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 facing 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
