Page 25 of Just One More Night

She took a nap in the early evening, flushed and warm in that bed upstairs while he tended to business concerns that couldn’t wait. Later, after she woke, he drove them down into Prague so they could walk through Old Town and sit in one of the restaurants opened up to the summer night. In public, where there was no possibility that she could revert to nakedness or sex when she wanted to change the subject.

That it also tortured him was worth it, because he could see—as the color climbed her cheeks and her eyes got brighter—that being forced to simply sit there andtalk to himwas driving her crazy.

“Have you been to Prague before?” he asked sedately when she looked as if she might be considering starting a scene to divert his attention.

“I came through twice during my two years of travel,” she said, squirming in her chair. Stefan knew full well that she was wet and ready. And more, that the prospect of this long dinner stretching before them was sending her over the edge.

Good. He hoped it did. He doubted Indy would be any quieter than that famous movie scene.

“Only twice? Some people would stay here forever if they could.”

“I would always think I’d found the perfect place,” she said, her smile taking on a slight edge. “Every place I go, I’m sure it’s the one. But then I go somewhere else. I meet someone else. And I fall in love all over again.”

He opted not to take the bait. “So nowhere is home, then?”

She squirmed again, taking a long pull from her water glass. “I guess when I think of home I still default to Ohio, but it’s not reallymyhome. It’s my parents’ home. My sister and I vowed we would get out as soon as we could, and we did. And I haven’t lived there in a million years. I complain when I have to go back, the way I do every Christmas. But still. You say home, and that’s still what I think.”

“What makes it home?”

Indy sighed, and he thought he could see the very moment she remembered that she didn’t like to share anything but her body. “Do you have a home?”

“No,” he said. “I grew up in various Romanian cities. Bucharest, mostly. But none of the places I lived werehome. I don’t fall in love with places.”

“That makes me sad.” She was tracing patterns on the side of her water glass. Around them, tourists talked loudly, languages blending together on the warm night air. “That’s the whole point of travel, as far as I am concerned.”

“But I did not travel as you did.” His smile was harder, then. “Flitting about the globe, finding myself in questionable pop-up clubs in dark, dangerous cities. This was not available to me.”

“Budapest isn’t all that dangerous.”

“There is no place in the world that is not dangerous if you are a pretty, careless girl,” he retorted. “As you discovered.”

But she only rolled her eyes at him. “The world is the world. I refuse to live in fear. If you assume goodness, most of the time, goodness is what you’re going to get.”

“That or guns to your head when you walk down the wrong alley.”

Indy shrugged. “That’s my case in point. A gun really was to my head and yet here I am, wined and dined in beautiful Prague for my trouble.”

“I think you know better.”

“What about you?” she asked, her dark gaze on his with more heat than he thought she meant to show him. “If the world is so dangerous, surely you should be walking around with an armed guard.”

“Not in the Czech Republic. It is not necessary.” Stefan didn’t quite smile. “There are some places it would not be wise for me to go, and so I will not go to them. But I am the reason pretty young things should not venture into alleys in the first place. I am not afraid of the world so much as it is afraid of me. And rightly.”

She studied him. “I can’t decide if you want me to be afraid of you or if you just like boasting about how mad, bad, and dangerous you are.”

“I think you should be afraid of me, Indiana,” he said quietly. “And I do not boast.”

“You’ve never seemed particularly dangerous to me. Sorry. I feel like I would have seen it by now.”

“But that is where you are wrong,” Stefan told her. “It is you who are in the most danger.”

For a moment, her gaze clung to his.

But then she waved her hand, picked up her menu, and let that roll away too, as if what he’d said was sheer nonsense. Maybe she wanted it to be.

He knew better.

After they ate and left the restaurant, she took his hand. She linked her fingers with his in a gesture that he told himself felt as foolish as the rest, but he didn’t disengage. Then she led him out into the cobbled streets of Old Town Prague, tugging him along through the crowds until they became a part of the same great energy of the ancient city on a clear summer night, like so many before them. Like everyone around them.