Page 36 of Just One More Night

“Why do you call me that? Maybe I should call youfoolish 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. “Doyou?”

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 wasdoing 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 makesmehappy.”

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 noshould. 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.