Page 9 of Just One More Night

Indy had impatiently waited out her two years. She had kept herself limber.

And now she was ready.

She left the café with only twenty minutes to go before the meeting time. The gorgeous old city gleamed bright in the summer sun, but all she could think about was the house up in the hills that she’d stared at on Google Maps a thousand times.

Indy took a cab out of Prague proper, crossing the river and scaling the hills into a neighborhood she’d read a lot about, these past two years. Upscale. Quiet. Wealthy.

Her heart was going wild in her chest and she pressed the heel of her palm hard against it, feeling something like giddy that this was finally happening. She knew that if she’d told anybody what she was doing, they not only would have told her something was wrong with her, they would have tried to talk her out of coming here today. They certainly would have tried to impose their grubby reality all over what she knew was her destiny.

Her older sister in particular, bless her.

The cab dropped her off in front of the correct address, a house that sprawled over a sizable piece of property right on the road. Indy pulled out her key and walked toward the door, unable to hear anything but the way her blood rushed through her. She thrust it into the lock on the front door, held her breath, and turned it.

The bolt clicked open.

Indy pushed her way inside, having absolutely no idea what to expect, but aware that she was no longer holding her breath. Because the key worked.It worked.She hadn’t let herself think about what she would do if it hadn’t. She slipped it back over her neck as she shut the door behind her, taking comfort in the familiar weight between her breasts.

Inside, the house seemed light and airy—or possibly that was just the foyer she stood in that soared upward to a set of skylights. She could hear music playing, something smoky and instrumental, and her impressions of the house seemed to shudder into her from afar. Clean. Nearly stark, were it not for the odd pieces of intriguing art set here and there. Or the surprisingly ornate banister of the grand stair directly in front of her.

She followed the music through a sitting room on the same floor that opened into another, nearly blinding her with all its great windows that looked down over Prague and the Vltava River that cut through it.

But the music wasn’t coming from those rooms or the bright gallery beyond, so she kept going. She wound her way down a hall until she came to a study at the end of it, drenched in the same sunlight.

And froze, because he was there.

Stefan sat in an armchair next to a bookcase, far more beautiful—and brutal—than she’d recalled. His poetic blue eyes came to hers. Held.

And she was sure she heard some kind of thunderclap in the distance.

It still felt like fate.

Better still, that gaze of his on hers felt like a command.

Indy only realized then—as she started moving toward him, unable to tear her gaze from his—that she hadn’t been afraid that hewouldn’tbe here. That hadn’t really worried her. But she had been afraid that hewouldbe here—but that she wouldn’t feel this again.

That she wouldn’t feel all this heat and glory, greed and longing.

This sense of coming home in a strange place.

And through it all, fate making them one.

The way she knew they had always been meant to be.

As if she’d been built for him alone.

Indy kept moving until she stood before him. She shrugged off the small backpack she wore and tossed it aside. Then she sank down on her knees, there before his outstretched legs, and smiled up at him as if he’d given her the world.

Maybe she thought he had.

Already.

“Finally,” she whispered, gazing up at him.

“Finally,” Stefan agreed, with a voice like gravel and a hard, bright light in his gaze that made her feel like she might be shimmering. Inside and out. “We can begin.”

CHAPTER THREE

STEFANROMANESCUWASnot a man of faith.