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 in
tensity—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.”<
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“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.
Just One More Night Page 7
