is that... Are you daring me?”
Stefan shrugged. “If you are too afraid to play with a little intensity, Indiana, I cannot help you with this. I have learned to live with other disappointments.”
He saw a series of emotions move over her heart-shaped face. Temper. Dismay. And then, more interesting, that amusement she usually wore so easily. He had never seen her put it into place in quite that way before. Like she was settling into a mask.
She laughed, because she always laughed. Because he thought she’d decided that made her seem exactly as fun—and as bulletproof—as she thought she needed to be.
“You’re reading this all wrong,” she told him lightly. Always so lightly. “I’m not afraid, I promise. I’m just not an intense person. It’s not how I’m made.”
He thought of the way she’d sobbed beneath him last night, her gaze slick with hunger and need, every part of her so tuned into him it was like its own, sweet agony. He thought of the way she had kissed her way over his scars, finding them in his tattoo and taking her time. Making sure she found every last one of them.
And he knew that she was used to controlling things this way. Her carelessness. Flitting from place to place, lover to lover, to the endless soundtrack of her own laughter.
But Stefan knew she was a liar.
All he did was study her until she flushed. And she did, bright and red.
“Bullshit,” he said.
And he made sure that when he smiled this time, it was a weapon.