He simply picked her up and settled her over his lap. He moved her skirts out of the way, and pulled her panties to the side as he worked his own fly. And then, his hands deliciously hard on her hips, he thrust deep into her, made them both sigh with that sheer, dizzying pleasure that was only theirs.
Only him, she thought. Only Ivan.
He gazed up at her then, and showed her that smile that she understood then that she would do anything to see. Anything at all. Especially this.
“You’ll have to do all the work.” It was a dare. A challenge.
And she met it.
The car slid through the streets of Hollywood. Miranda could see lights, other cars, city life clogging the roads and surging up and down the sidewalks—and all the while, Ivan was so hard beneath her and inside of her. So deliciously hard. She reached up and braced on hand against the roof of the car, and the other on his shoulder. And then she began to move.
It was so good. It felt like glory and wild, slick heat, perfect and impossible all at once.
She moved faster, making him groan. He let his head fall back against the seat and she watched him as she rocked against him, into him, circling her hips instinctively, finding the best fit, the hottest angle. He was so fierce, so intensely masculine, so ruthlessly physical, even with his eyes closed. Even as he let her take some kind of control. It made her feel wild with a new kind of power, incandescent with it. With him. Like she was made to do this. Like it made her new, and strong. That she could reduce this tough, hard man to nothing more than need.
That she could make him come.
And then fling herself over the edge behind him, knowing he would be there on the other side of all of this wildness to catch her, every time.
* * *
She had originally intended to go back to New York after the premiere, to wait out her time between Ivan’s events in the comfort and privacy of her own home. But after the premiere, sometime so far into the night that it was already the next morning, she woke to find him holding her close, his face buried against her neck.
“What’s the matter?” she asked, her hands going to his face, his back.
But he didn’t answer.
He entered her slowly. As if it was sacred. He moved like liquid; gentle, inexorable. He loved her with his mouth, his hands, making her writhe beneath him in that same quiet, shattering way. As if he was imprinting himself on her—making her his as surely as if he’d branded her. Because she understood that there was no way she would ever survive this—him—intact. No way she could even attempt it.
And when he lifted his face to hers, she could see that he wanted that.
As if this was his way of saying the things that couldn’t be said.
This beautiful, impossible wave of sensation, pulling them both up and then crashing them down, until they collapsed against each other, tangled and breathless, wrapped up in his bed like they were a knot that could never be untied.
And so she didn’t leave for New York the next day, as she’d planned. She just...stayed. And promised herself she’d love him as long as he’d let her.
* * *
One afternoon she sat on one of the terraces and watched as Ivan and his brother trained in their deadly sport on that bluff high above the sea. She’d wrapped herself in one of Ivan’s button-down shirts, letting herself indulge in the sensation of being held by him when he wasn’t near her. She’d woken from the usual daze he’d left her in to find him gone from his bed, and had followed the odd sounds on the breeze to this terrace.
She knew she should be disgusted. Appalled. But she wasn’t.
It didn’t look like jocks gone wrong. It didn’t look like cavemen. It looked like some kind of beautiful, lethal dance. Art on the edge of a blade. They circled each other, came together, flipped and kicked and rolled. They were like two titans, all muscle and grace, and she was most struck by the identical expressions on their hard, Korovin faces.
That fierce concentration. That deadly intent.
And the joy.
Pure and unadulterated.
Miranda found herself swallowing, hard, against a lump in her throat. She had to look away. She didn’t have to be told that these were men for whom joy was an intellectual exercise, not a fact. Not something they’d experienced much of—but they experienced it here. In the display of their magnificent skill. In this dance that only a very few people in the world could do as well as they did.