by Sarah Morgan
“I didn’t say that.”
“Your actions say it all.” Nikolai shook his head. “This should not have been hard. Seduce the professor. Then finish with her as publicly as possible tonight, making certain that no one will ever take her seriously again.”
“Nikolai.” His own voice was harsh, but he knew it was aimed at himself. For coming up with this plan in the first place. For making it happen. For making his brother—who had been let down and lied to by everyone he’d ever known, who’d been abandoned so many times he now expected it as a matter of course, who had nothing and no one in the world except Ivan—one more promise he wanted to break. “I know the damned plan.”
“You couldn’t wait for her to show up in your hotel, you were so excited to enact your revenge,” Nikolai said then, his voice something other than cold—which set off all kinds of alarms inside of Ivan. “You promised you would make her pay.”
“You’re giving me a headache,” Ivan growled. “I know all of this.”
“And it’s already worked beautifully,” Nikolai continued, unperturbed by the scowl Ivan was directing at him. “You’ve got your revenge. So why not drive it all the way home? The way you promised?”
Finally, something that should have been obvious from the start occurred to Ivan, and those alarms within grew louder. Deafening.
“Nikolai...” He searched his brother’s face. That hard face so much like his own, those cold, broken eyes he barely recognized. “Why are you talking to me in English?”
But even as he said it, he knew.
He saw that grim, painful sort of triumph in his brother’s eyes. More than that, he heard that soft sound from behind them.
He knew before he turned.
Miranda stood there, ashen. Her mouth was parted slightly, and two hectic spots of color appeared on her cheeks as she stared at him. As if he’d slapped her.
“Miranda...” he said, but she held up a hand, as if she couldn’t bear it, and for a moment her lovely face crumpled in on itself. He thought it might kill him. But he knew better than to move toward her, to hold her.
“I shouldn’t be surprised.” Her voice was small, but it didn’t shake. She looked at Nikolai briefly, then her gaze slammed into Ivan’s. “I’m not surprised, as a matter of fact. It makes perfect sense that you would do exactly this. It’s who you are, isn’t it? You decimate your opponents. You never lose.”
“Miranda,” he began again. He hated that tone in her voice, that stunned sort of pain. “Please.”
“And I suppose I owe it to you,” she continued as if she hadn’t heard him. She was standing so straight, so perfectly straight and unbearably fragile, and he had the sudden notion that she might shatter into pieces if she so much as breathed. “I’ve learned that, if nothing else. I was wrong about you, and I regret it.” She swallowed, hard, her gaze nothing but black as she stared at him. “But I can’t take it back. I can’t change it. So if you have to do this thing—if you have to humiliate me in public, here...” She stopped for a moment, then sucked in a ragged-sounding breath. “If that’s what you need, Ivan, I’ll do it.”
“This is not what I need,” he said furiously, painfully. “This is not what I want.”
“It’s your plan,” she said, so simply, so quietly, it broke his heart.
Her eyes were glazed with what he knew were tears, but she didn’t cry. She only waited. For him to tell her what to do—how best to participate in her own downfall. He saw the tiniest hint of a tremor move over her, but she repressed it almost at once, and he wondered what it cost her to stand there like this—for him.
He wanted to pull her into his arms. He wanted to be the man who saved her, who protected her—not the man who hurt her. He wanted to be the man he imagined he was when she smiled at him. The kind of man who would never make her feel the way she did right now. The man he’d always thought he was, not the man she’d believed him to be all these years. He wanted to kill his own brother for putting that terrible look on her precious face. And himself for letting it happen.
“No,” he said, his voice hoarse, barely a thread of sound. “It’s done. There is no plan anymore.”
He heard Nikolai’s muttered curse in Russian, but all of his attention was on Miranda. His beautiful Miranda. She nodded once, jerkily. Then she shifted back on her heels, and he saw the way she bit her lip.
“Your brother is right,” she said, her voice scratchy, as if the tears she fought back clawed at her throat. “The damage is done. You got your revenge. Congratulations.”
“This is not over—”
“It is.” She shook her head when he moved, almost involuntarily, and he froze. “It’s finished. This was the agreement, wasn’t it? This was always our last night.” She started to turn, but then she looked back at him, and her dark eyes, nearly black with the pain she wasn’t letting show, not completely, slapped at him. Shamed him. “Don’t follow me, Ivan. Please.”
And then she really did turn, and she walked away from him, head held high, as if he hadn’t seen the misery he felt raging inside of him written all over her.
As if she was already well on her way to surviving this intact. Ivan couldn’t say the same.
He forced a breath. Then another.
But he still wanted to rip his brother limb from limb when he turned.
Nikolai’s face was shut down. Hard and blank. But Ivan knew what he hid behind it. What howled in him, tearing him to pieces from within. Tonight, he didn’t care as much as he should.
“Don’t forget, Vanya. I am trained to do the things others don’t. Or won’t.” Nikolai’s frosty blue eyes met his. Held. “And I always keep my promises.”
Ivan knew that should have pierced him to the core. Two weeks ago, it would have swamped him with that same old guilt. But tonight he only looked at his brother and pitied him—pitied both of them. And it was nothing next to the rage he felt that Miranda was caught up in this old family mess. That it had tainted her, too.
No more. It’s not your fault, she’d told him, and it had changed everything. Perhaps he hadn’t understood how much until now. He rubbed his hands over his face.
“If you feel you have to fight me,” Nikolai continued, sounding hauntingly like the little brother Ivan remembered from a world away, a lifetime ago, “I don’t mind. If it helps you remember who you are.”
“Kolya,” he said finally, fiercely, using the family name he hadn’t dared speak aloud in too many years to count.
Nikolai jerked in surprise, and for the first time, there was something other than ice in his gaze. There was a glimmer again of the brother Ivan remembered.
“You are my brother, my only family, my blood. I wish I could have protected you. I wish I could have protected myself. But you need to go and fix your life before you disappear completely. And before you destroy whatever love I have for you.”
He held Nikolai’s gaze, and didn’t drop it when his brother’s face flushed slightly, as if he’d hit him. For the first time in years, Nikolai looked uncertain. Even lost. But it was too late.
“And I don’t want to see you again until you do.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
ELEGANT and sophisticated, Miranda reminded herself fiercely as she jerkily removed her makeup in front of the huge bathroom mirror in Ivan’s master suite, meant there would be no tears. No tears, no sobs, no crumpling into the fetal position on the bathroom floor and rocking herself for a while.
And if a tear or two leaked out while she scooped up water in her palms and washed her face, well, no one ever had to know that but her.
She was starting on her hair when Ivan appeared in the mirror behind her. She didn’t hear his approach. He wasn’t there, she blinked, and then he was leaning in the doorway, his black gaze hard and hurt and some kind of hungry. Her heart kicked against her ribs,
hard, then seemed to drop straight down to her bare toes.
Miranda’s arms dropped to her sides, letting the few pins she’d already pulled free clatter onto the granite countertop beside the sleek vertical basin of his sink. She wanted to ignore him, to bustle along with her departure, efficient and matter-of-fact, and be gone before the party was over. She’d already packed her bag. She looked almost like herself again now, in very old, very comfortable jeans that felt as close to that fetal position on the floor as she was going to get tonight, and the faded college T-shirt she slept in when she was alone. All she had to do was get her hair out of this dramatic style, slip on her shoes and leave. Simple.
But she couldn’t seem to look away from Ivan’s reflection.
And worse, she couldn’t seem to move.
The silence seemed too large between them, too painful, and she wished she didn’t love him as hopelessly and helplessly as she did. She wished she didn’t notice the pain in his eyes, the way his hard mouth flattened. She wished she didn’t want, even now, to turn and go to him. To comfort him.
“I meant what I said.” She couldn’t take the silence another second. She was too afraid of what she might do if it continued, and it had nothing to do with elegance or sophistication. “I was wrong. If you want me to take to the airwaves to say so, I will.”
“I don’t.”
“I’m happy to do it.” She curled her hands into fists, still watching him through the mirror. “If it’s what you or your brother need.”
Ivan pushed away from the doorjamb and prowled toward her, and she couldn’t help the flush of excitement that raced through her, over her. Her body was so attuned to his, it was readying itself for his possession no matter the state of her emotions. He stopped when he was behind her, his gaze still locked on hers, and for a moment he simply stood there, so big and so dangerous behind her, and it was so much like Paris all over again that it made Miranda’s chest tighten painfully. She thought she might explode, so she turned around to face him—anything to banish the memory of that dressing room—
But that was a mistake.
She was so used to touching him now. She was so used to closing small distances between them like this by simply leaning forward and into that powerful chest of his. It caused her actual, physical pain to reach behind her instead, and grip the lip of the bathroom counter.
“When did you turn passive and accommodating?” he asked quietly. “I find it terrifying.”
“This is not passive, Ivan,” she said, the sudden surge of temper like a shot of color through gray clouds. “This is polite. This is understanding. You said you didn’t want a scene. Have you changed your mind?”
“No,” he said. “But nothing else has changed, either.”
She didn’t understand him, until he simply reached over and slid that large hand of his over her hip, yanking her into him and taking her mouth that easily.
It was hot. It was perfect. It was Ivan.
And it hurt Miranda in ways she expected would leave scars.
She shoved him back, and he let her go, but she couldn’t control the tears that welled up in her eyes then, the great storm inside of her that she’d been fighting so hard to keep hidden away.
“Is this your final little bit of revenge?” she demanded when the tears began to fall, exposing her despite everything. “You want to see me fall apart in front of you? Just let me leave, Ivan. Let me keep my promise and go.”
“What if I don’t want you to go?” His voice was rough, his black gaze intense.
And she realized that this, right here, was her opportunity to be strong, finally. To protect herself, at last. She wanted to believe him more than she’d ever wanted anything. She wanted it so much she thought she could feel that wanting on a cellular level. She wanted him, any way she could get him. She loved him. And she knew that it would be far too easy to simply allow this. To take whatever time she could with him, and bask in it and simply postpone this harsh ending for another time.
She also knew it might kill her. So she shook her head at him, and wiped at her face. And tried, for once, to be as strong as she should have been all along.
“You can have sex exactly like this with anyone in the world,” she told him. “I’m sure you already have. You don’t need me.”
He laughed, though it was not a happy sound, and Miranda took the opportunity to duck around him and head for the dressing room and her bag. Forget her hair. She needed to get away from him while she still had some remnant of a spine.
“But you need me,” he said from behind her.
She stopped walking, as surely as if he’d had her on a leash and had just yanked on it. Hard. She turned back around slowly. Incredulously.
He looked more fierce than she’d ever seen him, in that sleek tuxedo that somehow hinted at all of his ferocity while managing to make him something like elegant, too. Yet all of him devastatingly, finely honed male. That heat of his seemed to burn brighter, making her belly tighten, and her core soften, even as she stared at him as if she could not possibly have heard him correctly.
“And more than that, Miranda,” he said in that way of his, a formidable punch wrapped with that Russian flavor, “you are in love with me.”
The whole world collapsed, sucked into a giant black hole of her shame and horror and a sheer terror that felt a lot like some kind of exultation—but she still stood there, her bare feet against the polished floor, her face wet from her own tears, her entire life a sad, sick joke that had led straight here. To this tragic little farce.
She wanted to deny it. She wanted to scream. She wished she could simply die where she stood, saving her the trouble of attempting to survive this. She’d known for a while now that he would break her heart. She hadn’t expected him to simply reach out and rip it still beating from her chest.
She should have remembered this was Ivan Korovin. He was capable of anything. That was why she loved him in the first place.
“You told me in your sleep,” he said, watching her as he moved closer, a dark menace in beautiful clothes. “And you screamed it yesterday as you fell into pieces all around me.”
Her heart seemed to beat with spikes attached, sending painful shock waves through her each time. She sucked in a breath, then another. And then she simply stopped fighting. What was the point? She’d already lost everything that mattered to her. The career she’d thought made her who she was, but was no more than a house of cards built on trashing this man. And now him, too, but she’d expected that. She’d signed up for it in advance. It didn’t make it easier. But it was still happening.
“Yes, well.” She laughed then, aware that it sounded ever so slightly hysterical against all of his white walls and moody, abstract paintings. “I’ve never been particularly smart, have I? Not where you’re concerned.”
“I don’t want you to go,” he said again, his voice harder this time, nearly ferocious.
And it hurt. It all just hurt.
“Because you don’t know how to lose,” she managed to say. “But this is how it’s going to happen, whether you like it or not. Whether it breaks your undefeated record or not. This is what we agreed.”
* * *
And Ivan lost his cool.
“I don’t care about the agreement,” he said. Though the first time he said it, he used far uglier words. “I don’t care about winning.”
But she only shook her head, unmoved despite the emotion he could see staining her face, making her stand so tautly. “Ivan—”
“You can’t tell me you love me and then walk away!” he threw at her, dimly aware that he was louder than usual. Much louder than was safe. “You can’t cry in my arms and tell me things you’ve never told another living soul and then just...go back to New York as if none of this ever happened!”
“Why not?” she demanded, her eyes t
oo bright again, her voice rough. “It’s what you want!”
“You should know by now, Miranda, that I never get what I want,” he snapped at her, totally unhinged now, completely lost to himself, as if he’d never had any training. As if he was nothing but this wild storm she’d made inside of him. “I suffer. I do my duty. I win on command. But what I want is never part of the package.”
“Ivan,” she began again, her voice broken, as he surged toward her and made her back up a few steps, as if she could see that wildness in him. But her wide eyes, dark jade and anguished, drank him in anyway.
“You have haunted me across years,” he told her hoarsely. “You have challenged me and provoked me, and that was before I met you. I didn’t expect to like you. I didn’t expect to crave you.” He wasn’t shouting anymore, but it felt the same, out of control and the closest he’d been to desperate since he was a boy. “Tell me how to let you go, Professor. Tell me how to pretend none of this ever happened. Tell me how to pretend that I can’t see that you hate the very idea of it yourself.”
“You wanted to humiliate me in public,” she challenged. “But not in any straightforward kind of way. You wanted to seduce me into submission first, because it would hurt more.”
“You are writing a nasty, damaging book about me,” he retorted. “All insinuations and fantasies and lies. Another book.”
“I’ve already told my agent it isn’t happening,” she snapped.
He reached over then to brush her tears from her pretty face.
“You are in love with me,” he gritted out. “You don’t want to do this. You don’t want to go.”
Her face crumpled then, and it tore at him. She raised a hand to her mouth as if that might hold her together, but still, a sob rolled out anyway and made him feel small. Mean.
“What happens if I stay, Ivan?” she asked, her voice thick. “If it hurts this much now, how much worse will it be two weeks from now? A month? I can’t do it. I can’t willingly subject myself—”
“You love me.”
She’d said it half-asleep. She’d screamed it in the height of passion. And so it lived in Ivan like tension, and he frowned at her as if he could bend her to his will that easily. As if he could make her say it now, when it counted.