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He’d only watched her, those impossibly dark eyes seeing far too much, brooding and amused at once.
“On my particular stage,” he’d replied, not quite mocking her, not quite putting her in whatever he thought her place was, she’d decided; not quite, “fashion is a statement of intent. A declaration of purpose. It is taken very seriously, like it or not.”
“Fine,” she’d said stiffly. She’d reminded herself of her greater goals, the plans she’d been so eager to put into action. The book she would write, exposing him, that would make all of these humiliations, large and small, worthwhile. That would allow her to continue reaching out to those, like her, who were tired of his brand of lauded violence. “If you want to throw your money around, that’s your prerogative.”
“Thank you,” Ivan had said in that too-dark voice of his. She’d had the wild notion that he knew the way that sardonic tone moved over her skin, into her flesh. The way it had teased at her, like the lick of a dark flame. His black gaze then had mocked them both. “I do so appreciate your permission.”
And that was how, barely seventy-two hours later, Miranda found herself standing half-dressed in a wildly famous Parisian haute couture house. It had all happened so fast. She told herself that was why her head was spinning—that and the time change. Or, perhaps, those old, terrifyingly familiar nightmares that had woken her in a heart-pounding, gasping panic each night since Georgetown. She stared at herself now in the range of mirrors splayed before her, clutching what she’d been assured would one day be a fantastically glamorous gown to her chest, as if that could preserve what was left of her modesty, wondering if the sleeplessness showed as much as her bare skin did.
Not that it mattered. She might as well have been a piece of the elegant furniture for all the notice anyone took of her.
Ivan was sprawled across the opulent settee that took up a good portion of the private, luxuriously appointed dressing room, all scarlets and golds, deep carpets and magnificent draperies, while couturiers and their obsequious underlings fawned all over him. They plied him with champagne and small silver trays of hors d’oeuvres, laughed uproariously at his passable French and treated Miranda exactly the same way he had since they’d arrived hours earlier: as the nameless, no doubt interchangeable mistress he was dressing for his own amusement today, her feelings on what pieces were selected to adorn her unsolicited and unimportant.
She hardly recognized her own reflection. She felt as if she was in some kind of time warp—that if she stepped outside, it could be the decadent Paris of any past century, and she the kind of fallen woman who would consent to the seedy arrangement they were pretending to have. She shook her head slightly, as if that could clear it of leftover nightmares and time-change grogginess. As if that could make this okay.
Was she really dressing for a man’s pleasure, at his command? Had she really climbed in and out of outfits at a wave of his hand, marching in and out from behind the privacy screen erected in the corner at a word or two from him, trying on this or that depending on his expression? Had she really let him pick out an entire wardrobe for her this morning, as if she’d come to him naked and with nothing?
It had been one thing to imagine it in her head, this calculated fake relationship with very clear goals that had seemed almost inevitable, even reasonable, in that suite of his in Georgetown. But it was something else entirely to make herself do it. To let all these haughty French strangers assess her so coolly, to let them think they knew exactly how she would pay for the piles of ready-to-wear pieces Ivan had decreed acceptable for his woman, all of it packed away already into glossy shopping bags as he turned his attention to the crucial matter of the gowns she would wear on two red carpets and at his benefit over the next six weeks.
It’s the jet lag, she told herself, again and again. It’s making you maudlin. It’s making everything seem so muchmorethan it really is, so muchharshersomehow, and the nightmares certainly haven’t helped.
But what she heard was that Russian-spiced voice of his, calling her my woman in his offhanded way, the sound of it echoing around and around in her head until her chest felt tight.
Ivan glanced up then, and caught her gaze in the gleaming bank of mirrors. She could see that focused fire in the depths of his black eyes, and was aware, anew, of the length of her naked back that was exposed to him, the glorious, shimmering blue fabric they’d pinned onto her yawning open almost all the way down to the top of her panties, which were the only thing of hers she wore.
She might as well have been naked, suddenly. She felt naked.
Like she was no more than an object, displayed for his brooding perusal.
Which was, of course, exactly what she was today, Miranda reminded herself sharply. Exactly what she was supposed to be. They’d agreed. She had agreed.
This was too much. It was too disturbing. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t do this—
His lips moved then, distinctly. And though he only mouthed the word, for her eyes alone, Miranda heard it like a thunderclap. As if he’d shouted it.
Public.
“We agreed we would only put on our little act when there were cameras around,” she’d said nervously when they were somewhere high above the Atlantic Ocean, and Ivan had settled into the wide seat across from her with a glass of wine in his hand.
Too close, she’d thought in a rising panic. He wore a white button-down shirt, crisp and untucked, that only hinted at the impressive strength beneath. And those intriguing tattoos—the one she’d seen on his arm and the teasing hint of another she could see in the open neck of his shirt, inked black on his golden skin. He’d been sitting much too close, and he’d been much too compelling, and she’d had no time to process any of this.
She’d returned home from Washington the day after their kiss to find paparazzi camped out outside her apartment building high on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. She’d holed up indoors, grateful that Columbia’s commencement ceremony had been the week before and that she’d finished teaching all of her classes for the semester. She’d pretended that none of this was happening, that everything was as it had been, that she’d never met Ivan Korovin. Or kissed him. Much less made this devil’s bargain with him.
And when the denial had run its course, she’d planned out her new book and calmed herself with bright and happy visions of her future. When he was out of her life. When she could analyze and shape and process all of this as she wished. When she could discuss that kiss in her own terms, on all the networks that had been clamoring to interview her.
When the nightmares faded away again, the way they had before she’d met him, and let her sleep.
She hadn’t been ready for him so soon after Georgetown. She hadn’t been prepared for the shock of it when he’d greeted her in the sleek silver car that had whisked them both to the airport, much less the scorching force of him once they’d found themselves alone in the sitting area of his private jet, his men up in the front or disappeared into the staterooms.
“We did not agree.” He’d drunk from his glass with apparent unconcern. “You made an announcement. I sense you do so often.”
She’d ignored that last part.
“Does that mean you don’t agree, then?” she’d asked tightly, aware only when his gaze had flicked down to her hands that she’d been clenching them too hard against the armrests of her deep leather seat. She’d forced herself to let go.
“As a matter of fact, I do not.” He’d met her glare with that irritatingly calm gaze of his, that had held, as ever, a simmering amusement in its brooding depths. She hadn’t wanted to ask herself why that affected her so much. Why it burrowed so deeply beneath her skin. “We will put on this little act, as you call it, when we are in public. Only when we are alone, just the two of us, will we drop it.”
“But—”
“Cameras are everywhere,” he’d said quietly, with that edge of quiet, implacable certainty. “Eager eyes and mobile phones set to record. Gossiping mouths with instant internet access. You think you know what it means to be in the public eye because you have appeared on some television programs, because your name is known in some circles.” His mouth had curved slightly. Mockingly. “You don’t.”
There had been something in his gaze then, something dark and almost painful that made her heart seem to beat too hard in her chest. She’d cleared her throat, more confused by her insane urge to offer him some kind of comfort than anything that had come before. She’d tried to shake it off.
“That seems extreme,” she’d said. “And unnecessarily paranoid.”
“Yet it is precisely how I have managed to be a major movie star, featured in the number-one summer action movie for four years running, and still considered mysterious and reclusive,” he’d said without the faintest shred of arrogance or pride. Only stark, indisputable fact. “This is my game, Professor. If you want a book out of it, we will play it my way.”
Public.
Miranda flushed slightly now, holding his gaze in the mirrors of the opulent Parisian dressing room, as chastened as if he’d reprimanded her out loud. She forced herself to breathe. And then, impossibly, attempt a smile.
It was anemic, she thought, studying herself in the wall of mirrors, but it was there.
Ivan only watched her for another moment, and she again got the sense that she amused him, though he neither smiled nor laughed. Then, his eyes still so dark and commanding on hers, he lifted up a single finger of one hand and wordlessly commanded her to turn around in a circle.
For his pleasure.
And Miranda loathed herself, deeply and totally. But she did it.
Because that was the deal. And she would be damned if she was the one who would break it. Not when she had so much to gain from simply … submitting to this, to him, for a scant few weeks. Surely she could do that.
Ivan’s dark eyes gleamed hot when she met them again, a kind of promise there that she refused to let herself understand, even as a deeper, purely feminine knowledge fanned the flames of it across her skin. His mouth moved into something like a smile, dangerous and edgy. It made her feel too warm, as if the fabric wrapped around her had shrunk two sizes as she stood there before him.
He held her gaze, looking like some kind of pagan god of war, so tough and hard and obviously dangerous. Capable, she thought wildly, of absolutely anything.
And then, sprawled there like that with attendants on either side, he lifted up his hand and beckoned for her to come to him. Peremptory. Commanding. With only his lazy fingers and that hard, intent look on his face.
Miranda felt it like a detonation, deep inside of her, setting off a chain of explosions throughout the rest of her body. She trembled. She wanted things she refused to name, things that made her soften and burn—things she wasn’t sure she understood, and told herself she didn’t want to. But she didn’t look away from that midnight gaze of his in the mirror. And despite a kind of deep, ravenous craving she’d never felt before, and found wholly terrifying, she didn’t move.
She couldn’t. She knew, with a deep certainty she’d never felt before, that if she did, if she followed the demands of this shocking, surprising yearning that ate her up inside, she would lose herself in ways she was afraid to imagine. In ways she couldn’t even foresee. Forever. And she knew better than to lose her head over a man. She knew better.
She had to fight to keep from jumping when he stood, abruptly, scattering his admirers as he rose. Her heart seemed to drop in her chest, then started to pound, hard and slow.
Fear, she told herself, and that was what it felt like, though she knew, somehow, it was more than that. Different. Panic.
“Leave us,” Ivan commanded in French to the people surrounding him, and Miranda didn’t miss the arched, knowing looks the couturiers and assistants shot at each other. Just as she didn’t miss the soft click of the door they closed behind them, leaving her all alone with him.
Alone and half-naked. Supposedly his mistress. She knew what they were imagining on the other side of the door. His hands, all over her. Pulling up the length of expensive fabric she wore, exploring beneath it. His mouth, hot and hard on hers. And elsewhere. She was imagining it, too.
Miranda couldn’t tear her eyes from his. She couldn’t bring herself to move, not even to turn around and face him. She wasn’t sure she breathed.
Ivan roamed toward her in that predatory way of his, loose and yet certain, as if he could as easily take down sets of attackers with one hand as cross the elegant, high-ceilinged room to the small dais where she stood. His battle-tested ferocity was stamped all over him, on that hard warrior’s face of his, on the tough and ruthless body he’d packed into dark trousers and another expensive-looking T-shirt that licked over his muscled torso, and even the tailored jacket that trumpeted his wealth at high volume, so well did it mold itself to his titanlike shoulders.
There was no mistaking who or what he was. Ivan Korovin. Desperately rich. Shockingly famous. And in complete and utter control of this situation, no matter how keenly Miranda might feel she was flying apart at the seams. Or even because of it.
Her limbs ached with the effort of keeping her upright, even her neck seemed too weak to support her head, and it was not until she saw the movement of her own chest in the mirror that she realized she was breathing shallow and fast.
Like prey.
“I don’t want—” she began, panicked beyond endurance, and he was so close—
“Quiet.”
Miranda didn’t know what was worse: that he believed he could speak to her like that, that he had the right, or that she heard that autocratic command and obeyed.
Instantly.
It was, she knew, representative of everything she hated about herself.
Ivan stepped up onto the raised platform and stood behind her, and it was too much. Too much. Her eyes eased closed, as if that might protect her, from him or from herself she wasn’t sure she could tell. There was too much noise in her head, too much chaos, and she was aware that she was trembling—that her heart was fluttering wildly against her ribs, and she knew, somehow, that there was no way he would miss that. He would know—but she couldn’t do anything to help herself. She felt caged. Trapped.
And somewhere deep inside, she was very much afraid that she didn’t hate that feeling as much as she knew she should. It was one more betrayal in a long line, and this game of theirs had hardly started.
How was she going to survive weeks of this? When she wasn’t sure she could survive another three seconds?
“Look at me,” he ordered her, his voice soft and yet no less authoritative, directly into her ear. She felt the tease of his breath, imagined she felt that clever mouth directly against her skin. Miranda shuddered, but opened her eyes, afraid of what she would see.
He loomed there behind her, not quite touching her. His dark head was bent to hers, and he was so big—so big—his wide shoulders and his height making her seem slight and small before him. He exuded power like a searchlight, blinding and unmistakable.
And he was breaking their agreement, and she couldn’t let that happen. For far more reasons than she was prepared to admit to herself.
“You promised,” she whispered, her voice only the faintest scratch of sound, hardly audible over her own heart beat. “You can’t do this kind of thing when we’re alone. You can’t shift.”
She could feel the heat he generated, and there was nothing but smoke and flames in his dark gaze as it slammed into hers in the mirror. Nothing but that consuming, impossible fire that echoed in her, simmering and treacherous, no matter how she ordered it to stop.
“There are security cameras in the corners,” he murmured, so that only she could hear, and then he touched her.
And Miranda told herself she was the kind of woman who kept her promises, no matter how difficult, so she let him.
Ivan traced a lazy path from her wrist to her upper arm with one hand, then back down again. He could feel the way she shook with the effort of not moving, not wrenching herself away from him, and it nearly made him smile. It nearly made him spin her around and take her mouth again, and this time, with no intention of stopping.
But this was supposed to be a seduction. It was too soon.
He traced the length of her elegant spine, and ordered the fire in him to subside. But she was wrapped in a glorious spill of fabric that made her skin look like cream, and he wanted a taste.
He wanted.
He bent his head closer, his lips so close to the line of her neck, so close that he could inhale her delicate scent. It worked through him, making him crazy. Making that razor’s edge of need sharper. Making him entertain the possibility that he, too, could be seduced.
And he could see it all in the mirror. He could see that dizzy, unfocused gleam in her dark eyes, see the way his lips hovered so close to her soft skin. So close. He could see the immensity of his battered champion’s body, the way he stood behind and all around her, the hulking brute to all her fragile, supple femininity.
The sight of it should not have made him that much hotter. But he had never been politically correct, had he? Especially not in bed.
He made himself go slowly, carefully, as if he was as in control of this, of himself, as he should have been. He held her wrist in one hand, the other moving from the small of her back to grip her hip as if he owned her. He held her the way he’d kissed her across the world in Georgetown, as if they’d been lovers a thousand times before. As if his smallest touch was a preview to a show they both knew by heart. As if he had spent hours already today thrusting hard and deep inside of her, shattering her into millions of pieces, the way he assured himself he would. And soon.
Very soon, Professor, he promised her silently.
In another life, where they were already lovers and there were none of these games, this scene would be very different. He would simply take. What he wanted. What he felt was his. Her. He would brace her against the mirrors, or have her kneel across his lap on that settee, and he wouldn’t care who might be watching them. And in that life, neither would she. She would welcome it—him—with none of her suspicious frowns or patrician pearl-clutching. She would meet his every touch, his every thrust. Ivan felt that work through him, as if it was real. As if it had happened—was happening. That hard fist of desire in his belly clenched ever tighter.
“Milaya moya,” he murmured, as he had before. But this time it came out like some kind of incantation. “What if I am shifting after all?”
She jerked against him, and he could see her pulse go wild at her throat. Her gaze was black, and he had no doubt at all that she would call what she felt then any number of names, but he knew what it was. He knew what her body was begging for, even if she denied it.
And it was harder than it should have been, far harder than he’d anticipated, to keep himself from claiming her right here and right now, and to hell with any security cameras.
This is an act, he reminded himself coldly. You are supposed to beacting.
He raised his head, slowly and deliberately, because he did not want to move at all. He did not want to let go of her. But this was meant to be a seduction wrapped inside a masquerade, and this was only the beginning. Why was that so hard to remember?
But he knew why. And he couldn’t let his suicidal fascination jeopardize all he and Nikolai had worked for. Not even if she was the first woman to get beneath his skin, to make him forget himself, in as long as he could remember. Something he had no intention of letting this haughty little aristocrat know. He could imagine all too well how she’d enjoy using it against him.
He let go of her wrist and plucked at the fabric draped all around her, still holding her gaze, his other hand hard and possessive on her hip, because, he assured himself, it was part of the act. And because he was only a man.
“This one is perfect, I think,” he said after a moment, when he was certain he would sound nothing but calm. Casual. He pretended he didn’t see the shock in her gaze, the fiery passion mixed with something like betrayal. He pretended he didn’t care that she thought he’d played her, because he shouldn’t. Because, in the end, he was. “I like the color.”
Horrible man.
“I’ve hired a team of stylists to attend to you,” Ivan said offhandedly when they returned to his plane, as if he was addressing the help. Horrible, awful man. “They can accomplish a great deal in an hour-long flight. Do not argue with anything they suggest, please. I picked them for a reason.”
“This is completely unnecessary,” Miranda said, in a scrupulously polite undertone that felt like glass against her tongue, so badly did she want to scream at him for that little performance in the dressing room. Scream, yell. Something.
But there were people around, and she’d agreed to this charade. They’d even signed a few documents on the plane ride to France, just to make sure everything was perfectly clear. And more than that, her demons were her business. He didn’t get to know them, which she feared he would if she let herself scream at him. He didn’t get to know her—no matter what darkness he’d churned up in her with his little act for the cameras, what nightmares that performance would inevitably wreak upon her. It didn’t matter anyway. She was going to play this role, get close to him for her own purposes and then do exactly as she liked with what she learned.
It will be worth it, she chanted to herself. It will.
“I don’t need stylists,” she told him now, impressed with how in control she sounded, when she still felt so raw inside. When she could still feel his hands on her body, like third-degree burns. “I don’t need anything except a very large glass of wine and some privacy.”
“I told you I have exacting standards,” he said, not even glancing up from his cell phone as they climbed from the car.
And then he did, and she wished he hadn’t, as that too-knowing gaze of his pinned her where she stood on the tarmac, hot and black and wildly consuming. She froze. She could hardly do anything else. His hand was warm and tough where he held her elbow so lightly, so gently, and she hated that she could feel it like an electric shock, sizzling through her. Just like in the dressing room, panic and reaction warred inside of her, and it took all she had to tamp it all back down.
“My game.” His gaze burned into her. Merciless and hot. “My rules.”
And she’d agreed, hadn’t she? No one had made her do this. No one had forced her into any of it. She’d chosen to get in his car in Georgetown. She’d walked into his hotel suite all on her own. She’d agreed to this plan, she’d signed her name.
She just didn’t understand why a single touch from him and she lit up inside, melting and clenching, as if he’d done much more than caress her so lightly in that dressing room. As if she’d wanted him to.
As if she was the kind of woman who wanted.
