No More Sweet Surrender (9 page)

Miranda was afraid to move, to breathe. He looked away for a moment, pulling her with him as he wove in and out of the nearby couples. If anything, he looked colder and more forbidding, more remote, and Miranda didn’t know why that made her ache for him. As if she of all people, his enemy, could give him solace even if he’d allowed it.

“That’s why I started fighting,” he said after a long moment. He looked back at her, and made no particular attempt to conceal the bleakness in his gaze. “Are you happy to know this, Miranda? Does it change me in your eyes? Make me something less than a caveman?”

“It makes you human,” she replied without thinking, and his smile then was sharper than that look in his eyes, and as desolate.

“Exactly what you want least, I imagine,” he taunted her, and that hurt, too. It all hurt, and she wondered where this was going—and what would be left of her when it ended.

Worse, for one long breath and then the next, she didn’t even know what he meant.

And then she did, and that was the worst part of all. That he knew exactly how invested she was in maintaining her negative opinion of him.

And that he was right.

* * *

Miranda’s team of stylists descended on her the next morning, not unlike a plague of locusts, while last night’s nightmare still pulsed in her and her throat was still raw from waking up crying out loud.

“It can’t possibly take all day to get ready to walk a few feet across a sidewalk!” she’d protested when Ivan had announced at breakfast how soon the preparations for the Cannes red carpet would begin.

She hadn’t added,
How hard could it be
?
But it had curled there between them in the clear morning air out on the terrace all the same.

“Are you basing this on your extensive experience of red carpet events?” he’d asked. He’d sounded as if he was smirking, though his hard face had remained impassive, his black gaze intent on hers.

“I bow to your superior knowledge,” she’d said, trying not to sound snide. It was unsuccessful. “As ever.”

And then she’d fled back into the villa, happy to get as far away from his too-incisive eyes as she could.

She was shooed into a chair in her bedchamber’s spacious bath and made to sit there while her team of five buzzed all around her. Her hair was teased and shaped, her brows plucked and tweezed, her nails buffed and painted.

It would have been boring, had she not had so much Ivan in her head.
I could make you come
,
he’d said. And then he’d put his hands on her, day after day. He’d held her close. He’d danced with her and made her crave him in ways she’d never craved anything before—in ways she hadn’t even known were possible. And despite all her experience to the contrary, despite everything she knew to be true about herself and her body, she almost believed he could do what he’d said he could.

It felt like some kind of revolution.

She should not have talked about sex with him in any capacity. Why not invite the wolf in from the cold, while she was at it? Introducing sex into the conversation meant it would stay there, humming between them, clouding everything, making her nightmares that much more vivid, that much more terrifying. She didn’t know what she’d been thinking. It was just that the kind of sex she suspected Ivan was talking about had never been much of an issue for her before, one way or another. She’d been so young when she’d escaped her father’s house for the safety and sanctuary of college, and she hadn’t ever really caught up with her Yale classmates, socially or emotionally.

Graduate school had been different. Miranda might have been a bit of a late bloomer, but it had seemed to matter less at Columbia. She’d eventually had what she’d always considered perfectly nice relationships with two men she met through her studies, one for about ten months, one for just over a year. She’d gotten to know each of them over very long periods of time—years, in fact. She’d become comfortable with them long before there had been any touching, or even any dating. She’d thought sex, when they’d had it, was nice. A good way to feel connected in a very specific way to a very specific person.
Very nice
, she’d thought, but certainly not worth all the commotion.

It had never once occurred to her until this moment that maybe the two men she’d had sex with simply...weren’t any good at it.

That was like a second revolution, smack on top of the first, all of it fusing together somehow and turning into some sort of internal avalanche.

Ivan, clearly, would be good at it. He fairly
oozed
“good at it.”

Miranda eyed herself in the bathroom mirror as one of the stylists toiled away on her face, adding a bit of drama to her cheekbones and extra fullness to her lips, and hoped no one would notice how flushed she’d become.

She pulled in a ragged sort of breath, and thought of his hands on her back, his arm over her shoulders. That sheer physical
intensity
of his. He had been touching her—kissing her—before they’d ever exchanged a word. He was the inverse of everything she knew. No wonder she felt so inside out.

And every time he looked at her, some part of her
wanted
to burst into flames and burn down into ash and soot. Like he compelled her to yearn for it. For him. Which was almost more disconcerting than the fact that she melted into all of that fire anyway.

She didn’t know what that meant, she thought as she tipped her head back and let one of the women work on her eyes with pencils and eyelash clamps and a palette of shadows. But she hadn’t hated all of this mandatory touching as much as she’d thought she would, no matter how many times she tried to talk herself into an appropriate state of outrage.

And he thought he could make her come. He’d said so with the same matter-of-fact confidence he’d used to tell her to listen to her messages and then get in his car in Georgetown. As if the outcome was never in any doubt.

She couldn’t seem to get that out of her head.

“You’ll be drop-dead gorgeous,” the nearest stylist told her in an accent that hinted at New York and reminded Miranda of home in this castle-like villa so far away from anything she knew. “Just like Cinderella.”

This was a business arrangement, not a fairy tale. But she couldn’t say that. She had to pretend. She had to smile as if Ivan was Prince Charming and her fairy godmother all wrapped up into one devastating male package, complete with wealth and celebrity and the breathless attention of the entire world. She had to laugh and agree. She had to act as if she found Ivan as fascinating as they all obviously did.

And if she wasn’t precisely
pretending
to be fascinated any longer—if that was far more encompassing and real than she wanted to admit even to herself, if it lived in her and grew with every breath and she was starting to worry it might be taking her over—

It wouldn’t be the first time Miranda had to pay a steep price for something she should have known better than to want in the first place. The only good thing to come of having so badly miscalculated once before was that she certainly wouldn’t be likely to do it again. She’d lost her family the last time. She wouldn’t lose anything else, not if she could help it.

This time she’d be smart enough to keep her mouth shut.

* * *

When Miranda finally made it down into the villa’s main reception room, she felt like a stranger to herself—and looked it. She’d hardly recognized the alien creature she’d seen in all the mirrors, though she’d
oohed
and
aahed
as necessary and declared everything
glamorous.

All part of her job, she supposed. Her performance.

At the bottom of the stairs, a man waited with two cell phones clutched in each hand, a headset clamped to his ear and acrobatically spiked hair, his impatience visible.

“Hi,” she said, feeling awkward when he didn’t speak. “I’m Miranda—”

“Your goal today is to maintain total silence,” he said, his attention flicking to one of his phones, his thumbs moving rapidly over the keyboard. “But without looking like you’re not talking.” She must have made some kind of noise because he looked up, and his expression shifted from disinterested to patronizing. “I handle Ivan’s publicity. Which means you need to follow my script.”

“I’m not an actress,” Miranda said coolly. She forced herself to smile. “So.”

“No cute comments about kissing,” the man shot back as if she hadn’t spoken. “The whole world knows you can talk. You haven’t stopped talking in years, into every available microphone. But we’re selling a love story here.”

“And in this love story the great vast swell of my emotions has rendered me mute?” Miranda asked drily. “How romantic.”

The man’s eyes narrowed.

“Craig.” Ivan’s voice came from the open doorway to one of the sitting rooms, a slap of sheer, raw command. “I have it from here.”

Craig stared at Miranda for a moment, and she stared back as if he was an overly entitled freshman in one of her core classes, and she didn’t have any idea how long that would have gone on—but one of his phones began to shrill, and he stepped away to answer it.

Which meant there was nothing to do but look at Ivan. She took her time about it, one hand still gripping the banister, and when she finally got up her nerve he had moved even closer. Too close.

He looked even more absurdly handsome than he usually did plastered across all those Jonas Dark billboards, and about ten times as dangerous. He was in a sleek black tuxedo, which Miranda had seen him in a hundred times before, in a hundred different magazines, posters, advertisements. Yet it was different, somehow, standing here with him in this perfect villa in this particularly beautiful corner of the Côte d’Azur. Dressed as she was in an over-the-top concoction of a formal gown and her face meticulously made up to look like someone else’s. Someone who belonged in this life, this moment. With this man. That had been her stylists’ main objective, hadn’t it?

To make a Columbia professor look like the sort of woman a major movie star like Ivan Korovin would actually be seen with.

His dark eyes swept over her now, taking his time and taking in the lush, vibrant sweep of the gown she wore. It was a strapless column of bright red, a shade she would have avoided because of her hair, but of course, no one had asked her for her opinion on the color. Or the cut, or the fit, or anything else. Ivan had chosen it, so she would wear it. That was the deal. She should find that offensive, no doubt. But this close, all she could seem to concentrate on was how magnetic he was, how impossibly compelling—she could
feel
it, heating up the air between them, making it seem to crackle.

Once again, she felt like his Parisian mistress from another time. Bought, dressed, adorned. Something deep inside of her turned over, way down there in the dark, and began to glow.

“I hope you approve,” she said, and her voice was too soft. Too uncertain.

Too much like a lover’s.

“Stand up straight,” he told her, though his voice was more husky than stern, and then he reached over to physically inch her shoulders down from where she’d tensed them up behind her ears. She hardly even reacted to his hands on her bare shoulders now, and she congratulated herself. It was like a tiny spark, not a full-on wall of fire.
Progress.
“This is not something you toss on to go to the supermarket. This is couture. Treat the dress with respect, and it will return the favor.”

She opened her mouth to say something, anything that didn’t involve personal revolutions or Parisian mistresses, anything at all—but his dark eyes finally met hers with the force of a midnight collision, and she found she couldn’t say a word.

“Come,” he said after a moment, as if he’d taken a moment to soak her in, too. As if the intensity all around them that they were both so studiously ignoring was as loud and heavy in him as in her. “The car is waiting.”

He held out his arm and she took it, and everything felt raw, then. Too much. Too formal.
Too
real.
Miranda didn’t understand how that was possible, when this was their most over-the-top moment yet. They were on their way to walk a red carpet. To parade down an aisle so that fans could cheer and reporters could take pictures and ask preapproved questions. So that pictures of them looking glamorous and together would be plastered across the globe, subject to any number of tabloid fantasies. What was less
real
than that?

And yet.

Something in her chest clutched tight. It was the fancy clothes, maybe. The dress and the jewelry they’d given her to wear with it, that she knew he’d chosen for her as well. Her hair was swept up into a sleek chignon to show off the dangling diamond earrings and the necklace was a masterpiece of intricate stones and stunning metals, making her seem to sparkle with elegance and style. Something about the idea of him picking them out for her to wear with this dress, to make her into this impossibly sophisticated version of herself, made her heart seem to stutter in her chest.

And more than all the rest of it, Ivan walked beside her, like every girl’s dream of the perfect fantasy prince.

Like
her
dream, anyway, she could finally admit to herself—a dream she’d packed away a long, long time ago and had been afraid to pull out into the light ever since. First because it had had no place in her father’s vicious, terrible home. And then, later, because it had seemed so silly and embarrassing a dream next to all of her important, serious studies. All of the intellectual things she’d wanted to do. Her theories, her books. Her dreams of a tenured professorship. She’d thought she’d had to choose. She’d chosen.

Yet if she squinted, she couldn’t help but think as they swept from the villa toward the waiting limousine, this would look a great deal like the very fairy tales she’d taught herself not to believe in any longer. She was dressed like a princess, a beautiful gown and gorgeous jewels to match. The whole world already thought Ivan was some kind of prince. Was that what she’d see when she saw the pictures of this tomorrow? Was this the love story Craig the publicist was selling? Would she look carried away into some Disney movie, as if at any moment she might break into song?