“You’re the one with a big house full of art. You must like some steadiness in your diet.”
He smoothed his hand over her face, her soft cheeks, where heat from her bath still lingered.
“I like you, foolish girl,” he said, though he knew he should not have. “Have I not made that clear?”
She smiled at him, though he thought he saw shadows in her gaze. “I’m not really a dietary staple. I’m more of an occasional dessert.”
“I like dessert, too,” he offered.
But she laughed and ran a hand over his chest, then down over his ridged abdomen. “Do you?”
The days passed. Stefan watched her, closely. He expected her to show signs of claustrophobia. To act as if it was sheer torture to stay in one place, with one man, for so long. He wasn’t sure she’d ever tried before. He anticipated that she would make it clear she was doing him a favor.
And yet, as one week became another, and another, if Indy was restless she failed to show it.
“I asked my father about happiness,” she told him one afternoon. “I wanted to know if he was as happy as it seems he is.”
They sat in the shade outside, beneath a trellis draped in blooming roses. He was working on his laptop while she curled up beside him, reading a book in between her dips in the pool. Not naked, sadly. It seemed the tiny little bright yellow bikini she wore was, apparently, one of the surprising number of items she’d managed to roll up and stick in that tiny pack of hers.
“I never needed to ask my father such a question,” he had replied, not looking up from his screen. “I already knew the answer. It was his fist, preferably connecting with my face.”
“I guess I can understand that,” she said with a quiet ferocity. “Because I’d very much like to plant my fist in his face. And imagining it makes me happy.”
He looked up then, entertained and touched in equal measure that his carefree, relentlessly nonjudgmental Indy had it in her to sound so bloodthirsty. Much less on his behalf.
“He died as he lived, never fear,” Stefan assured her. “As we all must.”
Indy had her book open in her lap and she turned it over then, frowning at him. “In a way, that’s what my father said. But how can you tell if you’re living life the way you should be?”
“There is no should. There are only the choices you make in each moment, strung together to make a day. A week. And sooner or later, a life that is the sum of its parts.”
There was the sound of the breeze rustling through the trees. Lawn mowers growled in the distance while up above them, birds sang and bees hummed. But Indy didn’t return to her reading.
“The thing is,” she said after a moment, haltingly, “I never saw myself in competition with Bristol. It was so important to her that she be the smart one. And if she was the smart one, then I got to be the pretty one.” She blew out a breath. “For a long time, that was all I really wanted.”
“I’ve seen your sister,” he said, though Indy knew that already. She called her sister daily and had told him, with glee, that she was responsible for her sister becoming girlfriend to Lachlan Drummond, the billionaire who couldn’t seem to keep his face out of the tabloids. The same tabloids that featured Indy’s sister, now—and that she liked to brandish at him. “Whether she is smarter or not, I couldn’t say. But she is also pretty. Surely you both know this.”
“She’s gorgeous, obviously. Hello. She’s my sister.” She smiled while she said that, but it faded. She toyed with the spine of her book. “It seems silly now. But for some reason, back when we were kids, it seemed absolutely crucial that we choose. We had to make sure that there was always a critical and obvious distance between us. Bristol disappeared into her books. And I...”
For a moment it seemed as if she didn’t intend to go on.
“And you?” Stefan asked.
To his surprise, she flushed slightly. “I did what I always do. I flitted around from group to group. I was everybody’s best friend, but they were never mine. I kissed all kinds of boys, even before my fateful relationship with Jamie Portnoy.” She shook her head. “If anyone had asked, I would’ve sworn on a stack of Bibles that I was a born extrovert.”
He had a sense of where this was going now, but he only waited, sitting back to better watch her lovely face as she spoke. And to enjoy the way she used her hands as emphasis, drawing pictures in the air.
Stefan wanted to tell her that already, she had bloomed here. That the frenetic edge to her was gone, because she didn’t have to plan her quick escape. Because living as they were, only the two of them in this house, it was impossible to maintain any kind of performance. He had seen her in all kinds of moods. The ones she would cheerfully admit as well as the ones she pretended she didn’t have. He’d held her when she sobbed at a movie, then pretended she hadn’t. He held her when she sobbed out her pleasure, then gave it back to him tenfold.
They woke every morning tangled around each other, as if in sleep they instinctively wanted nothing but to get closer.
Indy had not retreated from any of this. She had not run.
“But for weeks now,” she was saying, frowning at the roses, “I’ve been here. With you and all these books. I think I forgot how much I like to read. And how, if things had been different, I might have liked to disappear into books, too.”
“I’m glad,” he said, and meant it. ”You should.”
She shifted, turning her body so she could hold his gaze. “But I was really good stripping, Stefan.”
He laughed. “This I
