No More Sweet Surrender

by Caitlin Crews

  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 p
rofessor 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 ou
t 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.”