No More Sweet Surrender

“I hope you approve,” she said, and her voice was too soft. Too uncertain.

Too much like a lover’s.

“Stand up straight,” he told her, though his voice was more husky than stern, and then he reached over to physically inch her shoulders down from where she’d tensed them up behind her ears. She hardly even reacted to his hands on her bare shoulders now, and she congratulated herself. It was like a tiny spark, not a full-on wall of fire. Progress. “This is not something you toss on to go to the supermarket. This is couture. Treat the dress with respect, and it will return the favor.”

She opened her mouth to say something, anything that didn’t involve personal revolutions or Parisian mistresses, anything at all—but his dark eyes finally met hers with the force of a midnight collision, and she found she couldn’t say a word.

“Come,” he said after a moment, as if he’d taken a moment to soak her in, too. As if the intensity all around them that they were both so studiously ignoring was as loud and heavy in him as in her. “The car is waiting.”

He held out his arm and she took it, and everything felt raw, then. Too much. Too formal. Too real. Miranda didn’t understand how that was possible, when this was their most over-the-top moment yet. They were on their way to walk a red carpet. To parade down an aisle so that fans could cheer and reporters could take pictures and ask preapproved questions. So that pictures of them looking glamorous and together would be plastered across the globe, subject to any number of tabloid fantasies. What was less real than that?

And yet.

Something in her chest clutched tight. It was the fancy clothes, maybe. The dress and the jewelry they’d given her to wear with it, that she knew he’d chosen for her as well. Her hair was swept up into a sleek chignon to show off the dangling diamond earrings and the necklace was a masterpiece of intricate stones and stunning metals, making her seem to sparkle with elegance and style. Something about the idea of him picking them out for her to wear with this dress, to make her into this impossibly sophisticated version of herself, made her heart seem to stutter in her chest.

And more than all the rest of it, Ivan walked beside her, like every girl’s dream of the perfect fantasy prince.

Like her dream, anyway, she could finally admit to herself—a dream she’d packed away a long, long time ago and had been afraid to pull out into the light ever since. First because it had had no place in her father’s vicious, terrible home. And then, later, because it had seemed so silly and embarrassing a dream next to all of her important, serious studies. All of the intellectual things she’d wanted to do. Her theories, her books. Her dreams of a tenured professorship. She’d thought she’d had to choose. She’d chosen.

Yet if she squinted, she couldn’t help but think as they swept from the villa toward the waiting limousine, this would look a great deal like the very fairy tales she’d taught herself not to believe in any longer. She was dressed like a princess, a beautiful gown and gorgeous jewels to match. The whole world already thought Ivan was some kind of prince. Was that what she’d see when she saw the pictures of this tomorrow? Was this the love story Craig the publicist was selling? Would she look carried away into some Disney movie, as if at any moment she might break into song?

Somehow, she shoved everything down deep inside of her, before she broke out into either tears or songs, or worse—both. Her job tonight, she reminded herself sternly, was to smile and gaze adoringly at Ivan. To pretend she was madly and totally in love with him. No more and no less than that.

Fairy tales weren’t real. Neither was the way she had to behave tonight.

And both were only temporary, in any case. They’d agreed.

She told herself that didn’t hurt at all.

CHAPTER EIGHT

“ARE you ready?” Ivan asked when it was finally time. When the long queue of cars they waited in to take their turn at the red carpet finally delivered them to the arrival point.

Miranda had the sudden, intense urge to say that no, she wasn’t. To call the whole exercise off. As if it hadn’t already gone too far. As if there was any hope of saving herself.