No More Sweet Surrender

by Caitlin Crews

  “This is not what I need,” he said furiously, painfully. “This is not what I want.”

  “It’s your plan,” she said, so simply, so quietly, it broke his heart.

  Her eyes were glazed with what he knew were tears, but she didn’t cry. She only waited. For him to tell her what to do—how best to participate in her own downfall. He saw the tiniest hint of a tremor move over her, but she repressed it almost at once, and he wondered what it cost her to stand there like this—for him.

  He wanted to pull her into his arms. He wanted to be the man who saved her, who protected her—not the man who hurt her. He wanted to be the man he imagined he was when she smiled at him. The kind of man who would never make her feel the way she did right now. The man he’d always thought he was, not the man she’d believed him to be all these years. He wanted to kill his own brother for putting that terrible look on her precious face. And himself for letting it happen.

  “No,” he said, his voice hoarse, barely a thread of sound. “It’s done. There is no plan anymore.”

  He heard Nikolai’s muttered curse in Russian, but all of his attention was on Miranda. His beautiful Miranda. She nodded once, jerkily. Then she shifted back on her heels, and he saw the way she bit her lip.

  “Your brother is right,” she said, her voice scratchy, as if the tears she fought back clawed at her throat. “The damage is done. You got your revenge. Congratulations.”

  “This is not over—”

  “It is.” She shook her head when he moved, almost involuntarily, and he froze. “It’s finished. This was the agreement, wasn’t it? This was always our last night.” She started to turn, but then she looked back at him, and her dark eyes, nearly black with the pain she wasn’t letting show, not completely, slapped at him. Shamed him. “Don’t follow me, Ivan. Please.”

  And then she really did turn, and she walked away from him, head held high, as if he hadn’t seen the misery he felt raging inside of him written all over her.

  As if she was already well on her way to surviving this intact. Ivan couldn’t say the same.

  He forced a breath. Then another.

  But he still wanted to rip his brother limb from limb when he turned.

  Nikolai’s face was shut down. Hard and blank. But Ivan knew what he hid behind it. What howled in him, tearing him to pieces from within. Tonight, he didn’t care as much as he should.

  “Don’t forget, Vanya. I am trained to do the things others don’t. Or won’t.” Nikolai’s frosty blue eyes met his. Held. “And I always keep my promises.”

  Ivan knew that should have pierced him to the core. Two weeks ago, it would have swamped him with that same old guilt. But tonight he only looked at his brother and pitied him—pitied both of them. And it was nothing next to the rage he felt that Miranda was caught up in this old family mess. That it had tainted her, too.

  No more. It’s not your fault, she’d told him, and it had changed everything. Perhaps he hadn’t understood how much until now. He rubbed his hands over his face.

  “If you feel you have to fight me,” Nikolai continued, sounding hauntingly like the little brother Ivan remembered from a world away, a lifetime ago, “I don’t mind. If it helps you remember who you are.”

  “Kolya,” he said finally, fiercely, using the family name he hadn’t dared speak aloud in too many years to count.

  Nikolai jerked in surprise, and for the first time, there was something other than ice in his gaze. There was a glimmer again of the brother Ivan remembered.

  “You are my brother, my only family, my blood. I wish I could have protected you. I wish I could have protected myself. But you need to go and fix your life before you disappear completely. And before you destroy whatever love I have for you.”

  He held Nikolai’s gaze, and didn’t drop it when his brother’s face flushed slightly, as if he’d hit him. For the first time in years, Nikolai looked uncertain. Even lost. But it was too late.

  “And I don’t want to see you again until you do.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ELEGANT and sophisticated, Miranda reminded herself fiercely as she jerkily removed her makeup in front of the huge bathroom mirror in Ivan’s master suite, meant there would be no tears. No tears, no sobs, no crumpling into the fetal position on the bathroom floor and rocking herself for a while.

  And if a tear or two leaked out while she scooped up water in her palms and washed her face, well, no one ever had to know that but her.

  She was starting on her hair when Ivan appeared in the mirror behind her. She didn’t hear his approach. He wasn’t there, she blinked, and then he was leaning in the doorway, his black gaze hard and hurt and some kind of hungry. Her heart kicked against her ribs, hard, then seemed to drop straight down to her bare toes.

  Miranda’s arms dropped to her sides, letting the few pins she’d already pulled free clatter onto the granite countertop beside the sleek vertical basin of his sink. She wanted to ignore him, to bustle along with her departure, efficient and matter-of-fact, and be gone before the party was over. She’d already packed her bag. She looked almost like herself again now, in very old, very comfortable jeans that felt as close to that fetal position on the floor as she was going to get tonight, and the faded college T-shirt she slept in when she was alone. All she had to do was get her hair out of this dramatic style, slip on her shoes and leave. Simple.

  But she couldn’t seem to look away from Ivan’s reflection.

  And worse, she couldn’t seem to move.

  The silence seemed too large between them, too painful, and she wished she didn’t love him as hopelessly and helplessly as she did. She wished she didn’t notice the pain in his eyes, the way his hard mouth flattened. She wished she didn’t want, even now, to turn and go to him. To comfort him.

  “I meant what I said.” She couldn’t take the silence another second. She was too afraid of what she might do if it continued, and it had nothing to do with elegance or sophistication. “I was wrong. If you want me to take to the airwaves to say so, I will.”

  “I don’t.”

  “I’m happy to do it.” She curled her hands into fists, still watching him through the mirror. “If it’s what you or your brother need.”

  Ivan pushed away from the doorjamb and prowled toward her, and she couldn’t help the flush of excitement that raced through her, over her. Her body was so attuned to his, it was readying itself for his possession no matter the state of her emotions. He stopped when he was behind her, his gaze still locked on hers, and for a moment he simply stood there, so big and so dangerous behind her, and it was so much like Paris all over again that it made Miranda’s chest tighten painfully. She thought she might explode, so she turned around to face him—anything to banish the memory of that dressing room—

  But that was a mistake.

  She was so used to touching him now. She was so used to closing small distances between them like this by simply leaning forward and into that powerful chest of his. It caused her actual, physical pain to reach behind her instead, and grip the lip of the bathroom counter.

  “When did you turn passive and accommodating?” he asked quietly. “I find it terrifying.”

  “This is not passive, Ivan,” she said, the sudden surge of temper like a shot of color through gray clouds. “This is polite. This is understanding. You said you didn’t want a scene. Have you changed your mind?”

  “No,” he said. “But nothing else has changed, either.”

  She didn’t understand him, until he simply reached over and slid that large hand of his over her hip, yanking her into him and taking her mouth that easily.

  It was hot. It was perfect. It was Ivan.

  And it hurt Miranda in ways she expected would leave scars.

  She shoved him back, and he let her go, but she couldn’t control the tears that welled up in her eyes then, the great storm inside of her that she’d been fighting so hard to keep hidden away.

  “Is this your final little bit of revenge?�
� she demanded when the tears began to fall, exposing her despite everything. “You want to see me fall apart in front of you? Just let me leave, Ivan. Let me keep my promise and go.”

  “What if I don’t want you to go?” His voice was rough, his black gaze intense.

  And she realized that this, right here, was her opportunity to be strong, finally. To protect herself, at last. She wanted to believe him more than she’d ever wanted anything. She wanted it so much she thought she could feel that wanting on a cellular level. She wanted him, any way she could get him. She loved him. And she knew that it would be far too easy to simply allow this. To take whatever time she could with him, and bask in it and simply postpone this harsh ending for another time.

  She also knew it might kill her. So she shook her head at him, and wiped at her face. And tried, for once, to be as strong as she should have been all along.

  “You can have sex exactly like this with anyone in the world,” she told him. “I’m sure you already have. You don’t need me.”

  He laughed, though it was not a happy sound, and Miranda took the opportunity to duck around him and head for the dressing room and her bag. Forget her hair. She needed to get away from him while she still had some remnant of a spine.

  “But you need me,” he said from behind her.

  She stopped walking, as surely as if he’d had her on a leash and had just yanked on it. Hard. She turned back around slowly. Incredulously.

  He looked more fierce than she’d ever seen him, in that sleek tuxedo that somehow hinted at all of his ferocity while managing to make him something like elegant, too. Yet all of him devastatingly, finely honed male. That heat of his seemed to burn brighter, making her belly tighten, and her core soften, even as she stared at him as if she could not possibly have heard him correctly.

  “And more than that, Miranda,” he said in that way of his, a formidable punch wrapped with that Russian flavor, “you are in love with me.”

  The whole world collapsed, sucked into a giant black hole of her shame and horror and a sheer terror that felt a lot like some kind of exultation—but she still stood there, her bare feet against the polished floor, her face wet from her own tears, her entire life a sad, sick joke that had led straight here. To this tragic little farce.

  She wanted to deny it. She wanted to scream. She wished she could simply die where she stood, saving her the trouble of attempting to survive this. She’d known for a while now that he would break her heart. She hadn’t expected him to simply reach out and rip it still beating from her chest.

  She should have remembered this was Ivan Korovin. He was capable of anything. That was why she loved him in the first place.

  “You told me in your sleep,” he said, watching her as he moved closer, a dark menace in beautiful clothes. “And you screamed it yesterday as you fell into pieces all around me.”

  Her heart seemed to beat with spikes attached, sending painful shock waves through her each time. She sucked in a breath, then another. And then she simply stopped fighting. What was the point? She’d already lost everything that mattered to her. The career she’d thought made her who she was, but was no more than a house of cards built on trashing this man. And now him, too, but she’d expected that. She’d signed up for it in advance. It didn’t make it easier. But it was still happening.

  “Yes, well.” She laughed then, aware that it sounded ever so slightly hysterical against all of his white walls and moody, abstract paintings. “I’ve never been particularly smart, have I? Not where you’re concerned.”

  “I don’t want you to go,” he said again, his voice harder this time, nearly ferocious.

  And it hurt. It all just hurt.

  “Because you don’t know how to lose,” she managed to say. “But this is how it’s going to happen, whether you like it or not. Whether it breaks your undefeated record or not. This is what we agreed.”

  * * *

  And Ivan lost his cool.

  “I don’t care about the agreement,” he said. Though the first time he said it, he used far uglier words. “I don’t care about winning.”

  But she only shook her head, unmoved despite the emotion he could see staining her face, making her stand so tautly. “Ivan—”

  “You can’t tell me you love me and then walk away!” he threw at her, dimly aware that he was louder than usual. Much louder than was safe. “You can’t cry in my arms and tell me things you’ve never told another living soul and then just…go back to New York as if none of this ever happened!”

  “Why not?” she demanded, her eyes too bright again, her voice rough. “It’s what you want!”

  “You should know by now, Miranda, that I never get what I want,” he snapped at her, totally unhinged now, completely lost to himself, as if he’d never had any training. As if he was nothing but this wild storm she’d made inside of him. “I suffer. I do my duty. I win on command. But what I want is never part of the package.”

  “Ivan,” she began again, her voice broken, as he surged toward her and made her back up a few steps, as if she could see that wildness in him. But her wide eyes, dark jade and anguished, drank him in anyway.

  “You have haunted me across years,” he told her hoarsely. “You have challenged me and provoked me, and that was before I met you. I didn’t expect to like you. I didn’t expect to crave you.” He wasn’t shouting anymore, but it felt the same, out of control and the closest he’d been to desperate since he was a boy. “Tell me how to let you go, Professor. Tell me how to pretend none of this ever happened. Tell me how to pretend that I can’t see that you hate the very idea of it yourself.”

  “You wanted to humiliate me in public,” she challenged. “But not in any straightforward kind of way. You wanted to seduce me into submission first, because it would hurt more.”

  “You are writing a nasty, damaging book about me,” he retorted. “All insinuations and fantasies and lies. Another book.”

  “I’ve already told my agent it isn’t happening,” she snapped.

  He reached over then to brush her tears from her pretty face.

  “You are in love with me,” he gritted out. “You don’t want to do this. You don’t want to go.”

  Her face crumpled then, and it tore at him. She raised a hand to her mouth as if that might hold her together, but still, a sob rolled out anyway and made him feel small. Mean.

  “What happens if I stay, Ivan?” she asked, her voice thick. “If it hurts this much now, how much worse will it be two weeks from now? A month? I can’t do it. I can’t willingly subject myself—”

  “You love me.”

  She’d said it half-asleep. She’d screamed it in the height of passion. And so it lived in Ivan like tension, and he frowned at her as if he could bend her to his will that easily. As if he could make her say it now, when it counted.

  Miranda let out a sound somewhere between a sob and a sigh. Her shoulders dropped, and her head canted forward slightly, as if she’d let go of something very heavy, all at once.

  “I do,” she whispered. “I do love you.”

  And that was the last of his foundations turned into dust, just like that. Setting him free.

  He swept her into his arms and held her high against him, drowning in that look on her face, as if he was the man he’d always wanted to be. As if she saw him when no one else could.

  “I am a rough man,” he told her fiercely. “I made myself from fists and sheer will, and that is all I know. There were no ivory towers for me. No easy escapes. I’ve had to fight for every single thing I have, and most of what I lost.”

  She reached up her hand and held his face with it, her touch somehow healing, even as another tear tracked its way down her cheek.

  “I’ll fight for you,” she whispered.

  He lost himself then in the sweet, slick heat of her mouth. In the perfection of her arms around him, her body against his, the fact that she knew him better than anyone else in the world, and she loved him anyway.

 
When he pulled back to breathe, they had found their way to the bed, and she wrapped herself around him as if she would never let him go.

  “I want more than two weeks,” he told her in a rush, things opening wide inside of him, like she was the light and all of his shadows were surrendering to her, one by one. “I want forever. Live with me. Marry me. I don’t care. I want everything.”

  She smiled at him, that beautiful smile that changed him from the inside out, and he understood. Finally, he understood.

  “I love you,” he said, and the words sounded stilted. Strange. As well they should. He’d never said them before. In any language.

  Or maybe it was that his life, his love, his heart—everything he was or wanted to be—hung there in those three small syllables and the woman who gazed up at him, her face scrubbed clean and her dark red hair a fierce tangle.

  Her smile deepened, changed. Made new worlds, and took him with her.

  “I know you do,” she said softly, and then she kissed him.

  Binding them together, like a tightly held fist, unbreakable and sure.

  Forever.

  * * *

  Eighteen months later, Miranda stood in her one-bedroom apartment in New York City, wrinkling her nose as she looked around at the bare white walls. The empty floors. She stood in the center of what had been her bedroom so long ago, when she’d been a completely different person. When she’d hardly known herself. When she’d fought her nightmares nightly and alone, instead of very rarely and with Ivan. She gazed down at the simple, elegant solitaire that he’d slid onto her finger only a week ago now, when she’d finally agreed to marry him after a very long campaign.

  Mostly conducted in bed, his preferred negotiation strategy.

  Miranda smiled. It was time to trust. It was time to let go of fear. It was time to officially move into the sprawling penthouse on Central Park West he’d bought to be near her during the Columbia school year. It was past time.

  There was no noise behind her, no sound at all, but she knew he was there. She always did. She turned slowly, and let the punch of his sheer physical presence move through her, as ever. He was big and dark, wearing a great black coat over jeans and a jacket, looking every inch the wealthy, famous man he was. Beautiful and lethal.