No More Sweet Surrender

by Caitlin Crews

  Graduate school had been different. Miranda might have been a bit of a late bloomer, but it had seemed to matter less at Columbia. She’d eventually had what she’d always considered perfectly nice relationships with two men she met through her studies, one for about ten months, one for just over a year. She’d gotten to know each of them over very long periods of time—years, in fact. She’d become comfortable with them long before there had been any touching, or even any dating. She’d thought sex, when they’d had it, was nice. A good way to feel connected in a very specific way to a very specific person. Very nice, she’d thought, but certainly not worth all the commotion.

  It had never once occurred to her until this moment that maybe the two men she’d had sex with simply…weren’t any good at it.

  That was like a second revolution, smack on top of the first, all of it fusing together somehow and turning into some sort of internal avalanche.

  Ivan, clearly, would be good at it. He fairly oozed “good at it.”

  Miranda eyed herself in the bathroom mirror as one of the stylists toiled away on her face, adding a bit of drama to her cheekbones and extra fullness to her lips, and hoped no one would notice how flushed she’d become.

  She pulled in a ragged sort of breath, and thought of his hands on her back, his arm over her shoulders. That sheer physical intensity of his. He had been touching her—kissing her—before they’d ever exchanged a word. He was the inverse of everything she knew. No wonder she felt so inside out.

  And every time he looked at her, some part of her wanted to burst into flames and burn down into ash and soot. Like he compelled her to yearn for it. For him. Which was almost more disconcerting than the fact that she melted into all of that fire anyway.

  She didn’t know what that meant, she thought as she tipped her head back and let one of the women work on her eyes with pencils and eyelash clamps and a palette of shadows. But she hadn’t hated all of this mandatory touching as much as she’d thought she would, no matter how many times she tried to talk herself into an appropriate state of outrage.

  And he thought he could make her come. He’d said so with the same matter-of-fact confidence he’d used to tell her to listen to her messages and then get in his car in Georgetown. As if the outcome was never in any doubt.

  She couldn’t seem to get that out of her head.

  “You’ll be drop-dead gorgeous,” the nearest stylist told her in an accent that hinted at New York and reminded Miranda of home in this castle-like villa so far away from anything she knew. “Just like Cinderella.”

  This was a business arrangement, not a fairy tale. But she couldn’t say that. She had to pretend. She had to smile as if Ivan was Prince Charming and her fairy godmother all wrapped up into one devastating male package, complete with wealth and celebrity and the breathless attention of the entire world. She had to laugh and agree. She had to act as if she found Ivan as fascinating as they all obviously did.

  And if she wasn’t precisely pretending to be fascinated any longer—if that was far more encompassing and real than she wanted to admit even to herself, if it lived in her and grew with every breath and she was starting to worry it might be taking her over—

  It wouldn’t be the first time Miranda had to pay a steep price for something she should have known better than to want in the first place. The only good thing to come of having so badly miscalculated once before was that she certainly wouldn’t be likely to do it again. She’d lost her family the last time. She wouldn’t lose anything else, not if she could help it.

  This time she’d be smart enough to keep her mouth shut.

  * * *

  When Miranda finally made it down into the villa’s main reception room, she felt like a stranger to herself—and looked it. She’d hardly recognized the alien creature she’d seen in all the mirrors, though she’d oohed and aahed as necessary and declared everything glamorous.

  All part of her job, she supposed. Her performance.

  At the bottom of the stairs, a man waited with two cell phones clutched in each hand, a headset clamped to his ear and acrobatically spiked hair, his impatience visible.

  “Hi,” she said, feeling awkward when he didn’t speak. “I’m Miranda—”

  “Your goal today is to maintain total silence,” he said, his attention flicking to one of his phones, his thumbs moving rapidly over the keyboard. “But without looking like you’re not talking.” She must have made some kind of noise because he looked up, and his expression shifted from disinterested to patronizing. “I handle Ivan’s publicity. Which means you need to follow my script.”

  “I’m not an actress,” Miranda said coolly. She forced herself to smile. “So.”

  “No cute comments about kissing,” the man shot back as if she hadn’t spoken. “The whole world knows you can talk. You haven’t stopped talking in years, into every available microphone. But we’re selling a love story here.”

  “And in this love story the great vast swell of my emotions has rendered me mute?” Miranda asked drily. “How romantic.”

  The man’s eyes narrowed.

  “Craig.” Ivan’s voice came from the open doorway to one of the sitting rooms, a slap of sheer, raw command. “I have it from here.”

  Craig stared at Miranda for a moment, and she stared back as if he was an overly entitled freshman in one of her core classes, and she didn’t have any idea how long that would have gone on—but one of his phones began to shrill, and he stepped away to answer it.

  Which meant there was nothing to do but look at Ivan. She took her time about it, one hand still gripping the banister, and when she finally got up her nerve he had moved even closer. Too close.

  He looked even more absurdly handsome than he usually did plastered across all those Jonas Dark billboards, and about ten times as dangerous. He was in a sleek black tuxedo, which Miranda had seen him in a hundred times before, in a hundred different magazines, posters, advertisements. Yet it was different, somehow, standing here with him in this perfect villa in this particularly beautiful corner of the Côte d’Azur. Dressed as she was in an over-the-top concoction of a formal gown and her face meticulously made up to look like someone else’s. Someone who belonged in this life, this moment. With this man. That had been her stylists’ main objective, hadn’t it?

  To make a Columbia professor look like the sort of woman a major movie star like Ivan Korovin would actually be seen with.

  His dark eyes swept over her now, taking his time and taking in the lush, vibrant sweep of the gown she wore. It was a strapless column of bright red, a shade she would have avoided because of her hair, but of course, no one had asked her for her opinion on the color. Or the cut, or the fit, or anything else. Ivan had chosen it, so she would wear it. That was the deal. She should find that offensive, no doubt. But this close, all she could seem to concentrate on was how magnetic he was, how impossibly compelling—she could feel it, heating up the air between them, making it seem to crackle.

  Once again, she felt like his Parisian mistress from another time. Bought, dressed, adorned. Something deep inside of her turned over, way down there in the dark, and began to glow.

  “I hope you approve,” she said, and her voice was too soft. Too uncertain.

  Too much like a lover’s.

  “Stand up straight,” he told her, though his voice was more husky than stern, and then he reached over to physically inch her shoulders down from where she’d tensed them up behind her ears. She hardly even reacted to his hands on her bare shoulders now, and she congratulated herself. It was like a tiny spark, not a full-on wall of fire. Progress. “This is not something you toss on to go to the supermarket. This is couture. Treat the dress with respect, and it will return the favor.”

  She opened her mouth to say something, anything that didn’t involve personal revolutions or Parisian mistresses, anything at all—but his dark eyes finally met hers with the force of a midnight collision, and she found she couldn’t say a word.

  “
Come,” he said after a moment, as if he’d taken a moment to soak her in, too. As if the intensity all around them that they were both so studiously ignoring was as loud and heavy in him as in her. “The car is waiting.”

  He held out his arm and she took it, and everything felt raw, then. Too much. Too formal. Too real. Miranda didn’t understand how that was possible, when this was their most over-the-top moment yet. They were on their way to walk a red carpet. To parade down an aisle so that fans could cheer and reporters could take pictures and ask preapproved questions. So that pictures of them looking glamorous and together would be plastered across the globe, subject to any number of tabloid fantasies. What was less real than that?

  And yet.

  Something in her chest clutched tight. It was the fancy clothes, maybe. The dress and the jewelry they’d given her to wear with it, that she knew he’d chosen for her as well. Her hair was swept up into a sleek chignon to show off the dangling diamond earrings and the necklace was a masterpiece of intricate stones and stunning metals, making her seem to sparkle with elegance and style. Something about the idea of him picking them out for her to wear with this dress, to make her into this impossibly sophisticated version of herself, made her heart seem to stutter in her chest.

  And more than all the rest of it, Ivan walked beside her, like every girl’s dream of the perfect fantasy prince.

  Like her dream, anyway, she could finally admit to herself—a dream she’d packed away a long, long time ago and had been afraid to pull out into the light ever since. First because it had had no place in her father’s vicious, terrible home. And then, later, because it had seemed so silly and embarrassing a dream next to all of her important, serious studies. All of the intellectual things she’d wanted to do. Her theories, her books. Her dreams of a tenured professorship. She’d thought she’d had to choose. She’d chosen.

  Yet if she squinted, she couldn’t help but think as they swept from the villa toward the waiting limousine, this would look a great deal like the very fairy tales she’d taught herself not to believe in any longer. She was dressed like a princess, a beautiful gown and gorgeous jewels to match. The whole world already thought Ivan was some kind of prince. Was that what she’d see when she saw the pictures of this tomorrow? Was this the love story Craig the publicist was selling? Would she look carried away into some Disney movie, as if at any moment she might break into song?

  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

  “ARE 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.