“This is how I know you will come back again.” His voice was a low, rough sound. “As I have told you, I will wait for you.”
“But yesterday taught me something,” Indy said, as if he hadn’t spoken. “It taught me everything. I already know what my passion is, Stefan. I finally figured it out.”
She watched him gather himself, as if he expected a blow. And she could tell that he was a man used to taking blows, and returning them in kind. Those hands might curl into fists but she knew, deep inside, that he would never strike back when it was her.
“It’s you,” Indy said softly. “My passion is you. And with you, Stefan, I can do anything.”
He let out a sound she didn’t recognize, because it was low, almost animal.
And she didn’t wait. She vaulted onto the counter, and then crawled across it until she was kneeling there in front of him, her face to his. Then she took the jaw that had given him away in her hands, and held him there.
Fully aware that he allowed it.
But this would be their life, she understood then. He would always allow her to leave, and so she would stay. And she would have this power over him, because he let her—and because she would never abuse it.
“You need to be sure,” he said, his voice a mere scrape of sound. But his gaze was loud. “Very, very sure. Because if you choose me, this, now... I will not have it in me to be quite so forgiving as I might have sounded.”
“I don’t want forgiving,” Indy told him fiercely. “I want you, Stefan. I’m not afraid of your darkness. I know all about the light and I think deep down, beneath everything, it turns out I’ve been a jealous, possessive, dark kind of woman all along. Can you handle that?”
His smile was a long time coming, but when he finally surrendered to it, it took over his face. “I can handle it. Can you?”
“You and me,” she said. “No one else. I dare you.”
He was picking her up, holding her in his arms and then lifting her up above, as if he needed to look at her in the sunlight. She gazed down at him, aware only when her cheeks began to ache that she was smiling so hard, so wide, she might as well have been the sun herself.
“I will never understand where you came from that night,” he said, his voice as intent as his gaze.
“All that traveling. All those adventures. All of them were leading me to you.” Indy wrapped her legs around his waist when he let her slide down his body, smiling even brighter when they were face to face. “I love you, Stefan. I thought love at first sight was a myth, but then there you were.”
“I love you,” he replied.
And she kissed him, or maybe he kissed her, and everything was a tangle of heat and need and better still—best of all—love.
When he pulled away again, neither one of them was breathing steadily.
Indy hoped they never would.
“Now,” he murmured, his bright blue eyes turning wicked. “About that dare.”
Then he showed her how he met a challenge, right there on the counter again. How he would always meet a challenge, especially if it was her.
How they would always find their way back to each other, to that perfect fit that was only theirs.
Their hot, sweet, life-altering love, that was worth changing a world or two.
So they did.
CHAPTER TWELVE
TEN YEARS LATER, Indy shivered in the cold on the front porch of a sweet little old farmhouse she and Stefan had spent the last six months renovating.
Right there on the outskirts of the same little Ohio town where she’d grown up. The town she’d been so certain she would never return to, ever.
She reached down and slid her hand over her gigantic belly, feeling even bigger beneath all the layers she was wearing, smiling. Because life, it turned out, did what it wanted.
Especially when a person finally wised up and stopped living it all in one way.
Her parents had thought that when Indy called home at the end of the summer to announce she’d met a man and oops, had accidentally married him on a beach in Bali, it was more evidence of her well-documented flightiness.
Then they’d met Stefan that Christmas. It had been a banner holiday in the March family. Bristol had come home with Lachlan Drummond, and it had been a strange few days of too many men in a house that had never had that problem.
Lachlan and Stefan had bonded. Bristol and Indy had realized, too late, that this was a potential cause for concern.
“We are brothers now,” Stefan had said, a wicked light in his eyes, there in her childhood bedroom.
Where he’d proceeded to wash away all the ghosts of Jamie Portnoys past.
But quietly, so as to be respectful.
Indy’s parents had been instantly impressed with their new son-in-law. Bill had a few beers with him. Margie had taken Indy aside and told her, with great confidence, that a man like that would settle her down. Eventually.
That wasn’t quite how things had worked.
She and Stefan had followed their passions, whatever they might be. They didn’t need to work, or wander off into think tanks like Bristol and Lachlan, so they indulged their whims instead. And over time, their whims tended to shift back and forth—something worthwhile for every selfish bit of hedonism. Art appreciation and buying trips all over the world. A year of volunteering in the rain forest. A summer scuba diving off the Great Barrier Reef. A season in Antarctica on a research expedition.
There was no need to waste her time on silly love affairs with men not worth remembering. Not when she had everything she could ever want, and more, in Stefan.
Indy had never wanted to settle. She and Stefan had attended Bristol and Lachlan’s wedding
