“You can do as you please,” he told her, his voice perfectly even. “You kept your promise. The month is over. The world is yours, Indiana.”
“I do love when the world is mine.” She smiled. “But surely I can get a little coffee first.”
To her delight, or maybe that wasn’t the right word for the way her heart leapt in her chest, she saw a muscle move in his lean jaw.
Very much as if Stefan Romanescu was not as in control of himself as he usually was.
As if maybe, just maybe, he was finding this as overwhelming as she did.
She really hoped he did.
He stalked over to the stove, and set about making her the Turkish coffee she was pretty sure she was addicted to now. There were spices, fine coffee, a bit of sugar, and then the boiling. Three times, and all the while, she stood on her side of the counter and took the opportunity to study him.
Because maybe he was the real addiction.
She’d spent two years imagining and reimagining the little bit of time they’d spent together in Budapest. Now she’d had a month and two days. She knew him far better. The sex seemed to get more fantastic every time he touched her. She hadn’t been anything like bored.
And it still wasn’t enough.
There wasn’t a single part of his powerful body she hadn’t explored. Her mouth watered just thinking about it. Today he wore jeans and T-shirt, and as usual, elevated both to the kind of art he liked to hang on his walls. A study of a powerful man, she might call it, though the only kind of painting she wanted to do involved her fingers on his skin.
He turned back when the coffee was done, sliding the thick brew into place before her. And his eyes were still poet’s eyes, brooding and emotional and all the things he acted as if he wasn’t. His mouth was still sensual, and she knew how it felt at her breast, and all the other places he liked to put it.
He was a dream come true, but he was real.
This was real.
And she reminded herself that she got to decide what she made of this. Of them. Of her life and what was in it.
She picked up the delicate little cup and sipped at it, sighing a little bit at the first taste of the coffee she never could seem to get enough of.
“Stefan,” she began.
But a flash of blue cut her off again.
“Stop,” he ordered her. “I know already how this will go.”
Indy put her cup down on the counter between them. “Do you?”
“I changed my whole life after that night in the alley,” he told her, not sounding quite so even any longer. “This is not figurative speech. I am not exaggerating. I was one thing, then I saw you and I became another. There are some parts of some countries that will remain forever closed to me because of this. I accept it.”
“Will people come after you?” she asked, momentarily diverted from the fact this was the end of the month they agreed upon, and he was acting...the way he was acting. “Are you safe?”
Something glittered there in all that blue. “I would never have risked meeting you here if I was not.” She saw that muscle in his jaw again. “I would never have risked you. That part of my life is over. It is not merely a closed door, you understand. I set it on fire. It is better that way.”
“Stefan, I really want—”
“You will listen to me, Indiana.”
His voice was a command, but she could see he wasn’t as in control of himself as he usually was. And the longer she looked at him, the more she began to suspect that this—that hectic glitter in his gaze and that muscle flexing in his jaw—was Stefan’s version of messy.
Of wild.
Once again, she felt her heart swell to three times its size. All the parts of her that had been knotted tight loosened in a rush.
But she was still holding her breath.
“I have never worried about emotion,” he told her, his eyes too bright and his voice too dark. “It is not a factor. I like sex. I like women. I like them when they come to me and I do not miss them when they go. Then there was you.” He shook his head, as if he was trying to clear it. As if he was the one muddled now. “Nothing about that night made sense. Why were you there? Why weren’t you afraid? How was it possible that I could meet a creature such as you over the barrel of a gun?”
“I asked myself a great many of the same questions.”
“There is only one thing that makes sense,” he continued, his voice gruff. “I fell in love with you the moment I saw you, Indiana. It was that fast, and that mad. This isn’t intense between us because I’m an intense person. I never was before. Not with any other woman. It’s only you.”
Indy understood, then, that this was him stripped naked. That she could see so much in his gaze, he was telling her these things—this was how Stefan Romanescu ripped himself wide open.
“I love you,” he said in the same way, as if he was delivering terrible news. “And I will tell you, I did not want to.”
She smiled, though her heart was thumping at her. “How flattering.”
“I wanted nothing to do with any of this,” he growled at her. “What place is there in a life such as mine for a creature as soft as you are? You are too little, too breakable. You clearly have no sense of your own peril. You are American, of all things. And yet I knew that you were it for me. Instantly.”
She blew out a breath, shuddery and long. “Why are you telling me this as if you’re saying goodbye?”
And the way he smiled then changed him. He made
