No More Sweet Surrender

“I think we should date,” he said.

CHAPTER THREE

“DATE?”

She repeated the word in obvious horror, and then again, as if the idea of dating him was profoundly, soul-rendingly disgusting to her.

Ivan imagined that to someone like Miranda Sweet, who he had made it his business to know had been raised in a leafy green American Dream suburb redolent with affluence, it was. She was all Ivy League ivory towers, impressive vocabulary words, intellectual pursuits—the kind of plump, thoughtful life that one could achieve only if one had never wanted for anything. While he had fought his way out of Nizhny Novgorod after the collapse of the Soviet union       with his bare hands and nothing else, save his determination to do anything—absolutely anything—to survive and escape.

Of course she found him disgusting. It was almost amusing, really.

Almost.

That intriguing mouth of hers opened and then closed, and he found himself remembering the heat of it, the intoxicating kick he couldn’t seem to shake from his head. Or from the rest of him. Given how unimpressed she was with him, famously so, he should not find her so attractive. He hated that he did—hated even more that Nikolai had noted it. He suspected it spoke to the kind of deep, unmendable flaws that he’d thought he’d fought his way away from, literally, years before.

But then again, when had he ever wanted anything safe? Safety would have been staying in Nizhny Novgorod with his brutal uncle, eking out a living as best he could when the Soviet union       fell all around them. Safety would have been doing something other than fighting. Anything else. No one fought the way he had unless they’d had to; he knew that. He’d lived it. And he had never been anything like safe in all of his life. He wouldn’t know how to want such a thing.

But he knew what he was good at: winning. And this particular fight would take logic first, then seduction. The very underhandedness she’d accused him of—because why not live down to her expectations? Why not present her with the very Ivan Korovin she’d been conjuring up on her own all this time? It was only that fascination of his that might trip him up.

“I should have realized,” she said eventually, her voice cool, though her eyes were much darker than before, hinting at some deeper emotion Ivan could only guess at, and damn her, but he wanted to guess more than he should, “that you’re completely insane.”

“Not at all,” he said. He made no further attempt to conceal his temper, and saw her eyes widen slightly at his tone. “What I am is a businessman. And whatever your opinion of my business, I happen to be extremely good at it. You can’t pay for the kind of exposure and reach that today’s kiss brought us. My people think, and I agree, that we’d be foolish not to capitalize on it.”

But Miranda was shaking her head.

“I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about,” she said in that upper-crust voice of hers that intrigued him as much as it slapped at him.

Ivan felt something twist inside of him. He knew what women like her wanted, and it wasn’t a rough, unpedigreed Russian with big fists, no matter how famous he might have become. It was always the same. They wanted the smooth, polished movie star who only pretended to be a tough guy. They wanted the magazine spreads and the glossy premieres. They never wanted any of the darkness beneath, the things he’d done or the places he’d been—and, in fact, usually bolted at the first sight of it.

“If you would condescend to sit down, Professor,” he said, unable to keep the edge from his voice, “I would be happy to explain it to you.”

As expected, she looked at him as if she thought he was some kind of wild dog, howling into the night. She settled herself primly on the edge of the nearest sofa, her back straight, her dark red hair in a long, silken tail down her back. Everything about her deliberate, careful posture, he realized as he threw himself on the sofa opposite her, irritated him. Made him feel too big, too wild, too dangerous. Too dirty, too beneath her. Too much.

Oh, yes, he thought. She’d pay.

“Are you trying to provoke me?” His voice was hard, cracking across the lavish table that slouched between them, glass and gold and a riot of fresh flowers in the center. “Is that why you’re acting as if you’ve been thrown into a lion’s den?”