Page 31 of Just One More Night

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 withonetabloid.”

“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 herBristol-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.”