Page 37 of Just One More Night
“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,andsaving,anddoing 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?”