“It was fun. And I mean really fun. Maybe partly because I was actually paying for college, and saving, and doing something illicit at the same time. You may not know this about me—” and her eyes sparkled as she gazed at him “—but I really do kind of love it when people try to shame me for the things I enjoy.”
“Shame does not sit well on you, Indiana.” He wanted to reach for her, but checked himself. Because once again, this was not a sexual moment. He felt something more like sacred, and he was determined that he would honor it. “I am glad of that, too.”
And she didn’t have to tell him that they were only his, these moments that were all the more intense because they were not about sex. He could feel it in his bones.
“I stopped going to classes in college because I liked them too much.” Her voice was solemn, then, as if she was making a painful confession. Her eyes lost some of that sparkle. Stefan still waited. “I was getting an A in one class, so I made sure to skip out on the final because it was half my grade. And I had already made my choice, hadn’t I?” She searched his face for a moment. “How did you know that? Because you knew that, didn’t you?”
“I suspected.”
“No one else has ever thought there was anything more to me than a good fuck,” Indy said, her voice hardly above a whisper. “Not even me.”
He picked her up then. He hauled her into his lap and held her there, smoothing one hand over her damp hair and then holding her face tipped up to his so there could be no evasion. No hiding.
“There is much more to you than that,” he told her, his voice nearly a growl. He reached between her legs, beneath the damp scrap of her bathing suit, and found her molten hot. Swollen with need, as always. “Your pussy is one of the great wonders of this world, Indiana. But it is only an addiction because it’s yours.”
He stroked her, playing with her slippery folds and circling her clit until she moaned.
She bucked against him, her breath feathering out. “I’ve spent my whole life hiding, but you saw right through me. I still don’t understand how.”
“You understand.”
Stefan held her clit between his thumb and forefinger, pinching it in time with her pants. When she moaned again, he twisted his wrist and plunged two fingers deep inside her clinging heat.
“You called me into the light,” he growled. “But I found you in the dark. We fit together, two halves of a whole. There was no possibility that you could ever be anything but exactly who you are, not if this was to work. Beautiful, yes. Uninhibited and remarkably sexy, always. I will never get enough of you but even if this—” and he sped up the rhythm of his thrusting fingers, loving the way she clung to him, her fingers digging into him, her eyes half closed “—went away, even if I could never fuck you again, it would change nothing.”
“Bullshit,” she whispered.
He pulled his hand away, then laughed when she glared at him.
“Who do you want to be, Indy? It’s no longer a choice you made as a child. It doesn’t matter how you spent your years. We are here now. What do you want to be here?”
She was breathing heavily, her gaze something almost like hostile as she stared back at him—but Stefan knew that had more to do with the fact he hadn’t let her come.
“I will tell you what I know in only these short weeks,” he said. “You have spent no time at all maintaining your online life. I never see you huddled in a corner, scrolling through your phone, certain you’ve missed something. You seem genuinely happy. Maybe the trouble is that you don’t believe it.”
He saw her sit with that. And saw, too, that she didn’t like the weight of it.
“The trouble,” she said solemnly, “is that you are not inside me.”
“You know how to fix that,” he growled at her.
And when she went to straddle him, he turned her around. She pulled her bikini to one side as she wriggled against him, arching her back as he pulled out his cock so he could slam himself inside her.
For a moment the sheer wonder of it swept over him. Her too, he knew. They both paused, reveling in that impossible fit.
She might think it was this house. His art collection, or this new, pretty life he’d made for himself. But Stefan knew the truth.
His home was her.
But that wasn’t something he intended to tell her. Not yet. He wrapped one arm around her middle, holding her as he began to pound into her. He turned her head so he could take her mouth, because there weren’t enough ways to taste her.
There never would be. Not in a lifetime.
Maybe more.
And then he showed her what he could not put into words, and fucked them both home.
CHAPTER NINE
“I’M TRYING TO decide what my great passion in life is,” Indy announced one morning into her mobile, and wasn’t surprised when Bristol, off in some or other city on her world tour with Lachlan Drummond, laughed.
“I thought that was obvious,” Bristol said. “Isn’t it?”
Indy had been on her way toward the kitchen when she’d been sidetracked by her current favorite room in Stefan’s house. She’d left her book in here yesterday and when she’d come in to retrieve it, had sat down and called Bristol. Her favorite room in the house changed by the day. This one was arranged around a white-bricked fireplace, with only a few throw rugs and a deep red painting to break up the color scheme.
It appealed to her sense of drama.
“Thank you, asshole, but I like sex for fun, not for profit.” She let out a theatrical sort of sigh because she knew it would make her sister roll her
