Because if he knew anything, it was this. A man was not meant to hold on too tight to a vision. The vision itself was the gift.
He had made this house of his beautiful. Inviting. A place where a woman like Indy could be comfortable, and stay a while. But she had made it home.
Stefan had already changed the way his world revolved for her. What was waiting a little longer?
Because he knew that chasing this woman of his, filled as she was with wanderlust and that stubborn streak, would only chase her away.
So he held her close as the dawn crept ever closer, settled in, and talked himself into setting her free.
Because that was the only way she would ever come back.
For good.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
INDY SHOULDN’T HAVE been surprised to wake up the next morning to find Stefan gone from their bed.
He had taken intensity to whole new levels yesterday. She sat up carefully, and could feel her body, tight here and a twinge there, in case she’d forgotten. She hadn’t.
Good thing it made her feel a little too hot all over again.
She made her way into the shower and stood there a long while, letting the hot water revive her. When she got out and toweled off, she realized that everything inside of her was clear. At last.
Their month was over. He had chosen to end things with that endless, sensual-intensity marathon that made her feel shivery and molten just thinking about it.
She could picture his face, looking somehow more cruel as the day wore on. Even as those hard hands of his took such care with her, though they were the same hands that had spanked her. They’d moved over her body, coaxing her to just one more peak.
Then one more after that.
The man was a sorcerer.
But the thing about his kind of magic was that, here on this most momentous morning after, Indy finally felt swept clean.
All the muddling around, all the wondering, was all gone. Everything clicked into place.
She felt it hum through her, like awareness. Like attraction.
Like certainty.
Like fate, a voice inside her whispered.
She let her hair do what it liked, shoving it behind her ears as she walked back into the bedroom and slipped on her flowy dress. The one she’d been wearing when she’d tried for symmetry in that alleyway, only to have Stefan teach her a lesson about intensity.
A lesson he kept teaching her.
But because she’d learned that lesson, maybe too well, she knew what he’d been doing yesterday. It had been different from what had come before. She’d understood that while it was happening, but it made even more sense now.
Stefan had been saying goodbye.
She padded her way down the grand stairs, running her fingers along the smooth length of the banister as she moved, as if she needed the sensory input. When, maybe for the first time in her whole life, she felt full up.
Indy never liked to think of herself as having a wound that needed healing, or an empty hole inside her, as she’d been accused of more than once. But she couldn’t help noticing how different she felt here on the other side of a month of intense intimacy with Stefan.
Her whole life there’d been a kind of edginess in her that skittered over her skin and made her bones feel itchy in her limbs. The urge to keep going. The need to always leave where she was and find something new. But no more.
She’d always been preoccupied with seeing and being seen, but not because she had anything to prove. Indy had discovered early on that when she was feeling lonely—or feeling anything, really—the best cure was to go out somewhere and pretend she was happy.
Until she was.
And when that wasn’t on offer, there was always social media, which could amount to the same thing.
At the bottom of the stairs, she slipped her mobile out of the dress’s deep pocket, and pulled up her favorite personal account. She took a quick scroll through, on the off chance she’d forgotten what was there. Because she hadn’t posted anything since she’d come to Prague.
But the evidence was there before her. It was curated joy.
It wasn’t that it was fake. She’d taken all those pictures and had posted them, too. But she understood, in a way she wouldn’t have month ago, that while she might not have been trying to prove anything to anyone—the account existed so that any time she felt any emotion she didn’t like, she could scroll a little bit and feel like herself again. Fun, first and foremost. She collected pictures of the fun she had so in less fun moments she could look at it, remember it, and get back into that space.
And then somewhere along the line, she’d decided fun was happiness, and had built her life around it accordingly.
But happiness wasn’t a screen of pretty pictures.
Happiness was what happened when there were no screens around to record it.
Indy shoved her phone back into her pocket and wandered toward the kitchen, her feet bare against the smooth floor. It was another bit of input, all of it like whispers next to a shout when she walked into the kitchen and found Stefan there at the counter where he’d once spread her out like a dessert, then feasted.
He didn’t seem to move or acknowledge her presence. He was looking down at his laptop, but she knew. Indy knew full well that he knew she was there.
That it was possible he’d heard the moment she sat up in bed upstairs.
She wouldn’t put it past him.
“Am I allowed to speak today?” she asked, coming to stand on the opposite side of the counter, as if they were facing off with each other.
Stefan closed his laptop with a decisive click. His blue gaze pierced through her, lighting her up and leaving scorch marks.
She liked it that way.
Even if his expression was about as closed off as
