No More Sweet Surrender

by Caitlin Crews

  The equivalent of that smile of his, the public one, and the formidable truth of him to back it up.

  She climbed from the back of the car, reluctantly, and stood there for a moment as it pulled away again, headed for the separate building she assumed was the garage. She looked around as the breeze flowed in from the sea and the hills, cutting the heat, smelling of smoke and rosemary, the faint hint of eucalyptus. Salt and flowers.

  She was in so much trouble.

  She’d spent all of this time locked away in her apartment five flights above the busy Manhattan streets, desperately trying to distill her experience in France into cool, incisive, purely academic sentences. Trying to describe what it was like to spend all of that time in such close proximity to a man like Ivan in the detached vocabulary of her profession. Trying to write the damned book that would make all of this worthwhile.

  And had instead found herself staring off into space, reliving every time he’d brushed his fingers over her neck, her hand, her cheek. Feeling it as if it was happening all over again, as if, were she to close her eyes, she would open them to find him there in front of her as if summoned by the force of her yearning, all of that dark promise burning in his eyes as he gazed at her.

  It was pathetic. Not to mention dangerous.

  And it didn’t matter anymore. It couldn’t. She’d been so naive—expecting that a man who’d made his life a temple to the physical wouldn’t be…incredibly, impossibly tactile. All about skin, bodies, touch. Of course he was. Of course he’d overwhelmed her. In retrospect, she should have known it would happen. She suspected he’d known exactly what he was doing—and she should have anticipated that, too.

  But she knew now. And he couldn’t have the same effect on her if she was expecting it, could he? No matter what she felt for him. No matter what.

  The air changed, then, though there was no noise. No warning. Only that ineffable, inexplicable shift. Her skin prickled. There was the slightest chill down her spine, and her stomach flipped, then knotted.

  And when she turned her head, he was there.

  CHAPTER NINE

  IVAN stood in the open doorway, seeming to fill it. His arms were crossed over his mouthwateringly bare chest, his tattoos sinuous and seductive over all of that hard male flesh, his black eyes trained on her just the way she’d seen them in all of those hot, naked dreams that still moved in her, making her head spin. Or perhaps that was the ordinary, inevitable effect of Ivan standing only a few feet away wearing nothing but a pair of loose black trousers low on his hips, leaving even his feet bare.

  Miranda’s mind went blank. Her body exploded into a host of reactions she would have thought meant the onset of an intense and sudden illness had she not known better. Had she not understood by now that it was him. It was all Ivan. This desert in her throat, this flood of scalding heat between her legs. This breathless whirl of sensation, this spinning wilderness in her head.

  Ivan.

  Their gazes clashed. Burned.

  Miranda thought there should have been a storm—sudden thunder, torrents of hail, the sizzle and pop of summer lightning—but the California sky was a calm and sleepy blue all around them.

  It was Ivan. He was the storm, and Miranda was terribly afraid he was already inside of her, changing her, uprooting her and destroying her, without his having to do anything more than look at her like that.

  His hard mouth curved, though she didn’t make the mistake of thinking he was truly amused. Or even really smiling, come to that.

  He lifted one of his hands and crooked his finger at her in the universal signal to come, just as he had once before in a Parisian dressing room.

  Like he was some kind of Russian prince after all, beckoning the peasants near, wearing so little, wanting only her instant obedience in return.

  Expecting it.

  “Do you think I’ll come running?” she asked, not moving. Hardly daring to breathe. Afraid her feet would betray her of their own volition.

  That curve of his mouth hardened, made her chest feel tight. “Feel free to crawl.”

  Miranda reminded herself that she was brave. That she was strong. That he was, as he’d once told her himself, only a man. Not a monster, despite what she’d long wanted to believe about him. Not capable of making war on her unless she let him. He was only as in control of this—of her—as she allowed.

  “I’ve had a long flight,” she said. She smoothed her hands down the front of her floor-length black sundress, hoping it hid her nerves but suspecting from the way he tracked the movement that it did the opposite. She pushed on anyway. “I want something to drink. Maybe a nap. I don’t have the energy for this.”

  “‘This?’” he echoed, and now he did sound amused.

  “You.”

  Ivan’s dark eyes narrowed slightly. He didn’t move. He simply stood there like the warrior he was, and he was, she thought, the most intimidating man she’d ever seen. The most formidable. And he terrified her, but not, she’d come to understand over the past ten days, in any of the familiar ways.

  Miranda made herself walk toward him. She told herself there was no need to be the least bit intimidated, and still, that thunder rolled inside of her, that lightning crackled deep beneath her skin. That storm raged inside of her, mocking the perfection of the day.

  You can do this! she congratulated herself. You can’t control him, but you can control yourself—

  Ivan reached out again when she drew up next to him, and caught her by the elbow.

  “Miranda.”

  That was all. Just the lightest of touches, a brush of his hand. Her name.

  But that was all it took.

  The world sizzled, burned to white, then simmered red. Like everything simply burst into flame, incinerating her. Leaving her nothing but red-hot embers and that driving, incapacitating need.

  For him. For more.

  She didn’t know who moved first. Who closed the distance between them. But his mouth was on hers, hard and hot. Her hands were buried in his thick dark hair as she kissed him back, greedy and wild. There were no cameras here. No one to watch them, record them. Report back.

  So there were no brakes. No boundaries. Nothing to stop the impossible rush of pure sensation.

  Miranda stopped fighting and wrapped herself around that hard, tough body of his. That warrior’s physique, so roughly hewn and finely muscled. Finally, her breasts crushed into the great wall of his chest. Finally, she explored that breathtaking sweep of hot, chiseled male beauty that was his back, his waist, with her own hands. Finally.

  He kissed her like a starving man. And she was just as hungry. Just as desperate.

  She felt the world tilt and spin, more than usual when he was near, and he was lifting her up, pulling her legs around his waist, then taking her mouth again.

  As if she was his in every possible way.

  And she exulted in it. She loved the hardness of his strong, callused hand against her cheek, giving him total control over the depth and fire of the kiss. His other hand was hot and delicious against her bottom, holding her against the hardest part of him, making her feel shivery and glazed with heat. She loved the thrust of his tongue, the press of his lips, the way he teased and took in turn. He stood there like a rock, holding her so easily, as if she was made of something as insubstantial as cotton, and that made her tremble all the more.

  He was so massive. So incontrovertibly male. Sinew and muscle like marble, as if he’d been carved from stone, and yet he was so hot to the touch. So hot.

  He began to walk, still kissing her with all of that intensity, all of that insistent fire, and she was aware of only a jumble of things around her as he carried her into his house. There was blue everywhere—endless sky and sea through the glass on all sides, a huge abstract painting on a whitewashed wall. Wide-open rooms in that sleek modern style with unusual pops of color here and there.

  But mostly she saw that hard face of his, taut with the same mad desire she felt eating her alive.
Then everything shifted again and she was flat on her back on some kind of soft white rug near a fireplace that dominated one stark wall, and he was coming down over her with the kind of fluid ease and heart-stopping masculine grace that reminded her, forcefully, that his body was a sleek machine under his command, and he could make it do anything he wished.

  Anything at all.

  He stretched out beside her, running one of his hands down the length of her slowly, as if claiming her. Learning her. A languorous sweep from the side of one breast to the indentation of her waist, over the curve of her hip, then down the outside of her leg. It was like being bathed in lightning; electrified. One searing burst then another, the voltage of it jolting through her, making her close her eyes against the madness of this. The insanity.

  He whispered that phrase again. “Milaya moya.”

  “I don’t think I want to know what that means,” she whispered, hardly recognizing her own voice when she heard it, so glutted was it with the wildness inside of her, the riot of the storm he’d raised. The storm that showed no sign of easing.

  When she opened her eyes, she met his. Black, searing hot—and she trembled at the passion there. The stark sensual intent.

  “Sweet.” His voice was a rasp in the quiet room. Like a touch all its own, another devastating caress. Something moved across his face then, almost like a kind of anguish, then was gone. “It means ‘my sweet.’”

  And then he took her mouth again, demanding and possessive, and it was long moments before she realized that as he did, he was also lifting up her dress. He tugged it above her knees. Then up to her waist. The cool air moved over her flushed skin and she froze. Reality trickled back in, and with it, a sudden sharp pang of uneasiness.

  “Ivan—”

  But his hand was on the bare skin of her thigh, so hot, so possessive. The storm inside her raged on, and she bit her lip. Ivan shifted and looked down at her, his clever eyes searching hers.

  Slowly, inexorably, his hand moved higher. He held her gaze. Watching. Waiting.

  Miranda’s breath sawed in and out. Raw. Almost painful. But she didn’t say a word. She didn’t tell him to stop. She couldn’t seem to form a single syllable. It was as if he’d shorted out her brain.

  His hand crept higher and he shifted again, moving down over her with that surprising, distracting grace of his, until he kissed her thigh, right next to where his hand rested, so close to the very heart of her need.

  “Ivan.” It was so hard to speak. It was so hard to feel all of this, to feel it and not simply pass out from the pleasure. Or the deeper emotion she wasn’t equipped to handle. Or the rising panic she was struggling to ignore. She didn’t know how to feel this much—how to handle this kind of passion, this storm. “I don’t…”

  “You don’t what?”

  He was licking her skin, tracing a lazy path of fire along her thigh, and even as she registered the fact that he was pushing her legs apart and settling himself between them, he was there. He threw a single dark look at her, black like silk and as effortlessly seductive, intently sexual, deliciously male, and then pressed his mouth against her, hard.

  As if she wasn’t wearing that tiny scrap of satin between her legs at all. As if she was already naked.

  Miranda arched against him, up off the floor, the pleasure like a shock wave, coursing through her, setting her alight. She felt him in her breasts, her toes. Her skin seemed to burst into flames. He curved his hands around her bottom, holding her to him, taking her. Simply taking her as if she’d always been his.

  She couldn’t understand how he could wreck her like this—how he could make her feel such huge, unwieldy things, so big they were crowding her out of her own body, so giant she could hardly breathe, love and lust and electric want—

  “I don’t—”

  But she was panting with that terrible, impossible need and her own slick, hot response, and he simply moved her panties out of his way, then licked his way into the center of her, where she was already molten hot and he seemed to know intuitively exactly how to drive her wild.

  Exactly how to make her body arch up again, her entire being focused on the sheer mastery of that hard, perfect mouth, the things that he could do, the things that he was doing—

  It was too much. It was overload. Chaos. She felt strung out, lit up. How could she survive this much pleasure and still be herself? How could she be sure she would live through this at all? How could anything feel this good?

  “I don’t like—”

  “This?”

  He did something new with his mouth, licked into her harder. Deeper. She heard a far-off scream of pleasure almost too acute to bear and only dimly understood she’d made it.

  “Or this?”

  He slid two long, hard fingers deep into the core of her, as if he already knew all of her secrets, as if he’d already had her a thousand times. And Miranda writhed beneath him, mindless, unable to do anything at all but feel it coming toward her, this wildness like a terror in her veins, her flesh. This impossible crisis, inexorable and his to command. Just as she was.

  “I can’t—” she began.

  “You can. I promised.”

  And then he took the heat of her in his mouth again, performed that magic that was only his and threw her straight over the edge of the world.

  * * *

  That was one promise kept, Ivan thought with deep male satisfaction as she shuddered in his arms and he had to restrain himself from simply sliding into her then and there, putting the proper end to all of this torture.

  God, the ways he wanted her. He was man enough to admit, here, while she still shook herself apart in his arms, that he had wanted her long before he’d met her. That he had entertained any number of fantasies about that snooty little frown of hers that meant that overeducated brain of hers was working overtime, that entrancing sweep of dark red hair that begged for his hands, that beautiful mouth of hers that criticized him so resolutely and was so hot and wild on his.

  He had barely begun to scratch the surface of those fantasies. And he was running out of time.

  But he wanted her with him, every step of the way. He wanted her fully aware of it when he took her, every inch and every thrust, not blissed out with what he was fairly certain, with no little smugness, was her very first orgasm.

  A feeling wholly new to him moved through him then as he looked down at her. He couldn’t recognize it. He wasn’t sure he cared to. She still breathed so heavily. Her eyes were still shut tight, her face flushed red. She was making the slightest, smallest sound; it was so close to a moan, and it made him want her even more.

  He settled himself beside her, propping himself up on his elbow and drew her name on the bare skin of her arm in Russian. Milaya moya. His from the start, little though she might know it. And despite what was to come.

  But when her eyes finally opened, that dark jade gone green, she looked distressed. Panicked. And when she focused on him, she went pale.

  “No,” she said, but her voice was strained. Choked.

  She pushed against him wildly and he let her go at once, going perfectly still as she rolled and then scrambled away from him. She threw herself back against the nearest bright white couch, her dark red hair and black dress a punch of color against the pale cushions, the stark room; poignant and loud. She tugged her dress down to cover her legs and then she pulled her knees up to her chest and hugged herself.

  Like a scared child, not like the woman he knew. Not his bold, fearless professor, who had never met an opponent she couldn’t argue down, no matter how foolhardy that argument might be.

  “Miranda.” He made his voice calm. Soothing. “What is the matter? There is nothing to be afraid of here.”

  “This can’t happen,” she said in a heartbreakingly small voice, that was not in any way hers, and then she buried her head against her knees.

  A dark suspicion uncurled inside of him, making him deeply, almost incapacitatingly furious. At himself. Her insistence on
the separation of mind and body. Her bloodless previous relationships, all talk and so little sex. Her hatred of what he stood for from afar, her stunned, uncertain fascination with him in person. The way she kissed him, as if she couldn’t believe he was real, as if she’d never felt anything like it before. As if some part of her was afraid. Ivan seethed. How had he managed to overlook that? But he knew. He’d been focused on the game. And that glorious heat, that want. That incandescent fire. On having her, not reading her as he should have.

  He forced himself to breathe, to focus. To concentrate on here, now. Miranda.

  “But it’s already happened,” he said quietly. “And here we are, all in one piece. Safe.”

  “Ruined,” she whispered, more to her legs than to him, but he heard her all the same, and it felt like a sucker punch, hard and fast to the back of the head, taking him down to his knees. “You’ve ruined me.”

  “I don’t have that power, Milaya,” he told her, not permitting his voice to betray a single shred of the fury that roiled inside of him. The fury or the deep sympathy he wished he could express in more than just a few paltry words in his third language. “And neither does anyone else.”

  He heard a sound that was like a sob, and it broke what was left of his useless old heart into a thousand pieces. He pulled himself up into sitting position, but he didn’t go to her, though every part of him wanted to. He watched her delicate head, bent over her knees. Watched her lithe body shake slightly. Listened to the way she breathed, ragged and shallow. And he waited.

  Outside, the afternoon wore on. The light thinned, the shadows began to form. The wind picked up, making the palm trees dance slightly. And still he waited.

  Eventually, she lifted her head, her face wet with tears and her eyes, those beautiful, defiant eyes, too wide and much too troubled. He hated it. He wanted her dark, clever jade. He wanted that green flash of outrage, that dazed black of passion. Not this.

  “This is all I have,” she told him, her voice harsh and tight with emotion. She brought up one hand and held it against her forehead, the side of her face, indicating the whole of her head as if she was no more than a brain in a jar. “This is all I have. I can’t… I don’t…”