No More Sweet Surrender

“Do you really think they’ll hound me?” she’d asked then, her voice too quiet. Too unsure. He’d hated it. He’d wanted her spark back, her fire. He’d wanted her to feel this wildness, this madness, that lived in him now. He’d wanted her any way he could have her, no matter what it did to either one of them.

“The paparazzi?” Ivan had asked her then. He’d reached over and played with ends of her dark red hair, unable to keep himself from touching her, letting the silken strands slide through his fingers, letting the ways he wanted her burn through him, blaze hot, make him hard and edgy and wild with need. He hadn’t wanted to leave her in New York. He hadn’t wanted to leave her at all. “Yes. It will be a feeding frenzy, I imagine. Don’t leave your apartment unprepared.”

They’d discussed it on the flight back from France, when she’d sat with a throw wrapped tight around her and had avoided looking at him directly. As if she’d feared corrosion, or something far worse. They’d gone over what she should expect, what she should do. What he wanted her to do. What she should and shouldn’t say.

But he couldn’t stand the way she’d looked at him then, standing there on the tarmac, as if this was all some kind of betrayal. As if he’d done this to her. As if she hadn’t agreed to it herself.

“You could have said no, Miranda,” he’d reminded her, his voice harsher than necessary. But he hadn’t been able to stop himself. He’d seen the way she’d tensed. As if it had hurt. As if he’d hurt her. And he’d loathed himself anew.

“Could I?” she’d asked, that razor-sharp edge back in her voice then, and he’d found he preferred it, even as it cut deep. “After you pointed out it would make me a hypocrite either way? I think we both know you were well aware I would do exactly what you wanted me to do, even then.”

“When was this?” he’d asked in much the same way, while the heat between them roared. “I apologize, Professor. I must have missed your momentary lapse into obedience.”

Her smile then had been venomous, but he’d told himself that was better than the hurt. That terrible pain he couldn’t have fixed even if he’d wanted to—even if he hadn’t felt the lash of it himself.

“Goodbye, Ivan,” she’d said then, and climbed into the car. “May the next ten days feel like very long years.”

Ivan bit back a smile now, remembering that bite in her voice.

“I don’t think she is as easily subdued as you’d like to think,” he told Nikolai, and didn’t try as hard as he should have to keep that reluctant admiration out of his voice.

His brother’s brows lowered, as his frigid gaze moved over Ivan’s face, seeing far too much. “Then you have work to do,” he replied. “The benefit gala—”

“I know the plan,” Ivan snapped. “It was my idea, if you recall.”

“I recall it perfectly,” Nikolai said, as if he was worried. For Ivan. “Do you?”

His gaze met Ivan’s, bold and challenging. If he had been another man, Ivan would have taken that look as an invitation to a brawl. And the way he felt right now, he would have obliged, years of guilt or no. Instead, he looked away, back out the windows, furious with no outlet.

“That’s what I thought,” Nikolai said.

And Ivan had no response for him. No argument. There was only the empty sky, stretching out in all directions, and he didn’t know his own mind.

He didn’t know what he wanted.

Or, worse, he did.

* * *

Later, Ivan stood out on one of the many terraces outside the house he’d bought in Malibu not long after he’d signed on to play Jonas Dark. It was perched on a bluff overlooking the great expanse of the Pacific Ocean, almost entirely made up of glass walls, some of which simply slid aside to let the natural beauty in. The complacent California sun was sinking toward the gleaming, golden-tipped water through layers of stunning reds and deep oranges, Miranda was across a continent from him, and he felt emptier than he had in years.

He didn’t want this. He’d never wanted this. It was weakness.