“What does this say?”
“Mir,” he said gruffly. A guarded look in his eyes. “It’s the Russian word for peace.”
Her eyes filled up, her own heart ached for him, and he took her hand away from the tattoo. She remembered the balcony in Cap Ferrat, when he’d spoken of a better way to fight.
“Do not make mountains from molehills,” he ordered her.
“Relax,” she’d replied, hurt when she shouldn’t have been. Just because she’d shifted into this other, more emotional place, it didn’t mean he had. It didn’t mean he would. She knew she had to come to terms with that. “This is just sex.”
He’d pinned her with one of those brooding looks of his then, his eyes so dark it was like nighttime, and something clutched inside of her. He was a fighter with peace etched over his heart. He was more alone than anyone she’d ever known—maybe even more than she was, and something in her howled for him.
“As long as it is not insipid sex,” he’d said after a long moment. And then he’d pulled her head to his and made her forget again. For a while.
Ivan found himself talking. A lot.
* * *
They sat out on a terrace overlooking the sea, the sun falling over them like a caress, and he told her about long, Russian winters that felt as if they’d never end, that stayed in a man’s bones even all these years later.
“I like hot places,” he said, even smiling. “The hotter and drier the better.”
She laughed. “I don’t blame you.”
They lay in his bed, still panting from another round of the kind of sex that he thought might alter him permanently, and he told her about fighting.
His first championship title fight. What it was like to come to the United States for the first time. How quickly he’d realized that not being fluent in English was as dangerous as not being prepared for a match—that it left him open to attack.
“You make it sound as if you were surrounded by attackers,” she said, her fingers moving lazily through his hair.
“I was,” he said. “I am. And only sometimes in the ring.”
They walked along the edge of his bluff that overlooked the sea and he told her about his little-boy memories of the Soviet union , and his far sharper and more dangerous memories of what had happened after it fell, when he was only ten and forced to grow up. Fast. How he’d lost his parents and gained his uncle. How he’d had nothing to do with all of his fear and pain and anger but fight. For his life. For Nikolai’s.
“That must have been terrifying,” she said, frowning out at the ocean as if she was glaring at his past. “Not just losing your parents, but your whole way of life. Your whole world in one year.”
“It made me who I am today,” he replied, his voice harder than necessary, almost as if she’d forced him to discuss this when he knew full well she hadn’t. He could not seem to keep himself from her. She had asked for the unwatered-down version, and he wanted to give it to her—a wholly new and unfamiliar urge. “For good or ill.”
He heard the little sigh she gave then, despite the breeze that lifted the ends of her dark red hair and made it seem to glow in the sunlight.
“Do you think we’ll spend the rest of our lives cleaning up the mess?” she asked softly. “When it wasn’t even our mess?”
He knew what she meant. “I think the past informs everything we do. Ghosts are with us, whether we acknowledge them or not.”
She glanced back over her shoulder at the house, then looked at him, her dark jade gaze troubled.
“Like your brother.”
He felt that jolt in him, and questioned again why he was doing this. Why he was sharing anything at all with her, much less these particular things. Much less himself, when he’d never told any of this to women he’d been genuinely dating from the start. There was so little time left. He had accomplished what he’d set out to do. He’d seduced her. Their fake relationship was established. All that was left was the very public, hopefully televised dumping, which would render her mute. At last.
He should have been oozing triumph from every pore. He certainly shouldn’t have been sharing his private business. His private pain.