Page 33 of Just One More Night

Better.

What did it say about her that all she’d wanted was to finally come to Prague, to meet him here, and yet she’d run off the minute it got to be too much for her? Was she really that person? Deep down, she knew she’d woken up scared silly that first morning and had been running ever since. Because he’d touched things in her she hadn’t known were there.

Over the past two years she’d convinced herself that she’d imagined the intensity. That it had been the circumstances, not the man.

But the truth was, Stefan still felt like fate.

Like destiny.

She might like to tell anyone who asked that she was shallow and silly, but deep down, she didn’t think of herself that way. And Stefan was the only person she wasn’t related to who didn’t take her at face value. Who looked at her and saw depths. Who saw more than her body or her face or what she might look like beside him.

And she knew she should have been horrified that he’d treated her like a research project, but she wasn’t. Who else had she ever met who wanted to knowmoreabout her when they’d already had sex with her? Who refused to accept what they saw?

Even though she’d run off from his house and even though she hadn’t been faking her outrage while she’d been there, Indy knew the real truth was she liked it. All of it.

Shelikedhow intense he was, little as she knew how to handle it. He’d been that intense the first night she’d met him. Despite what she’d told herself since, she hadn’t imagined that part. And she liked what he seemed to be suggesting, that he’d been as shaken by her as she’d been by him. Maybe she just needed time to acclimate to that. To him.

To fate.

Maybe she’d needed to know that she could leave so that she could return.

Because that was what she did, climbing out of a taxi at his front door once again, and this time noticing the security pad on the wall. She let herself in with the key that still hung around her neck, finding the house as bright and sunny as she’d left it. She wandered through the beautiful rooms, amazed that a man she’d met in such a dark and gritty place had made himself a sanctuary like this one. Amazed that he felt the same way, impossibly bright when he should have been something else entirely.

She saw him standing out on the terrace, looking out over the pool toward the city in the distance with his mobile to his ear. He’d changed his clothes, putting on jeans and what looked like a well-loved red T-shirt that made the muscles in his wide back enough to weep over.

He was talking in what she assumed was Romanian when she opened the glass doors and stepped outside. He turned around, his blue gaze coming to her and staying there.

Bright and hard.

He finished his call and shoved his mobile into his pocket, then did nothing at all but regard her where she stood.

“Yes,” Indy said, as if she was making proclamations. “I’m back. I went to a bar, just as predicted. Are you happy?”

“Ecstatic.”

“I did not have sex with the numerous men I could have had sex with.” She studied him for a moment, that face carved of stone that had haunted her for years now. “I think you should take that as a statement of my intentions.”

The light in his blue eyes changed. Like a lightning storm. “I will make a note.”

“I don’t know how to do intensity, Stefan.” That sounded a little more uncertain, but Indy didn’t let that stop her. “I don’t know how to do any of this. This is not the kind of thing I do.”

“But you do, foolish girl. You have from the start.”

She blew out a breath and then crossed her arms, as if that could help her. “That’s very opaque, thank you. Anyway. Here I am. You get your night of wild intensity.”

His smile made everything in her seem to stand at attention. “No. I am afraid that is no longer on offer.”

“It’s not?” And she was... Crushed. There was no other word for it.

But he was still holding her gaze. “A night will not do it. I’m tired of these one-night games. You will give me a month, Indiana. And then we will see where we are.”

“A month?” She thought her teeth actually chattered. “I don’t know if I can.”

“You can,” Stefan told her, andhewas sure. He was commanding and certain in all things. She liked that, too. Maybe too much. “Because it is a month or nothing. Which will you choose?”

And when he put it like that, it was simple.

CHAPTER EIGHT