No More Sweet Surrender

This is the good kind of ruin, Ivan had told her. He’d meant sex. Allowing herself to fall apart in his arms without fearing the consequences. But she knew that it went much further than that—that it was, at the end of the day, a kind of warning it was much too late to heed.

She knew, with a certainty that she’d never felt before, about anything, that this time with him had changed everything. Had altered her, profoundly and fundamentally. She would never be the same, and there was a part of her that welcomed that.

She was in love with him.

And she was going to have to find a way to survive that, because the Korovin Foundation Benefit was coming closer by the day, and there was no reason to suppose this would ever go further than that. Nor that it should, no matter how she felt. No matter what she hoped, deep inside.

After all, they’d agreed.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

EVERYTHING was perfect.

Nikolai gave his first speech as president of the Korovin Foundation, making it clear that he was fully capable of ushering the charity into its bright new future, his ruthless coldness seeming more like pure, corporate focus when he spoke. Ivan gave his own speech afterward, using a highly sterilized account of his childhood to explain why he wanted to take the gifts he’d been given from the ring and from the screen and find a way to help children in need. So they didn’t have to choose between their self-respect and their survival. So they could choose to fight because they wanted to fight, not because they had no other way. So they could avoid selling themselves, whether to fight promoters or militaries or the far more unsavory “saviors” they might encounter in their times of need.

So they could choose.

All the while Miranda stood next to him, glowing like the trophy he’d once told her she wasn’t, gleaming and unutterably beautiful. Her hair was coiled back into a complicated twist of braids and pins that looked somehow effortlessly chic. Her eyes were mysterious. And she wore very high, very delicate silver shoes that made her look tall, invincible and deeply, deeply sexy. Every inch the Greenwich, Connecticut, heiress she would have been, had her life taken a different path. Had her father been something other than a monster.

Her final dress from the Parisian couture house was one of their signature creations, understated yet proud. Ivan had loved the sketches—had, in fact, spent longer than necessary imagining her in the dress—but the reality was far better than his fantasies. The dress managed to be bold and elegant at once, a deceptively simple-looking near-silver concoction that fit so beautifully it made her look edible. A smart, sexy package he couldn’t seem to get enough of.

And it was different, somehow, that she knew the truth about him. All of his truths. The stark terror he’d lived through, the guilt he couldn’t help but feel for escaping so much sooner than Nikolai had. She knew everything, and still she looked at him in that way of hers, as if he was something miraculous, after all: a good man.

And because of that, it felt like less of a performance. Less of an act. It felt real.

Just as she did. Her hand in his, their fingers laced together.

He didn’t know how he would let her go. He couldn’t imagine it—but then, how could this go on? How many of his internal foundations would she shatter before she was done?

He realized, looking at her there on the small dais the event managers had erected in the corner of the ballroom he usually used as his dojo, that she was the only fight he didn’t think he could win.

That he didn’t want to win. He just wanted her.

He didn’t have the slightest idea what to do about that. Not when he still owed his brother so much. Not when he’d promised.

“That was wonderful,” she told him when all the speeches were done, the formal pictures taken, and there was only the mingling left to do. She smiled at him, and he knew that was real. He knew her now. He could feel her inside of him, like a small, perfect light. Like hope. “I think you made the whole house cry.”

“So long as they dry their tears with their checkbooks,” he murmured, “we should be fine.”

Her smile deepened when he pulled their joined hands to his lips and placed a kiss there.

“I’m sure they will,” she said. “Especially if they get a chance to talk to you about it.” A curious sort of expression moved over her face, then disappeared behind a new smile he liked a good deal less than the one before. He wanted to know what she was hiding behind it.