Just One More Night

by Caitlin Crews

  “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.

  CHAPTER SIX

  HE WASN’T EVEN touching her and yet Indy felt splayed wide open like they were back in that alley.

  She’d thought she’d made such a good choice after playing tourist. After wandering around in the summer night, making them part of the crowds doing the same—and therefore not strung out on their connection and all that electric, breathtaking need—she’d thought she could pull him into a dark alley to reframe the admittedly intense beginning of their relationship.

  The joke had been on her. Because he’d wrecked her.

  Indy felt turned inside out. She didn’t like it.

  “It’s not bullshit,” she said, frowning at him.

  It was another beautiful, breezy summer’s day in the Czech Republic. Everything outside the endless sweep of windows was green and lush and beautiful. She could see the bridges spanning the Vltava and the spires of Prague Castle from the center of Stefan’s bed, where he’d ruined her fun. Repeatedly and deliberately, all night long.

  Last night she’d been so sure that she had this situation under control. She’d been convinced that she could simply be herself—because she didn’t accept what he’d said, that she was manipulative or unconsciously trying to handle anything—and he would somehow start behaving in a way that made sense to her.

  Yeah, she thought now, finishing up her braid while holding that gaze of his. That didn’t work.

  Today she was a little bit wiser, maybe. And dressed, thank you. Because she certainly had no intention of prancing around naked in front of him when he was far too good at using her own body against her. One more thing she’d never experienced before, she could admit. Normally she was the one who used her body. And she’d never met anyone who was better at it than she was...until now.

  But that didn’t make her afraid. And it didn’t make him right.

  “It is bullshit,” he said again, his voice implacable.

  And God, the way he looked at her. That hard and steady gaze that left her in absolutely no doubt that he could see straight through her. That he saw everything. Maybe even things she didn’t know about herself, a notion that made her feel far too trembly deep inside.

  That and his marvelous accent, that made her think of the taste of that plum brandy on her tongue.

  “I understand you like to play this carefree, languid character,” he continued in the same way, all steel and certainty. “But even your orgasms tell the truth, Indiana. You like the easy way out. You don’t like the commitment of anything more. You don’t even want sex if it demands too much of you. You tell yourself you’re made that way, when as we have proven, what you’re made for is me. This.” His blue eyes gleamed, brighter than the sky that stretched on forever outside the windows. “Us.”

  Indy told herself she was tired of the earthquakes he kept setting off inside her. The fault lines she hadn’t known were there, tangled and fragile and shaking while her heart beat too hard. In parts of her that her heart shouldn’t have been.

  “You don’t actually know me at all, Stefan.”

  She knew that sounded more defensive than she wanted to sound in his presence. Why not bare her throat to his teeth and see if he really was the wolf she thought he was? She knew he would read too much into it. She knew he would take that tone as proof.

  But she couldn’t seem to help herself. There was something beating in her along with her wild pulse, feeling far too much like panic.

  She smiled. Politely. “The fact of the matter is, we had a lot of sex. And I don’t know how to break this to you, Stefan, but that doesn’t make you special.”

  “If you say so.” His blue eyes gleamed, but not with the fury she’d wanted. It was something far more like amusement. Only hotter. She could feel it connect to all the shaky places inside her.<
br />
  She waved her hand in the air, a dismissive gesture she hoped he would find insulting. But he didn’t look insulted. He looked hard, everywhere, as he stood near the windows, his expression something like indulgent. And mouthwateringly hot. And gloriously wicked while he was at it. He wore only the pair of athletic shorts he had tossed on this morning when he’d left the bed, heading out for a run while she was left limp and soft and wheezing for breath. And she had so dearly hoped that he would somehow be diminished by rolling around in the kind of clothes that any random guy would wear. By doing mundane things like running, meaning that body of his wasn’t simply his by chance...

  But not Stefan. There wasn’t a single part of him that wasn’t commanding or powerful. He wasn’t a guy. He was a man, all man, and he was so far completely impervious to her fervent wishes that he might magically, suddenly, have less of a hold on her.

  “I’m not trying to be mean,” she began.

  “Are you not? That must be a bit of your kind of fun, yes?”

  She ignored that. “We met under bizarre circumstances. There’s no denying that. And we both like sex, clearly. A little rough and spicy, maybe. We spent two years apart after only being together for a few hours. And now, what? It’s been two nights?”

  “I applaud your ability to count.”

  “Basically, Stefan, we’ve shared a weekend stretched over years. We’re still strangers no matter how many times you’ve made me scream in the course of that weekend. That’s just the truth. And so when I tell you who I am and what I’m like, I think you can trust that I’m the expert in the room on that topic.”

  “Indiana. Please.” Everything was the blue of his gaze, then. Too hot to bear. ”Do I strike you as the kind of man who leaves things to chance?”

  That panicky thing inside her seemed to pick up speed, or maybe it was simply that she couldn’t catch her breath. Maybe you need to stop trying.

  “I don’t know what that means,” she threw at him, panic and all those other dark and nameless things pulsing too hard inside her. While, even then, her pussy melted, as if the way she wanted him was hardwired into her. “You left a thousand things to chance. Whether or not I would show up. Whether I might just take the key you’d given me, come to this address, and rob you blind at some point over the past two years. I could pick a thousand ways this could have gone that did not involve me showing up here, desperate for another taste of you.” She sniffed as if she were above all this, hoping the sound would steady her. And if that was impossible, the way it sure seemed to be, at least let her pretend. “Sounds like a gambler to me.”

  Stefan laughed. “I gave you a key, yes. There is also a security system. If you had attempted to access this house with your key alone at any other time you would have found that further security measures are required to get inside. They were waived because I was here. So no, there was no gambling involved.”

  “You didn’t know if I’d even show up,” she argued.

  “Maybe not.” But he didn’t look unsure in any way. It made her question why she was nothing but. “I built a certain life for myself—you know this. And after I cleaned up the mess I made in Budapest that night, I had a choice. Continue with the madness I began in that alley or go on as if it had never happened. Continue my life as it was. Maybe show up here on the time and date I’d given you, maybe not. That was something I could worry about two years later, if I chose that route. But before I made a decision, I studied.”

  Something in her hitched at that, though she frowned at him. Ignoring the way her heart fluttered.

  “What do you mean, you studied?” She heard the panic in her voice and made herself laugh. “Between you and me and the college I attended, I was never much for studying.”

  “You, Indiana. I studied you.”

  Indy felt as if she was coming apart. She found her hands in fists as she stared mutely back at him while all the implications of what he’d just said pounded through her.

  And made her pussy ache all the more.

  “Don’t be silly,” she managed to say softly. She wished she weren’t sitting on the bed, wearing nothing but cutoff jeans and a tank top. She wished she was swaddled in protective gear and far, far away—where you would only wish you were here, a voice inside chided her. “This is shallow water, Stefan. No need to study a puddle. It is what it is.”

  His gaze seemed to sharpen on her at that but he stayed where he was, lounging there with his back to the windows, the very picture of a certain insolent ease. If a person ignored the heft and majesty of his body, that was. Which Indy didn’t think she would ever be able to do.

  “What fascinates me is not that you would say such a thing, which of course is false,” he said after a moment. “But that you appear so invested in me believing it.”

  Her heart was starting to hurt her. “You don’t have to believe it. But I wouldn’t want to disappoint you any further. Because that’s where this is going. You know that, right? You can imagine me to be anything you want, Stefan. I can’t stop you. But that doesn’t make it real.”

  Stefan considered her for a moment, and she wanted to do something. Anything. But she felt pinned into place by that gaze of his. “You are so dedicated to performing this party girl persona. Even when it doesn’t suit you.”

  “It’s not a performance. It’s my life.”

  “You’re very easy to track, Indy.” It was official. She hated when he called her that. Though she refused to ask herself why. “You put it all out there, all over social media. This party, that party. Hints of new lovers everywhere you go. Suggestive photos in dark clubs. Naked flesh on sunny, topless beaches, all of it calculated to show off your beauty and your inability to stay in any one place for long.”

  She forced herself to uncurl her fists when her fingers began to cramp. “I am who I am. I post what I feel like posting. You could always not look at it if you don’t like it.”

  “And yet, if all of this were true, surely you would have developed a drug habit to go along with it as so many do. How else to fuel all those late nights and erotic dances? It is common enough. Yet instead, though you spent more time committed to your strip club than your college, you graduated a year late with suspiciously average grades. And with a hefty savings account and investment portfolio. These things do not match.”

  “How are average grades suspicious? They’re just average.” But her mouth was dry. “I’m not embarrassed by that.”

  “Your bank account demonstrates that you are not average. You were able to not only save, but invest to a profit. It suggests you deliberately downplayed your abilities in the classroom. I cannot be the only person who has noticed this, surely.”

  But no one else had ever looked at her this closely. Indy had made sure no one could. And she felt as if he were clawing her open. As if he were digging his hands deep into her chest and pulling her wide. She had to look down at her own front to make sure that wasn’t really happening.

  It wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t. Indy sighed as much in relief that she was still in one piece as anything else. “I’m good at being naked, Stefan. But as I said, not so good at studying.”

  “Then why didn’t you fail out?” He sounded so calm. So reasonable. It was maddening. “Why did you continue your studies at all if it meant so little to you?”

  “Now you sound like my father.” She managed a frosty sort of smile. “Which is not hot, by the way.”

  He didn’t laugh at that, but the look on his face felt about the same. “You are the one who said you did not have daddy issues. Or was that another lie?”

  She made herself laugh to try to break the tension. Before it broke her. “I’m not a liar, for God’s sake. I was a middling student. I was a much better dancer. I had some regulars who gave me great tips and suggested I bank what I could. It’s not a mystery, Stefan. It’s not a clue to my wounded inner child. And as I already t
old you, I stopped doing it because it stopped being fun. Or I thought it would stop being fun eventually, whatever.”

  “What is this ‘whatever’?” he asked, sounding irritatingly patient. “I have known many strippers over the years. Very few of them invest. This is what you did while paying for the school where you were pretending to be terrible student.”

  “I don’t know what part of me not liking school you’re not getting.”

  His blue gaze was bright then. Knowing in a way she not only didn’t like, but felt rush through her like a cold chill.

  “Is it that you don’t like school?” he asked. “Or is it that your sister is the scholar and that means that you cannot be?”

  It would have been better if he’d hauled off and hit her. It would have shocked her a lot less than...that. Indy moved then. She crawled over to the side of the bed, wishing her head weren’t spinning. Wishing her belly weren’t knotted up tight.

  Wishing this had stayed as simple as it had been that night in Budapest.

  Live. Love. Leave.

  “My sister?” She could barely get the words out. “Why are you talking about... How do you even know about my sister?”

  “I know everything about you,” Stefan said, mildly enough, which only made it worse. Because it was so matter-of-fact and everything inside her was a mess. Knots and shivering and what was he doing to her? “I made this my business. Because when I choose a path, Indiana, I expect to commit to it totally. Or I do not do it.”

  Foreboding settled in her, making her bones ache.

  Indy stood up abruptly, holding her palms up as if trying to ward him off—though he made no move toward her. He looked as if he was relaxing, in fact. Standing by his windows while the summer breeze blew in. Enjoying the lovely day, not eviscerating her.

  Not turning her inside out with every word.

  “This has all gotten way too intense for me,” she told him, fighting with everything she had to keep her voice from shaking. “And I told you, I’m not about that.”

  “I am unsurprised to hear this.” Stefan shrugged in that way of his that was not, in any way, a gesture of uncertainty. Somehow, when he shrugged it was aggressive. A decisive critique—of her. “Maybe you should ask yourself why dark alleys do not scare you. Why men with guns do not stop you. But intensity makes you run.”