No More Sweet Surrender (2 page)

After all, he thought with a certain grimness, he owed her. She’d been making his life difficult for going on two years now. Was there any name she hadn’t called him? Any lie she wasn’t prepared to tell to make her point, no matter what it cost him? Her voice echoed in his ears even now, painting him in the worst possible light, turning public opinion against him, announcing to anyone who would listen that he was exactly the kind of monster he’d spent his life fighting—

Oh, yes. He owed her.

“What,” she asked, her voice dripping with a mix of ice and fury, as if he was nothing more than a naughty student misbehaving in one of her classes, as if she was unaware of her own peril, “was
that
?”

“Did I startle you?” he asked idly, as if fighting off deep boredom. As if he’d already half forgotten her. It made her dark eyes glint green with outrage. “I thought it best to act swiftly.”

She moved up from her seat and on to her feet. She was not one of those drearily serious American women who feared heels, apparently. Hers were sleek and sharp and at least three inches high, and she looked entirely too comfortable in them as she stood there with a certain bravado meant, he knew, to tell him without words that she refused to be dominated by him.

But it was too late. He knew she tasted like fire.

“You grabbed me,” she bit out with that same controlled flash of temper that made him think of long, icy winters. And how they melted into summer, all the same. “You manhandled me. You...”

Her face flushed then, and Ivan found himself unaccountably fascinated by the stain of red that worked its way from her smooth cheeks down to her elegant neck. Kisses could lie, he knew. But not that telltale flush of color, making her eyes glitter and her breath come quicker. He couldn’t look away.

“Kissed you,” he affirmed.

He should not find an opponent
fascinating
. Especially not
this
opponent, who had judged him so harshly and unfairly condemned him years ago. This particular opponent whose well-timed, perfectly placed barbs always seemed to hit at exactly the right moment to make him seem like some kind of deranged comic book character—hardly the reputation he wanted to have when he needed to use his celebrity brand to bolster his brand-new charity foundation. He certainly should not make the fatal mistake of noticing she was a woman, and far more compelling than simply a voice of dissent.

“That is true,” he said darkly. “I did all of those things.”

“How dare you?”

“I dare many things.” He shrugged. “As I believe you have noted in nauseating detail in your cable television interviews.”

She glared at him, and Ivan took the opportunity to study this nemesis of his from up close. She was made up of those delicate bones and graceful, patrician lines that made his blood sing, entirely against his will. She was tall for a woman, and slim, though nothing like the kind of skinny he had been too poor for too long to associate with anything but desperation. But he could see, now, that she was neither as fragile nor as brittle as he’d assumed. Her hair was a long, sleek fall of a very dark red, captivating and unusual next to those mysterious eyes. The dark trouser suit she wore was both professional and decidedly, deliciously feminine, and he found himself reliving the brief, sweet crush of her small yet perfectly rounded breasts against his chest when he’d kissed her.

It was the closest he’d come to pure
want
in longer than he could remember.

He told himself he hated it.

“Dmitry Guberev is a remarkably unpleasant man who thinks his new money makes him strong,” Ivan said curtly, deeply annoyed with himself. “He had a very short, very pathetic career as a fighter in Kiev, and is now some kind of fight promoter. I convinced him to leave you alone in the only way he was likely to understand. If you choose to take offense at that, I can’t stop you.”

“By telling him I’m
yours
?” The icy emphasis she put on the last word poked at him, made him want to heat her up—and he knew how, now, didn’t he? He knew exactly how to kiss her, how to taste her, how to angle his mouth over hers for a wilder, better fit. “How medieval. Your
what
, may I ask?”

“I believe he thinks you are my lover,” Ivan said silkily, testing out the word on his tongue even as he tested the idea in his head, and despite the fact he knew it was as insane as it was impossible. Self-sabotage at its finest. This woman was poison. But he couldn’t seem to stop goading her, even so. “Not my goat.”

“I didn’t ask you to charge in on your white horse and save me,” she said, her fascinating gaze a shade or two darker, which Ivan took to be the remnants of that same fire he couldn’t seem to put out of his head. Her cultured American voice remained smooth.

She sounded like those dark gray pearls she wore in an elegant loop around her neck, smooth and supple and expensive, impossibly aristocratic. She was well out of the reach of a desperately poor kid who’d grown up hard in Nizhny Novgorod when it was still known as Gorky, the Russian word for
bitter—
which was precisely how he recalled those dark, cold years. Maybe that was why she got beneath his skin; it had been a long time now since anyone had dismissed him the way this woman did. He didn’t like it.

Or, he reminded himself pointedly, her.

“I didn’t need your help,” she continued, all offended dignity, as if he hadn’t seen that look in her eyes in the moment before he’d involved himself. As if he hadn’t seen that painfully familiar flash of something too much like helpless misery wash over her expressive face.

But she wasn’t his responsibility, he told himself now. She had made herself his enemy, and he should remember that above all things.

“Perhaps not.” He shrugged as if it was no matter to him, which, in fact, it shouldn’t have been. “But I know Guberev. He is an ugly little man, and he would have done far worse if I had not stepped in.” His brows rose in challenge. “How are your arms where he grabbed you, Professor? Do they hurt?”

She looked confused for a moment, as if she hadn’t yet taken the time to catalogue her own pains. She slid her hands up over her arms, hugging herself gently, and the idea of Guberev’s marks on her skin, Ivan discovered as she winced slightly, bothered him. A lot.

“I’m fine,” she said. She dropped her hands back to her sides, shifted her weight from one foot to the other, and Ivan had spent too much of his life reading body language not to understand that she was far less composed than she appeared. He shouldn’t have taken any kind of satisfaction in that, either. “And while I appreciate your urge to help, if that’s what it was, you’ll understand that I can’t condone the method you used.”

“It was extreme, perhaps,” he allowed. It was certainly that. Why had he kissed her? Like so many bullies, Guberev was at heart a coward, as Ivan well knew, having been forced to contend with the slimy little man in the mixed martial arts world for years. What Guberev might want to do to a weaker creature like this woman, given the chance, he would not dare to do in the presence of someone stronger. That Ivan was there should have been enough. Why had he taken it further? “But effective.”

“Effective for whom?” she asked, that smooth voice finally betraying her tension. “You may have single-handedly derailed my entire career. I can only assume that was your goal. What better way to undermine the things I say about you than to render me no more than one of the sexual playthings you famously run through like water?”

As if he had to fight like that, dirty and underhanded. He was Ivan Korovin. He was a champion and a movie star and neither by accident, despite her insinuations. He’d put in hours upon hours of grueling training to become the fighter he was. He’d become fluent in English and had minimized his accent within three years of leaving Russia. He did not
undermine
. He preferred the direct approach. He was famous for it, come to that.

“Did you become one of my sexual playthings?” he asked darkly. “I feel certain I would remember it.”

“Let’s be clear,” she said, her voice under that smooth control of hers once more, which made him want to throw her off balance again, somehow. “I study you. You’ve spent your entire professional life strategically taking down your opponents, one after the next, without admitting the possibility of defeat.”

He told himself the new color on her cheeks then was a result of the same stark and wild images that were currently torturing him, and had nothing to do with her
study
of him, as if he was an animal in a zoo. That wicked mouth of hers, slick and addictive. That damnable fire. Her long, graceful limbs wrapped around him. How could he find her so attractive when he knew she would destroy him in an instant, if she could? When she had already done her best to do so? But reason had nothing to do with the heat that rocketed through him. He wanted to sink his fingers into the dark fire of her hair and hear her scream his name as she came all around him, hot and wet and
his
.

Ivan despaired of himself.

“You are often called an unstoppable force,” she said crisply, her chin rising as if she expected a fight, as if she thought that simple truth was an insult. “It doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to conclude that you saw a way to cut me down, too. And jumped at the chance.”

“I can find your work interesting, Dr. Sweet,” he said, sick of himself as he tried to force the seductive, distracting images from his head, “even if I completely disagree with it. And I can disagree with it without concocting wild strategies to discredit you. I wanted to help you. I would have helped anyone in the same position. I’m sorry if you find that offensive.”

She studied him for a moment, her fine brows lowered into a frown. He had that dislocating sense of being measured and found wanting, another unpleasant reminder of his unfortunate youth, his desperate, determined climb to fame. He had to take a breath, control his response, keep himself calm. Lucky for her that he had made an art of it.

“Life is not an action movie, Mr. Korovin,” she said in her cool, professorial voice, as if she was rendering judgment from high on some podium instead of standing right there in front of him, within reach, her lips still slightly reddened from his. “You cannot sweep in, kiss a woman without her permission and expect accolades. You are far more likely to find yourself slapped with a harassment suit.”

“Of course,” he replied in that bored tone that made temper kick bright and hard in her dark jade gaze. A better man might not find the sight exhilarating. “Thank you for reminding me that I am currently in the most litigious country on earth. The next time I see you in the path of a truck, be it human or machine, I’ll let it mow you down where you stand.”

“I can’t imagine our paths will ever cross again,” she retorted, all elegant affront, which only made that dark current of
want
in him intensify. He’d felt her against him, meltingly pliant. Her heat. Her fire. He knew the truth, now, behind her high-class, overeducated front. Behind the cool way she’d ripped him into shreds for years now with every appearance of delight. It burned in him. “For which I am profoundly grateful. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go perform some damage control, since the whole world saw me let some macho Hollywood hulk kiss me in—”

“Be honest, Professor,” he interrupted her. “If you dare.”

His gaze met hers. Held. And he wasn’t amused or fascinated or anything that distant, suddenly. It was as if she’d woken that part of him he’d thought long buried with her cool disdain and her quiet horror at his touch—like he’d polluted her somehow. Like he was one of the very monsters he fought against. As if everything that hung in the balance here didn’t matter anymore, save the very real response he’d tasted on her lips.

He knew fire when it burned him. God help them both.

“You kissed me back,
milaya moya
,” he said softly, feeling the kick of it when her cheeks stained red again, the truth right there, written across her fair skin, his to use against her as he wished.

And that was the problem.
He wished
.

His brows arched high, daring her to deny it. Daring her to lie to him, to his face, when he knew better. “And you liked it.”

CHAPTER TWO

F
INALLY
!
Miranda thought in relief as she arrived back at her hotel room in Georgetown much later that evening.
You can drop the act.

She let the heavy door slam shut behind her, and entertained the notion that she was ill instead of...thrown. But she knew better. She locked the door and then leaned back against it, sliding all the way down to the ground, hugging her knees to her chest and burying her head against them.

She didn’t cry. Not quite. She didn’t weep over the bruises on her upper arms, or the fact they throbbed slightly now. She thought about how scared she’d been one minute, and then how off balance and confused, if inexplicably safe, the next. She thought about that damned kiss and her wild response, and how little she understood what had happened to her when Ivan Korovin had touched her. She thought about what
out of control
meant, and how unacceptable that was for her. She didn’t let out the old, terrified sobs that she’d thought she’d put behind her so long ago, though she could feel them clawing at her throat, insistent at the back of her eyes.

She squeezed her eyes shut tight, she fought for breath, and then she simply sat there and held herself for a very long time. If she sat still long enough, maybe the nightmares wouldn’t come this time. Maybe she could think them away.
Maybe.

She’d made it through the rest of her day on autopilot. She’d taped a segment on school bullying with one cable news channel and had suffered through an early dinner with her literary agent, who was in town to wrangle a loudmouthed politician’s ex-wife into a book deal and who had eyed Miranda with what looked like pity when she’d tried to discuss her work.

“The truth is,” Bob had said baldly over his filet, “you need to come up with something sexy as a follow-up to
Caveman Worship.
Nothing you’ve mentioned tonight is sexy.”

Which was his obnoxious way of telling her that her publisher had rejected her latest book proposal.

And as she’d sat there at dinner, pretending she found this latest rejection a delightful intellectual challenge instead of another crushing defeat, what had really bothered Miranda was that she hadn’t been able to regulate her temperature. Too hot, too cold, like some impossible fever—and she couldn’t get Ivan Korovin’s frank midnight gaze out of her head. The way he’d
looked
at her, as if she was dessert and he wanted to indulge. Like he’d been imagining doing it right then and there in the conference hotel lobby, no matter what barely civilized things he might have said.

How could one man make her feel safe and out of control at the same time?

Eventually, the worst of the storm passed. She leaned her head back against the door and blew out a long breath. She kicked off her shoes and tied her long hair back into a low ponytail, wishing she’d booked herself on the train back to her home in New York City tonight. She’d planned to sleep in the following morning and then head back to her office on the Columbia University campus, where she’d taught since being awarded her Ph.D. there three years ago, reinvigorated from the conference and plotting out how she’d use what she’d learned in her latest article.

She hadn’t planned on that awful Guberev. Much less Ivan Korovin.

Or that devastating mouth of his.

A long, hot bath will do the trick,
she told herself now, rubbing her hands over her face, trying to banish all of her ghosts. Old and new. All those nightmares in the making.
Along with a nice big glass of wine.

This was nothing more than a delayed reaction to Guberev and the sickeningly familiar sensations he had unleashed within her. And all of those memories of her childhood—but that was nothing Miranda particularly wanted to confront head-on tonight.

Unbidden, then, she remembered the way Ivan Korovin, of all people, had pulled her against him. So gently. So easily. He hadn’t been what she’d expected, what she’d imagined him to be. What she’d spent a lot of airtime telling people he was. That rich, dark voice, like the finest chocolate, that had seemed to warm her no matter how cold the words he used. That stern, black gaze of his that had seen too much. The way he’d held her, as if she was precious enough to save. As if she really was his. That had been dizzying enough. And then that kiss...

She sank down on the soft bed that took up most of the efficient room—almost involuntarily, as if his kiss was still
that potent
in her memory. She was obviously more shaken up than she’d thought. She remembered that she’d switched her phone off before her segment earlier and pulled her bag to her now, rummaging through the outside pocket. Finding her cell phone, she powered it up and sat there, waiting, flexing her bare, stiff toes into the carpeted floor beneath her and staring out the window into the Georgetown night.

Breathe
, she ordered herself. But she couldn’t seem to pull in a deep enough breath, and all she could see was that considering gleam in Ivan’s midnight gaze. Something licked in her then, dark and secret, and she felt herself flush with an unwelcome heat. She told herself she was overtired.

She glanced down at her phone as the welcome screen appeared, and watched as the tiny icon noting the number of missed calls appeared.

And rose.

And kept rising.

Next to it, another icon showing her number of emails did the same. Ten. Twenty. Thirty-five. Forty. Her heart began to beat fast and hard, as if to match.

Miranda was still frowning down at the phone in her hand when the room phone shrilled loudly from the bedside table. She jumped, and that was when she noticed that the red light on the hotel phone was blinking, too, indicating even more messages to go along with the mounting numbers on her cell phone.

Fifty. Sixty-two.

Her heart gave a great thump in her chest. Then again. The hotel phone shrilled insistently. Feeling shaky again, and not sure why or what, exactly, she was afraid of, she forced herself to lean over and snatch it up.

“Hello?”

“Professor.”

It was Ivan Korovin, as if she’d conjured him with her wayward thoughts. She flushed hot and hated herself for it, but she would know that voice anywhere. The erotic flavor of his native Russian, that commanding tone that was purely his. It snaked through her, wrapping around her, pulling tight inside and out. She couldn’t think of a single reason why this man should be calling her. Something pulsed, hard and hot and deep in her belly, and she hated herself for that, too.

“We have nothing to discuss,” she said, proud of herself for sounding so calm. So in control. She glanced down at her phone and swallowed. Seventy-three. Eighty-nine. What was going on?

“On the contrary,” he said, and the tone he used then made her realize somewhat belatedly that there were layers of steel to him, ruthlessness and authority, that he’d been holding in reserve before.

“We have a great deal to discuss,” he continued in the kind of tone that suggested he expected nothing less than swift and immediate obedience, from her and anyone else hapless enough to stumble into his path. Hadn’t he spoken in much the same tone to Guberev? “My car is waiting for you downstairs.”

“I can’t imagine what would make you think I’d go anywhere with you,” she said almost conversationally, as if she didn’t feel the obviously insane urge to simply do what he wanted, no questions asked. But she knew where that sort of blind obedience led, didn’t she? Nowhere a smart woman wanted to go. And she had no idea what had happened to her today, what she’d become when he’d touched her—what he’d made her with that kiss that still seemed to ricochet through her body, sending up showers of sparks even all these hours later—but she had always prided herself on being smart. It had saved her once before. It would now. It was her greatest—and only—weapon. “Frankly, I don’t think I’ve heard a more spectacularly bad idea.”

There was a short, loaded pause. She could almost
see
that dark, fulminating gaze of his, could imagine it running over her skin like heat. She despaired of herself as her body reacted, readying itself for a possession she had no intention of allowing.

“I take it you have not checked your messages, then?”

Her heart seemed to explode against her ribs. She even looked wildly around the room in a panic, as if she thought he might leap out from behind the drapes.

But she was alone. And he, apparently, was psychic.

“How do you know I have messages?” she demanded, and she was too thrown to care that she sounded as unnerved as she felt. That her voice actually shook, and he could undoubtedly hear it as well as she could.

“Listen to a few of them.” It was another command, and harsher this time. Her heart was still pounding too hard for her to protest. “Then I suggest you get in the car.”

* * *

“You play a dangerous game, brother.”

Ivan did not have to look up from the screen of his laptop to identify the voice speaking in Russian from the doorway. He knew it as well as his own.

“Guberev?” he asked as his brother Nikolai came to stand behind him.

“Handled. He won’t be an issue again.” Ivan could sense Nikolai’s cold smile then; he didn’t have to turn to see it. “He promised me personally, and you know how I feel about promises.”

For a moment, they both watched the screen on the coffee table. It was an old video of Professor Miranda Sweet on one of those interchangeable American gossip programs, talking. Always talking. And Ivan was her favorite subject.

“Ivan Korovin is a man, not a myth,” she was saying, so cool and composed, looking unassailable and far too
correct.
It made him want to reach through the screen and mess her up, somehow. With his hands. His mouth. It made him want to take her on a tour of the terrible things he’d lived through, the things he’d done and had done to him, that she cheapened, somehow, with these attacks. “We tell ourselves his treatment of women in the Jonas Dark films is just part of the character he plays, but then we breathlessly follow his questionable exploits with Hollywood starlets as if it’s some kind of extended reel of those same films—”

Ivan reached out and clicked the pause button, then picked up his drink and swirled it around in the heavy crystal tumbler. Sometimes he wondered, in the darkest places inside of him, if it were true. If she was right. If she saw something in him he’d thought he’d excised from himself when he was still young. If he was a brutal pig of a man like the uncle who had raised him—all drunken fists and unrestrained savagery. Even if he’d spent the whole of his adult life distancing himself from men like that.

No doubt that was the reason he’d concocted this little plan to destroy her. At last.

He owed her nothing less. She wasn’t merely his most vocal enemy, so quick to tear him down in public. That would have been bad enough. But Professor Miranda Sweet made him question
who he was
. She made him doubt himself, when he was the only thing he’d ever had to depend upon. It was unforgivable.

And he wanted her, finally, to pay. That kiss might have been a mistake, but the opportunities it had presented to him once he had time to think, to strategize, felt far more like fate.

“This is begging for trouble,” Nikolai said, walking around to the front of the sofa and fixing Ivan with that frigid glare of his. “You are far too fascinated with a woman you need only to seduce and then discard.”

Ivan knew, intellectually, that his brother was a threat. His years as a soldier, the things he’d done, all he’d lost—these things made him dangerous. Unpredictable and lethal. A hard, damaged man. But he still saw only his younger brother when he looked at him. And his own guilt.

He shrugged as if he was unconcerned. “Surely the fascination will only help in the seduction.”

Nikolai’s cold eyes moved over Ivan’s face. “There are some fights even you can’t win, Vanya.”

He used the old nickname that Ivan only tolerated from family—and Nikolai was the only one left. Ivan eyed his younger brother appraisingly. Nikolai had not answered to his own family nickname in many years now. His demons were so much closer to the surface, raw and hungry. They always had been. Ivan’s tended to lurk deeper, and bite down harder. He could feel their teeth in his flesh, digging deep, even now.

“Your faith in me is touching,” Ivan said after a moment, trying not to step on his brother’s many land mines, scattered all around them. He could almost see them with his own eyes and, as ever, felt nothing but the same old guilt for his part in setting them in the first place.

“There are so many who believe that Hollywood mask of yours,” Nikolai said. “But I know you. I know she makes you bleed, little though you might show it.”

Ivan sighed. “You think I will be bested by a woman who is all bark and no bite, Nikolai? Have I fallen so far?”

“That is not the fight that worries me,” Nikolai said in a low voice, his shadowed gaze clashing with Ivan’s. He jerked his chin at the computer screen, his mouth flattening. “You should not want what you cannot have.”

Nikolai refused to talk about it, so Ivan no longer asked about the wife who had left Nikolai some five years ago and taken what scant happiness his brother had ever known with her—what little happiness that might have been left after all his harsh years in the Russian special forces. Now Nikolai prided himself on being a stripped-down, shut-off machine who wanted almost nothing.

For this, too, Ivan blamed only himself.

On the laptop screen, the professor was frozen in place, her mouth deceptively soft, her delicate hands framing some point in midair. And Ivan knew, now, how she tasted—how she felt against him. He knew exactly how he’d make her pay for the things she’d said about him. All the deals he might have lost because of her campaign against him, the potential donors who balked at the idea of giving money to a man better known as a barbarian than a philanthropist, all thanks to her.

He told himself that would make the revenge he took all the sweeter.

“There are many ways to want,” he said now, quietly.