No More Sweet Surrender (7 page)

“I know the rules.”

But he didn’t move.

One breath. Another. And Miranda knew they were poised on a razor’s edge, no matter what he said about rules, or what she’d said about
shifting
. Or what she told herself she wanted from this twisted little game.

What she did want.
She did.

He dropped his hand and then he stepped back, as if it was harder than it should have been, and she told herself she was relieved.

“Some day, Miranda,” he said, that fire in his gaze, that dark promise in his voice, kicking up that exquisite shiver all along her body, “you will beg me to break those rules. You will beg me to make that shift.”

“I would rather die,” she vowed. Melodramatically, it was true.

He smiled then, and it connected hard with her belly, her sex. With that great riot he’d stirred up inside of her, that she didn’t have the slightest idea how to handle.

“I very, very rarely lose control of myself,” he said, another kind of promise, throwing kerosene on all of those fires again, making her think that soon there would be nothing left of her to burn. “It is one of the reasons I am who I am. Can you say the same?”

And that was the scariest part of all of this, Miranda thought, staring back at him in all of that breathless tension, her body yearning for him in ways that boded only ill.

Until today—until
him—
she’d thought she could. She’d prided herself on it.

CHAPTER SIX

T
HE
next morning, Ivan ran. Hard.

Nikolai kept pace with him through all five grueling miles, and was breathing only slightly more heavily than Ivan was when they came to a stop below the Grand Hotel, near one of the rocky beaches that sloped down into the gleaming sea. It was the sort of place he’d dreamed about when he was a boy and should have been appreciating now that it was commonplace for him, and yet all Ivan could think about was one snooty woman whose carefully orchestrated downfall should have been child’s play for him. He needed only to touch her, take her. He knew it. And he’d had the perfect opportunity to push that particular envelope yesterday—yet hadn’t.

He had no explanation for that. But it had kept him up half the night.

Ivan didn’t speak as they walked back through the hotel’s extensive grounds toward the villa. Beside him, Nikolai’s silence was as eloquently disapproving as ever, for all it was ferociously cold and ruthlessly contained. Ivan almost missed the half-mad, hair-trigger creature his brother had been before Ivan had abandoned him to go off and fight the whole world.

But that Nikolai was long gone, lost to his own darkness for years now, and Ivan, too, was the civilized, Americanized version of his old self. Stripped down from his fighting weight, the better to grace Hollywood screens. Expected to be urbane and amusing as well as brutal. Fluent in the language, in the tabloids, in his own contributions to the culture. But he was still the same Ivan he’d always been, underneath. Some part of him never let go of the fact he was nothing more than the son of a factory worker, no more or less than that.

He wasn’t sure he recognized the man who looked at him from Nikolai’s arctic-blue eyes any longer. He’d pulled his brother out of Russia eventually, as he’d promised when they were boys. He’d taken him from their uncle when he’d been able to do it. But first he’d had to leave him. And they were both still paying for that.

“Is this your version of handling this situation?” Nikolai asked in a low voice, breaking the heavy silence between them. His gaze flicked over Ivan’s expression, which was when Ivan realized he was scowling.

“It is under control.”

Nikolai’s frigid eyes met Ivan’s. Held.

“I can see how under control you are, of course,” he said, not even attempting to hide the sardonic lash in his voice. “As you run across Cap Ferrat as if pursued by the devil himself. Don’t trust your brother, trust your own bad eye, is that it?”

“If you are neither my brother nor the president of our foundation while we are here,” Ivan growled at him, “because you insist upon acting as the bodyguard I don’t need, then I beg of you, Nikolai, play your part. And spare me the Russian proverbs.”

“As you wish, boss,” Nikolai replied coolly. Not at all subserviently.

Ivan dismissed him, breaking into a light jog for the rest of the way back to the villa. He knew why Nikolai was here—why he’d taken on the role of bodyguard the night that kiss had gone viral, when he’d been supposed to highlight his role as president of the Korovin Foundation in the run-up to the benefit gala in Los Angeles in June. His little brother was worried about him. As if he couldn’t properly seduce and then discard one irritating woman—who wanted him, no matter what lies she might tell to the contrary.

He ran faster. He wanted to think about other things. He wanted to shower and change, and then he wanted to take his fake girlfriend out to experience a perfect, romantic, entirely feigned day in the glare of the French sunshine and as many cameras as possible.

Because he could control that. And her. And he very badly wanted to feel as in control as he normally felt. His rules trumped her Greenwich, Connecticut, pedigree, her years of fancy, expensive education. His rules meant he could touch her like she was already his. Like he’d already won. It was his game, and she didn’t need to know how close he’d come to taking her two separate times yesterday. How close he was to forgetting why he was doing this at all.

All she had to do was obey.

* * *

The nightmare struck again in the night.

It was always the same. Laughter and a giddy kind of hope, the summer evening pouring in from the wide-open windows of a small car. The hum of the cicadas, the hot, humid dark all around. And a sweet, perfect kiss that went on and on and on, making her heart swell, then beat happily inside her as she walked up a stone pathway toward a pretty brick house. And then it all turned, the way it always did, into horror. Angry faces, terrible words. Shouting. Blood and pain. Her desperate, terrified screams that no one ever heard.

Miranda bolted awake with those same screams in her ears and scraping at the back of her throat. There were tears coursing down her face; her heart galloped in her chest and it took her a long, long time to settle herself again. To breathe normally. It was the middle of the night in a foreign country and she was still so much more afraid than she wanted to be, than she thought she should have been. She blamed Ivan Korovin for that—for tearing her back open. But there was nothing to do at 4:13 a.m. but curl up in her decadently comfortable bed, piled high with exquisite linens and the softest feather pillows, and wait for the terrible images to fade. For the sun to rise and save her from her own head. Her own past.

She sat on the balcony outside her bedchamber now, a pile of tabloid magazines spread out before her on the small table, the glorious Cap Ferrat morning sun bathing her in gold and clearing her head. Doing its job.

She’d kind of lost it there yesterday, if she was honest. It was all that
touching
in Paris and in front of those reporters
.
All those
feelings
that went along with it that she’d been so unprepared for. Of course, the nightmare had felt even worse than usual. Of course, it had struck back. She should know her old enemy better by now, she thought then.

And her new enemy, too.

She stared down at the tabloid pictures of her with Ivan, in the sleek little convertible and snuggled up next to him outside the hotel. If she didn’t know otherwise, she would have thought exactly what everyone else looking at these pictures would think: that this was a scorching affair. That she had been swept away, straight off her feet, by this man, despite all of their well-documented acrimony. Fairy Tale in France! one of the headlines screamed, and it wasn’t hard to guess which one they meant. Ivan was the obvious prince, widely regarded as charming by his legions of adoring fans, and that made Miranda some kind of Cinderella.

She didn’t much care for the comparison. Especially because it felt so horribly apt.

She pulled the light caramel-colored sweater-wrap she wore tighter around her, luxuriating in the slide of the breathtakingly soft cashmere against her arms. Ivan might be an autocratic, demanding, shockingly arrogant man, but he certainly knew how to pick out clothes. Her own cutoff denim shorts and the easy tank top she wore beneath the wrap seemed even rattier than they really were in comparison to the confection of cashmere she’d found in one of the shopping bags from Paris.

It felt like a caress. Which in turn, made her think of Ivan, and his clever fingers against her skin. Her lips. It made her imagine what else he could do with those strong and battered fighter’s hands—

“Please try not to scowl so much,” Ivan said from the open doorway then, making Miranda’s heart leap in her chest though she managed, somehow, to keep from jumping in her seat. “People will begin to imagine that I am not satisfying you in bed, and all of this hard work will be for nothing.”

Miranda didn’t look up at him. She didn’t react. She flipped through the pages in front of her and congratulated herself on her far more measured, reasonable response to him today. No wild bursts of uncontrollable flames to light her up from the inside out. No embarrassing blushes. He only took getting used to, clearly. Soon she’d hardly notice him at all.

“Good morning,” she said mildly, taking a delicate sip of the coffee she’d forgotten about until this moment. She placed the china cup back down on the table very precisely, next to the French press at her elbow. “Do you consider yourself particularly narcissistic, or is it simply a natural result of your current line of work?” She smiled when she heard him sigh. “This certainty of yours that the entire world is fascinated by what you might or might not be doing in bed? It’s not healthy.”

She turned her head to look at him. It was a mistake.

Ivan lounged in the doorway to her bedchamber, glistening from a recent shower, wearing nothing more than a towel low on his hips, all of that perfectly molded male flesh just...there.

Right there.

That tattoo of his in all its black-inked, intricate glory, coiled down one side of his perfect chest like some kind of warning. It was a massive, somehow elegant serpent, sleek and deadly, and it swept down the side of his torso and then around to his back, as if it was wrapped around him like a kind of totem, ready to strike. There was the tattoo she’d seen beneath his T-shirt in Georgetown, encircling his bicep in some mysterious design of brambles and swirls then twisting down the length of his arm. And still another one, of three Cyrillic letters directly over his heart. It looked like MNP.

It was as if she’d fallen down hard and knocked the air right out of her lungs. Miranda’s pulse felt loud and hard, so fierce she could feel it behind her eyes. In her teeth. And lower, deeper, like a kettle drum, shaking her apart.

He only smiled that smile she now knew he used when they were being watched, all sex and promise. The fact that it was fake did not detract from its potency in any way, the way Miranda thought it should. The way she wished it would, in some despair.

“You were saying?” he asked, a rich vein of satisfaction in his voice. He moved toward her then, and stopped beside her chair, reaching out to run his fingers through her hair. It was a lover’s caress. It seemed almost natural, and she had the strangest urge to lean into his hand—but then she remembered where they were.

And who she was.

“What are you doing?”

It was terrible. She could hardly speak. She felt as if she’d been doused in kerosene and his strong hand against her scalp, playing with her hair, was a lit match.

“Paparazzi like to take boats out into the water, pretend to be fishermen or tourists and use their telephoto lenses to take pictures of private balconies just like this one,” he said matter-of-factly. “You can say whatever insulting thing you like, but try not to show it on your face, please.”

His voice was a low, insinuating murmur, and she couldn’t seem to handle all of that naked, damp male skin, all of those sleek muscles, his fascinating tattoos, the whole of him like perfect, hammered steel.

“Oh,” she said. Idiotically.

He let his hand drop from her hair, moving to take the seat opposite hers at the small table. It was not an improvement. He thrust his strong legs out in front of him, and she had to fight to keep from moving her chair back. He was sure to read it as some kind of capitulation. A silent surrender. And with him lounging there across from her, she had no choice but to stare at his acres upon acres of pectoral muscles, his fiercely chiseled abdomen. That lethally coiled serpent, somehow beautiful despite its deadliness, announcing exactly who and what he was, and what he could do.

It was not unlike staring into a blazing light. Complete with little black spots swimming before her eyes.

“I assume you do this deliberately,” she said, forcing herself to speak past the dazed, silly feeling that made her head spin so fast. She was impatient with herself, with this absurd, outsized reaction to him. Why was one weakness or another always her first response when challenged? She’d frozen in Georgetown. She’d simply stood there and waited to be rescued, which appalled her on some deep, primal level. Why couldn’t she be as strong as she thought she was when it counted?

“What am I doing?” he asked. He picked up one of the tabloids and looked at it, his expression unreadable as he studied the article in front of him. “I am almost afraid to ask.”

“This,” Miranda said, waving a hand at all of his bared skin. “You go out of your way to accent your physicality. It’s psychological warfare at its finest. I assume that’s your goal.”

He lowered the paper and eyed her from across the table.

“Are we at war, Miranda?” he asked mildly, but she wasn’t fooled by that tone, or the way he rolled her name around in his mouth, as if it was something sugary.

“I was under the impression that you view everything as a war.” She didn’t know where the seriousness in her voice came from, or why she’d shifted into it so abruptly. She suspected it was all of that naked flesh. It made her...cranky. The sun fell all over him like a caress, making him gleam golden. He looked, again, like some kind of god. Pagan and merciless, and she shouldn’t find that so intriguing. So impossibly tempting. “And if this is a war, that means I’m the enemy, and you can treat me however you please, doesn’t it?”

His dark eyes met hers and held. Miranda was aware of the gleaming sea in the distance, the faint, sweet breeze, the deep green of the trees. The smell of flowers and fresh-cut grass, and the sun falling over the balcony, bathing them in that perfect blue and gold French light.

“Is this a complaint?” he asked after a long moment. He jerked his chin at the papers in front of him, but he didn’t drop her gaze. “Because you are not a prisoner, last I checked, and these pictures indicate that all of this is having the desired effect.”

“I never said I was a prisoner.”

He shrugged in that way of his, so unconcerned. The more lethal than charming prince of all he surveyed.

“You will know when you become my enemy, Miranda. Your life in tatters all around you will be your first clue.”

“My life is already in tatters around me,” she pointed out, not bothering to keep the bite from her voice. “I just happen to be going along with it for my own purposes. And you haven’t held up your end of the bargain yet.” She tapped her finger against the nearest tabloid. “I notice that there are a lot of pictures out there, salaciously ruining my reputation, kicking up the scandal you wanted. And meanwhile, you have yet to tell me a single thing about yourself.”