No More Sweet Surrender (10 page)

Somehow, she shoved everything down deep inside of her, before she broke out into either tears or songs, or worse—both. Her job tonight, she reminded herself sternly, was to smile and gaze adoringly at Ivan. To pretend she was madly and totally in love with him. No more and no less than that.

Fairy tales weren’t real. Neither was the way she had to behave tonight.

And both were only temporary, in any case. They’d agreed.

She told herself that didn’t hurt at all.

CHAPTER EIGHT

“A
RE
you ready?” Ivan asked when it was finally time. When the long queue of cars they waited in to take their turn at the red carpet finally delivered them to the arrival point.

Miranda had the sudden, intense urge to say that no, she wasn’t. To call the whole exercise off. As if it hadn’t already gone too far. As if there was any hope of saving herself.

“Of course,” she lied.

His black eyes gleamed with something that looked a great deal like compassion, but couldn’t be. Her throat went dry.

“My first red carpet appearance made me much more nervous than my first title fight,” he said then. A quiet confession. Another voluntary bit of himself, and she held on to it with a grip that should have scared her. It did. “I knew how to hit, not pose. But you won’t be alone.”

Miranda swallowed. “No,” she agreed. “I won’t.”

Her reward was a smile—and not, she registered, stunned, that public one she’d grown so used to seeing over the past days.

This one was private. It was his. It was slightly crooked and not at all practiced.
It was real.
She knew it was real. She felt it kick hard inside of her, then send out echoes.

It made her want to look at nothing else, for hours. Days. Longer.

But then the car door was opening and Miranda had no choice but to be swept out along with him, into the baying crowd.

A roar went up when they saw Ivan. It was a wall of people—reporters and fans, the steady stream of celebrities and all of their handlers, everyone channeled down the red carpet gauntlet. Ivan’s publicist took charge of them immediately. He directed Ivan to this reporter, then that one. He ended interviews that went too long or veered into areas he didn’t like. He told them where to look, when to wave, when to amp up the smiles.

And they did exactly what they were told.

It was one more thing, Miranda thought when Ivan led her up the famous red-carpeted stairs, that looked effortlessly glamorous on television and, as she’d discovered herself while filming news segments, was a significantly harder task than it seemed.

“You survived,” Ivan said, gazing down at her. He’d pulled her to one side, out of the pack.

“I’m not at all sure about that.” Something about the oddness of the whole evening had her smiling up at him. Spontaneous. Unguarded. As real as his smile had been earlier.

He looked startled. Something moved through his dark gaze then that she would have called regret, if that had made any sense at all.

“Milaya,”
he murmured, so soft it was almost a whisper. So soft it sounded almost like an apology, but that was impossible.

And then he slid his hand around the back of her neck, pulled her just that crucial bit closer to him with that bone-melting certainty and smooth male grace that was only his, and fit his mouth to hers.

Miranda felt as if she’d fainted. Or simply burst apart into a shower of tiny pieces.

There was nothing but Ivan.

No noise, no screams. No people. No red carpet, no Cannes.

Just that mouth of his against hers once again.

Finally.

She forgot to panic. She forgot everything. She tasted him, wanted him, lost herself completely in the drugging kick and clamor of him, and then, after ages and eras, or perhaps only minutes, he pulled away. But only a little. Only enough for her to come back to herself. His big, tough hands rested at the base of her neck, his thumbs still stroking the line of her jaw, as if he might simply move her mouth back to where he wanted it in a moment, and lose them both to that wild, magical heat all over again.

Her heart thudded hard. And then again.

Miranda understood then, with a kind of painful resignation, that the things she felt about this man were deeper and far more complicated than she wanted to admit. But that didn’t change the fact of them.

And it was only then, when she processed the way he looked at her, something calculating and shrewd in that black gaze, mixed in with the fire she recognized all too well, did she understand that he’d staged it.

Of course he had.

Shame and humiliation fought for supremacy then, and both left scarring marks deep inside. She couldn’t believe how pathetic she was. How gullible. Dreams of Disney movies and a Cinderella dress didn’t change the truth of her situation. It only made her unacceptably, embarrassingly foolish.

And that didn’t change the way she felt about him either, which only shamed her all the more.

“Why here?” she asked, and she couldn’t do anything about her voice, choked and constricted, giving her away. Much less whatever look she had on her face then, that made him look back at her as if he hurt, too, but she couldn’t let herself think about that. It might take her out at the knees. “Why not out in the thick of the things for maximum coverage?”

There was something terrible in his dark eyes then, and that mocking curve to his beautiful mouth. And yet she knew, somehow, that this time, that mockery was not directed at her. She didn’t understand why that made her want to weep.

Why all of this did.

“It would look too staged,” he said, with devastating honesty, a sardonic inflection to his voice then, aimed, she could tell, once more at himself. His gaze was so bleak. And this was all too painful, when it shouldn’t have been. “Too showy. Back here we might have imagined ourselves in a private moment. It looks real. Stolen kisses, forbidden love. Who can resist it?”

Miranda knew, then, that he felt this, too, whatever this thing was that was choking her where she stood. This...
shift
, after all. It was too big. Too hot and uncontrollable and consuming. Real enough, she understood too late, to hurt this badly, to leave such deep marks inside of her.

Lost before it began.

Had she known all along that it would be like this? Had she sensed it even on that long-ago day, when his picture in a magazine had sent her down the road that had brought her here? Had she suspected that one day he would touch her like this, kiss her like this and tie her into knots she worried she’d never get wholly untied again? Tear her whole world apart so easily?

Except this was no kind of fairy tale, despite appearances to the contrary, and all Miranda was ever going to be was a convenient frog tarted up to look like a temporary princess.

It shouldn’t have hurt.

It shouldn’t have mattered at all. Someday, she thought, it wouldn’t.

In time she would forget that look in his eyes, that shadow across his face, this great and suffocating heaviness in her heart. When this little interlude was over. When she was free of this. Of him. Of all these things she felt without understanding why.

When she became herself again.

“I hope you didn’t ruin my lipstick,” she told him then, managing, somehow, to force herself back into the role she’d agreed to play. To keep that threatening heat behind her eyes from betraying them both. She even smiled again, carefree and amused. In on the joke.

Maybe she was more of an actress than they’d thought.

But then his midnight eyes met hers, so hard and so uncompromising, and there was nothing but agony there. Loss. Grief for something that never could have been.

It shouldn’t have mattered.

But it did. So much more than it should have. So much more than she could bear.

“Of course I didn’t,” he said quietly. “I’m a professional.”

And then he kissed her again, because he had to or because he wanted to, or maybe something caught somewhere far too complicated and breathless between the two, and none of that seemed to matter anyway when his hard mouth claimed hers.

Hot. Demanding.
Ivan.

Miranda kissed him back.

She knew it wasn’t real. She knew it didn’t count. But he tasted like smoke and Ivan and all of that longing she’d kept bottled up inside of her all this time, without ever knowing it was there. And there were truths she didn’t want to accept, especially not here. Terrible truths that worked through her like pain, like heat.

Like falling in love with the man she’d vowed to hate, when she knew he was only playing. But she couldn’t let herself think about that. She had the terrible suspicion it would lead only to tears, and she was in public. This was a performance.

So she kissed him instead, with all of those things she knew she’d never say, with her scared little heart and that pounding heat in her sex that was only for him, and told herself it was the best she could do. The best she
would
do.

And it was searing and right, terrible and heartbreaking, changing her forever right there in the glare of all those cameras and the whole of the watching world, damning them both.

But Miranda most of all, she feared. And possibly for good.

* * *

The plane hung high above North America, arcing its way from New York City toward Los Angeles, and Ivan stared out the window beside him as if there was something more than clouds below and sky ahead to see.

“It seems you were right after all,” Nikolai said, dropping into the wide leather seat opposite Ivan, his lethal blade of a frame seeming too primal, somehow, for the sleek executive luxury of the jet all around them.

“I am always right,” Ivan replied, smirking out at the empty sky. “I am Ivan Korovin. I read today that I am one of the sexiest men alive, according to a selection of fans in the Philippines. Can you say the same?”

“A great accolade indeed,” Nikolai said drily. “And no doubt a tremendous comfort to our parents, had they only lived to see it.”

Ivan remembered them only vaguely, gray and brisk and humorless, and felt certain that his entire life would have seemed, to them, like nothing but foolishness and vanity. That was no doubt Nikolai’s point. And tonight, Ivan agreed.

“Perhaps I underestimated you, brother,” Nikolai continued when Ivan offered no retort. Was that a note of admiration in his voice? Why did that make Ivan feel so cold, suddenly? “When we left your little professor in New York, she was significantly subdued. It shouldn’t be at all hard to break her now.”

But Ivan worried she was already broken, and unlike Nikolai, took no pleasure in it.

He’d escorted her down the metal stairs onto the tarmac in New York, then walked her to the waiting car, not wanting to admit to himself that he didn’t want to let her go. He didn’t want her out of his sight, or out of his reach. He didn’t know what had happened in Cannes, what had blown up between them like that on the red carpet. He didn’t want to think about it. But he could still feel her mouth on his, hot and sweet. He could still see that shattered look in her eyes that had had no business being there, that made no sense at all, and yet had lanced through him just the same.

He could see the photographs of the two of them in his head, as glossy and bright as they’d been in the papers. That first, hot kiss on the Cannes red carpet. The way she’d gazed at him, as if theirs really was a love affair too intense for words. And that aching blast of need that had nearly made him forget where they were when he’d taken her mouth that second time, because he’d had to taste her once again, or die. All of it on film, splashed across the papers and the internet. All of it available to anyone who cared to look, when it still moved in him like something highly charged, electric—and private.

None of this should have been happening.

His goals were very clear. First he would seduce her. Then he would toss her aside, brutally and publicly, tainting anything further she ever said about him as the unhinged rantings of a woman scorned. Simple. Easy. Exactly what she deserved after all these years.

Except nothing was going as planned.

He’d expected to want her, because he had a weakness for smart and haughty and unimpressed with him, apparently, wrapped up in one aristocratic, obstinate package. He’d always wanted the things he shouldn’t, the things not only likely to destroy him, but also certain to do so in the most painful way possible. It was a Korovin family trait. But he’d also expected to hate her, disdain her and her Ivy League snootiness at the very least, and he didn’t quite understand how that hadn’t happened. Or why he’d found himself telling her things he’d never told anyone before.

Or what had sprung up and taken him over like this, making him all but unrecognizable to himself. He was not a man who formed attachments. He knew better. He’d loved his parents as any son did, despite their coldness, and they had died. He’d wanted to love his uncle, until the drinking and brutality made that impossible. He had deeply admired his first trainer, the man he’d considered his savior, until he’d tried to steal the bulk of Ivan’s money after the championships had started mounting up. And he loved Nikolai, still and always, and look what he’d done to him. Look what Nikolai had become.

Damn her.

“I will see you in ten days’ time,” he’d told her, unnecessarily, standing in the open door of the car, holding her captive between him and it.

“Yes.” But she’d been hiding from him even as she’d tilted up her chin and met his gaze, that dark jade too black, too dark.

“Miranda...”

But there’d been nothing to say, and he couldn’t have said it even if there had been. How could he have? She was Miranda Sweet. His loudest critic. His enemy. They’d set all of this in motion that night in Georgetown, and there was no stopping it. There was no changing course. Not now. The benefit gala drew closer by the day, and with it, the end of all of this. His revenge and her comeuppance. As planned from the start.

“Do you really think they’ll hound me?” she’d asked then, her voice too quiet. Too unsure. He’d hated it. He’d wanted her spark back, her fire. He’d wanted her to feel this wildness, this madness, that lived in him now. He’d wanted her any way he could have her, no matter what it did to either one of them.

“The paparazzi?” Ivan had asked her then. He’d reached over and played with ends of her dark red hair, unable to keep himself from touching her, letting the silken strands slide through his fingers, letting the ways he wanted her burn through him, blaze hot, make him hard and edgy and wild with need. He hadn’t wanted to leave her in New York. He hadn’t wanted to leave her at all. “Yes. It will be a feeding frenzy, I imagine. Don’t leave your apartment unprepared.”