by Sarah Morgan
Miranda knew, then, that he felt this, too, whatever this thing was that was choking her where she stood. This...shift, after all. It was too big. Too hot and uncontrollable and consuming. Real enough, she understood too late, to hurt this badly, to leave such deep marks inside of her.
Lost before it began.
Had she known all along that it would be like this? Had she sensed it even on that long-ago day, when his picture in a magazine had sent her down the road that had brought her here? Had she suspected that one day he would touch her like this, kiss her like this and tie her into knots she worried she’d never get wholly untied again? Tear her whole world apart so easily?
Except this was no kind of fairy tale, despite appearances to the contrary, and all Miranda was ever going to be was a convenient frog tarted up to look like a temporary princess.
It shouldn’t have hurt.
It shouldn’t have mattered at all. Someday, she thought, it wouldn’t.
In time she would forget that look in his eyes, that shadow across his face, this great and suffocating heaviness in her heart. When this little interlude was over. When she was free of this. Of him. Of all these things she felt without understanding why.
When she became herself again.
“I hope you didn’t ruin my lipstick,” she told him then, managing, somehow, to force herself back into the role she’d agreed to play. To keep that threatening heat behind her eyes from betraying them both. She even smiled again, carefree and amused. In on the joke.
Maybe she was more of an actress than they’d thought.
But then his midnight eyes met hers, so hard and so uncompromising, and there was nothing but agony there. Loss. Grief for something that never could have been.
It shouldn’t have mattered.
But it did. So much more than it should have. So much more than she could bear.
“Of course I didn’t,” he said quietly. “I’m a professional.”
And then he kissed her again, because he had to or because he wanted to, or maybe something caught somewhere far too complicated and breathless between the two, and none of that seemed to matter anyway when his hard mouth claimed hers.
Hot. Demanding. Ivan.
Miranda kissed him back.
She knew it wasn’t real. She knew it didn’t count. But he tasted like smoke and Ivan and all of that longing she’d kept bottled up inside of her all this time, without ever knowing it was there. And there were truths she didn’t want to accept, especially not here. Terrible truths that worked through her like pain, like heat.
Like falling in love with the man she’d vowed to hate, when she knew he was only playing. But she couldn’t let herself think about that. She had the terrible suspicion it would lead only to tears, and she was in public. This was a performance.
So she kissed him instead, with all of those things she knew she’d never say, with her scared little heart and that pounding heat in her sex that was only for him, and told herself it was the best she could do. The best she would do.
And it was searing and right, terrible and heartbreaking, changing her forever right there in the glare of all those cameras and the whole of the watching world, damning them both.
But Miranda most of all, she feared. And possibly for good.
* * *
The plane hung high above North America, arcing its way from New York City toward Los Angeles, and Ivan stared out the window beside him as if there was something more than clouds below and sky ahead to see.
“It seems you were right after all,” Nikolai said, dropping into the wide leather seat opposite Ivan, his lethal blade of a frame seeming too primal, somehow, for the sleek executive luxury of the jet all around them.
“I am always right,” Ivan replied, smirking out at the empty sky. “I am Ivan Korovin. I read today that I am one of the sexiest men alive, according to a selection of fans in the Philippines. Can you say the same?”
“A great accolade indeed,” Nikolai said drily. “And no doubt a tremendous comfort to our parents, had they only lived to see it.”
Ivan remembered them only vaguely, gray and brisk and humorless, and felt certain that his entire life would have seemed, to them, like nothing but foolishness and vanity. That was no doubt Nikolai’s point. And tonight, Ivan agreed.
“Perhaps I underestimated you, brother,” Nikolai continued when Ivan offered no retort. Was that a note of admiration in his voice? Why did that make Ivan feel so cold, suddenly? “When we left your little professor in New York, she was significantly subdued. It shouldn’t be at all hard to break her now.”
But Ivan worried she was already broken, and unlike Nikolai, took no pleasure in it.
He’d escorted her down the metal stairs onto the tarmac in New York, then walked her to the waiting car, not wanting to admit to himself that he didn’t want to let her go. He didn’t want her out of his sight, or out of his reach. He didn’t know what had happened in Cannes, what had blown up between them like that on the red carpet. He didn’t want to think about it. But he could still feel her mouth on his, hot and sweet. He could still see that shattered look in her eyes that had had no business being there, that made no sense at all, and yet had lanced through him just the same.
He could see the photographs of the two of them in his head, as glossy and bright as they’d been in the papers. That first, hot kiss on the Cannes red carpet. The way she’d gazed at him, as if theirs really was a love affair too intense for words. And that aching blast of need that had nearly made him forget where they were when he’d taken her mouth that second time, because he’d had to taste her once again, or die. All of it on film, splashed across the papers and the internet. All of it available to anyone who cared to look, when it still moved in him like something highly charged, electric—and private.
None of this should have been happening.
His goals were very clear. First he would seduce her. Then he would toss her aside, brutally and publicly, tainting anything further she ever said about him as the unhinged rantings of a woman scorned. Simple. Easy. Exactly what she deserved after all these years.
Except nothing was going as planned.
He’d expected to want her, because he had a weakness for smart and haughty and unimpressed with him, apparently, wrapped up in one aristocratic, obstinate package. He’d always wanted the things he shouldn’t, the things not only likely to destroy him, but also certain to do so in the most painful way possible. It was a Korovin family trait. But he’d also expected to hate her, disdain her and her Ivy League snootiness at the very least, and he didn’t quite understand how that hadn’t happened. Or why he’d found himself telling her things he’d never told anyone before.
Or what had sprung up and taken him over like this, making him all but unrecognizable to himself. He was not a man who formed attachments. He knew better. He’d loved his parents as any son did, despite their coldness, and they had died. He’d wanted to love his uncle, until the drinking and brutality made that impossible. He had deeply admired his first trainer, the man he’d considered his savior, until he’d tried to steal the bulk of Ivan’s money after the championships had started mounting up. And he loved Nikolai, still and always, and look what he’d done to him. Look what Nikolai had become.
Damn her.
“I will see you in ten days’ time,” he’d told her, unnecessarily, standing in the open door of the car, holding her captive between him and it.
“Yes.” But she’d been hiding from him even as she’d tilted up her chin and met his gaze, that dark jade too black, too dark.
“Miranda...”
But there’d been nothing to say, and he couldn’t have said it even if there had been. How could he have? She was Miranda Sweet. His loudest critic. His enemy. They’d set all of this in motion that night in Georgetown, and there was no stopping it. Th
ere was no changing course. Not now. The benefit gala drew closer by the day, and with it, the end of all of this. His revenge and her comeuppance. As planned from the start.
“Do you really think they’ll hound me?” she’d asked then, her voice too quiet. Too unsure. He’d hated it. He’d wanted her spark back, her fire. He’d wanted her to feel this wildness, this madness, that lived in him now. He’d wanted her any way he could have her, no matter what it did to either one of them.
“The paparazzi?” Ivan had asked her then. He’d reached over and played with ends of her dark red hair, unable to keep himself from touching her, letting the silken strands slide through his fingers, letting the ways he wanted her burn through him, blaze hot, make him hard and edgy and wild with need. He hadn’t wanted to leave her in New York. He hadn’t wanted to leave her at all. “Yes. It will be a feeding frenzy, I imagine. Don’t leave your apartment unprepared.”
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 c
amera, 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.”