“Call it whatever you like,” he said in that intense, demanding way. “Was it revenge the first time you called me all of those names in that book of yours? Caveman Number One? The Nouveau Neanderthal? When you took it upon yourself to imagine—on camera—the most insulting reasons possible for any woman I might have dated to leave me?”
“You admit it, then.” Miranda pretended she didn’t feel the slap of his words, the unfortunate truth of them. She remembered that sense she’d gotten in Georgetown, that he’d planned all of this, that he’d known she would walk right into his trap. And she had. “This is nothing more than an elaborate exercise in petty, adolescent revenge.”
Why had she picked him all those years ago when she was working on her dissertation? There had been no shortage of widely adored, badly behaved sports heroes cluttering up the cultural consciousness, any one of whom could have made her point. Why had she zeroed in on this one?
But she knew why. She had turned a page in a magazine one afternoon and there he was, gleaming and intimidating and nearly naked, all of those muscles rippling and overwhelming, and she’d felt the punch of it. Of him. All of that rampant maleness, none of it in the least bit controlled… And she’d hated him for that feeling, for the things she felt curling inside of her, hot and wild and messy. Maybe she still did.
She sniffed now, shoving that sense of shame aside, her second thoughts so long after the fact, the probability that this was a trap she’d agreed to let him close on her. “And all because your feelings are hurt that I suggested one of your starlet girlfriends left you because you suffered from testosterone poisoning?”
“What’s a little foreplay next to that?” he asked silkily, though there was a flash in those dark eyes that made her think he was choosing his words far more carefully than it seemed. “You should try it.”
She rolled her eyes at him as if he didn’t get to her at all. As if she was as unimpressed with and unmoved by him as she wished she was.
“How depressingly predictable,” she said, temper in her voice, though she wasn’t sure if she was angry at herself or at him. Or both of them. “Is there a man alive who doesn’t think his magical penis can somehow cure a woman’s dislike of him? It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.”
“Enough of your wild generalizations and crackpot theories, Professor,” he said, not in the least cowed or shamed by her words. If anything, his black gaze seemed hotter, and he was closer to a smile than she’d ever seen him get. In private, anyway, and she was annoyed that she even noticed the distinction. “Let’s talk about you. And how obsessed you’ve been with me for all these years.” He opened his arms wide, the kind of arrogant display only an excessively confident man could manage with such decidedly masculine grace, and it should have been ridiculous. “With this.”
It should have been ridiculous. But instead, Miranda’s head seemed to go entirely blank. His chest was hard and chiseled and acres wide. This close to him, she could sense that roaring heat and power that was so uniquely his and worse, that terrifying, betraying lassitude inside of her in response that threatened to make her simply sag against him. Simply…lie down on the vast bed she’d somehow failed to notice she was standing beside and pray he came with her. On top of her. Into her.
What is the matter with you? She didn’t know how to want these things. She never had before. It was as if he’d cast some spell on her that made her someone else entirely.
“I don’t want you,” she bit out, desperation making her voice harsh. “Any of you.”
She blinked at him, the great expanse of him. All of those smooth, hard muscles, all of which, she was far too aware, he knew exactly how to use. She’d seen his fights on television. She’d seen his movies. She wished she didn’t notice that he smelled fresh and clean, of soap and warm male.
She wished she was as unmoved as she should have been.
“I want what we agreed to, and nothing more.” She nodded at his chest. “Certainly not any of that.”
It shouldn’t have been so hard to say, and he laughed then, dropping his arms but not backing up an inch.
“Keep telling yourself that.”
“You unbelievably arrogant—” she began, furiously.
“Did I ever pretend to be anything else?” he asked, his head tilting slightly to one side, cutting her off ruthlessly. His voice was calm, dark. Well nigh imperial, which was precisely how he looked as he gazed down at her. “You claimed you studied me. That you knew me. How did you think this was going to go?”
“I thought you were serious about this,” she accused, suspecting that the person she was truly furious with was herself. “Instead it’s been nothing but games and absurd demands, your hands on me and your constant attempts to—”
She cut herself off, but it was too late. His dark eyes seemed to glow.
“To what?” She heard it all in his voice then. Sex. Fire. Need. It pulsed in her, too. “Why don’t you say it, Miranda? You might just get what you want.”
God, her name in that mouth. Had he said it before? In that way of his, rich and Russian and so seductive it hurt her not to reach out and touch him? It hurt, and she was getting tired of all the ways she hated herself today, all the ways she continued to betray herself, all the ways this man was turning her into someone she couldn’t recognize or understand.
“Oh, good,” she said, proud of the way she sounded then, so close to her usual cool, almost as if she wasn’t losing herself here. “Another attempt to intimidate me.”
The corner of his wicked mouth simply kicked up into that mocking, compelling curve, and her mouth went dry.
“I don’t have to attempt anything,” he pointed out with a quiet certainty that pounded in her like a drumbeat. “I only have to enter a room and you begin to tremble. I only have to put my hands on you to feel you come apart.”
“That’s called disgust.”
“You and I both know what it’s called,” he contradicted her with all of that easy arrogance. He was so sure. She told herself it appalled her. It did. “But you can deny it to yourself if you must. It makes no difference to me. Or to reality.”
Miranda was shaking again, and furious with herself, knowing that he could see it—and what he’d think it meant. What it does mean, a part of her she refused to acknowledge whispered.
“We had a very specific deal,” she said, trying to find her footing again. She felt like such a fool. Had he tricked her or had she been so blinded by her greed to finally get the tools to expose him that she’d talked herself into this? And now the damage was done, and she could either disappear in shame or try, somehow, to make this worldwide humiliation work for her. Somehow. “Red carpets, public places. There was never any talk of calling up reporters so you could make nasty insinuations and have me stand there and just…take it.”
He smiled then, but it was a different kind of smile, and Miranda told herself it didn’t matter that there were shadows in his eyes then, that hint of darkness that she’d seen before and didn’t want to explore any further. His hand moved as if he might touch her face, but he dropped it back to his side, and she told herself she didn’t feel that as a loss. She didn’t. He was simply acting. Playing his role. Her own hand rose to her neck, as if taking the place of his, and some small light flared in his eyes then, as if he recognized what she’d done.
“Did you think I would make this easy for you?” he asked then, rough and soft all at once, that darkness still heavy in his gaze. “If you want that book, Miranda, you’ll have to work for it. And I can tell you right now, you probably won’t like it.”
“I already don’t like it,” she said, but it came out a whisper, and was much too dark. As if he was getting under her skin from the inside out.
“Then you’d better prepare yourself.” He was even closer suddenly, so close it felt as if he was touching her, or was it that she wanted that? With parts of herself she wasn’t sure she recognized? In ways she hadn’t known she could want anything? “Tomorrow
we go into Cannes.”
His head tilted to that dangerous angle, as if he was kissing her again. His mouth was right there, wicked and delicious, and she couldn’t seem to think of a reason why she shouldn’t reach across the space between them and taste it.
But that way lay madness, and she knew what came after. Why couldn’t she remember that? Why was she torturing herself?
“My hands are going to be all over you,” he promised, his voice dropping low, from silk to something like velvet, rough and lush all at once. “And yours will be all over me. I’m going to feed you from my fingers and you’ll lick them clean. And when we get back here, in private, you can tell me all about the ways you hated it and how much you dislike me, but we’ll both know the truth, won’t we?”
His hand came up again, and she thought he might push her hair back from her face or touch her cheek, but he paused. Everything went wildly electric—white and searing. It was too hot between them, blinding and impossible, and she knew that if she breathed too hard, it would all be over. He would touch her and she would explode and she had no idea what might happen after that.
Or, worse—she did know. She knew exactly what would happen. And she didn’t have any idea how that could be true, or why what charged through her then was as much that age-old fear of hers as it was desire. For him. As if they were made up of the same thing.
Or why she had the strangest notion that he might be able to tell the difference.
“We’re not in public now,” she told him from some place inside of her she hadn’t known was there, her voice the faintest whisper of sound. “There are no cameras, no people. You can’t touch me.” She swallowed. “You agreed.”
“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
THE 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.
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