“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
