Just One More Night

by Caitlin Crews

  And though she changed the subject then, even talking to her mother for a while when her father passed the phone on because Margie was actually up before nine for a change, it was that part that resonated with her.

  A life that was only one thing wasn’t much of a life.

  She couldn’t let it go. She tested herself, finding her way into a bar, and, sure enough, letting a few men flirt with her while she sat in it. But she did not take them up on any of their invitations.

  Or their candy-coated anything.

  Because her life had been only one thing for a long, long time.

  And she hated that Stefan had seized on the reason for that being Bristol, because she loved her sister. Adored her. Supported her, cheered her on, and wanted nothing but the best for her. That didn’t change the fact that way back when they were kids, Indy had decided that she was going to go a different way.

  Maybe because it was different.

  Was it that easy? If you made a decision when you were young were you doomed to repeat it ever after?

  But no, she thought as she found herself in Old Town Square again. She watched the statues of the apostles appear in the famous Astronomical Clock, doing their thing while the crowd cheered and took pictures. The statue of death waved. And Indy felt a kinship to the funny old thing. Because the clock put on its show at the top of each hour, and it was wonderful. But the rest of the time, no matter how beautiful and old, it was just a clock.

  Maybe, for the first time in her life, she didn’t want to be the same old thing she’d always been.

  And she could admit, then, that Stefan was right about this part, too. Intensity terrified her. The things that Stefan said to her, and all the implications, terrified her even more.

  But maybe she’d come all the way to Prague to be terrified. Maybe it was good for her. The fact was, if she paid attention to her orgasms alone, the man knew what he was talking about. Everything with him was dialed up to one hundred or more. Everything with him was more. Longer. Deeper.

  Better.

  What did it say about her that all she’d wanted was to finally come to Prague, to meet him here, and yet she’d run off the minute it got to be too much for her? Was she really that person? Deep down, she knew she’d woken up scared silly that first morning and had been running ever since. Because he’d touched things in her she hadn’t known were there.

  Over the past two years she’d convinced herself that she’d imagined the intensity. That it had been the circumstances, not the man.

  But the truth was, Stefan still felt like fate.

  Like destiny.

  She might like to tell anyone who asked that she was shallow and silly, but deep down, she didn’t think of herself that way. And Stefan was the only person she wasn’t related to who didn’t take her at face value. Who looked at her and saw depths. Who saw more than her body or her face or what she might look like beside him.

  And she knew she should have been horrified that he’d treated her like a research project, but she wasn’t. Who else had she ever met who wanted to know more about her when they’d already had sex with her? Who refused to accept what they saw?

  Even though she’d run off from his house and even though she hadn’t been faking her outrage while she’d been there, Indy knew the real truth was she liked it. All of it.

  She liked how intense he was, little as she knew how to handle it. He’d been that intense the first night she’d met him. Despite what she’d told herself since, she hadn’t imagined that part. And she liked what he seemed to be suggesting, that he’d been as shaken by her as she’d been by him. Maybe she just needed time to acclimate to that. To him.

  To fate.

  Maybe she’d needed to know that she could leave so that she could return.

  Because that was what she did, climbing out of a taxi at his front door once again, and this time noticing the security pad on the wall. She let herself in with the key that still hung around her neck, finding the house as bright and sunny as she’d left it. She wandered through the beautiful rooms, amazed that a man she’d met in such a dark and gritty place had made himself a sanctuary like this one. Amazed that he felt the same way, impossibly bright when he should have been something else entirely.

  She saw him standing out on the terrace, looking out over the pool toward the city in the distance with his mobile to his ear. He’d changed his clothes, putting on jeans and what looked like a well-loved red T-shirt that made the muscles in his wide back enough to weep over.

  He was talking in what she assumed was Romanian when she opened the glass doors and stepped outside. He turned around, his blue gaze coming to her and staying there.

  Bright and hard.

  He finished his call and shoved his mobile into his pocket, then did nothing at all but regard her where she stood.

  “Yes,” Indy said, as if she was making proclamations. “I’m back. I went to a bar, just as predicted. Are you happy?”

  “Ecstatic.”

  “I did not have sex with the numerous men I could have had sex with.” She studied him for a moment, that face carved of stone that had haunted her for years now. “I think you should take that as a statement of my intentions.”

  The light in his blue eyes changed. Like a lightning storm. “I will make a note.”

  “I don’t know how to do intensity, Stefan.” That sounded a little more uncertain, but Indy didn’t let that stop her. “I don’t know how to do any of this. This is not the kind of thing I do.”

  “But you do, foolish girl. You have from the start.”

  She blew out a breath and then crossed her arms, as if that could help her. “That’s very opaque, thank you. Anyway. Here I am. You get your night of wild intensity.”

  His smile made everything in her seem to stand at attention. “No. I am afraid that is no longer on offer.”

  “It’s not?” And she was... Crushed. There was no other word for it.

  But he was still holding her gaze. “A night will not do it. I’m tired of these one-night games. You will give me a month, Indiana. And then we will see where we are.”

  “A month?” She thought her teeth actually chattered. “I don’t know if I can.”

  “You can,” Stefan told her, and he was sure. He was commanding and certain in all things. She liked that, too. Maybe too much. “Because it is a month or nothing. Which will you choose?”

  And when he put it like that, it was simple.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  JUNE FADED, TURNING into a sweet, golden July that seemed to stretch on into forever.

  Maybe he only wished it could.

  Stefan had never spent much time contemplating the seasons. They marched on, one after the next, and what mattered was surviving what they wrought. Summer had simply been warmer than the bitter winters, but life had carried on the same. The less said about his childhood the better. Ditto the army. And since then, he’d been far too busy catapulting toward his dark future to spend any kind of deliberate time in the light.

  But this summer he was in Prague. The only place on the planet that he had ever viewed not just as an escape, but as safe. It was where his grandmother had showed him that there was more to life than his father’s heavy fist.

  And now, fittingly, Prague was where he and his Indy were finally coming to terms.

  I’ll give you a month, she’d said that first afternoon. When she’d left him but come back, looking jittery and wide-eyed and still somehow stubborn.

  Still stubborn, even as she’d surrendered.

  Even as she gave him what he wanted, she did it her way.

  He’d thought again of a splash of red in a dark alley. And how quickly, how irrevocably, this woman had happened along and changed everything. It was a good thing he had always been a practical man, or he might have been tempted to tear down a wall or two. With his bare han
ds, just to feel them fall.

  Anything to feel as if he could control the things he felt for this woman. As if he could control himself the way he always had before her.

  But he had a month. And Stefan intended to use it.

  Let me guess, she’d said that first afternoon, when all he’d done was gaze at her, victory and something that felt too much like relief pounding through him. You require nudity at all times. Blowjobs morning, noon, and night. Is that the kind of intensity you have in mind?

  It is never a bad place to start, he’d said, already amused. As I think you know.

  She had already told him that not indulging in her usual behavior, out there where she could have lovers eating from her hand with a single glance, was a statement of her intent. But Stefan didn’t think he was the only one who thought that really, when she crossed the terrace to kneel down at his feet, then held his gaze while she took him into her mouth again, that it was a new set of vows.

  And for the first few days, it was enough to simply have her near. To know that there would be no renegotiation come the dawn. That she had promised him a month and that meant she wouldn’t sneak out when he was on his run or while he was dealing with the inevitable phone call.

  Not that she struck him as the type to sneak anywhere. But then, before her, he hadn’t been the type to worry about what a woman might be doing. Or about anything at all save getting richer and staying in one piece.

  “I thought you walked away from your business,” she said when he finished one of those calls, standing out in the dusk and testing himself. Not looking back into the house to see what she was doing. Not checking to make sure she was where he’d left her.

  He supposed that was trust. Or a gesture in its direction. And in him, trust was a muscle that had atrophied long ago—but for her, for them, he would work on it.

  Stefan had been cooking Indy a traditional Romanian dinner when the call had come in. He walked back in now, something in him shifting—not quite uncomfortably—at the sight of her standing there at his stove. The kitchen was warm and bright, filled with the scents of his childhood, and Indy there in the middle of everything. She was barefoot, wearing those cutoff shorts that he had become a little bit obsessed with. Her hair was tied in a big knot on the top of her head, letting him look at her elegant neck and her shoulder blades beneath the airy tank she wore. Her bracelets sang small, happy songs every time she moved.

  He felt his heart beat harder in his chest, the way it did now.

  And he knew that two years ago he would have called what surged in him then a kind of horrifying neediness. He would have found it unpardonable. A weakness. He would have tried to excise it with his own fingers, if he could.

  But that had been before. Before she’d walked into his world and knocked it straight off its axis.

  “I walked away from my major business, yes,” he replied. “The part that would be frowned upon by any number of law enforcement agencies.”

  “Then why are you still taking business calls?”

  Once again he was struck by the fact she simply sounded interested. Not trying to score any points. Not building toward some kind of agenda. Just interested in him as a person.

  And only when he acknowledged how rare that was could Stefan also admit that he liked it. That he wasn’t sure how he’d lived without it all this time.

  “I always intended to retire from the more dangerous part of my business eventually,” he told her, and opted not to share how difficult that had turned out to be. It was clear to him that if he’d stayed in any longer than he had, exiting would not have been possible—and he didn’t like that at all. He’d always imagined himself in control of the things he did. “I only expedited the process. I am sure I told you this.”

  She looked over her shoulder at him, laughter in her gaze. “I guess I didn’t realize you had a legitimate arm of whatever had you gun slinging in an alley in Budapest.”

  Stefan went over to the stove and took the wooden spoon from her hand, nudging her away from his pot. “My money is perfectly legitimate. And as you know, money invested wisely makes more money.”

  “That’s what you do? Invest?”

  “Isn’t that what you do?”

  “I travel all over the globe, wherever my mood takes me,” she said airily. “My investments fuel that lifestyle, sure, but so do the jobs I take when I want some cash. But what about you? What do you like to do?” She lifted up a hand when he started to answer that. “Don’t say me. You had a whole life before you met me, Stefan. And in the years since. What is it you actually like?”

  Another question no one had ever asked him. A question he’d hardly dared ask himself some years, because how could it matter what he liked? He had needed to focus on surviving, like it or not.

  “Art,” he said, without letting himself brood about it.

  And he cautioned himself against putting too much weight on the fact that he’d never told anyone that before. His grandmother was the only person in his life who might have been interested in such things—but she had been a stoic, stern woman. It had never been her way to chatter idly.

  Still, he found himself looking sideways to see what Indy’s reaction might be. Would she laugh? His heart kicked at him. Would she laugh at him?

  He had never put himself in this position before. Where another person’s opinion could hold so much weight.

  The truth was, he did not care for the feeling.

  But all she did was nod, looking off across the room. When he followed her gaze, he saw that she was looking at a bold piece he’d bought years ago in Cluj, known for an avant-garde art scene to rival Bucharest’s claims of being Romania’s artistic capital. He’d had it installed here in this house, his cathedral to what could be.

  What could be—and now was.

  “All the art you have in this house is beautiful,” she said, moving that dreamy look of hers to him. “Interesting and confronting and lovely. Is that why the rooms are so airy here? So that the art is what’s seen?”

  “I spent most of my life in dark, desperate places,” Stefan told her, and his voice was rougher than he would have allowed it to be for anyone else. But this was Indy. And he could hardly demand her vulnerability if he wasn’t prepared to share his own, could he? “My mother did her best to make the places we lived feel more like a home, but my father always ruined it. Any extra money we had went to his debts or his drink. After she died, there was no point bothering.”

  “I’m surprised you remembered art existed at all,” Indy said softly.

  “Art is not something a person forgets.” He scowled down at his pot, this sentimental meal from one of the few good moments of his childhood, as if only just noticing that there was no part of what he was doing here tonight that wasn’t emotional. But he couldn’t seem to stop himself. “The perfection of a finely drawn line. A pop of color that changes everything. I saw pieces I liked over the years and had them sent here, telling myself that one day I would come here, live here, and have them all around me all the time. But that day never seemed to come any closer. Then I looked up from an ordinary evening of the typical darkness in my life, and there you were. All your fine lines and a splash of red in the night. I knew you were art, too.”

  He snuck a look at her and found her gazing back at him, her lovely eyes filled up with tears.

  Stefan could tell that she was trying out this intensity thing, as he’d asked her to do, because she didn’t dance away. She didn’t start singing, or change the subject, or move closer so she could put her mouth on him and distract them both. He almost wished she would. Instead, Indy let him see her respond. React.

  All those emotions he knew she would have said she didn’t possess. Right there in her eyes like the finest chocolate.

  “My grandmother left me her flat down Old Town when she passed,” he told her, because he couldn’t seem to stop.
Maybe he didn’t want to stop. “It was filled with art. Maybe she was why I never forgot the power in it. I bought this house before she was gone, but it wasn’t until then that I began to make it mine. Even if I only made it here once a year, if that, I knew it waited here. I knew that I could come, walk these rooms, and let the art I’d chosen make me believe I was a different man. A better man. I told myself it didn’t matter how far off one day was. For a long time, knowing this was here was enough.”

  Indy drifted close and bumped him with her shoulder, a kind of unconscious gesture that about laid him flat. Because it was the antithesis of any of the ways they touched. It wasn’t sex. It wasn’t the prelude to sex. It didn’t have anything to do with sex at all.

  But it was intimate.

  And even though Stefan was the one who’d confidently thought he’d already done all the changing necessary, he felt something in him crack wide open.

  “It seems like you do have a home after all, then,” she’d said quietly, her eyes shining. “That’s not a small thing, is it?”

  And he didn’t know how to tell her than nothing that happened between them, or because there was a them at all, had ever been small.

  But later that night, after he’d tied her up so she didn’t have access to her usual bag of tricks, then made her sob and scream until he was satisfied that she didn’t have a single thought in her head without his name on it, Stefan lay in the dark with the soft weight of her in his arms and wondered what he would do if a month was not enough.

  Because he did not think that any place would soothe him now, not when he knew how much better it was when she was here. Lighting up already bright rooms with that smile of hers, making the world stop again and again while she did it.

  He knew it did no good to worry about the future. There was only now.

  July continued on.

  Some days he bossed her around, because he could. Because it made both of them hot.

  “I think, foolish girl, that I will have you naked today,” he would say.