He’d recovered first. He’d lifted her, muttering another curse when she’d made a little sobbing sound at the loss of his cock. He’d set her in the passenger seat beside him, then winced as he’d folded his cock back into his jeans.
I am Stefan, he’d told her in that growl of his that had made her think of wolves again. She’d smoothed her red skirt down toward her thighs and shivered. Stefan Romanescu.
Indy, she’d replied. Indy March.
Indy? He’d sounded as if he was tasting her name the way he’d tasted her nipples. What kind of name is this?
Short for Indiana.
Indiana, he’d murmured, another long, deep taste.
Indy had nearly come again, just from that.
He’d looked around—out to the street and in his mirrors—in a way that told her more things about him. That he had some kind of military background. That he was just as deeply dangerous as she’d thought he was, if not more, because he wasn’t anything so simple as a thug.
But none of that had changed the fact that he was hers.
Nothing ever will, a voice in her had intoned, solemn and sure.
She’d curled her knees up beneath her and hadn’t cared where her skirt fell. The thong she’d simply moved to the side made her pussy feel even more wet and swollen, because it kept grabbing at her. Reminding her.
Not that she’d needed reminding.
We didn’t use a condom, she had pointed out.
You American girls are all on the pill. He hadn’t even looked at her as he started the car, then pulled out, roaring away from the curb and into the dark Budapest streets in a manner that told her he knew them well. And if you give me something, eh. Then we both have it. A memento, maybe.
She’d laughed, then shrugged when he’d shot a dark look her way. I don’t have anything. Yours is the only cock that has ever been inside me without a condom.
His gaze had caught at her, intense and too blue. The only one that ever will be, Indiana.
And she’d accepted that, because she’d felt it, too.
Fate.
Stefan had driven her straight to the airport.
I don’t know what your travel plans are, but they must change, he’d told her, another command. It came easily to him, she’d understood. It was who he was, maybe. You must leave here. Tonight. And do not return.
But—
I need time, he’d said with an urgency that she’d felt inside her like her own heartbeat. Two years. Then I will deal with this. With you. Do you understand?
Two years? She’d blinked the unexpected emotion away, not sure what was happening to her. Not sure words existed to describe what had already happened, much less what had still been happening. Stefan...
He had taken her jaw in his hard hand. Keep that pussy greedy for me, foolish girl. And enjoy as many inferior fucks as you can with my blessing. I want you limber.
He had given her the key, told her a time, made her memorize the address.
And she hadn’t heard from him since.
Indy blew out a breath at her café table in Prague. She drank down the last of her coffee.
She hadn’t told anybody what had happened to her in Budapest. Because what could she say? Instead, she’d flown back to the States. She’d surprised her sister and moved in with her when her latest disappointing roommate had moved out.
She had cried when her skinned knees healed, because it had felt as if the loss of those scrapes took Stefan away from her. And she’d spent the last two years in New York because she’d lost the thirst for it. She’d been everywhere. She’d seen everything. And she’d found what she’d been looking for without knowing it—but she couldn’t have him.
Yet.
Yet, she would whisper out loud in her bed at night, holding on tight to that key. Yet.
For a while, she hadn’t wanted to bother with sex—for pretty much the first time since she’d discovered it in high school—because what was the point? When you’d had the very best, why backslide into less than that? The first time she’d let a cute boy in a Brooklyn bar take her home, it had made her feel as close to empty as she’d ever been.
But when she thought of sex as keeping herself fit enough to be worthy to fuck Stefan again, that changed everything.
Indy had impatiently waited out her two years. She had kept herself limber.
And now she was ready.
She left the café with only twenty minutes to go before the meeting time. The gorgeous old city gleamed bright in the summer sun, but all she could think about was the house up in the hills that she’d stared at on Google Maps a thousand times.
Indy took a cab out of Prague proper, crossing the river and scaling the hills into a neighborhood she’d read a lot about, these past two years. Upscale. Quiet. Wealthy.
Her heart was going wild in her chest and she pressed the heel of her palm hard against it, feeling something like giddy that this was finally happening. She knew that if she’d told anybody what she was doing, they not only would have told her something was wrong with her, they would have tried to talk her out of coming here today. They certainly would have tried to impose their grubby reality all over what she knew was her destiny.
Her older sister in particular, bless her.
The cab dropped her off in front of the correct address, a house that sprawled over a sizable piece of property right on the road. Indy pulled out her key and walked toward the door, unable to hear anything but the way her blood rushed through her. She thrust it into the lock on the front door, held her breath, and turned it.
The bolt clicked open.
Indy pushed her way inside, having absolutely no idea what to expect, but aware that she was no longer holding her breath. Because the key worked. It worked. She hadn’t let herself think about what she would do if it hadn’t. She slipped it back over her neck as she shut the door behind her, taking comfort in the familiar weight between her breasts.
Inside, the house seemed light and airy—or possibly that was just the foyer she stood in that soared upward to a set of skylights. She could hear music playing, something smoky and instrumental, and her impressions of the house seemed to shudder into her from afar. Clean. Nearly stark, were it not for the odd pieces of intriguing art set here and there. Or the surprisingly ornate banister of the grand stair directly in front of her.
She followed the music through a sitting room on the same floor that opened into another, nearly blinding her with all its great windows that looked down over Prague and the Vltava River that cut through it.
But the music wasn’t coming from those rooms or the bright gallery beyond, so she kept going. She wound her way down a hall until she came to a study at the end of it, drenched in the same sunlight.
And froze, because he was there.
Stefan sat in an armchair next to a bookcase, far more beautiful—and brutal—than she’d recalled. His poetic blue eyes came to hers. Held.
And she was sure she heard some kind of thunderclap in the distance.
It still felt like fate.
Better still, that gaze of his on hers felt like a command.
Indy only realized then—as she started moving toward him, unable to tear her gaze from his—that she hadn’t been afraid that he wouldn’t be here. That hadn’t really worried her. But she had been afraid that he would be here—but that she wouldn’t feel this again.
That she wouldn’t feel all this heat and glory, greed and longing.
This sense of coming home in a strange place.
And through it all, fate making them one.
The way she knew they had always been meant to be.
As if she’d been built for him alone.
Indy kept moving until she stood before him. She shrugged off the small backpack she wore and tossed it aside. Then she sank down on her knees, there before his outst
retched legs, and smiled up at him as if he’d given her the world.
Maybe she thought he had.
Already.
“Finally,” she whispered, gazing up at him.
“Finally,” Stefan agreed, with a voice like gravel and a hard, bright light in his gaze that made her feel like she might be shimmering. Inside and out. “We can begin.”
CHAPTER THREE
STEFAN ROMANESCU WAS not a man of faith.
In anything.
But he had seen a vision in a shitty back alley two years ago. And even though he would have said he believed in visions even less than in the dour Orthodox god of his childhood, long since happily renounced, he had immediately known one thing above all others.
A man should never turn down a vision, no matter how inconvenient it was.
Though the word inconvenient was a mild way indeed to describe how he’d spent the past twenty-four months.
None of his former associates—because a man like him didn’t have friends—had understood. But then, how could they? All they’d seen was Stefan systematically dismantling a network he’d worked hard to put in place, removing himself completely, piece by piece.
For no good reason, he was sure they would have said if he’d encouraged such conversations. Because his network made money and for a long while, that was the only thing he’d cared about. It was the only thing that mattered to most of his associates, as it had to him, too. Before.
Only people who had always lived safe and secure—and rich—ever imagined that money wasn’t power.
But he’d met her in Budapest and everything had changed.
He couldn’t have explained it himself. He’d seen Indy March, bright with a fresh beauty though it had been the middle of the night. And no one who was wandering around that particular neighborhood at such an hour could possibly have been fresh in any sense of the word. Still, she was such a tiny little thing, with glossy dark hair and a heart-shaped face. Picking her way through the rubble and ruin of the world he lived in as if she hadn’t noticed the state of it.
She’d looked at him the same way.
His heart, that useless organ, had stopped. Then kicked back in, hard.
She had looked like an angel, and what fallen man could resist?
He couldn’t. He hadn’t.
And now here she was on her knees again, only this time Stefan had no gun aimed at her head. No collection of associates he barely tolerated himself. This time, she appeared before him of her own volition. Not because she’d wandered down the wrong alley in the wrong part of the wrong city.
Not to mention, she’d had two years to think better of the whole thing.
These were all important distinctions.
His cock might have been rock hard, the way it always had been every time he’d thought of her since he’d dropped her at the airport in Budapest, but he was in no rush now. Not now.
Because she was here. And Stefan could see from the expression on her face that her hunger was as fierce as his.
“Welcome to Prague, foolish girl,” he murmured, settling back in his chair and regarding her almost lazily. “Why don’t you tell me, at last, how you ended up in that alley?”
Her chest moved, telling him she was breathing too hard. He liked it. And though he saw a kind of dismay on her face, or possibly impatience, she didn’t argue with him. She settled back on her heels, giving him the opportunity to miss that flowy little red skirt she’d worn before that had fueled any number of fantasies since. She shoved the silken mass of her hair back from her face and smiled at him.
As if this was a proper dinner date in whatever squeaky-clean world she came from.
Though he knew what her world was like. All its fresh, bright, happy details. A man might trust a vision all he liked—but a wise man verified it.
Only wise men survived the kind of life Stefan had built for himself, then destroyed.
“I was at a club,” she told him, and her voice was as lovely as he remembered it. Sweet and sultry all at once, with that American Dream accent of hers. “It was just down the street in some crumbling-down warehouse I couldn’t find again if my life depended on it. I wanted a breath of fresh air and a little walk and then there I was. In the middle of your... Situation.”
That was significantly less celestial. He studied her, the laziness giving way to a frown. “You wanted to walk. At that hour. You didn’t notice what kind of neighborhood you were in?”
Indy shrugged, and his eye was drawn to how delicate she was. She was such a little thing. He remembered, vividly, picking her up. Holding her against him, his imagination wild with all the ways a man of his size could indulge himself with a tiny little creature like her—but he’d urged himself to be careful.
He might not have been a good man, but he didn’t break his toys.
Then she’d proved herself more than his equal. She’d showed him a libido to match his and better still, the ability to take his cock even if she hurt herself doing it.
Men changed their lives for far less.
That night had been warm, as he recalled. She’d worn a strappy little tank top, a tiny little backpack like the one she’d tossed aside here, and that filmy red skirt that had haunted him ever since. And loads of necklaces and bracelets that marked her as one of the carefree backpacker set who polluted most of Europe—and the world—with their vast privilege wrapped up as wanderlust. Today she wore skinny gray jeans that seemed pasted to her and a flowy sort of T-shirt that did as much to expose her midriff as cover it. She still wore a ton of bracelets, but the only necklace she wore today was the key to his villa.
Back in the alley, his first thought had been angel. His second thought had been bohemian—in the sense of a certain beach culture style popular with both Californians and those who aspired to look like Californians. Not in the sense of the Bohemian region where they currently sat that had nothing at all to do with Californian anything.
When she’d spoken, he had not been surprised to hear that she was an American, though he hadn’t known how to feel about that. And then he hadn’t cared, because it made his path clear.
He had practically been able to see the white picket fences of her people stamped all over her.
“Those kinds of clubs are always in terrible neighborhoods,” she was saying, almost dismissively. As if he was being...silly. Something Stefan had never been in his life. “I never got into trouble before.”
Stefan leaned forward. He rested his elbows on his knees and got his face close to hers.
She was even more perfect than he’d recalled. Flawless, really. That pretty face of hers, eyes like chocolate and that sweet and dirty mouth. She looked soft and breakable, but he knew better, didn’t he? His Indiana was wild, and a little crazy, and her pussy was voracious.
God, she was perfect.
Even if, right at this very moment, he was pissed at what could have happened to her if he hadn’t been the situation she’d stumbled into.
“Do you know how much trouble you were in?” he asked quietly. “Do you really know?”
Her melted chocolate gaze glittered. “I think the gun to my head was a clue.”
Stefan reached over and slid his palm over her jaw, her cheek. Not sure if he was holding her there...or assuring himself that she was real.
That he had not simply lost it in that alley two years ago, as many had claimed since. That there had been a reason and it was her.
That she was here.
“The man who held a gun to your head no longer exists,” he told her, making no attempt to keep the darkness from his voice. “But he was a very bad man, Indiana. You should have been terrified of him. Why weren’t you?”
She smiled and pressed her cheek deeper into his palm. “I don’t know.”
“I gave you that key and an address. You could have come here any time you li
ked, but you didn’t. You could have forgotten all about one strange night in Hungary, but you didn’t. You waited two years. You came to Prague. You showed up tonight at precisely the right time and now look at you, down on your knees with your skin already flushed with arousal.” He shook his head, his gaze all over her. “Why?”
“I trusted you.” When his scowl deepened, her smile widened. “And it didn’t occur to me to come here any sooner. I guess I could have come straight to Prague after Budapest, but I went to New York instead. And by the time it occurred to me, much later, that I had the key and could come over here and see if it fit in anytime, I was too busy... Recovering.”
He searched her face intently, something in him going still. “You were hurt?”
She shook her head. “No. But it was...”
Stefan nodded. Because he knew. “A beautiful catastrophe.”
Indy’s eyes glowed. “Yes. And then I thought I might as well wait. You had been so certain about the time period. Why was it two years? Why not two months? Or five years?”
He could have told her. That he had always had an exit strategy, because longevity was not a feature of the life he’d chosen after he’d left the army. He’d been planning his escape almost from the day he’d started. Meeting her had simply expedited those plans.
Instead of sharing any of that, he lifted a shoulder. “There were things I had to do.”
It was her turn to study him for a moment. “Like... A divorce?”
Stefan had not been expecting that. He laughed. “A divorce? What makes you think such a thing?”
Indy let out a small sigh, once again nestling her cheek a bit deeper into his palm. “It seemed like the kind of thing you might have had to get out of your way. I’ve never slept with a married man, to my knowledge, but then we didn’t do much talking.”
“I have never been married.” The very idea was ludicrous. “Have you?”
“Never.”
“And no unpleasant diseases,” he said, finding his thumb moving over her cheekbone. “Or I would have known soon enough.”
Just One More Night Page 3