Her lips felt blue. She couldn’t feel her own face. But she still tried to fight. “Maybe you should ask yourself why you think it’s okay to dig around in someone’s life without permission. Then use it as bait.”
“I have never pretended to be a good man, Indiana.” His voice was harsh. But something about the way he was looking at her was kind, and it made her want to give in to the sobs she could feel inside, threatening her ribs. “I never promised you anything at all, except a time and place. This is not a redemption story. I do not require your forgiveness. Did you believe that you might meet me as you did and I would be anything at all but this?”
“I’ve never given any thought,” she managed to say.
His blue eyes lit up with an unholy glee. “Liar. But it is not me you lie to, I think. It is yourself.”
Indy had never been so grateful that she packed light as she was then, with all that emotion surging around inside her, making her feel misshapen with it. Because all she had to do was pick up her little pack from the floor and shrug into it, then gaze at him almost sadly.
“I get that there’s this big movement for everyone to act as if what they really want from life is to be known,” she said. “To be wide open and vulnerable so that any passing stranger can take a glance and see exactly who they are. If you want to talk bullshit, that’s what that is. You think you know me because you looked through some social media posts and hacked my information? You don’t. You don’t. I don’t perform, but I also don’t think that the sum total of a person is a collection of photographs. Carefully curated photographs at that.”
Stefan didn’t look particularly impressed with that speech. “I’m not following. First you were a puddle. Now you cannot be discerned through the pictures that you post. Surely both cannot be true.”
“I have no interest in being psychoanalyzed,” she bit out. “If I wanted a therapist, I’d get one. And knowing me, I’d probably sleep with him. That’s how I roll.”
“I know how you roll, Indiana. I know you use sex to hide from your life, not to embrace it.” His smile lanced through her. “I told you—I know everything.”
“Then you already know what I’m going to do, don’t you?” She was finding it hard to stand still when she wanted to run. But she made herself do it. “That’s handy. It means I have no need to tell you myself.”
“You will storm out.” Stefan sounded almost bored—unless she looked at the way his eyes blazed at her. “Though I expect you will do it slowly. An easy, carefree little walk so I’m not tempted to jump to the wrong conclusions. So that no one could suggest that you are having an emotional response. And off you will go. I expect to a bar, where you will surround yourself at once with men who do not challenge you. Who will fawn all over you, buy you drinks, tell you that you’re pretty. And if you let them, give you those empty sugar-high orgasms you like so much. But not for long, because there’s always another cock to ride, is there not?”
Her whole body jolted with every word he said. Indy could hardly see past the strange heat clouding her gaze. She had given up on her breath. She either seemed to be panting, or holding what air she could inside her, and either way, she felt... Unhinged.
“Do you think that you’re the first person in my life to try to run me down so that I’ll do what they want me to do?” she managed to ask.
“I’m not trying to influence you one way or the other,” he said with a laugh. Still lounging there as if he not only didn’t have a care in the world, but as if none of this was getting to him. She was falling apart, but none of this was touching him at all.
“You can’t really believe I don’t know what I want, can you?” she demanded, though she knew she should have already made her exit.
Again, his shattering blue gaze moved through her like a storm, making her wish that he would shout, flip a table, punch a wall—do something to indicate that this was as ruinous for him as it was for her. That it mattered to him that he was ripping her apart.
That I matter to him, a voice inside said, and she didn’t want that. She didn’t want to feel these things. She didn’t want to feel.
“I imagine you want any number of things,” Stefan said with all that quiet intensity that had ruined her from the start. “But I know what you need. And so do you, I think, which is why it scares you so much. When you are ready, you will come back. And we will do this dance as many times as it takes, Indiana. Because in the end, there is nothing you want so much as the things you are afraid to need. Deep down, you know this.”
“Goodbye, Stefan,” she managed to bite out.
And then she turned, his words heavy inside her as she did exactly as he predicted. She made sure she kept her stride little more than an amble as she left the bedroom and headed for the stairs.
She moved through the light and airy house, the sunshine pouring in from all sides feeling like an affront. She wanted it dark and moody to match what she felt inside, but Prague wasn’t cooperating.
But she didn’t need it to rain to do what she needed to do.
She threw open the front door and walked away from Stefan Romanescu and all his simmering intensity, telling herself she had no intention of ever going back.
No matter what.
Because she, by God, was going to have some fun.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THOUGH FUN WAS not her first thought as Indy stood there outside the house, breathing in the summer morning while she tried to take stock of what had just happened.
What she’d just done.
A part of her wanted nothing more than to turn around and race back inside. She’d waited two long years for this and she was bailing already? Surely it made sense to just go back to him and see if she could salvage this somehow—
Salvage what? asked a caustic voice inside her. You know what you’re good at and it’s not this.
She blew out a breath, and started down the road, thinking a nice long walk would suit her perfectly, thank you. It would settle her down and let her think.
Prague glimmered there in the distance as she made her way down the hill, dance music in her ears to remind her that she liked her mood light and her parties never-ending. And it was the beautiful fairytale city it always was, but she hardly saw it. Because she was too busy going over every single thing Stefan had said to her.
Indy had always been a mediocre student. That wasn’t a question. Why had he made it a question? And why now, years after she’d finally graduated, when it didn’t matter what kind of student she’d been in the first place?
Her sister had been the student in the family. And it wasn’t that Indy had set herself up in opposition to Bristol. It was that there was no point competing with her sister for a crown Indy didn’t even want. She’d always thought that Bristol had become serious about her studies to put herself in an unimpeachable place where studying was all she did. Because Indy had been much better at flitting around their small-town schools, doing the popular thing.
There was no point doing things you weren’t good at, was there?
No one’s good at paying bills, Indy, Bristol had cried in exasperation at one point during their time as roommates. I’m not good at being responsible, I just don’t have an option not to be. Why don’t you understand that?
Maybe you don’t have a choice, Indy had replied, hugging Bristol even though her sister tried to shrug out of it, even batting at her a little because Bristol didn’t feel like not being frustrated. But you maybe also love it a little bit at the same time, don’t you?
Bristol had given up. But Indy had taken it as confirmation. She gravitated toward the things she was good at in life and that was why her life was a delight. Bristol might claim to enjoy what she did, but she had sure seemed endlessly stressed out about all of it while she did it, didn’t she? Her grades in high school. Her GPA and course load in college. Her masters and then her doctorate—it w
as all stress stress stress.
One thing Indy had avoided, as much as possible, was stress.
She couldn’t understand why anyone would want the kind of intensity Stefan had showed her. That just seemed like a whole lot of stress in all the places where life was supposed to be the most fun and she wanted no part of it.
“I’m fine the way I am,” she muttered out loud as she left his street behind.
It took her a while to walk down into the city and when she did, she found herself wandering through the city streets until she found a shop that sold newspapers and magazines in English.
And stopped dead, because there was her sister on the cover of several. Front and center.
Go Bristol, she thought.
She found a place to sit down by the river and read them all through. Then she got her sister on the phone, the way she did as often as she could while Bristol was off adventuring in tabloid splendor. If only for a few moments.
“Did you know that you’re on the front page of every single tabloid there is?” she asked when Bristol answered.
“What do you mean by every tabloid?” Bristol sounded annoyed, but Indy was looking at a whole series of pictures of her face. Soft and open and splashed across the papers—and Bristol was an academic, not an actress. Something in Indy turned over at that. “I’m not comfortable with one tabloid.”
“Then I have some bad news for you,” Indy said merrily. “They’re comfortable with you. And you do know you have a little something called the internet at your disposal, Bristol.”
She laughed, picturing the annoyed expression her sister was certain to be making, off in her Spanish island paradise with one of the richest and most famous men alive. Nice for some, she thought, though she knew she didn’t actually envy Bristol. It was that look on her face in all these pictures, though. It made Indy wish she were different, inside and out.
But she wasn’t. “You can access this exciting new invention with the newfangled handheld computer you’re using to talk to me, in a totally different country, right now.”
“I access the internet all the time, asshole,” Bristol replied in her typically snooty way. All big sister bossiness and the suggestion, right there beneath her words, that Indy was wasting her life. It was oddly comforting today. “And yet, oddly enough, it’s not the tabloid newspapers I look for when I do.”
“Well, good news, then,” Indy said brightly. “You look amazing. What else matters?”
Bristol let out her trademark longsuffering sigh, but Indy could hear that her out-of-character adventure was already changing her. Because Bristol was doing the exact opposite of the things she normally did. She was celebrating finishing up her doctorate and not knowing exactly what to do with the rest of her life by doing something completely outside her normal range. That was how she’d ended up on the arm of Lachlan Drummond, one of the most eligible billionaires in the world.
She even sounded happy.
And as Indy sat there glaring at the river after the call ended, that felt like yet another jolting sort of indictment inside her.
Stefan’s breakdown of what she was going to do once she walked away from him seemed to simmer inside her, taunting her, because she knew he was right. Wasn’t that what she always did when she found herself on her own? Maybe after a long night. Maybe after an adventure where she’d lost track of her companions. She could walk into any bar, anywhere. She often didn’t even have to walk into a bar. A few suggestive glances and she was sure that she could have a man eating out of her palm no matter where she was. But to what end?
She could hear Stefan’s voice in her head. Those empty sugar-high orgasms you like so much, he’d said, and she was very much afraid he’d ruined them for her. Because who wanted hollow junk-food sex when there was...him?
Meanwhile, despite her Bristol-ness, her sister had sounded happy.
Happy.
And for all that Indy had spent her life pursuing fun at all costs, had she remembered to make sure that she was happy while she was doing it?
Do you even know what happy is? asked another voice inside, this one sounding a whole lot like her father.
She called home, smiling when she heard her father’s grumpy voice on the other end.
“Do you know what time it is here?” he asked, instead of saying hello. “Don’t tell me you forgot to look at the time change. I think we both know you do it deliberately.”
“Hi, Dad,” she said, affection for him racing through her and warming her. “You sound deeply stressed out. Isn’t it a Saturday?”
She heard his laugh and could picture him easily, back in that house where she’d grown up. It was a little after six o’clock in the morning, Ohio time, but she knew perfectly well he hadn’t been asleep. Margie liked an extra few hours to catch up on her beauty sleep every weekend, but not Bill. He worked all week, as he liked to say, and therefore liked to be up and at it on the weekends to squeeze out every drip of leisure time available.
“It’s a fine Saturday,” her father said. “I have big plans. The hardware store, a little project in your mother’s vegetable garden, and I’m going to fire up the grill for dinner. Did you call to hear my itinerary? You’re not normally the itinerary sort, are you, Bean?”
Bean. She couldn’t remember why he’d started calling her that, only that he always had. And that something inside her would break forever if he ever stopped.
“I want to ask you a life question, Dad,” she said, and though her voice was pleasant enough, her heart still hurt. Walking down from Stefan’s hillside villa hadn’t helped at all.
“You’re the one gadding about in Europe. Mysteriously. Seems you have it figured out.”
She hadn’t told him—or anyone—where, precisely, in Europe she was. Because everything concerning Stefan had seemed too private. Too personal.
And because if she told them what she was doing, she would have to tell them why. Which could only lead to explaining things better left unexplained. Or, worse, coming back after a night or two and having to explain that instead.
Better not to risk any of that. “What is gadding anyway?” she asked. “No one ever says, oh, I think I’m up for a gad. Come join me in some gadding.”
“Is this one of your internet games?” She heard sounds she recognized. Her father puttering around in the kitchen. The cabinets and the fridge opening and closing as he made himself the English muffin he liked to eat every morning, getting out the honey and butter to use when the toaster made it the exact shade of tan he preferred. “You know I don’t like being recorded.”
“That was only the one time. I told you I wouldn’t do it again. And besides, you were amazing. You still have fans on my page.”
“Then my life is complete,” Bill said dryly. “Every man needs fans on a webpage.”
“Are you happy, Dad?” Indy asked before she lost her nerve. “I mean truly happy?”
There was a small pause, and Indy screwed her eyes shut. But when she did, all she could see was her dad at the kitchen window half a world away, staring out at the backyard and the woods, his brow furrowed in thought.
“Are you in trouble, Bean?” her father asked, his gruff, joking tone changed to something quieter that made the knots in her seem to swell to twice their size. “Because you know that all you have to do is say the word and your mother and I will be on the next plane. No matter where you are. Or what you’re doing.”
And something flooded her then, bright and sweet, because she knew he meant that. Her parents, who had always seemed so deeply content to be exactly where they were—who didn’t take the kind of trips their daughters did, or even their friends did, and never seemed all that interested in far off places—would think nothing of racing to her side if she needed them.
Shouldn’t she be happy with that? Why did she need more? Why did anyone need more? There were a whole lot of p
eople who didn’t even have what she did.
“I’m fine,” she hurried to assure him. “I was just thinking about what happiness really is. And you and mom always seem so content, I figured you must know.”
“You always said contentment was a fate worse than death,” her father reminded her, though he laughed when he said it. “When you were thirteen, you and your sister made solemn vows to leave this town and never come back, because neither one of you had any intention of settling. You were very sure of yourselves.”
“I’m always sure of myself, Dad.” That was true enough, but saying it out loud gave her pause. Why was she so sure? That she was bad at school. That she was shallow. That she only wanted what she knew she could get, and even then, only for a little while. She found herself rubbing at her chest again, though she already knew it wouldn’t keep her heart from aching. “But that’s why I’m calling. I’m asking what you’re sure of, for a change.”
She expected him to shrug that off. Make a little joke, maybe. Keep things light and easy.
“I think that a happy life is earned,” her father said instead, sounding...thoughtful. “Because life itself isn’t one thing or another. It’s not happy or sad. It just is. Like anything, it’s what you make of it. Your mom and I have had some hard times and we’ve had easy times. But the hard times are better, and the easy times sweeter, because of the work we put in.”
“That’s something people like to say,” Indy whispered. “Putting the work in. But they don’t ever say what it means.”
“It means you don’t let your life just happen to you, Indy,” her father said, not unkindly. “You have to live it, good and bad, boring and exciting, one day after the next. It’s not meant to be fun all the time. That isn’t to say you can’t enjoy it, but a life that’s only one thing isn’t much of a life.”
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