No More Sweet Surrender

“Of course,” she lied.

His black eyes gleamed with something that looked a great deal like compassion, but couldn’t be. Her throat went dry.

“My first red carpet appearance made me much more nervous than my first title fight,” he said then. A quiet confession. Another voluntary bit of himself, and she held on to it with a grip that should have scared her. It did. “I knew how to hit, not pose. But you won’t be alone.”

Miranda swallowed. “No,” she agreed. “I won’t.”

Her reward was a smile—and not, she registered, stunned, that public one she’d grown so used to seeing over the past days.

This one was private. It was his. It was slightly crooked and not at all practiced. It was real. She knew it was real. She felt it kick hard inside of her, then send out echoes.

It made her want to look at nothing else, for hours. Days. Longer.

But then the car door was opening and Miranda had no choice but to be swept out along with him, into the baying crowd.

A roar went up when they saw Ivan. It was a wall of people—reporters and fans, the steady stream of celebrities and all of their handlers, everyone channeled down the red carpet gauntlet. Ivan’s publicist took charge of them immediately. He directed Ivan to this reporter, then that one. He ended interviews that went too long or veered into areas he didn’t like. He told them where to look, when to wave, when to amp up the smiles.

And they did exactly what they were told.

It was one more thing, Miranda thought when Ivan led her up the famous red-carpeted stairs, that looked effortlessly glamorous on television and, as she’d discovered herself while filming news segments, was a significantly harder task than it seemed.

“You survived,” Ivan said, gazing down at her. He’d pulled her to one side, out of the pack.

“I’m not at all sure about that.” Something about the oddness of the whole evening had her smiling up at him. Spontaneous. Unguarded. As real as his smile had been earlier.

He looked startled. Something moved through his dark gaze then that she would have called regret, if that had made any sense at all.

“Milaya,” he murmured, so soft it was almost a whisper. So soft it sounded almost like an apology, but that was impossible.

And then he slid his hand around the back of her neck, pulled her just that crucial bit closer to him with that bone-melting certainty and smooth male grace that was only his, and fit his mouth to hers.

Miranda felt as if she’d fainted. Or simply burst apart into a shower of tiny pieces.

There was nothing but Ivan.

No noise, no screams. No people. No red carpet, no Cannes.

Just that mouth of his against hers once again.

Finally.

She forgot to panic. She forgot everything. She tasted him, wanted him, lost herself completely in the drugging kick and clamor of him, and then, after ages and eras, or perhaps only minutes, he pulled away. But only a little. Only enough for her to come back to herself. His big, tough hands rested at the base of her neck, his thumbs still stroking the line of her jaw, as if he might simply move her mouth back to where he wanted it in a moment, and lose them both to that wild, magical heat all over again.

Her heart thudded hard. And then again.

Miranda understood then, with a kind of painful resignation, that the things she felt about this man were deeper and far more complicated than she wanted to admit. But that didn’t change the fact of them.

And it was only then, when she processed the way he looked at her, something calculating and shrewd in that black gaze, mixed in with the fire she recognized all too well, did she understand that he’d staged it.

Of course he had.

Shame and humiliation fought for supremacy then, and both left scarring marks deep inside. She couldn’t believe how pathetic she was. How gullible. Dreams of Disney movies and a Cinderella dress didn’t change the truth of her situation. It only made her unacceptably, embarrassingly foolish.

And that didn’t change the way she felt about him either, which only shamed her all the more.

“Why here?” she asked, and she couldn’t do anything about her voice, choked and constricted, giving her away. Much less whatever look she had on her face then, that made him look back at her as if he hurt, too, but she couldn’t let herself think about that. It might take her out at the knees. “Why not out in the thick of the things for maximum coverage?”