“Innate it is, then. Fascinating.”
“I’m sorry if this is disappointing for you.” Indy sounded sweet then, yet the glittering light in her gaze was anything but. He liked her fierceness. He wanted to bathe in it. “I realize that men really, really want me to have some kind of deep inner wound only they can heal. With their penises. And I hate to break it to you but I really just like a lot of fun and a lot of sex. The end.”
Stefan could have told her that while that might have been true in her past, it wasn’t now. Because if it was, she never would have showed up in Prague. She never would have come back to him.
Because what happened between them in Budapest was the most intense thing that had ever happened to Stefan. And his whole life had been intense. None of it, before her, in a way he would call good. If what Indy said was true, her life had been a monument to avoiding intensity—meaning, she could have continued doing that. She could have very easily stayed in New York.
But she hadn’t.
And if she didn’t understand that yet, all he could do was sit back and enjoy the show while she came around to the truth. He intended to do just that.
“Tell me how you lost your virginity,” he said, picking up his utensils. “Let me guess. It was fun.”
“Yes, it was fun,” she said, her soft eyes gleaming. “He was an older boy, scandalously. I was a freshman in high school and he was a senior. Do you have freshmen and seniors here? Or... In Romania, I guess?”
“We have American television, Indiana,” he said dryly. “So it is all the same.”
“We dated a long, long time,” she said with a laugh. “Meaning, most of the fall semester. He wanted to do it and I finally told him it was fine as long as it felt good. And it did.”
“In the backseat of a car, I can only hope. What could be more American?”
“It was the backseat of a car!” She sounded delighted. “A Chevy, no less. It didn’t really hurt—he made it fun as promised, and that, I’m afraid, is how I began my downward spiral into the fallen woman you see before you today.”
He waited as she tucked in happily to her meal, but the silence dragged on.
“Do you want to know how I lost my virginity?” he asked.
“Not really.” She glanced up at him, her dark eyes laughing. “It doesn’t have the same resonance, does it? When and how girl gives away her V card is a clue, isn’t it?”
“Or a story.”
“Don’t be naïve, Stefan,” she said, waving her hand in the air so the spoon she held gleamed in the light. He tried to remember if anyone else had ever called him that. But of course they hadn’t. But his pretty little bulldozer charged straight on. “For men, who cares? The only reason it would be relevant would be if you were still a virgin. Otherwise, it’s assumed that men shed their innocence the way a caterpillar sheds its skin, then carry right on.”
“I am not a virgin,” he said, not sure if he was amused or...something else. “In case you wondered.”
“I didn’t. Now you think you know things about me, don’t you? When what you know is that I gave it away when I was fourteen. But that’s not the shocking part.” Indy paused, waiting for him to ask. When he didn’t, she rolled her eyes. “The shocking part is that I don’t regret it, and it wasn’t a horrific experience. Maybe I was always destined to be a whore.”
“The sounds like a lot of baggage, does it not?”
“It’s not my baggage,” she said, with another one of those light, airy laughs. “I slept with Jamie Portnoy in the backseat of his father’s Chevy because I wanted to. And even then, there were people who wanted to shame me for that decision. Because it turned out Jamie was a bragger. So I broke up with him and then I told even more people than he had. Why should I be embarrassed?”
And he thought he understood, then. She wasn’t pretending. It was all unconscious. She hadn’t needed to handle her father, maybe, but an older boy who had bragged about her and the people he’d told. She’d taken what could have been shame and called it fun, and he believed she felt that. It wasn’t a put-on.
It wasn’t quite real joy, either.
But this was about fun, he reminded himself. Or her attempt to convince him that fun was what they were having here. What he really wanted from her could wait.
After they ate, she played music from her mobile and danced around the kitchen. She made him laugh and once she did, she climbed into his lap, reached between them, and worked his cock deep inside her. And then sang along to the song that was playing as she rocked against him, until they both came in the same swift rush.
That was how it went. Light, airy.
She took a nap in the early evening, flushed and warm in that bed upstairs while he tended to business concerns that couldn’t wait. Later, after she woke, he drove them down into Prague so they could walk through Old Town and sit in one of the restaurants opened up to the summer night. In public, where there was no possibility that she could revert to nakedness or sex when she wanted to change the subject.
That it also tortured him was worth it, because he could see—as the color climbed her cheeks and her eyes got brighter—that being forced to simply sit there and talk to him was driving her crazy.
“Have you been to Prague before?” he asked sedately when she looked as if she might be considering starting a scene to divert his attention.
“I came through twice during my two years of travel,” she said, squirming in her chair. Stefan
