No More Sweet Surrender

“Is this how you keep your promises, Ivan?” she asked, fighting to keep her expression smooth, her posture easy against the hard chair. As if she hadn’t felt every last one of those bullets. As if she didn’t feel riddled with them. “I’m bending over backward to do the things you want me to do, and you can’t even answer a simple question?”

“Yes, of course,” he said, and there was that hard edge to his voice then. “This is a great and terrible sacrifice for you. I keep forgetting.”

She hated the way he said that, as if she’d insulted him. And hated even more that she cared whether or not that was true. When had that happened? What could it mean? She was afraid she wouldn’t much like the answers to either of those questions, and so she shoved them aside.

But she couldn’t pretend he hadn’t pushed her off balance again, without even seeming to try. Dizzy, confused—she was sick of feeling this way. She wanted to believe it was just the jet lag. The relentlessness of her recurring nightmares that she knew were because of him. She told herself it was.

“Of course it’s a sacrifice,” she choked out heedlessly. Foolishly. He only looked at her in that dark, cold way, and she felt it inside of her like a blow. And hated that, too. “I don’t like to be touched.”

Miranda could not believe she’d said that. Not out loud. If she could have snatched the words back from the air between them, she would have.

Ivan stared at her as if she was an insect.

“By the likes of me,” Ivan said, his voice a kind of harsh, terrible growl, and that hurt even more. “Rough and uneducated brute that I am. I understand. It is a tremendous sacrifice indeed. You might as well fling yourself on the nearest bonfire for relief, such is the extent of your suffering at my hands.”

“I don’t mean that,” she blurted, flustered, something about that awful look on his face twisting through her, making her ache in new and strange ways, making her doubt herself and hate herself all the more, and she wasn’t even sure why. Or why she couldn’t seem to stand the thought of this man in pain. “I mean—at all. In general. Not just by you.”

* * *

She could not possibly be saying what Ivan thought she was saying.

It was impossible. He knew it was impossible—he’d been the one touching her in Paris, for God’s sake. He’d kissed her in Georgetown. He’d watched her fight it, yes, but then lean into it, soak it up. He’d drunk in all her exquisite responses, the shivers she couldn’t hide and the tremors she fought to repress, the glaze in her eyes, the softening of her body when she’d stood tucked up beneath his arm. And he forgot, then, that all of that had been supposedly calculated on his part. He just knew it was real on hers.

“Exactly what are you saying?” he asked, searching her face for clues.

He saw only that delicious heat, climbing up her cheeks, and the sheen of acute embarrassment in her dark jade gaze, making them seem blacker, deeper. She swallowed, and then pressed her lips together, firmly, as if fighting to calm herself.

“What I just said.” She shrugged, a defensiveness to the movement that he imagined she had no idea betrayed her as much as it did. Why he found it fascinating was something else entirely. “I believe in mind over body. That’s what matters to me. My mind. Everything I’ve done to get to where I am is because of it.” She looked at him as if she expected an argument, and when he only regarded her in silence she sat up straighter, taller. Gathering herself. “I graduated from high school at sixteen. I entered my Ph.D. program before I was twenty. I was always focused on work. Touching is...” The flush on her cheeks deepened. Her eyes looked almost glazed. Panicked, Ivan thought. “Has always been completely incidental to my life in every way.”

“So you are frigid.”

He knew, categorically, she was no such thing. But did she know it? Was it possible she didn’t? Or was this some kind of twisted mind game women like her played with men like him?

“Of course not.” Her eyes cleared slightly, then narrowed as she looked at him. As if she was offended by the question.