Sometimes she grinned wickedly and looked thrilled at the notion. Other days she had different reactions, not all of them positive. One morning she scowled at him, blinking the sleep out of her eyes while she did it.
“Why do you call me that? Maybe I should call you foolish man. Would you like that?”
“You can call me whatever you like,” he told her. “But you will always be my very own foolish girl, who wandered into the dark and brought me out into the light.”
And he watched, sprawled there beside her in the bed they shared, while she melted at that.
“Well.” Her voice was grumpy, but her eyes were bright and shining. “I guess it’s okay then.”
“Naked,” he reminded her.
Because naked days were all about power and surrender and all the marvelous things a man with his imagination—and the wicked delight she could never repress for long—could build between them.
“I thought you’d be like that all the time,” she panted one night, after the kind of naked day that left her so limp and boneless that he’d had to carry her upstairs, bathe her with his own hands, then put her to bed.
He did not mind these tasks, to be clear.
“Like what?” he asked.
“You know. The way you are on naked days. All the rules. All the kneeling. I assumed you’d demand to be called Master Stefan or something and go crazy with nightly spankings and all the rest of that stuff.”
He was amused. He was stretched out, propping himself up on one arm, toying with a strand of her hair while he looked down to that heart-shaped face of hers that only grew more beautiful. When surely that should have been impossible. “Is that what you want?”
“Sometimes,” Indy replied, grinning up at him. “And sometimes not.”
“You do not like a steady diet of anything, Indiana,” Stefan said in a low voice, because he knew. And sometimes she was not in the mood to hear all the things he knew. He tugged on the lock of her hair, gently enough. “You thrive on variety. But then, so do I.”
“You’re the one with a big house full of art. You must like some steadiness in your diet.”
He smoothed his hand over her face, her soft cheeks, where heat from her bath still lingered.
“I like you, foolish girl,” he said, though he knew he should not have. “Have I not made that clear?”
She smiled at him, though he thought he saw shadows in her gaze. “I’m not really a dietary staple. I’m more of an occasional dessert.”
“I like dessert, too,” he offered.
But she laughed and ran a hand over his chest, then down over his ridged abdomen. “Do you?”
The days passed. Stefan watched her, closely. He expected her to show signs of claustrophobia. To act as if it was sheer torture to stay in one place, with one man, for so long. He wasn’t sure she’d ever tried before. He anticipated that she would make it clear she was doing him a favor.
And yet, as one week became another, and another, if Indy was restless she failed to show it.
“I asked my father about happiness,” she told him one afternoon. “I wanted to know if he was as happy as it seems he is.”
They sat in the shade outside, beneath a trellis draped in blooming roses. He was working on his laptop while she curled up beside him, reading a book in between her dips in the pool. Not naked, sadly. It seemed the tiny little bright yellow bikini she wore was, apparently, one of the surprising number of items she’d managed to roll up and stick in that tiny pack of hers.
“I never needed to ask my father such a question,” he had replied, not looking up from his screen. “I already knew the answer. It was his fist, preferably connecting with my face.”
“I guess I can understand that,” she said with a quiet ferocity. “Because I’d very much like to plant my fist in his face. And imagining it makes me happy.”
He looked up then, entertained and touched in equal measure that his carefree, relentlessly nonjudgmental Indy had it in her to sound so bloodthirsty. Much less on his behalf.
“He died as he lived, never fear,” Stefan assured her. “As we all must.”
Indy had her book open in her lap and she turned it over then, frowning at him. “In a way, that’s what my father said. But how can you tell if you’re living life the way you should be?”
“There is no should. There are only the choices you make in each moment, strung together to make a day. A week. And sooner or later, a life that is the sum of its parts.”
There was the sound of the breeze rustling through the trees. Lawn mowers growled in the distance while up above them, birds sang and bees hummed. But Indy didn’t return to her reading.
“The thing is,” she said after a moment, haltingly, “I never saw myself in competition with Bristol. It was so important to her that she be the smart one. And if she was the smart one, then I got to be the pretty one.” She blew out a breath. “For a long time, that was all I really wanted.”
“I’ve seen your sister,” he said, though Indy knew that already. She called her sister daily and had told him, with glee, that she was responsible for her sister becoming girlfriend to Lachlan Drummond, the billionaire who couldn’t seem to keep his face out of the tabloids. The same tabloids that featured Indy’s sister, now—and that she liked to brandish at him. “Whether she is smarter or not, I couldn’t say. But she is also pretty. Surely you both know this.”
“She’s gorgeous, obviously. Hello. She’s my sister.” She smiled while she said that, but it faded. She toyed with the spine of her book. “It seems silly now. But for some reason, back when we were kids, it seemed absolutely crucial that we choose. We had to make sure that there was always a critical and obvious distance between us. Bristol disappeared into her books. And I...”
For a moment it seemed as if she didn’t intend to go on.
“And you?” Stefan asked.
To his surprise, she flushed slightly. “I did what I always do. I flitted around from group to group. I was everybody’s best friend, but they were never mine. I kissed all kinds of boys, even before my fateful relationship with Jamie Portnoy.” She shook her head. “If anyone had asked, I would’ve sworn on a stack of Bibles that I was a born extrovert.”
He had a sense of where this was going now, but he only waited, sitting back to better watch her lovely face as she spoke. And to enjoy the way she used her hands as emphasis, drawing pictures in the air.
Stefan wanted to tell her that already, she had bloomed here. That the frenetic edge to her was gone, because she didn’t have to plan her quick escape. Because living as they were, only the two of them in this house, it was impossible to maintain any kind of performance. He had seen her in all kinds of moods. The ones she would cheerfully admit as well as the ones she pretended she didn’t have. He’d held her when she sobbed at a movie, then pretended she hadn’t. He held her when she sobbed out her pleasure, then gave it back to him tenfold.
They woke every morning tangled around each other, as if in sleep they instinctively wanted nothing but to get closer.
Indy had not retreated from any of this. She had not run.
“But for weeks now,” she was saying, frowning at the roses, “I’ve been here. With you and all these books. I think I forgot how much I like to read. And how, if things had been different, I might have liked to disappear into books, too.”
“I’m glad,” he said, and meant it. ”You should.”
She shifted, turning her body so she could hold his gaze. “But I was really good stripping, Stefan.”
He laughed. “This I believe.”
“It was fun. And I mean really fun. Maybe partly because I was actually paying for college, and saving, and doing something illicit at the same time. You may not know this about me—” and her eyes sparkled as she gazed at him “—but I really do kind of love it when people try to shame me for the things
I enjoy.”
“Shame does not sit well on you, Indiana.” He wanted to reach for her, but checked himself. Because once again, this was not a sexual moment. He felt something more like sacred, and he was determined that he would honor it. “I am glad of that, too.”
And she didn’t have to tell him that they were only his, these moments that were all the more intense because they were not about sex. He could feel it in his bones.
“I stopped going to classes in college because I liked them too much.” Her voice was solemn, then, as if she was making a painful confession. Her eyes lost some of that sparkle. Stefan still waited. “I was getting an A in one class, so I made sure to skip out on the final because it was half my grade. And I had already made my choice, hadn’t I?” She searched his face for a moment. “How did you know that? Because you knew that, didn’t you?”
“I suspected.”
“No one else has ever thought there was anything more to me than a good fuck,” Indy said, her voice hardly above a whisper. “Not even me.”
He picked her up then. He hauled her into his lap and held her there, smoothing one hand over her damp hair and then holding her face tipped up to his so there could be no evasion. No hiding.
“There is much more to you than that,” he told her, his voice nearly a growl. He reached between her legs, beneath the damp scrap of her bathing suit, and found her molten hot. Swollen with need, as always. “Your pussy is one of the great wonders of this world, Indiana. But it is only an addiction because it’s yours.”
He stroked her, playing with her slippery folds and circling her clit until she moaned.
She bucked against him, her breath feathering out. “I’ve spent my whole life hiding, but you saw right through me. I still don’t understand how.”
“You understand.”
Stefan held her clit between his thumb and forefinger, pinching it in time with her pants. When she moaned again, he twisted his wrist and plunged two fingers deep inside her clinging heat.
“You called me into the light,” he growled. “But I found you in the dark. We fit together, two halves of a whole. There was no possibility that you could ever be anything but exactly who you are, not if this was to work. Beautiful, yes. Uninhibited and remarkably sexy, always. I will never get enough of you but even if this—” and he sped up the rhythm of his thrusting fingers, loving the way she clung to him, her fingers digging into him, her eyes half closed “—went away, even if I could never fuck you again, it would change nothing.”
“Bullshit,” she whispered.
He pulled his hand away, then laughed when she glared at him.
“Who do you want to be, Indy? It’s no longer a choice you made as a child. It doesn’t matter how you spent your years. We are here now. What do you want to be here?”
She was breathing heavily, her gaze something almost like hostile as she stared back at him—but Stefan knew that had more to do with the fact he hadn’t let her come.
“I will tell you what I know in only these short weeks,” he said. “You have spent no time at all maintaining your online life. I never see you huddled in a corner, scrolling through your phone, certain you’ve missed something. You seem genuinely happy. Maybe the trouble is that you don’t believe it.”
He saw her sit with that. And saw, too, that she didn’t like the weight of it.
“The trouble,” she said solemnly, “is that you are not inside me.”
“You know how to fix that,” he growled at her.
And when she went to straddle him, he turned her around. She pulled her bikini to one side as she wriggled against him, arching her back as he pulled out his cock so he could slam himself inside her.
For a moment the sheer wonder of it swept over him. Her too, he knew. They both paused, reveling in that impossible fit.
She might think it was this house. His art collection, or this new, pretty life he’d made for himself. But Stefan knew the truth.
His home was her.
But that wasn’t something he intended to tell her. Not yet. He wrapped one arm around her middle, holding her as he began to pound into her. He turned her head so he could take her mouth, because there weren’t enough ways to taste her.
There never would be. Not in a lifetime.
Maybe more.
And then he showed her what he could not put into words, and fucked them both home.
CHAPTER NINE
“I’M TRYING TO decide what my great passion in life is,” Indy announced one morning into her mobile, and wasn’t surprised when Bristol, off in some or other city on her world tour with Lachlan Drummond, laughed.
“I thought that was obvious,” Bristol said. “Isn’t it?”
Indy had been on her way toward the kitchen when she’d been sidetracked by her current favorite room in Stefan’s house. She’d left her book in here yesterday and when she’d come in to retrieve it, had sat down and called Bristol. Her favorite room in the house changed by the day. This one was arranged around a white-bricked fireplace, with only a few throw rugs and a deep red painting to break up the color scheme.
It appealed to her sense of drama.
“Thank you, asshole, but I like sex for fun, not for profit.” She let out a theatrical sort of sigh because she knew it would make her sister roll her eyes. “Believe me, if I felt otherwise, I’ve had ample opportunity to take up sex work.”
That was all too true. She’d been offered all kinds of fascinating positions. Some people wanted her to be a dominatrix. Others thought she should lean into the erotic dancing. Or try the yacht-girl thing at Cannes and see if she could make that into an enterprise. One of the women she’d met in the South of France had told her frankly that these days, the internet made it so easy to conduct a personal escort service without having to cut anyone else in, that any woman who didn’t make money that way was a fool.
Indy had found all of these offers and suggestions fascinating. Surely it said something kind of fabulous about her that so many people thought she could make money from an act she would have done anyway—and for free?
Anyway, she had always chosen to take it as a compliment. No matter how it was meant.
“I would ordinarily express dismay at that sentiment,” Bristol said, sounding... Not happy. Not sad either, but almost... Rueful. “But you know. Pot meet kettle and there I am in the middle.”
“Signing a contract to be somebody’s girlfriend isn’t sex work,” Indy said loyally. “Not really.”
“I think you’ll find it is.”
“Not at all.” Indy waved a hand at Stefan’s white fireplace, as if her sister could see her. “It’s nothing more than a prenuptial agreement for a relationship that isn’t a marriage. Totally socially acceptable.”
“I’ll let Mom know then. She’ll be so proud.”
“Sometimes,” Indy said, in a confiding way, “I’m pretty much positive that Mom and Dad might just be bigger freaks than we think. We had to come from somewhere. And maybe there’s a reason they’ve always been perfectly happy to stay home and settle in to that Ohio life. Why bother going out when you have everything you could possibly desire right there with you already?”
“Ew. What? No.”
“I’m telling you—I think they have a rollicking—”
“Anyway,” Bristol said loudly, cutting her off. “Why are you interested in finding a passion? I thought you always had all the passion a girl could need or want. I thought you liked it that way.”
“Men are a passion of mine, it’s true,” Indy said lightly, because it was expected.
But a bolt of something far more complicated than need went through her as she said it, because when was the last time she’d thought about men in a general sense? She only thought about one man now. And for the past two years, really. Only and always, something in her whispered.
Even as she thou
ght that, she was aware that it wasn’t how she operated. She would have said she didn’t have that kind of possessiveness in her, but she held on to it anyway. As if it was something precious.
Only and always didn’t scare her.
Which, really, was the scariest thing yet.
“Your passion was always academics,” she said to her sister, trying to shake that off...whatever it was. But her hand found its way to her heart and stayed there. “I don’t really think that a meaningful life is built on an unquenchable thirst for socializing. We can both agree that I’ve tried.”
“You tell me, Indy,” Bristol said. “You’ve had a million temp jobs in the last year alone.”
That shouldn’t have stung. She told herself that the fact it did meant only that she was tired. And who wouldn’t be tired? The kind of demands Stefan liked to make could take whole nights to work out.
Especially because he liked to take it slow.
She shivered. “Yes, yes,” she said into her phone. “I can never settle down. I’m not serious. Lack of responsibility, careless and undependable, blah blah blah.”
“I didn’t mean that as a dig.” Bristol’s voice was even, and again, faintly rueful. “In a way, I’m envious. You’ve had the opportunity to try on a hundred different lives without having to commit to any of them. Did none of them appeal to you at all?”
“I guess I didn’t think of them as trying on lives,” Indy said, considering. “Maybe I should have. They were just jobs that I could leave whenever I wanted. It never occurred to me that someday, I might want... I don’t know. A career. Or at least a purpose.”
There was a long silence. Indy found herself sitting up straighter, her heart pounding. Because she’d just admitted something, hadn’t she? Whether she meant to or not.
Something she hadn’t admitted to herself before.
“And what exactly has prompted all of this fascinating speculation?” Bristol asked after a moment, sounding far more intrigued.
Bristol was stubbornly refusing to ask what exactly Indy was doing, and where, despite Indy breezily saying things like I’m summering on the Continent, Bristol. As you do.
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