No More Sweet Surrender

by Caitlin Crews

  It felt like a caress. Which in turn, made her think of Ivan, and his clever fingers against her skin. Her lips. It made her imagine what else he could do with those strong and battered fighter’s hands—

  “Please try not to scowl so much,” Ivan said from the open doorway then, making Miranda’s heart leap in her chest though she managed, somehow, to keep from jumping in her seat. “People will begin to imagine that I am not satisfying you in bed, and all of this hard work will be for nothing.”

  Miranda didn’t look up at him. She didn’t react. She flipped through the pages in front of her and congratulated herself on her far more measured, reasonable response to him today. No wild bursts of uncontrollable flames to light her up from the inside out. No embarrassing blushes. He only took getting used to, clearly. Soon she’d hardly notice him at all.

  “Good morning,” she said mildly, taking a delicate sip of the coffee she’d forgotten about until this moment. She placed the china cup back down on the table very precisely, next to the French press at her elbow. “Do you consider yourself particularly narcissistic, or is it simply a natural result of your current line of work?” She smiled when she heard him sigh. “This certainty of yours that the entire world is fascinated by what you might or might not be doing in bed? It’s not healthy.”

  She turned her head to look at him. It was a mistake.

  Ivan lounged in the doorway to her bedchamber, glistening from a recent shower, wearing nothing more than a towel low on his hips, all of that perfectly molded male flesh just…there.

  Right there.

  That tattoo of his in all its black-inked, intricate glory, coiled down one side of his perfect chest like some kind of warning. It was a massive, somehow elegant serpent, sleek and deadly, and it swept down the side of his torso and then around to his back, as if it was wrapped around him like a kind of totem, ready to strike. There was the tattoo she’d seen beneath his T-shirt in Georgetown, encircling his bicep in some mysterious design of brambles and swirls then twisting down the length of his arm. And still another one, of three Cyrillic letters directly over his heart. It looked like MNP.

  It was as if she’d fallen down hard and knocked the air right out of her lungs. Miranda’s pulse felt loud and hard, so fierce she could feel it behind her eyes. In her teeth. And lower, deeper, like a kettle drum, shaking her apart.

  He only smiled that smile she now knew he used when they were being watched, all sex and promise. The fact that it was fake did not detract from its potency in any way, the way Miranda thought it should. The way she wished it would, in some despair.

  “You were saying?” he asked, a rich vein of satisfaction in his voice. He moved toward her then, and stopped beside her chair, reaching out to run his fingers through her hair. It was a lover’s caress. It seemed almost natural, and she had the strangest urge to lean into his hand—but then she remembered where they were.

  And who she was.

  “What are you doing?”

  It was terrible. She could hardly speak. She felt as if she’d been doused in kerosene and his strong hand against her scalp, playing with her hair, was a lit match.

  “Paparazzi like to take boats out into the water, pretend to be fishermen or tourists and use their telephoto lenses to take pictures of private balconies just like this one,” he said matter-of-factly. “You can say whatever insulting thing you like, but try not to show it on your face, please.”

  His voice was a low, insinuating murmur, and she couldn’t seem to handle all of that naked, damp male skin, all of those sleek muscles, his fascinating tattoos, the whole of him like perfect, hammered steel.

  “Oh,” she said. Idiotically.

  He let his hand drop from her hair, moving to take the seat opposite hers at the small table. It was not an improvement. He thrust his strong legs out in front of him, and she had to fight to keep from moving her chair back. He was sure to read it as some kind of capitulation. A silent surrender. And with him lounging there across from her, she had no choice but to stare at his acres upon acres of pectoral muscles, his fiercely chiseled abdomen. That lethally coiled serpent, somehow beautiful despite its deadliness, announcing exactly who and what he was, and what he could do.

  It was not unlike staring into a blazing light. Complete with little black spots swimming before her eyes.

  “I assume you do this deliberately,” she said, forcing herself to speak past the dazed, silly feeling that made her head spin so fast. She was impatient with herself, with this absurd, outsized reaction to him. Why was one weakness or another always her first response when challenged? She’d frozen in Georgetown. She’d simply stood there and waited to be rescued, which appalled her on some deep, primal level. Why couldn’t she be as strong as she thought she was when it counted?

  “What am I doing?” he asked. He picked up one of the tabloids and looked at it, his expression unreadable as he studied the article in front of him. “I am almost afraid to ask.”

  “This,” Miranda said, waving a hand at all of his bared skin. “You go out of your way to accent your physicality. It’s psychological warfare at its finest. I assume that’s your goal.”

  He lowered the paper and eyed her from across the table.

  “Are we at war, Miranda?” he asked mildly, but she wasn’t fooled by that tone, or the way he rolled her name around in his mouth, as if it was something sugary.

  “I was under the impression that you view everything as a war.” She didn’t know where the seriousness in her voice came from, or why she’d shifted into it so abruptly. She suspected it was all of that naked flesh. It made her…cranky. The sun fell all over him like a caress, making him gleam golden. He looked, again, like some kind of god. Pagan and merciless, and she shouldn’t find that so intriguing. So impossibly tempting. “And if this is a war, that means I’m the enemy, and you can treat me however you please, doesn’t it?”

  His dark eyes met hers and held. Miranda was aware of the gleaming sea in the distance, the faint, sweet breeze, the deep green of the trees. The smell of flowers and fresh-cut grass, and the sun falling over the balcony, bathing them in that perfect blue and gold French light.

  “Is this a complaint?” he asked after a long moment. He jerked his chin at the papers in front of him, but he didn’t drop her gaze. “Because you are not a prisoner, last I checked, and these pictures indicate that all of this is having the desired effect.”

  “I never said I was a prisoner.”

  He shrugged in that way of his, so unconcerned. The more lethal than charming prince of all he surveyed.

  “You will know when you become my enemy, Miranda. Your life in tatters all around you will be your first clue.”

  “My life is already in tatters around me,” she pointed out, not bothering to keep the bite from her voice. “I just happen to be going along with it for my own purposes. And you haven’t held up your end of the bargain yet.” She tapped her finger against the nearest tabloid. “I notice that there are a lot of pictures out there, salaciously ruining my reputation, kicking up the scandal you wanted. And meanwhile, you have yet to tell me a single thing about yourself.”

  She could see the storm brewing there, behind those impossibly dark eyes of his, though his expression remained calm—and would photograph, no doubt, as if he was gazing at her in some or other sensual form of rapture.

  “If you want to know something, ask it,” he said lightly, though she could hear the steel blade beneath a seemingly mild tone like that. She could see it in that warrior’s face of his. “If you are waiting for me to spontaneously volunteer something, it will be a very long wait.”

  “Why are you giving up Hollywood for philanthropy?” she asked.

  He shifted in his chair, and rubbed those letters over his heart with one hand absently.

  “There are other ways to fight,” he said after a moment, in an odd tone. “Perhaps better ways.”

  “Why did you start fighting?”

  His brows arched slightly, and
there was a kind of very old, very deep hardness in his gaze then.

  “I was good at it.”

  She blew out a breath when he didn’t elaborate. When she could tell that he wouldn’t. “That’s not an answer.”

  “It is the correct answer to that particular question.” His voice was implacable, and there was something terrible and ruthless in his gaze. Although she wondered, suddenly, what was behind all of the harsh power he carried with such seeming ease. All of that heavy steel. Was it that darkness she saw glimpses of now and again? Or something else—something worse?

  “That’s not much of an answer, either.”

  “Perhaps you should ask better questions.”

  “If you can’t tell your own story,” she said softly, “how can I trust that you’ll tell me anything at all?”

  “I know what you want to hear,” Ivan said, and there was no doubting that deep, inky darkness in him then, something sharp and sad and fierce in his black eyes, in his rich voice. “Was I born the vicious monster you see before you today, made of equal parts temper and violence, a perfect fighting machine? Or did I perhaps do only what I had to do out of desperation, using my fists to escape far worse? I already know what you think of me, Professor. I have no doubt that you expect a tale that perfectly matches the character you’ve had in your pampered head all these years.” That hard mouth moved, as if he was biting back something far worse than the bitter words that fell like bullets between them on the small table. “But only one of those things is what actually happened.”

  “Is this how you keep your promises, Ivan?” she asked, fighting to keep her expression smooth, her posture easy against the hard chair. As if she hadn’t felt every last one of those bullets. As if she didn’t feel riddled with them. “I’m bending over backward to do the things you want me to do, and you can’t even answer a simple question?”

  “Yes, of course,” he said, and there was that hard edge to his voice then. “This is a great and terrible sacrifice for you. I keep forgetting.”

  She hated the way he said that, as if she’d insulted him. And hated even more that she cared whether or not that was true. When had that happened? What could it mean? She was afraid she wouldn’t much like the answers to either of those questions, and so she shoved them aside.

  But she couldn’t pretend he hadn’t pushed her off balance again, without even seeming to try. Dizzy, confused—she was sick of feeling this way. She wanted to believe it was just the jet lag. The relentlessness of her recurring nightmares that she knew were because of him. She told herself it was.

  “Of course it’s a sacrifice,” she choked out heedlessly. Foolishly. He only looked at her in that dark, cold way, and she felt it inside of her like a blow. And hated that, too. “I don’t like to be touched.”

  Miranda could not believe she’d said that. Not out loud. If she could have snatched the words back from the air between them, she would have.

  Ivan stared at her as if she was an insect.

  “By the likes of me,” Ivan said, his voice a kind of harsh, terrible growl, and that hurt even more. “Rough and uneducated brute that I am. I understand. It is a tremendous sacrifice indeed. You might as well fling yourself on the nearest bonfire for relief, such is the extent of your suffering at my hands.”

  “I don’t mean that,” she blurted, flustered, something about that awful look on his face twisting through her, making her ache in new and strange ways, making her doubt herself and hate herself all the more, and she wasn’t even sure why. Or why she couldn’t seem to stand the thought of this man in pain. “I mean—at all. In general. Not just by you.”

  * * *

  She could not possibly be saying what Ivan thought she was saying.

  It was impossible. He knew it was impossible—he’d been the one touching her in Paris, for God’s sake. He’d kissed her in Georgetown. He’d watched her fight it, yes, but then lean into it, soak it up. He’d drunk in all her exquisite responses, the shivers she couldn’t hide and the tremors she fought to repress, the glaze in her eyes, the softening of her body when she’d stood tucked up beneath his arm. And he forgot, then, that all of that had been supposedly calculated on his part. He just knew it was real on hers.

  “Exactly what are you saying?” he asked, searching her face for clues.

  He saw only that delicious heat, climbing up her cheeks, and the sheen of acute embarrassment in her dark jade gaze, making them seem blacker, deeper. She swallowed, and then pressed her lips together, firmly, as if fighting to calm herself.

  “What I just said.” She shrugged, a defensiveness to the movement that he imagined she had no idea betrayed her as much as it did. Why he found it fascinating was something else entirely. “I believe in mind over body. That’s what matters to me. My mind. Everything I’ve done to get to where I am is because of it.” She looked at him as if she expected an argument, and when he only regarded her in silence she sat up straighter, taller. Gathering herself. “I graduated from high school at sixteen. I entered my Ph.D. program before I was twenty. I was always focused on work. Touching is…” The flush on her cheeks deepened. Her eyes looked almost glazed. Panicked, Ivan thought. “Has always been completely incidental to my life in every way.”

  “So you are frigid.”

  He knew, categorically, she was no such thing. But did she know it? Was it possible she didn’t? Or was this some kind of twisted mind game women like her played with men like him?

  “Of course not.” Her eyes cleared slightly, then narrowed as she looked at him. As if she was offended by the question.

  “Are you a virgin, then?” He couldn’t help the way his mouth curved at the idea, as if he was the very caveman she’d accused him of being. He shouldn’t have cared. He shouldn’t have wondered, suddenly and with far too many detailed images, what it would be like to be her first. “Chaste and untouched?”

  “Yes,” she replied, her voice tart. Offended, perhaps. Or simply annoyed. “And I am also a unicorn. Surprise!”

  “Then tell me what you mean,” he said, ignoring the sarcasm. Almost enjoying it, if he was honest. “Because the mind and the body are not separate entities, Miranda. Surely they taught this in one of your Ivy League schools. You cannot choose between them. They are one and the same.”

  “I’m sure that you think so.” She did that dismissive thing with her hand again, waving it at him as if to encompass everything he was. He wanted to catch it with his. Bite it. Put it to far better use. “You would.”

  “Tell me,” he said then, as mildly as he could, which was perhaps not so mildly after all, “how do you suppose I became the greatest fighter in my generation? Because that is what I am. How do you imagine I forced myself to train when I was no more than a collection of agonies and bruises, and there was nothing ahead of me but more of the same?”

  “Masochism?”

  Ivan eyed her for a moment. Training had not brought out the masochist in him, but she might.

  “My mind.” He almost smiled at her expression. “Yes, Professor. I have one.”

  “If you say so,” she replied, sweet and acid all at once.

  “So tell me about these lovers of yours instead,” he said then, lounging back in his chair. He didn’t know why he cared what lies this woman told herself. How could it possibly affect what would happen between them—what he would make happen? And yet here he was asking anyway. “The ones for whom touch was as unimportant as it is for you.”

  “Some men are motivated by intellect,” she said loftily, clearly insinuating that he was not one among them. Reminding them both of his place—but he couldn’t tell if it was a deliberate slight or not. He let it go. “And there are more important things than sex.”

  He only looked at her, brows high.

  “I never said I didn’t have sex,” she said, scowling at him. “Only that it wasn’t the central focus of the relationships I’ve had.”

  “I understand,” he said, almost amused then. He felt very nearly benevol
ent, while anticipation nearly crippled him with its intensity. “None of them satisfied you. No wonder you think such things.”

  She sighed. “Because you, of course, believe that you deeply satisfy every woman who’s ever crossed your path, is that right?” She rolled her eyes. “What a shock.”

  Ivan discovered, to his great surprise, that he was enjoying himself.

  “My woman,” he said, very distinctly, “is, by definition and my personal preference, satisfied.”

  Miranda looked unimpressed. “I think you should consider the possibility they were all faking to preserve your obviously gigantic ego.”

  “Shall I prove it to you?” he asked silkily. And he wanted to. He did. More than was either wise or safe.

  His challenge sat there for a moment. Her dark red hair caught the light, gleaming like a simmering fire, and he wanted her the way it seemed he always did. Despite his own intellect and reason, the very things she clearly thought he lacked. Perhaps she was right—perhaps, around her, he reverted to the animal she already believed he was.

  “Why would you?” she asked, and he heard that catch in her throat, betraying her all over again. “I’m not your woman.”

  “I could still make you come,” he told her quietly, not only to see her jerk in her chair, though he could admit he enjoyed that far more than he should have. “And I will. It is inevitable.”

  “Back again to sex,” she began, in that professorial way of hers, as if her cheeks weren’t that intriguing shade of scarlet. As if she wasn’t breathing too fast or moving in her chair like that, as if she ached the way he did.

  As if she thought he couldn’t tell.

  “This is all about sex,” he said, cutting off the lecture before she could start. “That’s what the world wants to see. That’s what we’re giving them.”

  “That’s the game.” But her soft mouth trembled slightly, and there was that anxious line between her brows. “It’s not real.”