“Art is not something a person forgets.” He scowled down at his pot, this sentimental meal from one of the few good moments of his childhood, as if only just noticing that there was no part of what he was doing here tonight that wasn’t emotional. But he couldn’t seem to stop himself. “The perfection of a finely drawn line. A pop of color that changes everything. I saw pieces I liked over the years and had them sent here, telling myself that one day I would come here, live here, and have them all around me all the time. But that day never seemed to come any closer. Then I looked up from an ordinary evening of the typical darkness in my life, and there you were. All your fine lines and a splash of red in the night. I knew you were art, too.”
He snuck a look at her and found her gazing back at him, her lovely eyes filled up with tears.
Stefan could tell that she was trying out this intensity thing, as he’d asked her to do, because she didn’t dance away. She didn’t start singing, or change the subject, or move closer so she could put her mouth on him and distract them both. He almost wished she would. Instead, Indy let him see her respond. React.
All those emotions he knew she would have said she didn’t possess. Right there in her eyes like the finest chocolate.
“My grandmother left me her flat down Old Town when she passed,” he told her, because he couldn’t seem to stop. Maybe he didn’t want to stop. “It was filled with art. Maybe she was why I never forgot the power in it. I bought this house before she was gone, but it wasn’t until then that I began to make it mine. Even if I only made it here once a year, if that, I knew it waited here. I knew that I could come, walk these rooms, and let the art I’d chosen make me believe I was a different man. A better man. I told myself it didn’t matter how far off one day was. For a long time, knowing this was here was enough.”
Indy drifted close and bumped him with her shoulder, a kind of unconscious gesture that about laid him flat. Because it was the antithesis of any of the ways they touched. It wasn’t sex. It wasn’t the prelude to sex. It didn’t have anything to do with sex at all.
But it was intimate.
And even though Stefan was the one who’d confidently thought he’d already done all the changing necessary, he felt something in him crack wide open.
“It seems like you do have a home after all, then,” she’d said quietly, her eyes shining. “That’s not a small thing, is it?”
And he didn’t know how to tell her than nothing that happened between them, or because there was a them at all, had ever been small.
But later that night, after he’d tied her up so she didn’t have access to her usual bag of tricks, then made her sob and scream until he was satisfied that she didn’t have a single thought in her head without his name on it, Stefan lay in the dark with the soft weight of her in his arms and wondered what he would do if a month was not enough.
Because he did not think that any place would soothe him now, not when he knew how much better it was when she was here. Lighting up already bright rooms with that smile of hers, making the world stop again and again while she did it.
He knew it did no good to worry about the future. There was only now.
July continued on.
Some days he bossed her around, because he could. Because it made both of them hot.
“I think, foolish girl, that I will have you naked today,” he would say.
Sometimes she grinned wickedly and looked thrilled at the notion. Other days she had different reactions, not all of them positive. One morning she scowled at him, blinking the sleep out of her eyes while she did it.
“Why do you call me that? Maybe I should call you foolish man. Would you like that?”
“You can call me whatever you like,” he told her. “But you will always be my very own foolish girl, who wandered into the dark and brought me out into the light.”
And he watched, sprawled there beside her in the bed they shared, while she melted at that.
“Well.” Her voice was grumpy, but her eyes were bright and shining. “I guess it’s okay then.”
“Naked,” he reminded her.
Because naked days were all about power and surrender and all the marvelous things a man with his imagination—and the wicked delight she could never repress for long—could build between them.
“I thought you’d be like that all the time,” she panted one night, after the kind of naked day that left her so limp and boneless that he’d had to carry her upstairs, bathe her with his own hands, then put her to bed.
He did not mind these tasks, to be clear.
“Like what?” he asked.
“You know. The way you are on naked days. All the rules. All the kneeling. I assumed you’d demand to be called Master Stefan or something and go crazy with nightly spankings and all the rest of that stuff.”
He was amused. He was stretched out, propping himself up on one arm, toying with a strand of her hair while he looked down to that heart-shaped face of hers that only grew more beautiful. When surely that should have been impossible. “Is that what you want?”
“Sometimes,” Indy replied, grinning up at him. “And sometimes not.”
“You do not like a steady diet of anything, Indiana,” Stefan said in a low voice, because he knew. And sometimes she was not in the mood to hear all the things he knew. He tugged on the lock of her hair, gently enough. “You thrive on variety. But then,
