No More Sweet Surrender (11 page)

They’d discussed it on the flight back from France, when she’d sat with a throw wrapped tight around her and had avoided looking at him directly. As if she’d feared corrosion, or something far worse. They’d gone over what she should expect, what she should do. What he wanted her to do. What she should and shouldn’t say.

But he couldn’t stand the way she’d looked at him then, standing there on the tarmac, as if this was all some kind of betrayal. As if he’d done this to her. As if she hadn’t agreed to it herself.

“You could have said no, Miranda,” he’d reminded her, his voice harsher than necessary. But he hadn’t been able to stop himself. He’d seen the way she’d tensed. As if it had hurt. As if
he’d
hurt her. And he’d loathed himself anew.

“Could I?” she’d asked, that razor-sharp edge back in her voice then, and he’d found he preferred it, even as it cut deep. “After you pointed out it would make me a hypocrite either way? I think we both know you were well aware I would do exactly what you wanted me to do, even then.”

“When was this?” he’d asked in much the same way, while the heat between them roared. “I apologize, Professor. I must have missed your momentary lapse into obedience.”

Her smile then had been venomous, but he’d told himself that was better than the hurt. That terrible pain he couldn’t have fixed even if he’d wanted to—even if he hadn’t felt the lash of it himself.

“Goodbye, Ivan,” she’d said then, and climbed into the car. “May the next ten days feel like very long years.”

Ivan bit back a smile now, remembering that bite in her voice.

“I don’t think she is as easily subdued as you’d like to think,” he told Nikolai, and didn’t try as hard as he should have to keep that reluctant admiration out of his voice.

His brother’s brows lowered, as his frigid gaze moved over Ivan’s face, seeing far too much. “Then you have work to do,” he replied. “The benefit gala—”

“I know the plan,” Ivan snapped. “It was my idea, if you recall.”

“I recall it perfectly,” Nikolai said, as if he was worried. For Ivan. “Do you?”

His gaze met Ivan’s, bold and challenging. If he had been another man, Ivan would have taken that look as an invitation to a brawl. And the way he felt right now, he would have obliged, years of guilt or no. Instead, he looked away, back out the windows, furious with no outlet.

“That’s what I thought,” Nikolai said.

And Ivan had no response for him. No argument. There was only the empty sky, stretching out in all directions, and he didn’t know his own mind.

He didn’t know what he wanted.

Or, worse, he did.

* * *

Later, Ivan stood out on one of the many terraces outside the house he’d bought in Malibu not long after he’d signed on to play Jonas Dark. It was perched on a bluff overlooking the great expanse of the Pacific Ocean, almost entirely made up of glass walls, some of which simply slid aside to let the natural beauty in. The complacent California sun was sinking toward the gleaming, golden-tipped water through layers of stunning reds and deep oranges, Miranda was across a continent from him, and he felt emptier than he had in years.

He didn’t want this. He’d never wanted this. It was weakness.

She
was a weakness.

He saw her gorgeous smile, so unaffected and true, making the whole of Cannes disappear in a single flash far brighter than any of the cameras. He heard the sound of her cultured American voice, the fascinating way she put words together, the sweet sting of them. He felt her in his arms, that slight, delicious little tremor that shook through her when he touched her, her fingers laced tight with his as if keeping the kinds of promises she was afraid to acknowledge. He tasted her mouth, addictive and wild. He had a promise to keep to her, and he had every intention of doing exactly that. Again and again. And not only because it was part of his damned plan.

Ten days already felt like years, and not a one of them had passed.

I’m not done with you yet, Professor
,
he thought, as if she could hear him. As if it would change anything if she could.

“There’s something you need to see,” Nikolai said.

“I feel certain I won’t like it,” Ivan replied, turning to see his brother standing behind him like the ghost he’d become, almost blended into the shadows, almost as dark as they were.

“You won’t.”

Ivan followed Nikolai through the sprawling cliffside house to his media center, where a huge television screen dominated the whole of one wall. Nikolai pressed a few buttons on a remote control and the screen filled with Miranda, as if Ivan had conjured her into being with his thoughts alone. His terrible longing for one more thing he couldn’t have.

She looked sleek and calm, standing in front of her apartment building as if she routinely held press conferences there. As if she was happy to do so, in fact. She did not appear broken or wounded in the least. She was smiling prettily at the cameras as if she’d never been more comfortable in her life.

“This is alarming,” Ivan noted drily.

“Just wait.”

They were throwing questions at her, some speculative, some surprisingly knowledgeable, some insane. Some simply rude.

“Don’t you hate Ivan Korovin?” someone yelled at her, the braying male voice rising above the rest of the din. “Didn’t you once vow that your goal in life was to take him down?”

Miranda’s smile deepened. Became a mystery.

“There are so many ways to take a man down,” she said, that particular smile a weapon Ivan hadn’t known she carried. But he felt it all the same, like a knife to the jugular. “Aren’t there?”

They loved that. They howled at her, and Ivan hardly heard what they asked. He only saw the way she looked into the cameras and knew, without a single shred of doubt, that she was looking straight at him. He could see the challenge in her dark jade gaze, through the cameras, across the vastness of this wide country. He recognized an opponent when one stepped into his ring, then stepped to him.

Her smile hinted at wickedness, played with something naughty, yet never quite crossed over that line. It was vaguely familiar, he thought. It was very nearly masterful.

It was, he realized in sudden astonishment, his.

She’d obviously learned it from him in France, and he found himself torn between a reluctant admiration and a cold, encompassing fury that she would use it against him like this. No matter that he planned to do far worse to her.

“The barbarian was at the gate,” she said then, so very smoothly, undermining him that easily.

With that single word—
barbarian—
she reminded the world that she’d always thought he was a Neanderthal, and let them know that she, at least, still believed he was one. As if the whole world was in on the same joke with her. Ivan felt his teeth clench hard, and forced himself to breathe.

She shrugged, looking straight in the camera, her gaze clear. “So I let him in.”

He had certain promises to keep to her, Ivan thought then, that fury pumping through him and then, as it always did, turning him fiercely calculating and endlessly, diabolically patient, just as he’d always been right before he’d won another fight.

Just as he’d been before he’d crushed whatever opponent dared challenge him into an apologetic pulp.

He’d keep his promise. He’d make her scream out his name like he was her god. Like the barbarian she believed he was already. He would take great pleasure in making her pay.

And when he destroyed her, the way he’d always planned he would, he told himself he wouldn’t even care.

* * *

Miranda stepped off the plane into what was, in June, already the arid height of summer in Los Angeles. The dry heat was like a hard slap, fierce and uncompromising. The ubiquitous palm trees stretched toward the hot blue sky overhead, and the hills were toasted gold and brown, looking mellow and easy despite the temperature as they sloped into the waiting sea.

Miranda herself was determined. Resolute. France had been a disaster, she’d decided in her ten days of Ivanless solitude, and largely of her own making. She’d lost her head and then, somehow, herself. She’d let all of this become far too complicated.

It was a business deal, not a fairy tale. Fairy tales were stories for lost children, not grown women. It was time she acted like the adult she was.

“Do you think it is wise to declare war on me?” Ivan had asked her over the phone, not long after he’d left her to the paparazzi in New York City. Not long after Miranda had decided to reclaim some small part of what she’d lost. What she’d surrendered.

“You are the undefeated champion in the mixed martial arts ring and on various movie screens,” Miranda had replied coolly. “But in the court of public opinion, I think we’re tied.”

“That, Miranda,” he’d barked, “is because I have not been fighting you. Yet.”

But he couldn’t help but fight, whatever he did. And she knew him now. Better than she wanted to. So well, in fact, that it had invaded her already fractured sleep. Nightly. She woke up in the small hours, breathless. Yearning. Shaking from the aftereffects of the disturbingly passionate images that chased each other through her head, too vivid and too carnal. Too infused with longing and lust. Too real.

Dreams of Ivan chased her usual nightmares in a loop. Long-ago summer evenings mixed with the sweet Cannes breeze, Cap Ferrat shattered beneath the inevitable pain and fear, Ivan himself appeared in scenes of that same old nightmare as if he’d taken that over, too, and all of it was swept through with that wild, unshakeable
need.

None of that mattered, she told herself now, sitting quietly in the back of yet another one of Ivan’s endless fleet of cars. She stared out the window as the car drove north along the famous Pacific Coast Highway, taking her much too quickly through beach communities like Venice and Santa Monica that she knew from a thousand television programs and heading straight into the legendary heart of Malibu.

It should not have surprised her that Ivan lived in a house of glass and architectural whimsy, perched on the edge of a rocky outcropping over the mesmerizing shift and roll of the ocean. It was bold and demanding, much like the man. It did not fade into its surroundings, nor did it lord itself over them. It simply was. It commanded attention and respect.

I’m in so much trouble
, she thought as she was driven to the front door at the top of the sweeping private drive, surrounded on all sides by proudly jutting palm trees, sweet-smelling bushes of fragrant jasmine and great tangles of bougainvillea vines in magentas and purples, a riot of bright color and soft scent before the punch of that hard, cold house beyond.

The equivalent of that smile of his, the public one, and the formidable truth of him to back it up.

She climbed from the back of the car, reluctantly, and stood there for a moment as it pulled away again, headed for the separate building she assumed was the garage. She looked around as the breeze flowed in from the sea and the hills, cutting the heat, smelling of smoke and rosemary, the faint hint of eucalyptus. Salt and flowers.

She was in so much trouble.

She’d spent all of this time locked away in her apartment five flights above the busy Manhattan streets, desperately trying to distill her experience in France into cool, incisive, purely academic sentences. Trying to describe what it was like to spend all of that time in such close proximity to a man like Ivan in the detached vocabulary of her profession. Trying to write the damned book that would make all of this worthwhile.

And had instead found herself staring off into space, reliving every time he’d brushed his fingers over her neck, her hand, her cheek. Feeling it as if it was happening all over again, as if, were she to close her eyes, she would open them to find him there in front of her as if summoned by the force of her yearning, all of that dark promise burning in his eyes as he gazed at her.

It was pathetic. Not to mention dangerous.

And it didn’t matter anymore. It couldn’t. She’d been so naive—expecting that a man who’d made his life a temple to the physical wouldn’t be...incredibly, impossibly tactile. All about skin, bodies, touch. Of course he was.
Of course
he’d overwhelmed her. In retrospect, she should have known it would happen. She suspected he’d known exactly what he was doing—and she should have anticipated that, too.

But she knew now. And he couldn’t have the same effect on her if she was expecting it, could he? No matter what she felt for him. No matter what.

The air changed, then, though there was no noise. No warning. Only that ineffable, inexplicable shift. Her skin prickled. There was the slightest chill down her spine, and her stomach flipped, then knotted.

And when she turned her head, he was there.

CHAPTER NINE

I
VAN
stood in the open doorway, seeming to fill it. His arms were crossed over his mouthwateringly bare chest, his tattoos sinuous and seductive over all of that hard male flesh, his black eyes trained on her just the way she’d seen them in all of those hot, naked dreams that still moved in her, making her head spin. Or perhaps that was the ordinary, inevitable effect of Ivan standing only a few feet away wearing nothing but a pair of loose black trousers low on his hips, leaving even his feet bare.

Miranda’s mind went blank. Her body exploded into a host of reactions she would have thought meant the onset of an intense and sudden illness had she not known better. Had she not understood by now that it was him. It was all Ivan. This desert in her throat, this flood of scalding heat between her legs. This breathless whirl of sensation, this spinning wilderness in her head.

Ivan.

Their gazes clashed. Burned.

Miranda thought there should have been a storm—sudden thunder, torrents of hail, the sizzle and pop of summer lightning—but the California sky was a calm and sleepy blue all around them.

It was Ivan. He was the storm, and Miranda was terribly afraid he was already inside of her, changing her, uprooting her and destroying her, without his having to do anything more than
look
at her like that.

His hard mouth curved, though she didn’t make the mistake of thinking he was truly amused. Or even really smiling, come to that.

He lifted one of his hands and crooked his finger at her in the universal signal to come, just as he had once before in a Parisian dressing room.

Like he was some kind of Russian prince after all, beckoning the peasants near, wearing so little, wanting only her instant obedience in return.

Expecting it.

“Do you think I’ll come running?” she asked, not moving. Hardly daring to breathe. Afraid her feet would betray her of their own volition.

That curve of his mouth hardened, made her chest feel tight. “Feel free to crawl.”

Miranda reminded herself that she was brave. That she was strong. That he was, as he’d once told her himself, only a man. Not a monster, despite what she’d long wanted to believe about him. Not capable of
making war
on her unless she let him. He was only as in control of this—of her—as she allowed.

“I’ve had a long flight,” she said. She smoothed her hands down the front of her floor-length black sundress, hoping it hid her nerves but suspecting from the way he tracked the movement that it did the opposite. She pushed on anyway. “I want something to drink. Maybe a nap. I don’t have the energy for this.”

“‘This?’” he echoed, and now he did sound amused.

“You.”

Ivan’s dark eyes narrowed slightly. He didn’t move. He simply stood there like the warrior he was, and he was, she thought, the most intimidating man she’d ever seen. The most formidable. And he terrified her, but not, she’d come to understand over the past ten days, in any of the familiar ways.

Miranda made herself walk toward him. She told herself there was no need to be the least bit intimidated, and still, that thunder rolled inside of her, that lightning crackled deep beneath her skin. That storm raged inside of her, mocking the perfection of the day.

You can do this
!
she congratulated herself.
You can’t control him, but you can control yourself—

Ivan reached out again when she drew up next to him, and caught her by the elbow.

“Miranda.”

That was all. Just the lightest of touches, a brush of his hand. Her name.

But that was all it took.

The world sizzled, burned to white, then simmered red. Like everything simply burst into flame, incinerating her. Leaving her nothing but red-hot embers and that driving, incapacitating need.

For him. For
more
.

She didn’t know who moved first. Who closed the distance between them. But his mouth was on hers, hard and hot. Her hands were buried in his thick dark hair as she kissed him back, greedy and wild. There were no cameras here. No one to watch them, record them. Report back.

So there were no brakes. No boundaries. Nothing to stop the impossible rush of pure sensation.

Miranda stopped fighting and wrapped herself around that hard, tough body of his. That warrior’s physique, so roughly hewn and finely muscled. Finally, her breasts crushed into the great wall of his chest. Finally, she explored that breathtaking sweep of hot, chiseled male beauty that was his back, his waist, with her own hands.
Finally.

He kissed her like a starving man. And she was just as hungry. Just as desperate.

She felt the world tilt and spin, more than usual when he was near, and he was lifting her up, pulling her legs around his waist, then taking her mouth again.

As if she was his in every possible way.

And she exulted in it. She loved the hardness of his strong, callused hand against her cheek, giving him total control over the depth and fire of the kiss. His other hand was hot and delicious against her bottom, holding her against the hardest part of him, making her feel shivery and glazed with heat. She loved the thrust of his tongue, the press of his lips, the way he teased and took in turn. He stood there like a rock, holding her so easily, as if she was made of something as insubstantial as cotton, and that made her tremble all the more.

He was so massive. So incontrovertibly male. Sinew and muscle like marble, as if he’d been carved from stone, and yet he was so hot to the touch.
So hot.

He began to walk, still kissing her with all of that intensity, all of that insistent fire, and she was aware of only a jumble of things around her as he carried her into his house. There was blue everywhere—endless sky and sea through the glass on all sides, a huge abstract painting on a whitewashed wall. Wide-open rooms in that sleek modern style with unusual pops of color here and there.

But mostly she saw that hard face of his, taut with the same mad desire she felt eating her alive. Then everything shifted again and she was flat on her back on some kind of soft white rug near a fireplace that dominated one stark wall, and he was coming down over her with the kind of fluid ease and heart-stopping masculine grace that reminded her, forcefully, that his body was a sleek machine under his command, and he could make it do anything he wished.

Anything at all.

He stretched out beside her, running one of his hands down the length of her slowly, as if claiming her. Learning her. A languorous sweep from the side of one breast to the indentation of her waist, over the curve of her hip, then down the outside of her leg. It was like being bathed in lightning; electrified. One searing burst then another, the voltage of it jolting through her, making her close her eyes against the madness of this. The insanity.

He whispered that phrase again.
“Milaya moya.”

“I don’t think I want to know what that means,” she whispered, hardly recognizing her own voice when she heard it, so glutted was it with the wildness inside of her, the riot of the storm he’d raised. The storm that showed no sign of easing.

When she opened her eyes, she met his. Black, searing hot—and she trembled at the passion there. The stark sensual intent.

“Sweet.” His voice was a rasp in the quiet room. Like a touch all its own, another devastating caress. Something moved across his face then, almost like a kind of anguish, then was gone. “It means ‘my sweet.’”

And then he took her mouth again, demanding and possessive, and it was long moments before she realized that as he did, he was also lifting up her dress. He tugged it above her knees. Then up to her waist. The cool air moved over her flushed skin and she froze. Reality trickled back in, and with it, a sudden sharp pang of uneasiness.

“Ivan—”

But his hand was on the bare skin of her thigh, so hot, so possessive. The storm inside her raged on, and she bit her lip. Ivan shifted and looked down at her, his clever eyes searching hers.

Slowly, inexorably, his hand moved higher. He held her gaze. Watching. Waiting.

Miranda’s breath sawed in and out. Raw. Almost painful. But she didn’t say a word. She didn’t tell him to stop. She couldn’t seem to form a single syllable. It was as if he’d shorted out her brain.

His hand crept higher and he shifted again, moving down over her with that surprising, distracting grace of his, until he kissed her thigh, right next to where his hand rested, so close to the very heart of her need.

“Ivan.” It was so hard to speak. It was so hard to
feel
all of this, to feel it and not simply pass out from the pleasure. Or the deeper emotion she wasn’t equipped to handle. Or the rising panic she was struggling to ignore. She didn’t know how to feel this much—how to handle this kind of passion, this storm. “I don’t...”

“You don’t what?”

He was licking her skin, tracing a lazy path of fire along her thigh, and even as she registered the fact that he was pushing her legs apart and settling himself between them, he was there. He threw a single dark look at her, black like silk and as effortlessly seductive, intently sexual, deliciously male, and then pressed his mouth against her, hard.

As if she wasn’t wearing that tiny scrap of satin between her legs at all. As if she was already naked.

Miranda arched against him, up off the floor, the pleasure like a shock wave, coursing through her, setting her alight. She felt him in her breasts, her toes. Her skin seemed to burst into flames. He curved his hands around her bottom, holding her to him, taking her. Simply
taking
her as if she’d always been his.

She couldn’t understand how he could wreck her like this—how he could make her feel such huge, unwieldy things, so big they were crowding her out of her own body, so giant she could hardly breathe, love and lust and electric
want
—

“I don’t—”

But she was panting with that terrible, impossible need and her own slick, hot response, and he simply moved her panties out of his way, then licked his way into the center of her, where she was already molten hot and he seemed to know intuitively exactly how to drive her wild.

Exactly how to make her body arch up again, her entire being focused on the sheer mastery of that hard, perfect mouth, the things that he could do, the
things
that he was
doing—

It was too much. It was overload. Chaos. She felt strung out, lit up. How could she survive this much pleasure and still be herself? How could she be sure she would live through this at all? How could anything feel this good?

“I don’t like—”

“This?”

He did something new with his mouth, licked into her harder. Deeper. She heard a far-off scream of pleasure almost too acute to bear and only dimly understood she’d made it.

“Or this?”

He slid two long, hard fingers deep into the core of her, as if he already knew all of her secrets, as if he’d already had her a thousand times. And Miranda writhed beneath him, mindless, unable to do anything at all but feel it coming toward her, this wildness like a terror in her veins, her flesh. This impossible crisis, inexorable and his to command. Just as she was.

“I can’t—” she began.

“You can. I promised.”

And then he took the heat of her in his mouth again, performed that magic that was only his and threw her straight over the edge of the world.

* * *

That was one promise kept
, Ivan thought with deep male satisfaction as she shuddered in his arms and he had to restrain himself from simply sliding into her then and there, putting the proper end to all of this torture.

God, the ways he wanted her. He was man enough to admit, here, while she still shook herself apart in his arms, that he had wanted her long before he’d met her. That he had entertained any number of fantasies about that snooty little frown of hers that meant that overeducated brain of hers was working overtime, that entrancing sweep of dark red hair that begged for his hands, that beautiful mouth of hers that criticized him so resolutely and was so hot and wild on his.

He had barely begun to scratch the surface of those fantasies. And he was running out of time.

But he wanted her with him, every step of the way. He wanted her fully aware of it when he took her, every inch and every thrust, not blissed out with what he was fairly certain, with no little smugness, was her very first orgasm.

A feeling wholly new to him moved through him then as he looked down at her. He couldn’t recognize it. He wasn’t sure he cared to. She still breathed so heavily. Her eyes were still shut tight, her face flushed red. She was making the slightest, smallest sound; it was so close to a moan, and it made him want her even more.

He settled himself beside her, propping himself up on his elbow and drew her name on the bare skin of her arm in Russian.
Milaya moya.
His from the start, little though she might know it. And despite what was to come.

But when her eyes finally opened, that dark jade gone green, she looked distressed. Panicked. And when she focused on him, she went pale.

“No,” she said, but her voice was strained. Choked.

She pushed against him wildly and he let her go at once, going perfectly still as she rolled and then scrambled away from him. She threw herself back against the nearest bright white couch, her dark red hair and black dress a punch of color against the pale cushions, the stark room; poignant and loud. She tugged her dress down to cover her legs and then she pulled her knees up to her chest and hugged herself.

Like a scared child, not like the woman he knew. Not his bold, fearless professor, who had never met an opponent she couldn’t argue down, no matter how foolhardy that argument might be.

“Miranda.” He made his voice calm. Soothing. “What is the matter? There is nothing to be afraid of here.”

“This can’t happen,” she said in a heartbreakingly small voice, that was not in any way hers, and then she buried her head against her knees.