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
