That and his marvelous accent, that made her think of the taste of that plum brandy on her tongue.
“I understand you like to play this carefree, languid character,” he continued in the same way, all steel and certainty. “But even your orgasms tell the truth, Indiana. You like the easy way out. You don’t like the commitment of anything more. You don’t even want sex if it demands too much of you. You tell yourself you’re made that way, when as we have proven, what you’re made for is me. This.” His blue eyes gleamed, brighter than the sky that stretched on forever outside the windows. “Us.”
Indy told herself she was tired of the earthquakes he kept setting off inside her. The fault lines she hadn’t known were there, tangled and fragile and shaking while her heart beat too hard. In parts of her that her heart shouldn’t have been.
“You don’t actually know me at all, Stefan.”
She knew that sounded more defensive than she wanted to sound in his presence. Why not bare her throat to his teeth and see if he really was the wolf she thought he was? She knew he would read too much into it. She knew he would take that tone as proof.
But she couldn’t seem to help herself. There was something beating in her along with her wild pulse, feeling far too much like panic.
She smiled. Politely. “The fact of the matter is, we had a lot of sex. And I don’t know how to break this to you, Stefan, but that doesn’t make you special.”
“If you say so.” His blue eyes gleamed, but not with the fury she’d wanted. It was something far more like amusement. Only hotter. She could feel it connect to all the shaky places inside her.
She waved her hand in the air, a dismissive gesture she hoped he would find insulting. But he didn’t look insulted. He looked hard, everywhere, as he stood near the windows, his expression something like indulgent. And mouthwateringly hot. And gloriously wicked while he was at it. He wore only the pair of athletic shorts he had tossed on this morning when he’d left the bed, heading out for a run while she was left limp and soft and wheezing for breath. And she had so dearly hoped that he would somehow be diminished by rolling around in the kind of clothes that any random guy would wear. By doing mundane things like running, meaning that body of his wasn’t simply his by chance...
But not Stefan. There wasn’t a single part of him that wasn’t commanding or powerful. He wasn’t a guy. He was a man, all man, and he was so far completely impervious to her fervent wishes that he might magically, suddenly, have less of a hold on her.
“I’m not trying to be mean,” she began.
“Are you not? That must be a bit of your kind of fun, yes?”
She ignored that. “We met under bizarre circumstances. There’s no denying that. And we both like sex, clearly. A little rough and spicy, maybe. We spent two years apart after only being together for a few hours. And now, what? It’s been two nights?”
“I applaud your ability to count.”
“Basically, Stefan, we’ve shared a weekend stretched over years. We’re still strangers no matter how many times you’ve made me scream in the course of that weekend. That’s just the truth. And so when I tell you who I am and what I’m like, I think you can trust that I’m the expert in the room on that topic.”
“Indiana. Please.” Everything was the blue of his gaze, then. Too hot to bear. ”Do I strike you as the kind of man who leaves things to chance?”
That panicky thing inside her seemed to pick up speed, or maybe it was simply that she couldn’t catch her breath. Maybe you need to stop trying.
“I don’t know what that means,” she threw at him, panic and all those other dark and nameless things pulsing too hard inside her. While, even then, her pussy melted, as if the way she wanted him was hardwired into her. “You left a thousand things to chance. Whether or not I would show up. Whether I might just take the key you’d given me, come to this address, and rob you blind at some point over the past two years. I could pick a thousand ways this could have gone that did not involve me showing up here, desperate for another taste of you.” She sniffed as if she were above all this, hoping the sound would steady her. And if that was impossible, the way it sure seemed to be, at least let her pretend. “Sounds like a gambler to me.”
Stefan laughed. “I gave you a key, yes. There is also a security system. If you had attempted to access this house with your key alone at any other time you would have found that further security measures are required to get inside. They were waived because I was here. So no, there was no gambling involved.”
“You didn’t know if I’d even show up,” she argued.
“Maybe not.” But he didn’t look unsure in any way. It made her question why she was nothing but. “I built a certain life for myself—you know this. And after I cleaned up the mess I made in Budapest that night, I had a choice. Continue with the madness I began in that alley or go on as if it had never happened. Continue my life as it was. Maybe show up here on the time and date I’d given you, maybe not. That was something I could worry about two years later, if I chose that route. But before I made a decision, I studied.”
Something in her hitched at that, though she frowned at him. Ignoring the way her heart fluttered.
“What do you mean, you studied?” She heard the panic in her voice and made herself laugh. “Between you and me and the college I
