INDY SHOULDN’T HAVE been surprised to wake up the next morning to find Stefan gone from their bed.
He had taken intensity to whole new levels yesterday. She sat up carefully, and could feel her body, tight here and a twinge there, in case she’d forgotten. She hadn’t.
Good thing it made her feel a little too hot all over again.
She made her way into the shower and stood there a long while, letting the hot water revive her. When she got out and toweled off, she realized that everything inside of her was clear. At last.
Their month was over. He had chosen to end things with that endless, sensual-intensity marathon that made her feel shivery and molten just thinking about it.
She could picture his face, looking somehow more cruel as the day wore on. Even as those hard hands of his took such care with her, though they were the same hands that had spanked her. They’d moved over her body, coaxing her to just one more peak.
Then one more after that.
The man was a sorcerer.
But the thing about his kind of magic was that, here on this most momentous morning after, Indy finally felt swept clean.
All the muddling around, all the wondering, was all gone. Everything clicked into place.
She felt it hum through her, like awareness. Like attraction.
Like certainty.
Like fate, a voice inside her whispered.
She let her hair do what it liked, shoving it behind her ears as she walked back into the bedroom and slipped on her flowy dress. The one she’d been wearing when she’d tried for symmetry in that alleyway, only to have Stefan teach her a lesson about intensity.
A lesson he kept teaching her.
But because she’d learned that lesson, maybe too well, she knew what he’d been doing yesterday. It had been different from what had come before. She’d understood that while it was happening, but it made even more sense now.
Stefan had been saying goodbye.
She padded her way down the grand stairs, running her fingers along the smooth length of the banister as she moved, as if she needed the sensory input. When, maybe for the first time in her whole life, she felt full up.
Indy never liked to think of herself as having a wound that needed healing, or an empty hole inside her, as she’d been accused of more than once. But she couldn’t help noticing how different she felt here on the other side of a month of intense intimacy with Stefan.
Her whole life there’d been a kind of edginess in her that skittered over her skin and made her bones feel itchy in her limbs. The urge to keep going. The need to always leave where she was and find something new. But no more.
She’d always been preoccupied with seeing and being seen, but not because she had anything to prove. Indy had discovered early on that when she was feeling lonely—or feeling anything, really—the best cure was to go out somewhere and pretend she was happy.
Until she was.
And when that wasn’t on offer, there was always social media, which could amount to the same thing.
At the bottom of the stairs, she slipped her mobile out of the dress’s deep pocket, and pulled up her favorite personal account. She took a quick scroll through, on the off chance she’d forgotten what was there. Because she hadn’t posted anything since she’d come to Prague.
But the evidence was there before her. It was curated joy.
It wasn’t that it was fake. She’d taken all those pictures and had posted them, too. But she understood, in a way she wouldn’t have month ago, that while she might not have been trying to prove anything to anyone—the account existed so that any time she felt any emotion she didn’t like, she could scroll a little bit and feel like herself again. Fun, first and foremost. She collected pictures of the fun she had so in less fun moments she could look at it, remember it, and get back into that space.
And then somewhere along the line, she’d decided fun was happiness, and had built her life around it accordingly.
But happiness wasn’t a screen of pretty pictures.
Happiness was what happened when there were no screens around to record it.
Indy shoved her phone back into her pocket and wandered toward the kitchen, her feet bare against the smooth floor. It was another bit of input, all of it like whispers next to a shout when she walked into the kitchen and found Stefan there at the counter where he’d once spread her out like a dessert, then feasted.
He didn’t seem to move or acknowledge her presence. He was looking down at his laptop, but she knew. Indy knew full well that he knew she was there.
That it was possible he’d heard the moment she sat up in bed upstairs.
She wouldn’t put it past him.
“Am I allowed to speak today?” she asked, coming to stand on the opposite side of the counter, as if they were facing off with each other.
Stefan closed his laptop with a decisive click. His blue gaze pierced through her, lighting her up and leaving scorch marks.
She liked it that way.
Even if his expression was about as closed off as she’d ever seen it.
“You can do as you please,” he told her, his voice perfectly even. “You kept your promise. The month is over. The world is yours, Indiana.”
“I do love when the world is mine.” She smiled. “But surely I can get a little coffee first.”
To her delight, or maybe that wasn’t the right word for the way her heart leapt in her chest, she saw a muscle move in his lean jaw.
Very much as if Stefan Romanescu was not as in control of himself as he usually was.
As if maybe, just maybe, he was finding this as overwhelming as she did.
She really hoped he did.
He stalked over to the stove, and set about making her the Turkish coffee she was pretty sure she was addicted to now. There were spices, fine coffee, a bit of sugar, and then the boiling. Three times, and all the while, she stood on her side of the counter and took the opportunity to study him.
Because maybe he was the real addiction.
She’d spent two years imagining and reimagining the little bit of time they’d spent together in Budapest. Now she’d had a month and two days. She knew him far better. The sex seemed to get more fantastic every time he touched her. She hadn’t been anything like bored.
And it still wasn’t enough.
There wasn’t a single part of his powerful body she hadn’t explored. Her mouth watered just thinking about it. Today he wore jeans and T-shirt, and as usual, elevated both to the kind of art he liked to hang on his walls. A study of a powerful man, she might call it, though the only kind of painting she wanted to do involved her fingers on his skin.
He turned back when the coffee was done, sliding the thick brew into place before her. And his eyes were still poet’s eyes, brooding and emotional and all the things he acted as if he wasn’t. His mouth was still sensual, and she knew how it felt at her breast, and all the other places he liked to put it.
He was a dream come true, but he was real.
This was real.
And she reminded herself that she got to decide what she made of this. Of them. Of her life and what was in it.
She picked up the delicate little cup and sipped at it, sighing a little bit at the first taste of the coffee she never could seem to get enough of.
“Stefan,” she began.
But a flash of blue cut her off again.
“Stop,” he ordered her. “I know already how this will go.”
Indy put her cup down on the counter between them. “Do you?”
“I changed my whole life after that night in the alley,” he told her, not sounding quite so even any longer. “This is not figurative speech. I am not exaggerating. I was one thing, then I saw you and I became another. There are some parts of some countries that will remain forever closed to me because of this. I accept it.”
“Will people come after you?” she asked, momentarily diverted from the fact this was the end of the month they agreed upon, and he was acting...the way he was acting. “Are you safe?”
Something glittered there in all that blue. “I would never have risked meeting you here if I was not.” She saw that muscle in his jaw again. “I would never have risked you. That part of my life is over. It is not merely a closed door, you understand. I set it on fire. It is better that way.”
“Stefan, I really want—”
“You will listen to me, Indiana.”
His voice was a command, but she could see he wasn’t as in control of himself as he usually was. And the longer she looked at him, the more she began to suspect that this—that hectic glitter in his gaze and that muscle flexing in his jaw—was Stefan’s version of messy.
Of wild.
Once again, she felt her heart swell to three times its size. All the parts of her that had been knotted tight loosened in a rush.
But she was still holding her breath.
“I have never worried about emotion,” he told her, his eyes too bright and his voice too dark. “It is not a factor. I like sex. I like women. I like them when they come to me and I do not miss them when they go. Then there was you.” He shook his head, as if he was trying to clear it. As if he was the one muddled now. “Nothing about that night made sense. Why were you there? Why weren’t you afraid? How was it possible that I could meet a creature such as you over the barrel of a gun?”
“I asked myself a great many of the same questions.”
“There is only one thing that makes sense,” he continued, his voice gruff. “I fell in love with you the moment I saw you, Indiana. It was that fast, and that mad. This isn’t intense between us because I’m an intense person. I never was before. Not with any other woman. It’s only you.”
Indy understood, then, that this was him stripped naked. That she could see so much in his gaze, he was telling her these things—this was how Stefan Romanescu ripped himself wide open.
“I love you,” he said in the same way, as if he was delivering terrible news. “And I will tell you, I did not want to.”
She smiled, though her heart was thumping at her. “How flattering.”
“I wanted nothing to do with any of this,” he growled at her. “What place is there in a life such as mine for a creature as soft as you are? You are too little, too breakable. You clearly have no sense of your own peril. You are American, of all things. And yet I knew that you were it for me. Instantly.”
She blew out a breath, shuddery and long. “Why are you telling me this as if you’re saying goodbye?”
And the way he smiled then changed him. He made her want to cry.
Maybe she did.
“I fell in love with you, Indy,” he told her, almost hoarsely. “And I don’t want to change you. I don’t want to tie you down. I threw out my entire world so that I might try to deserve an angel in an alleyway. How could I pluck off your wings?”
An angel in alleyway. It sounded like a poem, and even though Indy still felt as if she might cry, there was something laced through it. Something so beautiful it hurt.
“It doesn’t take much to deserve me,” she told him, though her voice was thick. “I think you’ve already cracked the code.”
But Stefan shook his head again, looking down at where he had his hands braced on the counter. “You have spoken a great deal about how you want to find your passion. I want this for you. And I know who you are, Indy. I know you are not a girl who stays put.”
“Stefan—”
He ignored her, lifting that blue gaze to hers. “But I will. I want you to understand that I’m not afraid of anything you might find out there, or anything you might do. I have never been a patient man, but for you, I will wait.” He managed to indicate the house with one of those shrugs of his. “I will be here. And I know you’ll come back. Maybe more than once. And maybe one day, you will stay.”
Indy stared at him, stricken. That look on his face was doing odd things inside of her. He looked so stoic. So resigned. And yet here he was, making this sacrifice, when she knew there was not one inch of this man who was at all good with either waiting, letting go, or sacrificing himself in any way.
She knew it.
She knew him.
Maybe what she knew most of all was the two of them, together.
“This is what you think will happen?” she asked softly. “You think the passion I want to find involves going back out there and continuing to do what I’ve always done?”
That muscle in his jaw twitched, but his gaze remained steady. “If that is what you want, I won’t be the one to stop you.”
Indy wanted to throw something at him. She wanted to throw herself at him. Hug him a little and maybe shake him while she was at it.
But she didn’t do any of those things.
“Well,” she said. And maybe made a little meal out of the word. “Look at that. You don’t know everything.”
Whatever response he’d expected, that clearly wasn’t it.
Stefan blinked. His head tilted slightly to one side. And she watched those impossible blue eyes change once more.
Taking on a shade she recognized.
Danger, not sacrifice.
Which was to say, him.
“I woke up this morning and everything made sense.” It was her turn to look at him steadily. To hide nothing. “Yesterday was so intense it’s like it was a key in a lock. You wouldn’t let me speak and so I couldn’t make excuses. Not even in my own head.”
“You don’t need to draw this out. You can simply leave. I told you this already.”
“And in the middle of all that intensity, the whole world boiled down to this,” Indy said, ignoring him. “I didn’t think that I was searching for anything, but then I found you. I think you know I’ve had a lot of steamy nights. I don’t normally pay them any attention. They fade away as soon as the sun comes up, and I go on to the next. It was different with you.”
“Maybe it was the gun,” he suggested, with a glimmer of that dry humor she loved.
She smiled at him, and even she knew that it was a real smile. Because it was for him.
“It was you, Stefan. I thought of nothing else for two years, and then I came here to find that you’re everything I had imagined and so much more.” Her heart was thundering at her. She felt almost shaky standing still. But she looked at him and none of that mattered. “You were right—there was part of this that terrified me. I walked away, but really, I think I only did it to see if I could. To see if you’d let me. And you did.”
“I’m doing the same thing now,” Stefan gritted out. “But I should tell you, I was never much of a martyr. The longer you stand here, not leaving, the less I can remember why I’m not convincing you to stay.”
“You can’t convince me to stay,” Indy said softly. “No one could ever convince me to stay. Because a long time ago, I decided that I needed to be a rolling stone. That I could never stay in one place too long. That it would take something from me if I did. Do you know what I think that was?”
Another hint of dryness. “Not daddy issues, I understand.”
“Because I thought I had to be different from how I started. Just like I decided I couldn’t do well in school because my sister did. I had to distinguish myself.” She pulled in a breath. “I took something that might have cut a different girl off at the knees, a dumb older boy taking private things and making them public, and I owned it. And do you know what, Stefan? It felt good. Powerful.”
“As it should.”
“I tasted that at fourteen and all I wanted was more. So I had whatever sex I felt like having. I was a stripper because why not? I liked taking off my clothes, and more than that, I liked people’s reactions when they found out that’s what I did.” Indy had never talked about these things like this. She had never laid out her life, not like this. But it didn’t feel like her life any longer, did it? She focused on him. “And ever since then, I’ve done exactly as I pleased. I’ve gone wherever I wanted, taken lovers and friends as I liked and left them, too, without a qualm. You’re the only man I’ve ever come back to. Twice.”
“This is how I know you will come back again.” His voice was a low, rough sound. “As I have told you, I will wait for you.”
“But yesterday taught me something,” Indy said, as if he hadn’t spoken. “It taught me everything. I already know what my passion is, Stefan. I finally figured it out.”
She watched him gather himself, as if he expected a blow. And she could tell that he was a man used to taking blows, and returning them in kind. Those hands might curl into fists but she knew, deep inside, that he would never strike back when it was her.
“It’s you,” Indy said softly. “My passion is you. And with you, Stefan, I can do anything.”
He let out a sound she didn’t recognize, because it was low, almost animal.
And she didn’t wait. She vaulted onto the counter, and then crawled across it until she was kneeling there in front of him, her face to his. Then she took the jaw that had given him away in her hands, and held him there.
Fully aware that he allowed it.
But this would be their life, she understood then. He would always allow her to leave, and so she would stay. And she would have this power over him, because he let her—and because she would never abuse it.
“You need to be sure,” he said, his voice a mere scrape of sound. But his gaze was loud. “Very, very sure. Because if you choose me, this, now... I will not have it in me to be quite so forgiving as I might have sounded.”
“I don’t want forgiving,” Indy told him fiercely. “I want you, Stefan. I’m not afraid of your darkness. I know all about the light and I think deep down, beneath everything, it turns out I’ve been a jealous, possessive, dark kind of woman all along. Can you handle that?”
His smile was a long time coming, but when he finally surrendered to it, it took over his face. “I can handle it. Can you?”
“You and me,” she said. “No one else. I dare you.”
He was picking her up, holding her in his arms and then lifting her up above, as if he needed to look at her in the sunlight. She gazed down at him, aware only when her cheeks began to ache that she was smiling so hard, so wide, she might as well have been the sun herself.
“I will never understand where you came from that night,” he said, his voice as intent as his gaze.
“All that traveling. All those adventures. All of them were leading me to you.” Indy wrapped her legs around his waist when he let her slide down his body, smiling even brighter when they were face to face. “I love you, Stefan. I thought love at first sight was a myth, but then there you were.”
“I love you,” he replied.
And she kissed him, or maybe he kissed her, and everything was a tangle of heat and need and better still—best of all—love.
When he pulled away again, neither one of them was breathing steadily.
Indy hoped they never would.
“Now,” he murmured, his bright blue eyes turning wicked. “About that dare.”
Then he showed her how he met a challenge, right there on the counter again. How he would always meet a challenge, especially if it was her.
How they would always find their way back to each other, to that perfect fit that was only theirs.
Their hot, sweet, life-altering love, that was worth changing a world or two.
So they did.