“You did.”
Her eyes streaked to his, and she swallowed hard. “You don’t understand.”
“Then tell me.”
“How can you think this is safe, Ivan? You’re the least safe person I could possibly imagine—”
“I keep having to remind you that I am widely considered to be the greatest fighter of all time,” he said, cutting her off, his gaze intent on hers. “I still train every day with my brother, who did things so secret and so terrible in the Russian army that they dare not speak his name aloud. And I could beat him with my eyes closed.” He let that sink in. Then continued in the same quiet tone. “This is what I do. There is no power on this earth that can get to you through me, Miranda. Not one.”
She looked away, out across the vast living room toward the sea that glimmered through the glass walls on three sides. That deep, brooding Pacific blue. Ivan thought he’d lost her, and he couldn’t understand the way that felt, the things that surged in him, outraged and very nearly frantic at the very idea. He refused to accept that he couldn’t reach her, couldn’t help her. That whatever had done this to her could best him, too.
He refused to think about all the reasons why he shouldn’t be reacting this way. About how he was supposed to be breaking her apart, not building her back up.
Breathe, he ordered himself, and it took a lifetime of training, of battles hard won, to simply do it. To let her gather herself, swipe her hair back from her face and then begin to speak, as if she was talking to the ocean and he wasn’t there at all.
“He beat all of us,” she said in a low voice. “My mother. My brother. Me. We all lived in terror of setting off one of his moods, of triggering one of his rages, and it didn’t occur to me until much later, when I escaped, that there was no behavior good enough to please him—that he couldn’t be pleased, ever. That he wanted to do the things he did, or he would have stopped. He didn’t stop. He never stopped.”
“Your father,” Ivan indicated when she didn’t, and wondered why he’d imagined that money protected anyone from anything. When people remained people, and bullies remained bullies. He should know. He’d fought so hard to get away from his uncle only to find the world was filled with monsters just like him.
She nodded jerkily, still staring out the windows, her pretty face haunted.
“He was the most physical man I knew,” she whispered. “He was so big. He broke things with his hands. And he was always touching me. My head, my back, my arms—little reminders when we were out in public. That no matter how many times he smiled in church or joked around while he was coaching my brother’s soccer games, he could turn on us in an instant. And he did.”
Ivan still didn’t speak. She turned to face him then, her dark eyes searching his face as if looking for something. Disbelief? Pity? He didn’t know, and so he only gazed back at her, knowing nothing showed on his face but calm, easy compassion, no matter how it killed him to stay so quiet when what he wanted to do was find whoever had done this to her, the man who should have loved her the most, and break him into pieces. With his own big hands.
“I had one date,” she told him, her voice a painful little whisper in the quiet room. “I was sixteen. I’d decided early on that there was only one way out of there, and I was determined to take it. I studied like a maniac. I skipped two grades in school. But there was this boy.” Her smile was so sad it made his heart twist hard in his chest. “We saw a movie the week after we graduated from high school. He drove me home in his car and then he kissed me. It was my first. I forgot myself completely.” She pressed her lips together, hugged her legs tighter to her torso. “And when I walked into the house, my father called me a whore and beat me up so badly I had to stay in bed for three weeks.”
Ivan couldn’t help the sound he made then. He shook his head when she looked at him, so very carefully, as if she was waiting for him to turn on her. Which, of course, she was. And you will in the end, won’t you? a small voice inside of him asked. If you keep to the plan… But he shoved that aside.
“You are not talking about a man, Miranda,” he said quietly. “You must know this. A creature who would do such things is the worst kind of coward. My uncle was the very same sort.”
“But you fought him.” Her voice was bitter. A slap of pain, of self-recrimination. “You stood up to him.”
“I was six feet by the time I was twelve. What do you imagine you could have done? What use would fighting have been to you when he could break your bones? Where was your brother?”
She shook her head, her eyes a misery, and again, it hurt him not to reach for her, not to try to soothe her with his hands—as if that would help.
“At my college graduation, I was ready for them,” she said after a moment. She swiped at her eyes with the backs of her hands. “I’d been accepted into my graduate program. I had housing, a stipend. A job to help pay the bills. So I finally stood up to him.” Her eyes swam with tears. “I told him he was an abusive bully who’d made all our lives hell and I wanted nothing more to do with him. I thought my mother and my brother would applaud.”
Ivan sighed, knowing where this was going. “Miranda…”
“My father walked out of the restaurant,” she said very precisely, as if careful enunciation might keep her from crying. “I thought my mother would choose me but instead she told me I was dead to her, and I haven’t spoken to either of them since.” She let out a sound too hollow to be a laugh, and a tear traced a sluggish path down her cheek. “My brother thinks I’m delusional. He sends me hateful emails when he sees me on television. He thinks I need a strong hand to keep me in my place. I got a few messages from him when I was in New York and guess what? He thinks you can do the job nicely.”
Ivan sat forward slightly, and waited until her eyes met his.
“Come here,” he said. Very quietly.
She shivered, and not entirely in fear, he thought. But then she shook her head, tears swimming in her eyes again.
“I can’t. I just can’t. You make me…” She dragged a hand through her hair, scraping her hair back from her face. “You make me forget myself again, and I can’t, Ivan. I can’t.”
“You can.” He opened up his hands and laid them, palms up, on his knees. “Just as soon as it occurs to you that you have already said far nastier things to me and about me than you have ever said to a man like your father, and I have yet to harm you in any way. Just as soon as that marvelous brain of yours analyzes what that means. What it suggests about how safe you are here. With me.”
“Ivan—”
“I have very strong hands,” he said in the same tone, flipping them over on his knees, then back, inviting her to study them. “I’ve spent my entire life studying fighting. I have black belts in three martial arts systems. I’ve won every MMA championship I ever entered. You think that makes me more violent, more dangerous, than the average man?”
“Of course it does. It would have to.”
“You’re wrong.”
She didn’t like that, clearly, but she shifted position against the white couch, dropping her knees to the side and no longer hugging herself in that way, as if she was protecting herself from a blow. Her eyes moved over his hands, then back to his face.
“The more I train, the more I learn, the less I fight,” he said quietly. “The less I have to fight.”
He watched her take that in, start to think about it. He felt a trickle of relief when he saw that frown of hers again, carving that familiar line between her brows. This was the Miranda he knew. This was his Professor.
He told himself that was only relief he felt. Nothing more. Nothing deeper, more dangerous.
“Come here,” he said again, softer this time.
“I don’t think I want to.”
“I think you do.”
He still didn’t move, and after a very long time, when the sun began to sink into vibrant golds and reds across the wide horizon and the house lights came on around them, low and warm, she exhaled
a long and shuddering breath. And then, very slowly, very carefully, she moved back toward him across the polished wood floor. She stopped when she was directly in front of him, and knelt there, frightened eyes big in her delicate face.
He indicated the hands he still held there, open on his knees, and she swallowed convulsively. She took another deep breath. Then she reached out and placed her hands in his, one after the other, her fingers cold and stiff. He closed his fingers over hers carefully. Slowly. Giving her ample chance to pull away.
“I’d fight your demons for you, Professor,” he whispered. “But they’d put me in jail.”
She trembled, but she didn’t pull away.
“I thought my old boyfriends were bad at sex,” she whispered in a rush, not looking at him. “But it wasn’t them, was it? It was me. There’s something wrong with me. He— I’m ruined.”
“You’re perfect,” he told her very distinctly. “And you’re safe with me. I promise you.”
She shook her head, but she didn’t move her hands, and they were warming against his, her skin heating from the contact with his. She didn’t seem to notice that she was also breathing more steadily, more easily, breath by breath. That he was calming her with his touch.
“You don’t know that,” she said after a moment, looking down at the floor. “Look what happened today.”
“Look at me.” His voice was commanding then. Sure. Her head jerked up but she met his gaze. He felt her shiver slightly, and he didn’t let go. “I’m not a teenage boy or a coward. I told you. I can control myself. You can’t hurt me. And I won’t hurt you.”
He squeezed her hands slightly in his when she began to make a face, and her gaze slid back to his, reluctantly. So reluctantly, and he saw the fear there. And more than that, the hope. It moved in him, shaming him. Making him wish for things he knew he’d never have all over again. Making him wish they were different people. Making him wish they’d met a different way, played a different game.
And as she stared back at him, that terrible tension draining from her face little by little, her skin becoming less pale, looking more and more like Miranda by the moment, he told himself that it was true. That he could keep that promise, despite what he had to do.
That he would.
But then she tilted her head forward and kissed him.
CHAPTER TEN
MIRANDA didn’t let herself think. There’d been enough of that.
She simply kissed him again and again, angling her mouth over his the way he’d taught her, and it was sweet and right and then, once more, that fire.
That wild, unquenchable fire that, she understood now, had always been leading her here. To him. The only man who made her burn. Who made her want to burn. Who she believed would keep her safe no matter what happened when she was nothing more than ash. Who might even fight off her nightmares, if she let him.
Hadn’t he just proved it?
He pulled back, though he didn’t move his hands, and she knew, somehow, that he was afraid of scaring her off again. It made her heart kick hard against her ribs. Then ache.
“You don’t have to kiss me,” he said, frowning slightly.
She wanted to sob. It felt like she might—or simply explode all around him, and neither one was what she wanted. So she took refuge in her favorite suit of armor.
“Of course I don’t have to.” She raised her brows at him. “That would be coercive and repellent. Much like our public displays of feigned affection.”
He watched her for a long moment. Then blinked. For a breath, Miranda thought he might force her back into the fragile space she could still feel all around them, clinging to them—that he might say something else so devastatingly perfect, so miraculously right, that she would collapse before him all over again—
“Yes,” he said, the rich rumble of his mocking voice moving through her, like a shiver, his dark eyes shrewd as they tracked over her face, then down to where she gripped his hands too tightly—and didn’t let go. “I noted how repelled you were. It was your defining characteristic in all of those tabloid pictures.”
This time, she felt that sardonic lash like the gift it was.
“Ivan.” She waited for those midnight eyes to slide to hers again. So guarded as they searched hers, as if he was waiting for her to dissolve into sobs all over again, despite her brusque tone of voice. “Be quiet.”
His dark eyes gleamed.
And when she leaned in to take his mouth again, he didn’t say a word. He only kissed her back. Long and sweet. Endless. Heat spiraled into pleasure and rolled through her, making the body so recently racked in such old anguish begin to hum again. As if he was making her brand-new.
Miranda was the one who wanted more, who pulled her hands from his to hold his face between them, that strong, hard jaw scraping gently, erotically beneath her palms. She was the one who moved closer, then closer still, unable to get enough of his taste, his touch, the sheer, dizzying magic of his mouth on hers.
But he still didn’t move to hold her, to touch her, and eventually she couldn’t take it any longer.
“Why aren’t you touching me?” she demanded.
His rare, real smile lit up his face and charmed her straight through to the bone, as he lifted a hand to graze his knuckles over her cheek, like she was somehow precious to him. She wanted to sink into it—into him. She wanted to simply disappear into that smile, that touch.
“I don’t want to be another thing that scares you, Miranda.” Something moved over his face, like a shadow, but then disappeared so fast she thought she must have imagined it. “No matter what happens.”
“I want you,” she said with quiet conviction. Because she knew that, if nothing else. She knew it in the way she knew that she needed breath to live, and she didn’t want to examine that, analyze it. She just wanted him. Maybe she always had. Maybe that was why all of this felt so inevitable. “Not the watered-down version you trot out for the damaged woman who sobbed out a sad story on your floor.”
“This is not ‘watered down,’” he said, that rich current of laughter in his voice then, and flirting with that hard mouth. “This is patient. I’m not at all surprised you can’t recognize it.”
“You look at me and make me think you’ll burn me alive where I stand,” she whispered, not caring if it made her seem needy, desperate. Not caring about anything but the way she knew he could touch her—the way she wanted him to touch her. The way he’d simply…swept her up, from the first moment she’d met him. “That’s what I want, Ivan. I don’t want you to treat me like…like I’m ruined.”
“You already think I’m a wild, untamed animal,” he pointed out bluntly, though that gleam in his eyes was brighter. Hotter. It made her flush. Squirm slightly where she knelt before him. “Why would I want to go and do something that will inevitably prove it to you?”
“I don’t think you’re an animal,” she retorted, and as she said it, she realized that it was true. And that she hadn’t thought anything of the kind in a long time. It was astonishing. Dizzying. And it meant a whole host of things she didn’t want to think about. Not here. Not now. She slammed the door shut on all of them and looked at him instead.
“A caveman,” he continued in that same blunt voice, as if he knew what she was thinking and didn’t care. “A Neanderthal. Testosterone-poisoned.”
“I said all of those things, yes.” Miranda searched his face, which he kept perfectly blank. But she knew better. She knew he was fighting back the same desire that was coursing through her, making her burn all over again every time she inhaled. She could sense it like some kind of aura that surrounded them both. “Don’t tell me this is your revenge. I called you a caveman and so now you’re going to act like a Victorian maiden?”
“Yes.” But his other hand moved then, tracing a lazy line up the length of her spine, making her turn molten hot, making goose bumps break out over her arms. “I plan to punish you with lukewarm, perfectly competent sex.”
By the time he
finished the sentence his hand had made it to the nape of her neck, and he left it there, a hot, hard, delicious weight. A kind of sensual promise. She shivered against it, into it, and that crook in the corner of his hard mouth deepened.
“I’ve already had that,” she reminded him, breathlessly. “I’ve only had that.”
He smiled again, and it was far wickeder this time, and seemed to shoot off sparks inside of her that flipped into explosions and made her belly tighten around that same deep, low ache that she understood, now, only he could ease.
“And what do I do when my vastly superior touch renders you a sobbing mess on my floor yet again, as it inevitably will?” he asked gently, his tone teasing. He traced a feather-light pattern along her cheek again, then over her lips, then down to her collarbone, bathing her in light. In yearning. “I am, in fact, that good.”
It was, Miranda realized as she blinked back the heat behind her eyes, the nicest thing this man—any man—had ever done for her. Made her feel normal. Made her feel…unruined. As if she wasn’t damaged at all.
“Do I have to beg you to prove it?” she asked, her voice catching.
“I believe I told you that one day, you would.”
“I don’t know how to beg,” she said, her pulse rocketing in her veins as his dark gaze moved to her mouth. “I was hoping you could teach me that, too.”
“Miranda, Miranda.” He sighed. “You are far too educated already.”
And then, finally, finally, he took control.
He simply picked her up. He slid his hands beneath her arms and lifted her, settling her astride his lap. He was so strong. She watched the play of his muscles, the sheer power he demonstrated so casually, and knew that when she began to tremble this time, it was not from fear.
He gazed up at her for a brief, searing moment, and then he claimed her mouth.
No More Sweet Surrender Page 14
