Good. He hoped it did. He doubted Indy would be any quieter than that famous movie scene.
“Only twice? Some people would stay here forever if they could.”
“I would always think I’d found the perfect place,” she said, her smile taking on a slight edge. “Every place I go, I’m sure it’s the one. But then I go somewhere else. I meet someone else. And I fall in love all over again.”
He opted not to take the bait. “So nowhere is home, then?”
She squirmed again, taking a long pull from her water glass. “I guess when I think of home I still default to Ohio, but it’s not really my home. It’s my parents’ home. My sister and I vowed we would get out as soon as we could, and we did. And I haven’t lived there in a million years. I complain when I have to go back, the way I do every Christmas. But still. You say home, and that’s still what I think.”
“What makes it home?”
Indy sighed, and he thought he could see the very moment she remembered that she didn’t like to share anything but her body. “Do you have a home?”
“No,” he said. “I grew up in various Romanian cities. Bucharest, mostly. But none of the places I lived were home. I don’t fall in love with places.”
“That makes me sad.” She was tracing patterns on the side of her water glass. Around them, tourists talked loudly, languages blending together on the warm night air. “That’s the whole point of travel, as far as I am concerned.”
“But I did not travel as you did.” His smile was harder, then. “Flitting about the globe, finding myself in questionable pop-up clubs in dark, dangerous cities. This was not available to me.”
“Budapest isn’t all that dangerous.”
“There is no place in the world that is not dangerous if you are a pretty, careless girl,” he retorted. “As you discovered.”
But she only rolled her eyes at him. “The world is the world. I refuse to live in fear. If you assume goodness, most of the time, goodness is what you’re going to get.”
“That or guns to your head when you walk down the wrong alley.”
Indy shrugged. “That’s my case in point. A gun really was to my head and yet here I am, wined and dined in beautiful Prague for my trouble.”
“I think you know better.”
“What about you?” she asked, her dark gaze on his with more heat than he thought she meant to show him. “If the world is so dangerous, surely you should be walking around with an armed guard.”
“Not in the Czech Republic. It is not necessary.” Stefan didn’t quite smile. “There are some places it would not be wise for me to go, and so I will not go to them. But I am the reason pretty young things should not venture into alleys in the first place. I am not afraid of the world so much as it is afraid of me. And rightly.”
She studied him. “I can’t decide if you want me to be afraid of you or if you just like boasting about how mad, bad, and dangerous you are.”
“I think you should be afraid of me, Indiana,” he said quietly. “And I do not boast.”
“You’ve never seemed particularly dangerous to me. Sorry. I feel like I would have seen it by now.”
“But that is where you are wrong,” Stefan told her. “It is you who are in the most danger.”
For a moment, her gaze clung to his.
But then she waved her hand, picked up her menu, and let that roll away too, as if what he’d said was sheer nonsense. Maybe she wanted it to be.
He knew better.
After they ate and left the restaurant, she took his hand. She linked her fingers with his in a gesture that he told himself felt as foolish as the rest, but he didn’t disengage. Then she led him out into the cobbled streets of Old Town Prague, tugging him along through the crowds until they became a part of the same great energy of the ancient city on a clear summer night, like so many before them. Like everyone around them.
“Should we pretend to be tourists?” she asked, smiling up at him outside Prague Castle.
“I have never been a tourist.”
He looked down at her, still holding his hand like they were anyone. As if he were a regular person like all the other men he saw around him tonight. Soft, unwary. Was it that simple? Change his life, shed his old skin, and become what he had never let himself imagine he could?
With her fingers threaded in his, he almost believed it.
He wanted to believe it, and maybe that was worse.
“Then there’s no time like the present,” Indy declared. “We can be tourists right here.”
Stefan let her tote him along with her, walking the length of the Charles Bridge and then back again. He posed for the inevitable photographs. He even smiled winningly as they took them, which made her nearly cry with laughter.
“What? Even I know you must smile in these things.”
“Yes, Stefan,” she murmured, standing on her tiptoes to adjust the angle of her mobile. “You’re a regular old selfie-taking fool like everyone else. It’s obvious.”
And she was still laughing, later, when instead of following him back to where he’d parked his car so they could drive back to his villa, she tugged him into a dark alley. Then let her smile go wicked as she melted against him.
“Is this the real truth?” he asked her gruffly as he leaned back against the nearest wall and let her sprawl against his chest. “You cannot keep out of alleyways?”
“Let’s call it symmetry,” she whispered back.
And she wanted it fun and light. Flirty and fun.
But he didn’t.
Stefan kept it slow. He lifted her up and wrapped her around his body,
