“I’ve already told my agent it isn’t happening,” she snapped.
He reached over then to brush her tears from her pretty face.
“You are in love with me,” he gritted out. “You don’t want to do this. You don’t want to go.”
Her face crumpled then, and it tore at him. She raised a hand to her mouth as if that might hold her together, but still, a sob rolled out anyway and made him feel small. Mean.
“What happens if I stay, Ivan?” she asked, her voice thick. “If it hurts this much now, how much worse will it be two weeks from now? A month? I can’t do it. I can’t willingly subject myself—”
“You love me.”
She’d said it half-asleep. She’d screamed it in the height of passion. And so it lived in Ivan like tension, and he frowned at her as if he could bend her to his will that easily. As if he could make her say it now, when it counted.
Miranda let out a sound somewhere between a sob and a sigh. Her shoulders dropped, and her head canted forward slightly, as if she’d let go of something very heavy, all at once.
“I do,” she whispered. “I do love you.”
And that was the last of his foundations turned into dust, just like that. Setting him free.
He swept her into his arms and held her high against him, drowning in that look on her face, as if he was the man he’d always wanted to be. As if she saw him when no one else could.
“I am a rough man,” he told her fiercely. “I made myself from fists and sheer will, and that is all I know. There were no ivory towers for me. No easy escapes. I’ve had to fight for every single thing I have, and most of what I lost.”
She reached up her hand and held his face with it, her touch somehow healing, even as another tear tracked its way down her cheek.
“I’ll fight for you,” she whispered.
He lost himself then in the sweet, slick heat of her mouth. In the perfection of her arms around him, her body against his, the fact that she knew him better than anyone else in the world, and she loved him anyway.
When he pulled back to breathe, they had found their way to the bed, and she wrapped herself around him as if she would never let him go.
“I want more than two weeks,” he told her in a rush, things opening wide inside of him, like she was the light and all of his shadows were surrendering to her, one by one. “I want forever. Live with me. Marry me. I don’t care. I want everything.”
She smiled at him, that beautiful smile that changed him from the inside out, and he understood. Finally, he understood.
“I love you,” he said, and the words sounded stilted. Strange. As well they should. He’d never said them before. In any language.
Or maybe it was that his life, his love, his heart—everything he was or wanted to be—hung there in those three small syllables and the woman who gazed up at him, her face scrubbed clean and her dark red hair a fierce tangle.
Her smile deepened, changed. Made new worlds, and took him with her.
“I know you do,” she said softly, and then she kissed him.
Binding them together, like a tightly held fist, unbreakable and sure.
Forever.
* * *
Eighteen months later, Miranda stood in her one-bedroom apartment in New York City, wrinkling her nose as she looked around at the bare white walls. The empty floors. She stood in the center of what had been her bedroom so long ago, when she’d been a completely different person. When she’d hardly known herself. When she’d fought her nightmares nightly and alone, instead of very rarely and with Ivan. She gazed down at the simple, elegant solitaire that he’d slid onto her finger only a week ago now, when she’d finally agreed to marry him after a very long campaign.
Mostly conducted in bed, his preferred negotiation strategy.
Miranda smiled. It was time to trust. It was time to let go of fear. It was time to officially move into the sprawling penthouse on Central Park West he’d bought to be near her during the Columbia school year. It was past time.
There was no noise behind her, no sound at all, but she knew he was there. She always did. She turned slowly, and let the punch of his sheer physical presence move through her, as ever. He was big and dark, wearing a great black coat over jeans and a jacket, looking every inch the wealthy, famous man he was. Beautiful and lethal.