To fate.
Maybe she’d needed to know that she could leave so that she could return.
Because that was what she did, climbing out of a taxi at his front door once again, and this time noticing the security pad on the wall. She let herself in with the key that still hung around her neck, finding the house as bright and sunny as she’d left it. She wandered through the beautiful rooms, amazed that a man she’d met in such a dark and gritty place had made himself a sanctuary like this one. Amazed that he felt the same way, impossibly bright when he should have been something else entirely.
She saw him standing out on the terrace, looking out over the pool toward the city in the distance with his mobile to his ear. He’d changed his clothes, putting on jeans and what looked like a well-loved red T-shirt that made the muscles in his wide back enough to weep over.
He was talking in what she assumed was Romanian when she opened the glass doors and stepped outside. He turned around, his blue gaze coming to her and staying there.
Bright and hard.
He finished his call and shoved his mobile into his pocket, then did nothing at all but regard her where she stood.
“Yes,” Indy said, as if she was making proclamations. “I’m back. I went to a bar, just as predicted. Are you happy?”
“Ecstatic.”
“I did not have sex with the numerous men I could have had sex with.” She studied him for a moment, that face carved of stone that had haunted her for years now. “I think you should take that as a statement of my intentions.”
The light in his blue eyes changed. Like a lightning storm. “I will make a note.”
“I don’t know how to do intensity, Stefan.” That sounded a little more uncertain, but Indy didn’t let that stop her. “I don’t know how to do any of this. This is not the kind of thing I do.”
“But you do, foolish girl. You have from the start.”
She blew out a breath and then crossed her arms, as if that could help her. “That’s very opaque, thank you. Anyway. Here I am. You get your night of wild intensity.”
His smile made everything in her seem to stand at attention. “No. I am afraid that is no longer on offer.”
“It’s not?” And she was... Crushed. There was no other word for it.
But he was still holding her gaze. “A night will not do it. I’m tired of these one-night games. You will give me a month, Indiana. And then we will see where we are.”
“A month?” She thought her teeth actually chattered. “I don’t know if I can.”
“You can,” Stefan told her, and he was sure. He was commanding and certain in all things. She liked that, too. Maybe too much. “Because it is a month or nothing. Which will you choose?”
And when he put it like that, it was simple.
CHAPTER EIGHT
JUNE FADED, TURNING into a sweet, golden July that seemed to stretch on into forever.
Maybe he only wished it could.
Stefan had never spent much time contemplating the seasons. They marched on, one after the next, and what mattered was surviving what they wrought. Summer had simply been warmer than the bitter winters, but life had carried on the same. The less said about his childhood the better. Ditto the army. And since then, he’d been far too busy catapulting toward his dark future to spend any kind of deliberate time in the light.
But this summer he was in Prague. The only place on the planet that he had ever viewed not just as an escape, but as safe. It was where his grandmother had showed him that there was more to life than his father’s heavy fist.
And now, fittingly, Prague was where he and his Indy were finally coming to terms.
I’ll give you a month, she’d said that first afternoon. When she’d left him but come back, looking jittery and wide-eyed and still somehow stubborn.
Still stubborn, even as she’d surrendered.
Even as she gave him what he wanted, she did it her way.
He’d thought again of a splash of red in a dark alley. And how quickly, how irrevocably, this woman had happened along and changed everything. It was a good thing he had always been a practical man, or he might have been tempted to tear down a wall or two. With his bare hands, just to feel them fall.
Anything to feel as if he could control the things he felt for this woman. As if he could control himself the way he always had before her.
But he had a month. And Stefan intended to use it.
Let me guess, she’d said that first afternoon, when all he’d done was gaze at her, victory and something that felt too much like relief pounding through him. You require nudity at all times. Blowjobs morning, noon, and night. Is that the kind of intensity you have in mind?
It is never a bad place to start, he’d said, already amused. As I think you know.
She had already told him that not indulging in her usual behavior, out there where she could have lovers eating from her hand with a single glance, was a statement of her intent. But Stefan didn’t think he was the only one who thought that really, when she crossed the terrace to kneel down at his feet, then held his gaze while she took him into her mouth again, that it was a new set of vows.
And for the first few days, it was enough to simply have her near. To know that there would be no
