Just One More Night

by Caitlin Crews

  “Does this mean you did not work in New York?”

  “I worked in a lot of different jobs in New York.” Indy shrugged. “I like temporary positions. Right when they get boring, you move on to the next.”

  He studied her, sitting so carelessly on his counter, eating food he’d made her with his own hands. Naked and unselfconscious. Perfect in every way.

  The ways he wanted her should have horrified him, but they didn’t. They never had.

  Still, he wanted to know her. Not what he could dig up on her, but her.

  “Surely you must know that the kind of life you lead is only possible because you’re young and beautiful.” He tugged on the end of her braid. “It cannot last, this wandering here and there with no thought to your future. That is the thing about the future. It finds you, always.”

  “All the more reason to enjoy it then,” she replied with maddening calm. “While I can.”

  “You must have some kind of dream. Some ambition.”

  “Must I? Ambition is for people who don’t like what they have. But I do.” She frowned at him. “And if I have a dream, I go after it.”

  He didn’t believe her. But he didn’t press. She wanted one night, so that was what he would give her. Because there were a lot of things a man could do in the course of one night that might just teach his foolish girl how to want a few things she couldn’t possibly be sure she could get.

  And to learn how to long for them, like everyone else.

  “Lie down on the counter,” he told her then, all command and heat. “Face down.”

  The heat in her eyes kindled, but she still took her time licking her fingers. Then stretching sinuously, like a cat, so he had no choice but to watch the way it made her breasts bounce. She rolled herself over, sliding herself across the countertop until she was stretched out before him.

  “Enjoy the stone on those greedy little nipples,” he invited her.

  Stefan gripped her hips, pulling her back toward him so her legs hung down over the edge of the counter and he could line her up with his cock again.

  He slid inside, sheathing himself fully. She made a cute little grunting sound, wiggling this way and that because he filled her so completely and she needed to make a little space. He had the notion then that no matter how many times he took her, she would always be this tight, always gripping him just like this, always precisely this perfect.

  This time he went slow, because he wanted to enjoy looking down at her the way he’d imagined so many times before. Feeling her cute little butt against him as he plunged deep, then drew back. The line of her spine, the swell of her hips, the soft nape of her neck.

  She stretched her arms up so she could grip the other end of the counter, giving herself a little bit of leverage as he worked.

  Slow. Deep.

  Relentless.

  He watched as her skin reddened, everywhere, and listened as her breathing changed. She came differently in this position, one wave into the next, an easy kind of roll. But Stefan wanted more than waves, so he reached beneath her to find that eager little clit and played with her until her intensity skyrocketed.

  On and on he went, drawing out her responses, learning the difference between those light little climaxes and the wilder, deeper ones that made her whole body seem to shatter around him.

  The ones that made her sob. Real tears.

  And only when he thought he could read her well enough did he build her up to one more bone rattling, screaming finish.

  Then follow her.

  But he still wasn’t done.

  Because she thought this was only the one night.

  And Stefan knew full well that one night wasn’t going to be enough.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  INDY WOKE UP with a start instead of her usual sweet ease. There was sunshine all over her face and she had no idea where she was, but that wasn’t particularly unusual in and of itself. Normally she stretched, smiled, and happily looked around to see where she’d ended up the night before.

  But then she didn’t normally wake from dark, erotic dreams, unsure what was real and what she’d imagined. She blinked in the bright light, the contrast to the cascade of images in her head making her feel almost lightheaded.

  Then the night came back to her in a rush, far more erotic than any dreams she might have had. Her body reacted as if it were happening all over again. She was dizzy and molten, hollowed out with longing, and a little bit drunk on all that sensation within her.

  She sat up slowly, gingerly, and looked around the room, half expecting to find Stefan watching her from some or other vantage point.

  But she was alone.

  And when she took a breath or two, she decided she was glad of it.

  Because clearly, she needed to take stock of...this.

  Of what had happened to her here.

  What she’d wanted, so desperately, last night and now...

  Thinking about all the things she’d done last night—all night—made her flush, everywhere. Her nipples pebbled into twin aches and between her legs, the rush of sheer longing made her squirm against the soft sheets. She pressed her hands to her cheeks and found them hot, and that, too, made her shudder.

  Inside and out.

  Indy hardly knew who she was, sitting upright in a shaft of Czech sun, her hair falling all around her in abandon, adding to the shocking sensuality of the morning. Since when had she ever been embarrassed? Or even this affected, the morning after and alone? She’d meant what she’d told him last night. She only did things that were fun. She followed that fun wherever it led. The more people who told her she couldn’t dance her way through life, footloose and fancy free and whatever else they liked to call it, the harder she kept on dancing.

  And sex had always been the sweetest and best dance of all. Fun from start to finish, every time and everywhere.

  But Stefan had switched things up last night. She knew exactly when he’d done it. When he’d taken that electricity between them and jacked it up to high. It was when he’d had her spread out across the kitchen counter like a dessert, and suddenly, without warning, it was as if he’d thrown a switch.

  That suddenly, everything had been far more...intense.

  Until she’d felt scraped raw and needy in a way that had nothing to do with laughter. And it was still with her this morning, as if he’d peeled off a layer or two of her skin and left her naked in a new way.

  A lot like that night in Budapest, but this time, there had been no dark alley or scary gun in sight.

  It had just been...him. Stefan.

  He had carried on like that throughout the night. Until she’d found herself sobbing, in a frantic, mad frenzy to find her release—so she could start all over again, ripping herself wide open and giving him things she hadn’t known she had it in her to give.

  Indy was not used to intensity.

  That night in Budapest, sure. The situation had been intense.

  She’d come here for the connection, but on some level, Indy had figured nothing could stay so intense. One night of intensity was one thing. She didn’t want to repeat it.

  You avoid intensity, a voice inside her pronounced and she couldn’t say she cared for that, either. Like the plague.

  Intensity left a residue, she found. She felt stained with it.

  She rubbed at her face, waiting for that flush to fade from her cheeks, and wished the unsettled feelings churning around inside her would go away with that heat. Then she sat there in the sunlight and took her time re-braiding her hair.

  As if curbing its wildness would settle her, too.

  But it didn’t help as much as she wanted it to. And eventually she could see no other choice but to get up and face...whatever there was to face on the other side of a night like that. At least after Budapest, she hadn’t had to face Stefan. She’d imagined facin
g him, but that was different.

  Everything about this was different.

  Indy suddenly found she related to all those stories other women had told her over the years. The ones she’d laughed at, but there was no laughter in her now. Instead she had a strange flutter in her belly. She had feelings. And an emotional hangover that made her bare feet against the distressed wood floor feel both sensual and unsteady.

  The truth of the matter was that she had no idea how to feel anything less than perfectly confident when it came to sexual politics or bright mornings after dark nights. Much less how to navigate the unexpected wallop of all this emotion churning around inside.

  She remembered crying over her healed-up skinned knees, curled up in a ball in the closet that passed for her bedroom in the Brooklyn apartment she shared with Bristol. Actual tears for her own healed flesh.

  Why did she feel like that again today?

  Indy looked around the stark yet somehow welcoming bedroom, dimly recalling that she’d left her clothes on the floor she’d first knelt on. Downstairs. She opened the first drawer she found, something inside her lurching a bit at the discovery that Stefan was...neat. She pulled out a T-shirt and tugged it on, because she didn’t want to be naked.

  Or maybe she’d wanted the softness of the fabric against her sensitized skin, so soft it told her he cared about the things that touched him. And the faint hint of whatever laundry detergent he used that teased her with a part of why she wanted to bury her face in his neck and inhale that scent. Forever.

  “You need to get a grip,” she advised herself then. And avoided looking at her reflection in the mirror as she left the bedroom.

  Another new thing she couldn’t say she liked.

  Then she slowly walked down the stairs, her bare feet silent in the quiet house that loomed around her. It was too bright everywhere, and slowly, it dawned on her that it wasn’t actually morning. The sun was overhead. Had she really slept that hard? Maybe it was the jet lag she should have had yesterday, catching up to her at last.

  Because it certainly couldn’t be a deep reaction to what had happened between them. Indy didn’t have reactions. She moved on.

  She always, always moved on, like a flickering flame never quite committed to any one fire. She burned on and on without burning out.

  Indy padded through the house, appreciating it all the more now that she wasn’t in such a rush of anticipation, wondering if he’d actually be here. Today she wasn’t bristling and wild with two years of pent-up need. Now she could take her time with the surprising art gracing the walls and the quiet, understated elegance of the rooms she peered into. This wasn’t a designer’s take on a rich man’s house. This was a home of modern lines and a crisp aesthetic, run through with an old-world undercurrent.

  Not unlike the man who lived here.

  But she didn’t want to think too much along those lines. It made her feel even more unsettled than she already did.

  You need to find him to say goodbye, she told herself sternly. Because their night was over and it had been as overwhelming as the first, if different. Maybe she’d need three years to recover this time.

  Maybe more like five.

  She found herself rubbing absently at the gap between her breasts, as if that could do something about the ache inside.

  Indy headed for the kitchen, but it was empty, and she could admit—if only to herself—that she took it as a reprieve. She helped herself to a glass of water, drinking it down hungrily. When she was done, she rinsed it out and set it on the drying rack, then drifted over to the big glass doors that looked out over the slope of the hill. There were gardens rolling down the slope of the yard on the far side of the gleaming pool, green trees almost concealing the other houses tucked away on this hill, and in the distance, the silvery ribbon of the Vltava carving its path through Prague.

  That was where she found him. He was sitting out on the terrace off the kitchen with Turkish coffee and a laptop before him on the table, though he was looking at a newspaper, turning the pages with a kind of efficient crispness that indicated he was a habitual reader.

  The June sun adored him. It cascaded all over him, lighting him up and making him seem made of some kind of melted steel. Gleaming and lethal in a pair of loose, casual trousers and a T-shirt much like the one she was wearing. And something shifted in her as she looked at him. Because she’d really never imagined Stefan, her dark and dangerous man, who’d been there in that alley and had haunted her dreams ever since...sitting at a table in the sunlight, looking edgily domestic and burnished with heat and light.

  While reading.

  Indy didn’t understand why something so unremarkable should sit on her the way it did, like a set of heavy weights. She only knew she could hardly breathe through it.

  Stefan glanced up at her, a glimmer of blue that seared through her, but he said nothing. He only picked up the small pot at his elbow and set it in front of the other place at the table. That was when she noticed that there was a plate waiting for her with the traditional Czech breakfast she recalled from her last visit here. Slices of thick bread with a choice of butter, honey, and jams. And a selection of cold meats and cheeses.

  He returned his attention to the paper, leaving Indy to sit down and pour out the thick coffee Stefan had prepared. She sipped at it to find it smooth and silky and still hot, with a hint of sweetness and other spices that gave it a richer, deeper taste. Even that struck her as sensual today.

  The same feeling she’d had upstairs returned to her with a vengeance, slapping at her and then sinking in deep, though she did her best to fight it off. She concentrated on the coffee with its texture against her tongue, glad it was sweet and savory and strong. Just what she needed.

  Maybe it would clear her head. And wash away whatever cobwebs these were, cluttering up her chest.

  It felt a lot like baggage, this intensity hangover, and Indy didn’t do baggage. She always had much, much better things to do. She found herself scowling down at the plate of food before her as she thought about that. And this electric reunion between them that was not how she’d anticipated it would be at all. It was all supposed to be that rush of wonder and dark joy she had experienced in Budapest. That certainty that had changed her so profoundly, down on her knees in that alley. The sudden clarity like a punch, telling her she was exactly where she was meant to be and with the man she was meant to be with, above and beyond everything else.

  Not this...unrest.

  “Is something the matter?” he asked, his voice mild.

  She lifted her scowl to him, but he was still reading. Reading, of all things. “What could possibly be the matter?”

  “If you do not wish to eat, do not eat,” he said in that practical yet jaded way of his that made her think of the house rising behind her that represented him all too well. Functional with that old-world spin. “You surely don’t have to look at it as if it is plotting your death.”

  “You don’t know,” she replied. “Maybe the honey is looking at me funny.”

  He put the paper down then, shifting all that intense blue to her. Was that what she’d wanted? Indy felt a different sort of sensation shiver all the way through her. It took her a moment to recognize it.

  Uncertainty.

  She rarely felt such a thing. And it hadn’t occurred to her, until just now, what a gift it was to always feel she knew her place. Her sister liked to tell her—sometimes laughing, sometimes not—that she was filled with unearned confidence. Indy had never understood that as a criticism. Why should confidence need any earning? Bristol had always believed that a person gained things like confidence—and self-worth, and bragging rights while she was at it—by accomplishing things.

  But that meant there was a measure and others might assess it differently.

  Indy had always felt real confidence was innate. It was about being open to anything. To
being fully prepared to say yes to whatever came. She had done that in spades, always.

  The only other time she’d felt uncertain, this man had held a gun to her head.

  “Do you still have a gun?” she asked.

  But she regretted it, instantly, because that was exactly the kind of question that she prided herself on not asking. It wasn’t that she didn’t care, she’d explained to her sister once. It was that there was no point digging in deep to things she couldn’t hold on to. Better by far to accept what was given and make do.

  And okay, she acknowledged internally. There might also be some power wrapped up in seeming not to care about the things people usually care too much about.

  The power thing was especially clear now. As she’d just given hers away.

  She watched as Stefan took in that question. His expression changed as he sat with it, growing unreadable as he gazed back at her. Not quite like armor, she thought. More like the suggestion that he could, at any moment, produce an entire armory.

  “Not that particular gun,” he replied, and something jolted in her because he didn’t pretend he didn’t know which gun she meant.

  Or maybe it was all the implications about his relationship with guns wrapped up in that succinct statement.

  “And are you...the sort of person who spends a lot of time pointing guns at people’s heads?” Again, she didn’t know what on earth she was doing. Or what she hoped to gain. This was why she never asked questions like this. She preferred to let people tell her their stories as they liked, the bonus being she never felt so messy while they did. But now that she’d started actually asking him questions she wanted the answers to, how could she stop? “It was a while ago now, but if memory serves, you were holding it pretty confidently.”

  “I was in the army for some time. I hold all guns confidently.”

  “Are you really not going to answer me? We met up in Prague after what certainly couldn’t be called a meet cute Budapest. Two whole years ago.”

  “Thank you.” His dry tone and all that gleaming blue made her...edgy. “I had forgotten all of this.”