And this time, the fire roared. It swept through Miranda, making her melt and burn and melt again. She collapsed against the hard wall of his glorious chest, and sighed at the searing friction they made. And it wasn’t close enough.
She felt desperate, needy, and rocked herself against the hard proof of his desire until he groaned. He tangled one hand in her hair to hold her head precisely where he wanted it, and moved to press kisses along her cheek, her neck, then pulled back to reach between them and, in a single sweep of his arm, tug her dress up and over her head.
Miranda was sure her heartbeat was loud enough to drown out the world. She couldn’t seem to do more than catch shallow breaths, and everything seemed to stop as Ivan stared down at her, as if mesmerized by what he’d uncovered. She felt that low ache inside of her pull tight, and shuddered, so much closer to that wild oblivion he’d showed her than should have been possible.
“Ti takaya krasivaya,” he muttered, in reverent tones, and then he pressed his mouth to the hollow between her breasts, where the cups of her pale blue bra met in a delicate bow. “You’re beautiful. Perfect.”
And in that moment, she believed him.
Miranda arched against him, into him. Her blood seemed to sing inside of her, her head spun, and she was only dimly aware of the way he held her with one arm and even so, managed to unclasp her bra. She helped as he pulled it from her arms and tossed it aside. But she knew nothing else when he fastened his dangerous mouth to one taut nipple, pulling it into all of that wicked heat.
He started to speak in Russian, a low, rough music to her ears, as he worked a trail of bright, hot fire from one breast to the other. Then back. As if she was some kind of candy, and he wanted to lick up every last bit of it. She felt the pull of his mouth in her pulse, in her fingers, and like a hungry blaze between her legs.
He moved without warning, shifting them around so that she lay on her back and he was stretched out above her, and for a moment he paused there, suspended on his hands, and Miranda could see the passion etched hard into his features. It made him look stark. Fierce. She thought he was beautiful, too.
“This time,” he said, “when you scream, remember that I am right here.”
She couldn’t speak. She could only nod, and then her heart flipped in her chest when he leaned down to kiss her sweetly.
But it was only the one kiss, and then he turned back to her breasts. He tested their shape in his hands, with his mouth. He licked her until she writhed beneath him, and then he reached down between them and simply held the heat of her in his hand. She bucked against him, dazed with this madness, this sweet, impossible insanity.
“Ivan—” Her voice was cracked. Crazed.
And he ignored her anyway. He used his teeth against one sensitive peak, a gentle if deliberate scrape, while at the same time he pressed his palm hard against the core of her, and once again, Miranda flew apart in a great, shuddering tornado of bliss.
When she came back to herself, he was naked, and so was she. It took one breath to realize that, and another to comprehend that he had settled himself between her legs, the head of him teasing her entrance.
She didn’t have time to be afraid. She didn’t have time to throw herself across the room again, or cry. He was so big, so hot, and there was that ruthlessness of his that made her weak. It made her want to melt all around him. It made her want with parts of herself she’d never known before.
He braced himself on one hand and slid the other around to lift her bottom closer to him. One more breath, ragged and wild. His dark gaze on hers, formidable and dangerous, even now. Especially now.
“I don’t want to be ruined,” she whispered.
“There is more than one kind of ruin,” he said in a gruff, thrilling voice that made her want to bask in him like sunlight. “This is the good kind.”
And then he slid into her in one slick, devastating thrust.
* * *
She went wild beneath him, and the feel of it, her silky limbs wrapped around him, her soft skin flushed from his mouth and hot to the touch, almost did him in. She arched against him, pressing that lithe body of hers to his in a glorious stretch, and it took everything he had to keep from losing himself there and then.
If he was a good man, a sensitive man, he would love her softly. Sweetly. Make her come around him again and again, languorous and endless.
But he wasn’t that man, and anyway, she didn’t want the watered-down version of him. She wanted the real him. All of him. Ivan didn’t think she could know how that had exploded inside of him. What it meant. He wasn’t sure he wanted to think about it himself. He bent his head to hers, burying his face in the sweet hollow of her neck and shoulder, and set the demanding rhythm his body craved.
And she met it. Threw back her head and gloried in it.
Which made him that much crazier.
She wrapped her arms around his neck, pressing those maddeningly perfect breasts into his chest. She nearly undid him. She was hot and soft and melting all around him, and he was desperate for her. For this.
I will never get enough, he thought very distinctly.
He heard her small, erotic moans in his ear and turned his head to capture that mouth of hers again.
There were no games here, in this meeting of tongues and lips. As the fire that burned through them seared them both, reducing them both to nothing more than dancing flames. And still he moved in her, filled with her in ways he couldn’t begin to explore, mad with need, wild with delight at her perfect, slick fit.
Mine, he thought when she grew taut against him, when her fingers dug into his skin and her eyes closed tight. Mine, he thought when he reached between them and found the center of desire, making her cry out his name before she hurtled once more over that cliff.
All mine, he thought, when at last he followed her over the edge, her own name like an answered prayer on his lips.
* * *
This was what shifting felt like, Miranda told herself the next morning, when she woke and realized there had been no nightmares. That he’d wiped them away, or helped her face them at long last. Or perhaps it was that she’d done the actual shifting some time ago, and this was what happened afterward. Either way, she was lost.
Wholly, unutterably lost, but she couldn’t find it anywhere in her to mind. There was that little whisper of warning that moved in her, dark and distracting, but she didn’t listen to it. She couldn’t.
There was only Ivan. At last.
“I—” she’d begun in that heady rush of the forty-eight precious hours that followed that first night, leading up to the premiere she’d come to California to attend. “I think I…”
But she couldn’t finish. She couldn’t quite say it.
“I told you I was good, Professor,” he replied with that casual arrogance that made her smile, stretched out across the massive bed in his minimalistic bedroom, with nothing to soften its modern, masculine edges but the Pacific Ocean just beyond the walls of glass. Nothing to interrupt the fact of his magnificence, his perfectly honed body displayed like treasure on the sumptuously dark brown sheets.
She was sprawled across his chest, overcome with all these things she felt. They were cracking her wide open, making her question everything. She traced the three letters tattooed over his heart.
“What does this say?”
“Mir,” he said gruffly. A guarded look in his eyes. “It’s the Russian word for peace.”
Her eyes filled up, her own heart ached for him, and he took her hand away from the tattoo. She remembered the balcony in Cap Ferrat, when he’d spoken of a better way to fight.
“Do not make mountains from molehills,” he ordered her.
“Relax,” she’d replied, hurt when she shouldn’t have been. Just because she’d shifted into this other, more emotional place, it didn’t mean he had. It didn’t mean he would. She knew she had to come to terms with that. “This is just sex.”
He’d pinned her with one of those brooding
looks of his then, his eyes so dark it was like nighttime, and something clutched inside of her. He was a fighter with peace etched over his heart. He was more alone than anyone she’d ever known—maybe even more than she was, and something in her howled for him.
“As long as it is not insipid sex,” he’d said after a long moment. And then he’d pulled her head to his and made her forget again. For a while.
Ivan found himself talking. A lot.
* * *
They sat out on a terrace overlooking the sea, the sun falling over them like a caress, and he told her about long, Russian winters that felt as if they’d never end, that stayed in a man’s bones even all these years later.
“I like hot places,” he said, even smiling. “The hotter and drier the better.”
She laughed. “I don’t blame you.”
They lay in his bed, still panting from another round of the kind of sex that he thought might alter him permanently, and he told her about fighting.
His first championship title fight. What it was like to come to the United States for the first time. How quickly he’d realized that not being fluent in English was as dangerous as not being prepared for a match—that it left him open to attack.
“You make it sound as if you were surrounded by attackers,” she said, her fingers moving lazily through his hair.
“I was,” he said. “I am. And only sometimes in the ring.”
They walked along the edge of his bluff that overlooked the sea and he told her about his little-boy memories of the Soviet Union, and his far sharper and more dangerous memories of what had happened after it fell, when he was only ten and forced to grow up. Fast. How he’d lost his parents and gained his uncle. How he’d had nothing to do with all of his fear and pain and anger but fight. For his life. For Nikolai’s.
“That must have been terrifying,” she said, frowning out at the ocean as if she was glaring at his past. “Not just losing your parents, but your whole way of life. Your whole world in one year.”
“It made me who I am today,” he replied, his voice harder than necessary, almost as if she’d forced him to discuss this when he knew full well she hadn’t. He could not seem to keep himself from her. She had asked for the unwatered-down version, and he wanted to give it to her—a wholly new and unfamiliar urge. “For good or ill.”
He heard the little sigh she gave then, despite the breeze that lifted the ends of her dark red hair and made it seem to glow in the sunlight.
“Do you think we’ll spend the rest of our lives cleaning up the mess?” she asked softly. “When it wasn’t even our mess?”
He knew what she meant. “I think the past informs everything we do. Ghosts are with us, whether we acknowledge them or not.”
She glanced back over her shoulder at the house, then looked at him, her dark jade gaze troubled.
“Like your brother.”
He felt that jolt in him, and questioned again why he was doing this. Why he was sharing anything at all with her, much less these particular things. Much less himself, when he’d never told any of this to women he’d been genuinely dating from the start. There was so little time left. He had accomplished what he’d set out to do. He’d seduced her. Their fake relationship was established. All that was left was the very public, hopefully televised dumping, which would render her mute. At last.
He should have been oozing triumph from every pore. He certainly shouldn’t have been sharing his private business. His private pain.
But he couldn’t seem to help himself.
He turned slightly and saw what she must have—Nikolai out on one of the higher balconies, arms crossed, watching. Always watching. He could feel his brother’s typical disapproval like its own, stiff breeze.
“If my brother is a ghost,” he said quietly, “the fault is mine.”
She only looked at him curiously, as if the guilt that was so much a part of him didn’t make any sense.
“I left him,” Ivan choked out. “To the tender mercies of our uncle. He escaped into the military when he could, and he thought so little of himself that he volunteered for a unit that took chunks of his soul every time he went on a mission. For a time he thought he could drink what he was missing back in, but that didn’t work. His wife left him. She took his child. He lost everything.”
“He hasn’t lost you.”
Ivan didn’t know what twisted in him, rolling over like an earthquake, shaking things loose that he hadn’t known could move. For a moment he thought the whole world shifted—this was California, after all—but Miranda still stood there, looking up at him, so pretty in something flowing and red that teased over her body to skim her thighs. So it was only him, and he didn’t know what that meant, or how to handle it.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, because he had no idea what was happening, and trying to cram it back down where it belonged seemed like the best course of action. “It’s my fault he was put in the position of having to make those decisions. If I’d stayed—”
“You would have had to make the same decisions that he did,” she interrupted him with a shrug. “Just as he could have followed your example, presumably. If he didn’t, that’s sad, but it’s not your fault.”
Ivan said nothing. He was, he thought in some astonishment, incapable of speech. That thing in him shook harder. Seismic overload, turning everything to rubble. Cities collapsing. Landscapes changing. He was surprised he didn’t fall to the ground.
Miranda looked at him, then frowned in concern. She reached over and put her hand on his arm, and he had the strangest sensation, then—that this small, slight woman was holding him up. That she could carry him, if she wanted. If he let her.
“Ivan,” she said gently. Insistently, her gaze never leaving his, and causing, he realized, the same kind of trouble all through him. He should have taken precautions. He should have listened to his brother. He should have paid more attention to what she was doing to him—because now, he was very much afraid, it was far too late. “You do know that, don’t you?”
* * *
The red carpet for Ivan’s Jonas Dark premiere didn’t overwhelm Miranda this time. She didn’t care about the cameras. She didn’t care about the roar of the crowd or the attempts at intrusive questions. She was aware of nothing but Ivan. She saw the way he looked at her that was only theirs. All of the stories he’d told her, all the ways he’d shared himself, as if he wanted to be as open to her as she was to him… It made her imagine he was not as alone as he sometimes seemed.
Or that she wasn’t.
She was dressed in the shimmering blue dress she’d worn as little more than fabric in that dressing room in Paris. It clung to her breasts and then fell like water to the floor, reminding her somehow of the sea. The back was a wide V, allowing him to brush her skin with his fingertips whenever he liked, catapulting them both back to Paris. To what could have been.
“Do you know what I wanted to do to you the last time you wore this?” he asked, murmuring into her ear as they entered the theater.
“I wanted you to do it,” she told him, smiling. “I dreamed about it for nights on end.”
“Lucky for you this is Hollywood,” he replied, that fire in dark gaze. “Where all your wildest dreams can come true.”
And he was as good as his word.
He didn’t wait for them to go back to his Malibu house. The moment they entered the limousine that was to take them from the premiere to the after-party, he pulled her to him.
“No kissing,” he told her sternly, making her melt with the heat lurking in his voice and gleaming in his gaze. “We have to look presentable.”
He simply picked her up and settled her over his lap. He moved her skirts out of the way, and pulled her panties to the side as he worked his own fly. And then, his hands deliciously hard on her hips, he thrust deep into her, made them both sigh with that sheer, dizzying pleasure that was only theirs.
Only him, she thought. Only Ivan.
; He gazed up at her then, and showed her that smile that she understood then that she would do anything to see. Anything at all. Especially this.
“You’ll have to do all the work.” It was a dare. A challenge.
And she met it.
The car slid through the streets of Hollywood. Miranda could see lights, other cars, city life clogging the roads and surging up and down the sidewalks—and all the while, Ivan was so hard beneath her and inside of her. So deliciously hard. She reached up and braced on hand against the roof of the car, and the other on his shoulder. And then she began to move.
It was so good. It felt like glory and wild, slick heat, perfect and impossible all at once.
She moved faster, making him groan. He let his head fall back against the seat and she watched him as she rocked against him, into him, circling her hips instinctively, finding the best fit, the hottest angle. He was so fierce, so intensely masculine, so ruthlessly physical, even with his eyes closed. Even as he let her take some kind of control. It made her feel wild with a new kind of power, incandescent with it. With him. Like she was made to do this. Like it made her new, and strong. That she could reduce this tough, hard man to nothing more than need.
That she could make him come.
And then fling herself over the edge behind him, knowing he would be there on the other side of all of this wildness to catch her, every time.
* * *
She had originally intended to go back to New York after the premiere, to wait out her time between Ivan’s events in the comfort and privacy of her own home. But after the premiere, sometime so far into the night that it was already the next morning, she woke to find him holding her close, his face buried against her neck.
“What’s the matter?” she asked, her hands going to his face, his back.
But he didn’t answer.
He entered her slowly. As if it was sacred. He moved like liquid; gentle, inexorable. He loved her with his mouth, his hands, making her writhe beneath him in that same quiet, shattering way. As if he was imprinting himself on her—making her his as surely as if he’d branded her. Because she understood that there was no way she would ever survive this—him—intact. No way she could even attempt it.
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