No More Sweet Surrender
CAITLIN CREWS
Enemies attract! Ivan Korovin is determined to cement his evolution from dirt-poor dreamless kid to billionaire philanthropist. But first he has a serious PR problem to take care of: outspoken Miranda Sweet has ruined his reputation by labelling him ‘Caveman #1’ in her bestselling book.The solution? Give the ravenous public what they want – to see the enemies become lovers! From the red carpet in LA to black-tie charity balls in Moscow, they play out their pretend love story for all the world to see. But beneath the glare of the spotlight it’s getting harder to tell what’s real and what’s for show…‘Brilliant, emotional and passionately intense. Thank you, Caitlin!’ – Becca, Photographer, Dumfries
“What about all the nasty things Miranda’s said about you over the years, Ivan?” asked one of the more dogged reporters, pitching her voice above the rest. “Have you hashed all of that out behind closed doors?”
It was an American reporter, and Ivan recognized her. Give this woman the right soundbite, he knew, and it would dominate the entertainment news. He slid his sunglasses from his face. He looked at Miranda for a long moment, until she flushed again—unaware, he was sure, that it looked as if what had passed between them in that glance was purely sexual. Carnal and burning hot. Then he looked back at the camera.
He knew exactly what he was doing. He did it all the time. Enigmatic. Dangerous. And impossibly, explosively sexy.
Ivan smiled. Slowly and knowingly. He dragged it out, knowing his famous smile was the most lethal weapon in this particular arsenal.
“That was just foreplay,” he said.
About the Author
CAITLIN CREWS discovered her first romance novel at the age of twelve. It involved swashbuckling pirates, grand adventures, a heroine with rustling skirts and a mind of her own, and a seriously mouthwatering and masterful hero. The book (the title of which remains lost in the mists of time) made a serious impression. Caitlin was immediately smitten with romances and romance heroes, to the detriment of her middle school social life. And so began her life-long love affair with romance novels, many of which she insists on keeping near her at all times.
Caitlin has made her home in places as far-flung as York, England, and Atlanta, Georgia. She was raised near New York City, and fell in love with London on her first visit when she was a teenager. She has backpacked in Zimbabwe, been on safari in Botswana, and visited tiny villages in Namibia. She has, while visiting the place in question, declared her intention to live in Prague, Dublin, Paris, Athens, Nice, the Greek Islands, Rome, Venice, and/or any of the Hawaiian islands. Writing about exotic places seems like the next best thing to moving there.
She currently lives in California, with her animator/comic book artist husband and their menagerie of ridiculous animals.
Recent titles by the same author:
A DEVIL IN DISGUISE
THE MAN BEHIND THE SCARS
(The Santina Crown) IN DEFIANCE OF DUTY HEIRESS BEHIND THE HEADLINES
Did you know these are also available as eBooks?
Visit www.millsandboon.co.uk
No More Sweet Surrender
Caitlin Crews
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
This book could not have been written without the wonderful ladies on Sharon Kendrick’s gorgeous writing course at the Watermill in Posara, Italy. Thank you so much for all of your encouragement and enthusiasm—it made all the difference!
Victoria Parker, Jennifer Drogell, Lorna Sweeney, Louise Okafor, Ann Burnell, Shirley Knight, and Jane Carling—this one is for you.
Special thanks to the incomparable Sharon Kendrick and the always inspiring Jane Porter: I’ll always treasure what amounted to a Master Class in writing with the two of you—in glorious Tuscany, no less!
And to my private and personal ninja Jeff Johnson, for teaching me about martial arts—and how to breathe.
CHAPTER ONE
ONE moment Professor Miranda Sweet was trying to slip through the scrum of people outside the Georgetown University Conference Center, where she’d just delivered her keynote speech to attendees of the Global Summit to End Violence in Media, and the next, someone was gripping her arms. Hard. Mean. Enough to bruise.
She clenched her hands tight on the handle of her bag as she was swung around, wholly against her will—and then there was a man’s face much too close to hers, invading her space. The warm spring afternoon in Washington, D.C., seemed cold and hostile, suddenly. She had the hectic impression of angry words with a belligerent scowl, and the swift and terrifying understanding that this man wished her ill.
And like that, she was a girl again. Helpless and scared and cowering in the corner while her father raged and smashed things, then turned his furious glare on her. Just like the girl she’d been then, she shook.
“What—” she began, shocked to hear the quaver in her voice that reminded her of that helpless version of herself she’d thought she’d buried almost ten years ago.
“You need to listen instead of talk, for once,” the strange man growled at her, his words heavily accented.
Miranda’s instinct was to apologize, to obey. To cower and agree—anything to deflect his anger, to appease it—
But then there was another hand, this one smooth and gentle against the small of her back, though it was also undeniably strong. It felt almost possessive as it drew her inexorably away from the man who’d grabbed her and brought her up against a broad male chest. Miranda lost her breath. She knew she should have protested—screamed, swung out with her bag, perhaps—but something stopped her. It was the strangest sensation, as if she was safe, despite all evidence to the contrary. The hard fingers around the tender flesh of her upper arms dropped away, at last, and she tilted her head back to blink in astonishment at the man who still held her close to him.
Like some kind of protector. Like a lover. But she knew who he was, she realized in astonishment. And she knew he was neither of those things.
“You have made a mistake,” he told the other man, his Russian-flavored voice cold.
He recognized her, too, Miranda knew when he looked down at her again. She saw the flare of it in his deep black eyes, and despite herself, she felt an echoing chill of that recognition shiver down her spine and shake its way through her. She had studied this man, taught his films and his fights in her classes. She had discussed what she felt he represented, at length, in print and on television. But she had never met him before. She had certainly never touched him.
He was Ivan Korovin. The Ivan Korovin. Former undefeated mixed martial arts champion, current Hollywood action movie darling, famous for being exactly what he was and everything Miranda hated: unapologetically aggressive, casually brutal and celebrated hither and yon for both.
He was the tall, dark and entirely too handsome walking embodiment of everything she’d built her career fighting against.
The angry man barked out something then that she didn’t need to speak Russian to understand was cruel and vicious. She’d heard that tone before, and she felt it like a blow to her stomach just the same.
Miranda felt every famous inch of Ivan Korovin, pressed against her as he was—hot and hard and not, it turned out, air-brushed in any way beneath the luxurious suit he wore—stiffen with tension.
“Be very careful you do not insult what belongs to me,” he warned in that low voice of his that was richer and more stirring in person than on film. It seemed to wash over her like a heat rash, making her skin prickle in reaction. It confused her. It came far too close to scaring her in a wholly different way.
It made her almost miss the impossible, absurd thing he’d just said.
What belongs to him?
“I do not mean to trespass, of course,” the other man said then, his small, mean eyes still fastened on Miranda in a way that made her shift uneasily in what no doubt looked like Ivan’s embrace. Though she did nothing to extricate herself, and on some level she thought less of herself for her own cowardice. “It does me no good to have you as my enemy.”
Ivan’s smile then was like one of the weapons they claimed he didn’t even need, so lethal was he without them. With only his hands and his skill. “Then be certain you never lay hands on her again, Guberev.”
Miranda could feel it when he spoke, this man made of brute force and extreme physical prowess, the dark timbre of it rumbling through her like an expensive engine, powerful and low, making parts of her she’d never paid much attention to before seem to … spark.
What was the matter with her? She much preferred brains to brawn, thank you. She always had, due to her father’s reliance on his superior strength and size throughout her violent childhood under his deceptively well-manicured roof in tony Greenwich, Connecticut. And besides … this was Ivan Korovin!
Miranda had been a regular face on the news and talk-show circuit ever since she’d published her doctoral dissertation as a surprisingly well-received book two years back. Caveman Worship focused on the widespread hero worship of particularly brutal professional sports figures. She considered herself a much-needed voice of reason in a tragically violent world that adored brutes like the famously reclusive and tight-lipped Ivan Korovin—both the one he’d been in his mixed martial arts days and the one he’d played in the incredibly violent Jonas Dark action films for the past few years since his retirement from the ring.
She pushed back against his absurdly chiseled chest, ignoring the way all of that smooth muscle felt against her palms. She hardly heard the other man’s insincere apologies then, because she was caught up in Ivan Korovin’s searing midnight gaze instead. And suddenly, a wild staccato sort of pounding seemed to beat through her veins, thick and sweet and dizzying, and she thought her legs might give out from underneath her.
It turned out that the camera did him no favors. On screen he looked tough, dangerous. A lethal killing machine, forged in a bloodthirsty fire. He was usually half-naked and extravagantly tattooed—an extraordinarily powerful punch of sheer masculinity who could mow through his opponents like they were made of butter, and usually did.
A Neanderthal, Miranda had always thought. And had felt comfortable calling him in a variety of public places.
And he was certainly that, as well as tall and hard-packed with all of that sleek and solid muscle, as expected—but this close Miranda could see that he was surprisingly, shockingly beautiful in his ruthlessly male way, for all that he was also so clearly battered from all of his years of fighting. The nose he’d obviously broken a few times couldn’t take away from the perfect lushness of his mouth. The scar on his forehead faded next to the sheer glory of his cheekbones. The gorgeous, expertly tailored suit he wore made him a kind of elegant suggestion of a threat instead of the direct one she’d always considered him, and she was completely thrown by the surprising gleam of intelligence in his too-dark eyes.
It was like falling over a cliff into a very deep, very dark abyss. Miranda forgot about the angry man who’d started this by grabbing her. She forgot the old, awful memories he’d stirred up, and her own ingrained cowardice. She forgot everything. Even herself, as if there was nothing in all the world but the way Ivan Korovin was looking at her.
And Miranda never forgot herself. She never lost control. Never. She was appalled that she had to remind herself of that.
“What belongs to you?” she asked, echoing back his words, trying to regain her balance. “Did you just refer to me as if I’m some kind of possession? Like a goat?”
There was no reason he should have smiled like that, that dark quirk of his dangerously beautiful mouth. There was even less reason that she should have felt it like a touch against her skin, long and lingering. And she certainly shouldn’t have felt an answering sort of echo, a deep and irresistible pull, low in her belly.
It occurred to her then that he was far more dangerous than even she’d believed, and she’d only last week called him the bogeyman on national television.
“I am a very possessive man,” he told her, his accent making the words seem almost like a caress. He flicked a hard look at the other man who still stood there, reeking of malice and terrible cologne, then returned his dark, brooding gaze to Miranda’s. And she felt it. Everywhere. “It is a terrible flaw.”
He tugged her closer to him with embarrassing ease then, plastering her against him as if she had no will of her own, which was, frighteningly, exactly how she felt—and then he simply bent his head and claimed her mouth with his.
She had no time to think.
His lush and beautiful mouth was shockingly carnal against hers, wicked and clever, demanding and hot.
Physical.
He took her over, as if it was his right. As if she’d begged him to do it. She felt his hard hand against the side of her face, guiding her mouth to his with an easy, almost offhanded mastery that made her whole body pull tight in sensual delight. Heat exploded inside of her, volcanic and stunning. She didn’t fight. She didn’t so much as whimper. She didn’t even want to. She simply … let this man she imagined disliked her as much as she did him kiss her as if they were moments away from tumbling into the nearest bed. She simply surrendered to his endless, impossible, unspeakably erotic kiss—
When he finally lifted his head, his black eyes were burning with the same fire Miranda felt consuming her. There was a ringing in her ears, and she couldn’t feel her own hands where they were braced against his great wall of a chest. She had the vague thought that she might actually be having a heart attack. And then, a moment later, she knew she only wished she was—the better to avoid, forever, what had just happened.
What he’d done and, worse, what she’d felt. What she hadn’t so much as offered up a token protest against. What was still raging through her like an electrical storm, knocking down power lines and leaving her stunned.
He muttered a pretty word that she was certain was a curse, but speared through her like a wild flame. “Milaya.”
It was something about the way he said it, or perhaps it was that stirring, considering look in his black gaze. It flipped some kind of switch in her, and what washed over her then was nothing as simple as fire. It was dark and complicated and new, and left her feeling starkly, nakedly vulnerable, and worse, convinced that he could see it—
For a wild, panicked moment then, she thought she really had burst into flames after all. Bright lights exploded all around her and she realized, dazedly, that they’d been flashing for some time.
It took her one ragged breath, then another, to understand that it was not his kiss—though she could still feel it storming through her, shuddering and spinning out that wild heat, making her something like nauseated and restless and humiliatingly desperate for more, all at once—or even that demanding, challenging way he was looking at her now. It wasn’t his hard, capable hands that still held her against him. It wasn’t even that sudden slap of fearful vulnerability that she was still too afraid he could read.
It was the cameras. The paparazzi who hung on Ivan Korovin’s every taciturn word and calculated deed, recording the entire insane situation for posterity and plastering it all over those glossy supermarket magazines. And they’d certainly gotten a show today, hadn’t they?
The angry man was gone, as if he’d never been. There was only Ivan Korovin and the aftereffects of that searing kiss. And Miranda was forced to face the unsavory truth: she’d just been caught with one of her staunchest opponents, the man who had once dismissed her by calling her a tiny, yipping dog on a famous nightly talk show to the sound of much approving applause.
Kissing him, no less. In public.
At an international summit teeming with policy makers, academics and delegates from at least fifteen countries, all as deeply and philosophically opposed to everything he stood for as she was.
Miranda had to assume that every last moment of it was on film. The avid, delighted expressions of the jostling throng of reporters surrounding her assured her that it was.
Which meant, she knew with a terrible sinking sensation inside, that her entire career had just taken one of the knockout body blows for which Ivan Korovin was so famous.
To say nothing of the rest of her.
If looks could kill, Ivan reflected a short time later, the redheaded professor would have eviscerated him while the cameras still rolled.
He’d moved fast after he’d kissed her, that serious lapse in judgment he was still having difficulty justifying to himself. He’d had his security people clear a path into the conference hotel. Once inside, he’d directed her into a secluded seating area behind a riot of plants.
She hadn’t looked at him again and he’d imagined she was fighting with a truth that must have been wholly unpalatable for this self-appointed harpy who fought against all he wanted to accomplish: she owed him her thanks. Her gratitude. A better man might not have taken such satisfaction in that, but then, Ivan had never pretended to be anything but what he was. What would be the point?
But when she lifted her gaze to his—that slap of dark jade that he found intrigued him far more than it should, far more than he was comfortable admitting, even to himself—he understood that she had no intention of thanking him.
She was furious. At him.
He wasn’t surprised. But he was too much the fighter, still and always, not to see a flare of temper in another and want to meet it. Dominate it and control it.
Her.
After all, he thought with a certain grimness, he owed her. She’d been making his life difficult for going on two years now. Was there any name she hadn’t called him? Any lie she wasn’t prepared to tell to make her point, no matter what it cost him? Her voice echoed in his ears even now, painting him in the worst possible light, turning public opinion against him, announcing to anyone who would listen that he was exactly the kind of monster he’d spent his life fighting—
Oh, yes. He owed her.
“What,” she asked, her voice dripping with a mix of ice and fury, as if he was nothing more than a naughty student misbehaving in one of her classes, as if she was unaware of her own peril, “was that?”
“Did I startle you?” he asked idly, as if fighting off deep boredom. As if he’d already half forgotten her. It made her dark eyes glint green with outrage. “I thought it best to act swiftly.”
She moved up from her seat and on to her feet. She was not one of those drearily serious American women who feared heels, apparently. Hers were sleek and sharp and at least three inches high, and she looked entirely too comfortable in them as she stood there with a certain bravado meant, he knew, to tell him without words that she refused to be dominated by him.
But it was too late. He knew she tasted like fire.
“You grabbed me,” she bit out with that same controlled flash of temper that made him think of long, icy winters. And how they melted into summer, all the same. “You manhandled me. You …”
Her face flushed then, and Ivan found himself unaccountably fascinated by the stain of red that worked its way from her smooth cheeks down to her elegant neck. Kisses could lie, he knew. But not that telltale flush of color, making her eyes glitter and her breath come quicker. He couldn’t look away.
“Kissed you,” he affirmed.
He should not find an opponent fascinating. Especially not this opponent, who had judged him so harshly and unfairly condemned him years ago. This particular opponent whose well-timed, perfectly placed barbs always seemed to hit at exactly the right moment to make him seem like some kind of deranged comic book character—hardly the reputation he wanted to have when he needed to use his celebrity brand to bolster his brand-new charity foundation. He certainly should not make the fatal mistake of noticing she was a woman, and far more compelling than simply a voice of dissent.
“That is true,” he said darkly. “I did all of those things.”
“How dare you?”
“I dare many things.” He shrugged. “As I believe you have noted in nauseating detail in your cable television interviews.”
She glared at him, and Ivan took the opportunity to study this nemesis of his from up close. She was made up of those delicate bones and graceful, patrician lines that made his blood sing, entirely against his will. She was tall for a woman, and slim, though nothing like the kind of skinny he had been too poor for too long to associate with anything but desperation. But he could see, now, that she was neither as fragile nor as brittle as he’d assumed. Her hair was a long, sleek fall of a very dark red, captivating and unusual next to those mysterious eyes. The dark trouser suit she wore was both professional and decidedly, deliciously feminine, and he found himself reliving the brief, sweet crush of her small yet perfectly rounded breasts against his chest when he’d kissed her.
It was the closest he’d come to pure want in longer than he could remember.
He told himself he hated it.
“Dmitry Guberev is a remarkably unpleasant man who thinks his new money makes him strong,” Ivan said curtly, deeply annoyed with himself. “He had a very short, very pathetic career as a fighter in Kiev, and is now some kind of fight promoter. I convinced him to leave you alone in the only way he was likely to understand. If you choose to take offense at that, I can’t stop you.”
“By telling him I’m yours?” The icy emphasis she put on the last word poked at him, made him want to heat her up—and he knew how, now, didn’t he? He knew exactly how to kiss her, how to taste her, how to angle his mouth over hers for a wilder, better fit. “How medieval. Your what, may I ask?”
“I believe he thinks you are my lover,” Ivan said silkily, testing out the word on his tongue even as he tested the idea in his head, and despite the fact he knew it was as insane as it was impossible. Self-sabotage at its finest. This woman was poison. But he couldn’t seem to stop goading her, even so. “Not my goat.”
“I didn’t ask you to charge in on your white horse and save me,” she said, her fascinating gaze a shade or two darker, which Ivan took to be the remnants of that same fire he couldn’t seem to put out of his head. Her cultured American voice remained smooth.
She sounded like those dark gray pearls she wore in an elegant loop around her neck, smooth and supple and expensive, impossibly aristocratic. She was well out of the reach of a desperately poor kid who’d grown up hard in Nizhny Novgorod when it was still known as Gorky, the Russian word for bitter—which was precisely how he recalled those dark, cold years. Maybe that was why she got beneath his skin; it had been a long time now since anyone had dismissed him the way this woman did. He didn’t like it.
Or, he reminded himself pointedly, her.
“I didn’t need your help,” she continued, all offended dignity, as if he hadn’t seen that look in her eyes in the moment before he’d involved himself. As if he hadn’t seen that painfully familiar flash of something too much like helpless misery wash over her expressive face.
But she wasn’t his responsibility, he told himself now. She had made herself his enemy, and he should remember that above all things.
“Perhaps not.” He shrugged as if it was no matter to him, which, in fact, it shouldn’t have been. “But I know Guberev. He is an ugly little man, and he would have done far worse if I had not stepped in.” His brows rose in challenge. “How are your arms where he grabbed you, Professor? Do they hurt?”
She looked confused for a moment, as if she hadn’t yet taken the time to catalogue her own pains. She slid her hands up over her arms, hugging herself gently, and the idea of Guberev’s marks on her skin, Ivan discovered as she winced slightly, bothered him. A lot.
“I’m fine,” she said. She dropped her hands back to her sides, shifted her weight from one foot to the other, and Ivan had spent too much of his life reading body language not to understand that she was far less composed than she appeared. He shouldn’t have taken any kind of satisfaction in that, either. “And while I appreciate your urge to help, if that’s what it was, you’ll understand that I can’t condone the method you used.”
“It was extreme, perhaps,” he allowed. It was certainly that. Why had he kissed her? Like so many bullies, Guberev was at heart a coward, as Ivan well knew, having been forced to contend with the slimy little man in the mixed martial arts world for years. What Guberev might want to do to a weaker creature like this woman, given the chance, he would not dare to do in the presence of someone stronger. That Ivan was there should have been enough. Why had he taken it further? “But effective.”
“Effective for whom?” she asked, that smooth voice finally betraying her tension. “You may have single-handedly derailed my entire career. I can only assume that was your goal. What better way to undermine the things I say about you than to render me no more than one of the sexual playthings you famously run through like water?”
As if he had to fight like that, dirty and underhanded. He was Ivan Korovin. He was a champion and a movie star and neither by accident, despite her insinuations. He’d put in hours upon hours of grueling training to become the fighter he was. He’d become fluent in English and had minimized his accent within three years of leaving Russia. He did not undermine. He preferred the direct approach. He was famous for it, come to that.
“Did you become one of my sexual playthings?” he asked darkly. “I feel certain I would remember it.”
“Let’s be clear,” she said, her voice under that smooth control of hers once more, which made him want to throw her off balance again, somehow. “I study you. You’ve spent your entire professional life strategically taking down your opponents, one after the next, without admitting the possibility of defeat.”
He told himself the new color on her cheeks then was a result of the same stark and wild images that were currently torturing him, and had nothing to do with her study of him, as if he was an animal in a zoo. That wicked mouth of hers, slick and addictive. That damnable fire. Her long, graceful limbs wrapped around him. How could he find her so attractive when he knew she would destroy him in an instant, if she could? When she had already done her best to do so? But reason had nothing to do with the heat that rocketed through him. He wanted to sink his fingers into the dark fire of her hair and hear her scream his name as she came all around him, hot and wet and his.
Ivan despaired of himself.
“You are often called an unstoppable force,” she said crisply, her chin rising as if she expected a fight, as if she thought that simple truth was an insult. “It doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to conclude that you saw a way to cut me down, too. And jumped at the chance.”
“I can find your work interesting, Dr. Sweet,” he said, sick of himself as he tried to force the seductive, distracting images from his head, “even if I completely disagree with it. And I can disagree with it without concocting wild strategies to discredit you. I wanted to help you. I would have helped anyone in the same position. I’m sorry if you find that offensive.”
She studied him for a moment, her fine brows lowered into a frown. He had that dislocating sense of being measured and found wanting, another unpleasant reminder of his unfortunate youth, his desperate, determined climb to fame. He had to take a breath, control his response, keep himself calm. Lucky for her that he had made an art of it.
“Life is not an action movie, Mr. Korovin,” she said in her cool, professorial voice, as if she was rendering judgment from high on some podium instead of standing right there in front of him, within reach, her lips still slightly reddened from his. “You cannot sweep in, kiss a woman without her permission and expect accolades. You are far more likely to find yourself slapped with a harassment suit.”
“Of course,” he replied in that bored tone that made temper kick bright and hard in her dark jade gaze. A better man might not find the sight exhilarating. “Thank you for reminding me that I am currently in the most litigious country on earth. The next time I see you in the path of a truck, be it human or machine, I’ll let it mow you down where you stand.”
“I can’t imagine our paths will ever cross again,” she retorted, all elegant affront, which only made that dark current of want in him intensify. He’d felt her against him, meltingly pliant. Her heat. Her fire. He knew the truth, now, behind her high-class, overeducated front. Behind the cool way she’d ripped him into shreds for years now with every appearance of delight. It burned in him. “For which I am profoundly grateful. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go perform some damage control, since the whole world saw me let some macho Hollywood hulk kiss me in—”
“Be honest, Professor,” he interrupted her. “If you dare.”
His gaze met hers. Held. And he wasn’t amused or fascinated or anything that distant, suddenly. It was as if she’d woken that part of him he’d thought long buried with her cool disdain and her quiet horror at his touch—like he’d polluted her somehow. Like he was one of the very monsters he fought against. As if everything that hung in the balance here didn’t matter anymore, save the very real response he’d tasted on her lips.
He knew fire when it burned him. God help them both.
“You kissed me back, milaya moya,” he said softly, feeling the kick of it when her cheeks stained red again, the truth right there, written across her fair skin, his to use against her as he wished.
And that was the problem. He wished.
His brows arched high, daring her to deny it. Daring her to lie to him, to his face, when he knew better. “And you liked it.”
CHAPTER TWO
FINALLY! Miranda thought in relief as she arrived back at her hotel room in Georgetown much later that evening. You can drop the act.
She let the heavy door slam shut behind her, and entertained the notion that she was ill instead of … thrown. But she knew better. She locked the door and then leaned back against it, sliding all the way down to the ground, hugging her knees to her chest and burying her head against them.
She didn’t cry. Not quite. She didn’t weep over the bruises on her upper arms, or the fact they throbbed slightly now. She thought about how scared she’d been one minute, and then how off balance and confused, if inexplicably safe, the next. She thought about that damned kiss and her wild response, and how little she understood what had happened to her when Ivan Korovin had touched her. She thought about what out of control meant, and how unacceptable that was for her. She didn’t let out the old, terrified sobs that she’d thought she’d put behind her so long ago, though she could feel them clawing at her throat, insistent at the back of her eyes.
She squeezed her eyes shut tight, she fought for breath, and then she simply sat there and held herself for a very long time. If she sat still long enough, maybe the nightmares wouldn’t come this time. Maybe she could think them away. Maybe.
She’d made it through the rest of her day on autopilot. She’d taped a segment on school bullying with one cable news channel and had suffered through an early dinner with her literary agent, who was in town to wrangle a loudmouthed politician’s ex-wife into a book deal and who had eyed Miranda with what looked like pity when she’d tried to discuss her work.
“The truth is,” Bob had said baldly over his filet, “you need to come up with something sexy as a follow-up to Caveman Worship. Nothing you’ve mentioned tonight is sexy.”
Which was his obnoxious way of telling her that her publisher had rejected her latest book proposal.
And as she’d sat there at dinner, pretending she found this latest rejection a delightful intellectual challenge instead of another crushing defeat, what had really bothered Miranda was that she hadn’t been able to regulate her temperature. Too hot, too cold, like some impossible fever—and she couldn’t get Ivan Korovin’s frank midnight gaze out of her head. The way he’d looked at her, as if she was dessert and he wanted to indulge. Like he’d been imagining doing it right then and there in the conference hotel lobby, no matter what barely civilized things he might have said.
How could one man make her feel safe and out of control at the same time?
Eventually, the worst of the storm passed. She leaned her head back against the door and blew out a long breath. She kicked off her shoes and tied her long hair back into a low ponytail, wishing she’d booked herself on the train back to her home in New York City tonight. She’d planned to sleep in the following morning and then head back to her office on the Columbia University campus, where she’d taught since being awarded her Ph.D. there three years ago, reinvigorated from the conference and plotting out how she’d use what she’d learned in her latest article.
She hadn’t planned on that awful Guberev. Much less Ivan Korovin.
Or that devastating mouth of his.
A long, hot bath will do the trick, she told herself now, rubbing her hands over her face, trying to banish all of her ghosts. Old and new. All those nightmares in the making. Along with a nice big glass of wine.
This was nothing more than a delayed reaction to Guberev and the sickeningly familiar sensations he had unleashed within her. And all of those memories of her childhood—but that was nothing Miranda particularly wanted to confront head-on tonight.
Unbidden, then, she remembered the way Ivan Korovin, of all people, had pulled her against him. So gently. So easily. He hadn’t been what she’d expected, what she’d imagined him to be. What she’d spent a lot of airtime telling people he was. That rich, dark voice, like the finest chocolate, that had seemed to warm her no matter how cold the words he used. That stern, black gaze of his that had seen too much. The way he’d held her, as if she was precious enough to save. As if she really was his. That had been dizzying enough. And then that kiss …
She sank down on the soft bed that took up most of the efficient room—almost involuntarily, as if his kiss was still that potent in her memory. She was obviously more shaken up than she’d thought. She remembered that she’d switched her phone off before her segment earlier and pulled her bag to her now, rummaging through the outside pocket. Finding her cell phone, she powered it up and sat there, waiting, flexing her bare, stiff toes into the carpeted floor beneath her and staring out the window into the Georgetown night.
Breathe, she ordered herself. But she couldn’t seem to pull in a deep enough breath, and all she could see was that considering gleam in Ivan’s midnight gaze. Something licked in her then, dark and secret, and she felt herself flush with an unwelcome heat. She told herself she was overtired.
She glanced down at her phone as the welcome screen appeared, and watched as the tiny icon noting the number of missed calls appeared.
And rose.
And kept rising.
Next to it, another icon showing her number of emails did the same. Ten. Twenty. Thirty-five. Forty. Her heart began to beat fast and hard, as if to match.
Miranda was still frowning down at the phone in her hand when the room phone shrilled loudly from the bedside table. She jumped, and that was when she noticed that the red light on the hotel phone was blinking, too, indicating even more messages to go along with the mounting numbers on her cell phone.
Fifty. Sixty-two.
Her heart gave a great thump in her chest. Then again. The hotel phone shrilled insistently. Feeling shaky again, and not sure why or what, exactly, she was afraid of, she forced herself to lean over and snatch it up.
“Hello?”
“Professor.”
It was Ivan Korovin, as if she’d conjured him with her wayward thoughts. She flushed hot and hated herself for it, but she would know that voice anywhere. The erotic flavor of his native Russian, that commanding tone that was purely his. It snaked through her, wrapping around her, pulling tight inside and out. She couldn’t think of a single reason why this man should be calling her. Something pulsed, hard and hot and deep in her belly, and she hated herself for that, too.
“We have nothing to discuss,” she said, proud of herself for sounding so calm. So in control. She glanced down at her phone and swallowed. Seventy-three. Eighty-nine. What was going on?
“On the contrary,” he said, and the tone he used then made her realize somewhat belatedly that there were layers of steel to him, ruthlessness and authority, that he’d been holding in reserve before.
“We have a great deal to discuss,” he continued in the kind of tone that suggested he expected nothing less than swift and immediate obedience, from her and anyone else hapless enough to stumble into his path. Hadn’t he spoken in much the same tone to Guberev? “My car is waiting for you downstairs.”
“I can’t imagine what would make you think I’d go anywhere with you,” she said almost conversationally, as if she didn’t feel the obviously insane urge to simply do what he wanted, no questions asked. But she knew where that sort of blind obedience led, didn’t she? Nowhere a smart woman wanted to go. And she had no idea what had happened to her today, what she’d become when he’d touched her—what he’d made her with that kiss that still seemed to ricochet through her body, sending up showers of sparks even all these hours later—but she had always prided herself on being smart. It had saved her once before. It would now. It was her greatest—and only—weapon. “Frankly, I don’t think I’ve heard a more spectacularly bad idea.”
There was a short, loaded pause. She could almost see that dark, fulminating gaze of his, could imagine it running over her skin like heat. She despaired of herself as her body reacted, readying itself for a possession she had no intention of allowing.
“I take it you have not checked your messages, then?”
Her heart seemed to explode against her ribs. She even looked wildly around the room in a panic, as if she thought he might leap out from behind the drapes.
But she was alone. And he, apparently, was psychic.
“How do you know I have messages?” she demanded, and she was too thrown to care that she sounded as unnerved as she felt. That her voice actually shook, and he could undoubtedly hear it as well as she could.
“Listen to a few of them.” It was another command, and harsher this time. Her heart was still pounding too hard for her to protest. “Then I suggest you get in the car.”
“You play a dangerous game, brother.”
Ivan did not have to look up from the screen of his laptop to identify the voice speaking in Russian from the doorway. He knew it as well as his own.
“Guberev?” he asked as his brother Nikolai came to stand behind him.
“Handled. He won’t be an issue again.” Ivan could sense Nikolai’s cold smile then; he didn’t have to turn to see it. “He promised me personally, and you know how I feel about promises.”
For a moment, they both watched the screen on the coffee table. It was an old video of Professor Miranda Sweet on one of those interchangeable American gossip programs, talking. Always talking. And Ivan was her favorite subject.
“Ivan Korovin is a man, not a myth,” she was saying, so cool and composed, looking unassailable and far too correct. It made him want to reach through the screen and mess her up, somehow. With his hands. His mouth. It made him want to take her on a tour of the terrible things he’d lived through, the things he’d done and had done to him, that she cheapened, somehow, with these attacks. “We tell ourselves his treatment of women in the Jonas Dark films is just part of the character he plays, but then we breathlessly follow his questionable exploits with Hollywood starlets as if it’s some kind of extended reel of those same films—”
Ivan reached out and clicked the pause button, then picked up his drink and swirled it around in the heavy crystal tumbler. Sometimes he wondered, in the darkest places inside of him, if it were true. If she was right. If she saw something in him he’d thought he’d excised from himself when he was still young. If he was a brutal pig of a man like the uncle who had raised him—all drunken fists and unrestrained savagery. Even if he’d spent the whole of his adult life distancing himself from men like that.
No doubt that was the reason he’d concocted this little plan to destroy her. At last.
He owed her nothing less. She wasn’t merely his most vocal enemy, so quick to tear him down in public. That would have been bad enough. But Professor Miranda Sweet made him question who he was. She made him doubt himself, when he was the only thing he’d ever had to depend upon. It was unforgivable.
And he wanted her, finally, to pay. That kiss might have been a mistake, but the opportunities it had presented to him once he had time to think, to strategize, felt far more like fate.
“This is begging for trouble,” Nikolai said, walking around to the front of the sofa and fixing Ivan with that frigid glare of his. “You are far too fascinated with a woman you need only to seduce and then discard.”
Ivan knew, intellectually, that his brother was a threat. His years as a soldier, the things he’d done, all he’d lost—these things made him dangerous. Unpredictable and lethal. A hard, damaged man. But he still saw only his younger brother when he looked at him. And his own guilt.
He shrugged as if he was unconcerned. “Surely the fascination will only help in the seduction.”
Nikolai’s cold eyes moved over Ivan’s face. “There are some fights even you can’t win, Vanya.”
He used the old nickname that Ivan only tolerated from family—and Nikolai was the only one left. Ivan eyed his younger brother appraisingly. Nikolai had not answered to his own family nickname in many years now. His demons were so much closer to the surface, raw and hungry. They always had been. Ivan’s tended to lurk deeper, and bite down harder. He could feel their teeth in his flesh, digging deep, even now.
“Your faith in me is touching,” Ivan said after a moment, trying not to step on his brother’s many land mines, scattered all around them. He could almost see them with his own eyes and, as ever, felt nothing but the same old guilt for his part in setting them in the first place.
“There are so many who believe that Hollywood mask of yours,” Nikolai said. “But I know you. I know she makes you bleed, little though you might show it.”
Ivan sighed. “You think I will be bested by a woman who is all bark and no bite, Nikolai? Have I fallen so far?”
“That is not the fight that worries me,” Nikolai said in a low voice, his shadowed gaze clashing with Ivan’s. He jerked his chin at the computer screen, his mouth flattening. “You should not want what you cannot have.”
Nikolai refused to talk about it, so Ivan no longer asked about the wife who had left Nikolai some five years ago and taken what scant happiness his brother had ever known with her—what little happiness that might have been left after all his harsh years in the Russian special forces. Now Nikolai prided himself on being a stripped-down, shut-off machine who wanted almost nothing.
For this, too, Ivan blamed only himself.
On the laptop screen, the professor was frozen in place, her mouth deceptively soft, her delicate hands framing some point in midair. And Ivan knew, now, how she tasted—how she felt against him. He knew exactly how he’d make her pay for the things she’d said about him. All the deals he might have lost because of her campaign against him, the potential donors who balked at the idea of giving money to a man better known as a barbarian than a philanthropist, all thanks to her.
He told himself that would make the revenge he took all the sweeter.
“There are many ways to want,” he said now, quietly.
Nikolai snorted. “And far more ways than that to lose.”
“You don’t need to worry about me, Nikolai,” he said gruffly. “I know what I’m doing.”
But he was more than a little afraid that he was a liar.
Ivan Korovin, naturally, was staying in a palatial suite in the nicest hotel in Georgetown, far from the bustle and clamor of the conference. Miranda strode confidently across the lobby and into the private elevator that led to the penthouse suite, where she leaned against the wall and would have crumpled in on herself a little bit if she hadn’t been aware of the cameras, no doubt recording her every move. Anyone could be watching. Even him. The thought of his brooding black gaze on her, when she couldn’t see him in return, kept her defiantly upright.
The elevator doors opened smoothly and delivered her into a private, gilt-edged foyer, dizzy with frescoed walls and marble floors. Miranda stepped out into it, her heels loud against the hard floor, and then froze as the doors slid shut behind her. Flashes from earlier in the day scorched through her. Ivan’s hands. His mouth. That look.
Why are you really here? a small, suspicious voice asked inside of her, and she didn’t have an answer. Not one she liked.
She reached out as if to call back the elevator, but the great door at the other end of the foyer opened then, and it was too late. A terrifying man with a face like a honed and deadly blade glared at her, and she swallowed. His eyes were the harshest, coldest blue she’d ever seen, and burned like ice against her skin. But she somehow kept herself from stepping back, or showing any of the nerves that made her knees feel a little bit too weak beneath her.
“My name is Miranda—”
“Yes,” he said, cutting her off coldly, in another Russian-accented voice, though this one was a great deal less like chocolate and far more like a Cyrillic-infused knife, straight to her jugular. “We know who you are. We would not have let you up in the elevator if we did not.”
He led her through the overwhelmingly grand suite, his disapproval as obvious as it was silent. Miranda became more nervous with every step. She shouldn’t have come here. What could Ivan Korovin possibly have to say that was worth subjecting herself to this? But she followed as expected, and eventually she was ushered into a cozy, quiet sitting area that featured pretty views over the city through huge, ostentatiously curtained windows.
Ivan stood there, his strong back to her, far more impressive than his luxurious surroundings. The imposing security guard disappeared, closing the door behind him. Ivan seemed bigger here than in her memory. More intimidating, somehow—or perhaps it was only that she knew, now, how very dangerous he really was. To her. It was no longer an academic exercise. It was distressingly personal. And even so, as she had earlier today, she immediately felt something ease in her when she saw him.
Safe, that voice whispered inside of her. She couldn’t understand it. Surely he was the most dangerous of all? Surely this entire day had proved that?
He turned to meet her gaze, his own that deep, mesmerizing midnight, and a dark current seemed to hum too loud in her, drowning out her confusion. Then a devastating pulse of awareness reverberated down her spine and sent out shock waves as he closed the distance between them and beckoned her toward one of the elegant gold-and-cream sofas with a wave of his hand. He moved like liquid, ruthless and sure. He was a nightmare made real, and she couldn’t understand why her body didn’t seem to know it.
She ignored the invitation to sit. She called it self-preservation.
“Why does a man like you need bodyguards?” she asked, not aware she meant to speak.
His dark brows arched high. “By ‘a man like me,’ do I assume you mean rich? Famous?”
“Deadly,” she replied. She fought to control her own expression when his hardened, when he seemed to move closer to her without having moved at all. “Shouldn’t a man with your particular skills be able to handle himself?”
“Most lunatics use guns,” he said with a certain calm resignation that sent a chill spiraling through her. “And fists are somewhat inadequate from certain distances, I find. But I appreciate your interest in my security arrangements, Dr. Sweet. I’m sure it is benevolent.”
She didn’t like how he said her name. Or, if she was brutally honest, she didn’t like how very much she did like it—he said it as if he was tasting it with that wicked mouth of his. But she wasn’t here to sink any further into that mire. She couldn’t. How had she wandered off on this tangent when there was so much to discuss—and all of it far more important that his damned mouth?
But even as she thought about that mouth, it seemed to relent. “And in any case, that was my brother.”
“Your brother?” Although now that she thought about it, the other man had been like a far colder, far more terrifying Ivan, hadn’t he? It boggled the mind.
“Nikolai acts as my bodyguard when he feels it necessary,” Ivan said. His dark brows rose. “Would you like me to explain to you the peculiar swamp of Korovin family dynamics? Would that make you feel more at ease? You look as if you are about to faint.”
“I’m fine,” she snapped. And then couldn’t contain what was swirling inside of her another second. “This is a complete disaster, and it’s your fault. I told you it would affect my career and I was right. And that was before we made the news!”
The kiss had gone viral. Every person Miranda had ever met, it seemed, had called or e-mailed or texted to inform her that they’d seen the clip of it. Online or e-mailed to them. Then on television. Of Ivan’s hands all over her and her seemingly enthusiastic acceptance of it and, worse, her response to it. To him.
I am a very possessive man, he’d told her in that dark, stirring voice of his, picked up by all those cameras. He’d looked down at her as if she was edible and he was starving. She’d watched it herself on her own laptop in her hotel room. Over and over. She’d watched him kiss her so thoroughly, almost lazily, as if he had all the time in the world and every right. With such raw, carnal power that she’d felt it explode inside of her all over again. She’d watched herself simply … submit. Surrender. And then melt all over him like wax against a flame.
There was no way she could lie to herself about what had happened, about how she’d responded to him. It had been right there in front of her. He’d been the one to kiss her and he’d been the one to pull back when he was done, but she’d been the one draped against him, boneless and glassy-eyed and evidently mindless.
Opposites Really Do Attract!the online gossip sites had shrieked. Mortal Enemies in Not-So-Mortal Combat? Korovin’s Kiss KOs the Competition!
Ivan Korovin is sexy with a capital S! her agent had texted while she was obediently sitting in the back of Ivan’s chauffeured car, too upset with the situation to be as outraged as she should have been at his high-handedness. He’s a bestseller on two feet!
Clearly, Ivan Korovin kissing anyone with a pulse would be a story. She’d seen that story a thousand times herself—Ivan with this model or that starlet. She’d discussed that story in detail, dissecting the dramatic tales his various women always told in the wake of their affairs with him. But Ivan Korovin kissing the starchy professor best known for calling him “a barbaric King Leonidas without the excuse of a Sparta”? Miranda didn’t need her agent to tell her how salacious that story was.
“It seems we are thrown together in this, like it or not,” Ivan said then, breaking her out of the dark spiral of her thoughts with his far darker, far richer voice. “Perhaps it would be better if we tried to think of it as an opportunity.”
He was dressed in casual black trousers slung low on his narrow hips and a soft, charcoal-gray T-shirt that strained over his rock-hard biceps and clung to his well-honed gladiatorial torso. A darkly inked tattoo in an intricate pattern wrapped around the tight muscles of his left upper arm, twisting around to end just above his wrist. His thick, dark hair was damp, which felt like a kind of unearned, unwanted intimacy. It made her imagine him in the shower. It was almost too much to bear.
Even doing no more than simply standing there, he looked distractingly, aggressively male, powerfully masculine, like some kind of potent, lethal work of art. She felt the force of it—of him—as if his very presence a few feet away was the same as his mouth on hers, tutoring her in all those layers of fire and need she’d never imagined existed.
He looked like the warrior he was. She should have been actively repelled by him, and she couldn’t understand why she wasn’t. Why she still felt as if this untamed, uncivilized menace of a man was safe even when he very clearly, very obviously wasn’t.
“An opportunity to do what?” she asked, her voice thicker than it should have been. She saw his eyes narrow, and knew he’d noticed it. She crossed her arms as if to ward him off. “Celebrate the end of my career? Who on earth will take me seriously now that I’ve been seen in such a compromising position with the poster boy for all things violent?”
There was a long, simmering silence. He only looked at her, his dark eyes seeming even blacker than before, his hard face with its much-broken nose forbidding in the soft light of the sitting room lamps. Miranda found it hard to swallow, suddenly, and even harder to breathe, and she was forced to remind herself that he was a very, very dangerous man. A violent man. By trade and training. Possibly also by inclination.
These were all things that should have been foremost in her mind.
“I make action movies,” he said in a cold, distinctly hostile tone. There was no sign of temper on that ruthless face of his, which somehow made the lash of it all the worse. “I also practice sambo, among other martial arts, like the rest of my countrymen. It is our national sport. If that makes me the poster boy for all things violent, Professor, I would suggest to you that it’s your poster. You’re the one who’s made me into a monster. I am only a man.”
She felt something course through her then that was too close to guilt, to the sickening heat of shame, and she didn’t understand it. She didn’t want to understand it, just as she didn’t want to feel that betraying flood of heat behind her eyes. She didn’t want to think about her work from his perspective. She liked the box she’d put him in all these years. She shoved it all aside, and tried to focus on the point of this. The reason she was here—and it wasn’t to let him take her down in his inimitable way. Again.
“Exactly what opportunities do you see in this mess?” she asked instead, fighting to keep her voice level.
He watched her for another long, intense moment, and Miranda had to order herself not to fidget as she stood there before him. A wild panic surged through her then, alarm bells tolling out a frantic melody, her stomach in a twist, because she had the terrible feeling that whatever was about to happen would ruin her forever, far more comprehensively and irrevocably than any kiss had done. She knew it. She could feel it hanging there in the air between them.
And worse, she suspected he knew it, too. As if this was all just one more nightmare waiting to happen, and she the fool who had walked right into it.
Don’t be ridiculous! she snapped at herself. Why was she reduced to hysteria in the presence of this man? Miranda had always prided herself on her calm reason, her logic. She’d studied so hard, and from such a young age, to be a scholar—to save herself from moments like this one by thinking her way out of them.
She had weapons, too. She needed to remember that.
But even as she hastily tried to arm herself, his midnight eyes only seemed darker, that temptation of a mouth something near enough to stern, and she had to fight to restrain a shiver. Anticipation or anxiety? She honestly didn’t know. His mouth curved, though it was not a smile, not at all, and it danced through her all the same.
“I think we should date,” he said.
CHAPTER THREE
“DATE?”
She repeated the word in obvious horror, and then again, as if the idea of dating him was profoundly, soul-rendingly disgusting to her.
Ivan imagined that to someone like Miranda Sweet, who he had made it his business to know had been raised in a leafy green American Dream suburb redolent with affluence, it was. She was all Ivy League ivory towers, impressive vocabulary words, intellectual pursuits—the kind of plump, thoughtful life that one could achieve only if one had never wanted for anything. While he had fought his way out of Nizhny Novgorod after the collapse of the Soviet Union with his bare hands and nothing else, save his determination to do anything—absolutely anything—to survive and escape.
Of course she found him disgusting. It was almost amusing, really.
Almost.
That intriguing mouth of hers opened and then closed, and he found himself remembering the heat of it, the intoxicating kick he couldn’t seem to shake from his head. Or from the rest of him. Given how unimpressed she was with him, famously so, he should not find her so attractive. He hated that he did—hated even more that Nikolai had noted it. He suspected it spoke to the kind of deep, unmendable flaws that he’d thought he’d fought his way away from, literally, years before.
But then again, when had he ever wanted anything safe? Safety would have been staying in Nizhny Novgorod with his brutal uncle, eking out a living as best he could when the Soviet Union fell all around them. Safety would have been doing something other than fighting. Anything else. No one fought the way he had unless they’d had to; he knew that. He’d lived it. And he had never been anything like safe in all of his life. He wouldn’t know how to want such a thing.
But he knew what he was good at: winning. And this particular fight would take logic first, then seduction. The very underhandedness she’d accused him of—because why not live down to her expectations? Why not present her with the very Ivan Korovin she’d been conjuring up on her own all this time? It was only that fascination of his that might trip him up.
“I should have realized,” she said eventually, her voice cool, though her eyes were much darker than before, hinting at some deeper emotion Ivan could only guess at, and damn her, but he wanted to guess more than he should, “that you’re completely insane.”
“Not at all,” he said. He made no further attempt to conceal his temper, and saw her eyes widen slightly at his tone. “What I am is a businessman. And whatever your opinion of my business, I happen to be extremely good at it. You can’t pay for the kind of exposure and reach that today’s kiss brought us. My people think, and I agree, that we’d be foolish not to capitalize on it.”
But Miranda was shaking her head.
“I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about,” she said in that upper-crust voice of hers that intrigued him as much as it slapped at him.
Ivan felt something twist inside of him. He knew what women like her wanted, and it wasn’t a rough, unpedigreed Russian with big fists, no matter how famous he might have become. It was always the same. They wanted the smooth, polished movie star who only pretended to be a tough guy. They wanted the magazine spreads and the glossy premieres. They never wanted any of the darkness beneath, the things he’d done or the places he’d been—and, in fact, usually bolted at the first sight of it.
“If you would condescend to sit down, Professor,” he said, unable to keep the edge from his voice, “I would be happy to explain it to you.”
As expected, she looked at him as if she thought he was some kind of wild dog, howling into the night. She settled herself primly on the edge of the nearest sofa, her back straight, her dark red hair in a long, silken tail down her back. Everything about her deliberate, careful posture, he realized as he threw himself on the sofa opposite her, irritated him. Made him feel too big, too wild, too dangerous. Too dirty, too beneath her. Too much.
Oh, yes, he thought. She’d pay.
“Are you trying to provoke me?” His voice was hard, cracking across the lavish table that slouched between them, glass and gold and a riot of fresh flowers in the center. “Is that why you’re acting as if you’ve been thrown into a lion’s den?”
“I have been,” she replied, her eyes gleaming green with the temper that didn’t—quite—sound in her voice. “Who knows what you might do next? You introduced yourself mouth-first.”
“Are you claiming what you feel right now is fear?” he asked, almost amused again. Or so he told himself.
She only glared back at him, clearly unaware that he found her defiance impossibly sexy. He had no intention of sharing that with her. Women like this one already had far too many weapons at their disposal. Why should he hand her another?
“Your pulse is racing,” he told her softly, as sure of this, of her, as he would have been about any opponent in any ring. He hadn’t lied when he’d told her he was good at what he did. “And your skin is flushed. Your pupils are slightly dilated and you keep worrying your lower lip with your teeth. That is not fear. It is attraction.”
For a moment she stared at him, aghast. And then Ivan saw that something else move beneath it, that simmering fire that was causing all of this trouble in the first place.
“You don’t know me well enough to make that determination.” But her voice was far too constricted and she sat even straighter, if possible, and pressed her soft lips into a tight line.
He wanted to lick her all over, starting there.
“I don’t need to know you at all.” He shrugged. “I know people, and I know how to read physical tells.”
She scowled at him. “What do physical tells have to do with anything?” Her hands tightened on her lap, as if she wanted to clench them into fists, but thought better of it at the last moment. “The physical is the least important part of attraction. It’s nothing but smoke and mirrors. The brain is what really matters.”
He really was amused. Finally. He leaned back against the sofa. “Then, Professor, I am sorry to tell you this, but you’re doing it wrong.”
She was so much prettier in person, he thought then, even as she glared at him in all of her high-class fury. He was so much more susceptible to her than he’d ever dreamed he’d be. Damn her. It made everything that much more complicated. Or it made him a fool. He supposed it was the same result either way.
She tensed as if she was debating running for the door. But she only breathed for a moment, then relaxed again, however slightly, and he wished he knew why. He wished he could read whatever was going on behind that smooth, compelling triangle of her face. He wished, and he was old enough, battle-scarred enough, to know better.
“Is that why you think we should date?” she asked then, her tone crisp with disbelief. And all those other things he wanted far too much to uncover and identify, one by one. “So you can regale me with your theories about the physiological reactions of total strangers?”
“That would be a side benefit, of course.”
“This is ridiculous,” she said, standing then, practically vibrating with tension. Or was it something else? He had the sudden sense that she was far more emotional, perhaps even fragile, than he’d imagined. Than she showed. But he didn’t want to think of her that way. “I knew I shouldn’t have come here. My life is disintegrating around me and your solution is to date?”
“Calm yourself, please.” He stretched his legs out in front of him as if he had never been more at ease, enjoying the way her dark eyes narrowed in outrage. It was better than the possibility of tears, however remote. “It obviously wouldn’t be a real relationship. I am well aware of your opinion of me. I am no fonder of you. In that sense, we are perfectly matched.”
Which was true, of course. But it did not address this thing between them that had nearly burned him alive where he stood earlier. And Ivan only had to look at her to know that bringing up the best way he knew of to deal with that kind of wildfire, out-of-control chemistry—in the nearest bed, for a week or so—would only cloud the issue unnecessarily. Not to mention, force her to vehemently deny something that he had every intention of proving to his satisfaction. At length.
But not now.
“Why would you even suggest something like this? Is that how people do things in Hollywood?” She looked scandalized. “I didn’t think that was true. Not really.”
“Surely you cannot deny the power of that kiss,” he said, for no other reason than to poke at her. Or so he told himself. He shrugged languidly when she stiffened. “If you can, you are alone. Last I checked, the clip has been watched in excess of—”
“There is no accounting for taste,” she blurted, as if she couldn’t bear to think about how many people had seen the video. Seen them. The perfect Ivy League professor with a shined-up Russian thug all over her. She no doubt felt contaminated by his very public touch. Forever marred. It made him want only to dirty her further. Here. Now.
“Indeed.” He eyed her. Forced his voice to remain cool. “Just as there is no denying our on-screen chemistry. Think of the headlines we could generate if we actually tried.”
“You have to be kidding me—” she began, though he could see the heat across her cheeks, telling him far more than her words ever could. For one thing, that she wanted him just as much as he wanted her, however loath she was to admit it.
He could use that. He would.
“I am changing careers.” He watched her process that. That blink. That considering tilt of her head. Why should he find such things so powerfully compelling? “Again.”
“Racing about the world claiming that unnecessary kisses are a new form of chivalry?” she asked drily. It was as if she couldn’t help herself. “With your fame and fans, I’m sure you could turn it into quite the cottage industry. A moveable kissing booth, if you will. Headlines and chemistry at every turn, just the way you like it.”
“Philanthropy,” he replied, and watched her redden further, as if he’d chastised her. “My last Jonas Dark movie comes out in June. My new charity will be kicking off with its first major event a week or so later. It can only benefit me, as I make the switch from action hero to philanthropist, to have my most outspoken critic show the world she sees me as a man, not merely the Neanderthal fighting machine she has claimed I am on every available media outlet for the past two years.”
That had been the main thrust of his publicist’s argument earlier, as Ivan had watched the clip of the kiss on one of the major gossip programs in disbelief. Ivan had been unable to get his head around the fact that he was now linked to his nemesis in this way. And worse, that he had no one to blame for his predicament but himself. That last had been Nikolai’s main point—that and the suggestion that he take this opportunity to neutralize the Miranda Sweet issue once and for all.
Why had he kissed her?
But Ivan was nothing if not practical. No matter the force of his fascinations. No matter what price he might have to pay. And so there was no reason he couldn’t make this little game work for him on a number of levels, he thought as he watched her now, that dark shimmer of red in her hair, that lush mouth, that unconscious patrician certainty of hers. No reason in the world.
The plan had practically made itself. Revenge might have been a dish better served cold, but that wasn’t to say it wasn’t just as effective hot and wild. He supposed he’d find out.
“I can see how that would benefit you,” she said after a moment, her tone suggesting he had begged for her help on his knees—as if he needed her desperately and she was trying her hardest to be polite in the face of such naked entreaty. He bit back a laugh at the image.
“Let’s not get carried away.” His voice was dry, no hint of the laughter that moved in him. “I said that it could benefit me, not that I needed it. I don’t. But I could use you, certainly.”
“I appreciate the distinction,” she said in that cool way that made him ache to find his way into the fire she hid beneath it. “But I can’t quite see how going along with this would do anything for me but make me a hypocrite.”
“Please.” He did not precisely scoff at her. He didn’t have to. “I’m a movie star. There’s no way you could ever generate this kind of exposure on your own. We’ll play to the public’s obvious fascination with the possibility that so appalls you—that a man like me and a woman like you could ever be together. They’ll eat it up. We’ll break up after about a month or so, milk the rumors and go our merry ways. I don’t see the downside.”
“Because there isn’t one,” she said quietly, something that looked much darker than simple panic in the green of her gaze. “For you. It actually matters to me that people will see me as a hypocrite. That, in fact, I’ll be a hypocrite.” She made a low noise. “Not everything is for sale.”
“Spoken by someone who never had to sell something precious in order to stay alive.”
He couldn’t hide his impatience—nor his irritation at her and all the people like her, who had been born rich and privileged and would never know what it was like to have to choose between their pride and their survival. Much less fight for it with their own hands. Much less lose so much of themselves, and everything else that mattered, along the way.
“I understand you, too, Professor,” he told her, his own voice much colder than it had been. “You’re not the only one who studies their opponents. I know precisely what kind of princess you like to pretend you never were.”
Her eyes flew to his, stricken, and that delicious color rose in her cheeks again, making him feel the same kind of rush he’d felt in the ring when he’d won a tough round. He supposed that confirmed that he was exactly the Neanderthal she believed he was, and in that moment he didn’t care.
“That seems like an ineffective bargaining tool,” she said after a short pause, and while he could hear that he’d got to her in the scratchiness in her voice, see it in that extra bright sheen to her dark jade eyes, she still said it calmly. Coolly. As if she was utterly unfazed. He felt a trickle of reluctant admiration work through him. “Bludgeoning someone you’re trying to persuade with a highly slanted interpretation of their biography. Not the smoothest approach, I’d have thought.”
“Try this one,” he suggested. “Guberev actually is the animal you would like to think I am.” It shouldn’t bother him in the slightest to lie to her, to manipulate the fear he’d seen she felt. It was one more strategy, wasn’t it? All worth it in the end, no matter how it felt now. No matter that it made him who she thought he was. “I don’t know what he wanted from you, but the fact that he felt comfortable showing up at a summit and approaching you in the way he did should give you pause.”
“It does.”
“Then I offer you, again, the perfect solution to make sure he keeps his distance from you.”
“Because he is like a dog who responds to shows of domination, is that it?” she asked. “Does that make you the alpha in this scenario?”
Her smile was wintry then, and he should not have felt it like a touch. He should not have wanted to lick into it, beneath it, to taste her again. He should not have been contemplating the best way to get under her too-privileged skin. He should not have been so conflicted about what he was doing here. He should not have worried if his brother was right, after all—that there were too many ways to lose, and he was courting every one of them.
Miranda’s cold smile only deepened, as if she could read him, too. “Because if so, I’m afraid I know exactly what it makes me,” she said.
The room seemed to stretch tight around them, and Miranda couldn’t remember the last time she’d taken a full breath. No wonder she felt so off balance.
It wasn’t only that he’d called her a princess in that insulting way, as if she was some kind of socialite. It wasn’t only that he wanted to date her, of all things—but only as an elaborate ruse. It wasn’t the fact of him, so big and male and inarguably powerful, sitting there so close to her, like he was waiting to pounce. She concentrated on filling her lungs. In. Out. It was the only thing she was sure she could control.
Ivan started to speak again, but she threw up one of her hands, palm out, and stopped him, happy to see that for some reason, her hand wasn’t shaking the way she was afraid the rest of her was. Or soon would.
“I’m going to have to think about all of this,” she said, and she hated that there was a part of her that sounded almost pleading, as if, by walking into this hotel suite tonight, she had handed over her right to make decisions about her own life. “I’ll get back to you—”
“That is impossible,” he said, cutting her off. When she frowned at him, he only shrugged in that languid, lazy way of his that she was quickly coming to loathe. “We either use the momentum of this kiss to our benefit now, or we wait for it to blow over. For me, that will be very soon. For you? Perhaps not.” His hard mouth curved faintly. He was daring her, she realized, as her skin seemed to pull tight in response. “I wonder, are you more of a hypocrite if you are seen to date me, this man that you so famously hate—or if, having kissed me in so wanton a fashion in front of all the world, you don’t?”
That question hung there between them. Miranda became aware of the rushing sound in her ears and the rapid clamor of her pulse, just as he’d pointed out before. And that too-tight feeling all over, like her skin was too small for her body. She forced herself to ignore it. And to think.
The fact was, she knew he was on to something, however far-fetched and insane it sounded. However trapped she felt. She knew that a few accusations of hypocrisy were nothing compared to the kind of notoriety “dating” him would grant her—and notoriety would not only sell book proposals and the books that came from them, but guarantee that her presence as a pundit, as the go-to sound bite, was assured. As her agent had told her already, Ivan Korovin was sexy. The entire world was obsessed with him. If she went along with this, she would build her profile to unimaginable heights and would then be that much more able to get her message out, which was all she’d ever wanted in the first place. How could she turn that down and still live with herself?
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