Not that she struck him as the type to sneak anywhere. But then, before her, he hadn’t been the type to worry about what a woman might be doing. Or about anything at all save getting richer and staying in one piece.
“I thought you walked away from your business,” she said when he finished one of those calls, standing out in the dusk and testing himself. Not looking back into the house to see what she was doing. Not checking to make sure she was where he’d left her.
He supposed that was trust. Or a gesture in its direction. And in him, trust was a muscle that had atrophied long ago—but for her, for them, he would work on it.
Stefan had been cooking Indy a traditional Romanian dinner when the call had come in. He walked back in now, something in him shifting—not quite uncomfortably—at the sight of her standing there at his stove. The kitchen was warm and bright, filled with the scents of his childhood, and Indy there in the middle of everything. She was barefoot, wearing those cutoff shorts that he had become a little bit obsessed with. Her hair was tied in a big knot on the top of her head, letting him look at her elegant neck and her shoulder blades beneath the airy tank she wore. Her bracelets sang small, happy songs every time she moved.
He felt his heart beat harder in his chest, the way it did now.
And he knew that two years ago he would have called what surged in him then a kind of horrifying neediness. He would have found it unpardonable. A weakness. He would have tried to excise it with his own fingers, if he could.
But that had been before. Before she’d walked into his world and knocked it straight off its axis.
“I walked away from my major business, yes,” he replied. “The part that would be frowned upon by any number of law enforcement agencies.”
“Then why are you still taking business calls?”
Once again he was struck by the fact she simply sounded interested. Not trying to score any points. Not building toward some kind of agenda. Just interested in him as a person.
And only when he acknowledged how rare that was could Stefan also admit that he liked it. That he wasn’t sure how he’d lived without it all this time.
“I always intended to retire from the more dangerous part of my business eventually,” he told her, and opted not to share how difficult that had turned out to be. It was clear to him that if he’d stayed in any longer than he had, exiting would not have been possible—and he didn’t like that at all. He’d always imagined himself in control of the things he did. “I only expedited the process. I am sure I told you this.”
She looked over her shoulder at him, laughter in her gaze. “I guess I didn’t realize you had a legitimate arm of whatever had you gun slinging in an alley in Budapest.”
Stefan went over to the stove and took the wooden spoon from her hand, nudging her away from his pot. “My money is perfectly legitimate. And as you know, money invested wisely makes more money.”
“That’s what you do? Invest?”
“Isn’t that what you do?”
“I travel all over the globe, wherever my mood takes me,” she said airily. “My investments fuel that lifestyle, sure, but so do the jobs I take when I want some cash. But what about you? What do you like to do?” She lifted up a hand when he started to answer that. “Don’t say me. You had a whole life before you met me, Stefan. And in the years since. What is it you actually like?”
Another question no one had ever asked him. A question he’d hardly dared ask himself some years, because how could it matter what he liked? He had needed to focus on surviving, like it or not.
“Art,” he said, without letting himself brood about it.
And he cautioned himself against putting too much weight on the fact that he’d never told anyone that before. His grandmother was the only person in his life who might have been interested in such things—but she had been a stoic, stern woman. It had never been her way to chatter idly.
Still, he found himself looking sideways to see what Indy’s reaction might be. Would she laugh? His heart kicked at him. Would she laugh at him?
He had never put himself in this position before. Where another person’s opinion could hold so much weight.
The truth was, he did not care for the feeling.
But all she did was nod, looking off across the room. When he followed her gaze, he saw that she was looking at a bold piece he’d bought years ago in Cluj, known for an avant-garde art scene to rival Bucharest’s claims of being Romania’s artistic capital. He’d had it installed here in this house, his cathedral to what could be.
What could be—and now was.
“All the art you have in this house is beautiful,” she said, moving that dreamy look of hers to him. “Interesting and confronting and lovely. Is that why the rooms are so airy here? So that the art is what’s seen?”
“I spent most of my life in dark, desperate places,” Stefan told her, and his voice was rougher than he would have allowed it to be for anyone else. But this was Indy. And he could hardly demand her vulnerability if he wasn’t prepared to share his own, could he? “My mother did her best to make the places we lived feel more like a home, but my father always ruined it. Any extra money we had went to his debts or his drink. After she died, there was no point bothering.”
“I’m surprised you remembered art existed at
