She was a weakness.
He saw her gorgeous smile, so unaffected and true, making the whole of Cannes disappear in a single flash far brighter than any of the cameras. He heard the sound of her cultured American voice, the fascinating way she put words together, the sweet sting of them. He felt her in his arms, that slight, delicious little tremor that shook through her when he touched her, her fingers laced tight with his as if keeping the kinds of promises she was afraid to acknowledge. He tasted her mouth, addictive and wild. He had a promise to keep to her, and he had every intention of doing exactly that. Again and again. And not only because it was part of his damned plan.
Ten days already felt like years, and not a one of them had passed.
I’m not done with you yet, Professor, he thought, as if she could hear him. As if it would change anything if she could.
“There’s something you need to see,” Nikolai said.
“I feel certain I won’t like it,” Ivan replied, turning to see his brother standing behind him like the ghost he’d become, almost blended into the shadows, almost as dark as they were.
“You won’t.”
Ivan followed Nikolai through the sprawling cliffside house to his media center, where a huge television screen dominated the whole of one wall. Nikolai pressed a few buttons on a remote control and the screen filled with Miranda, as if Ivan had conjured her into being with his thoughts alone. His terrible longing for one more thing he couldn’t have.
She looked sleek and calm, standing in front of her apartment building as if she routinely held press conferences there. As if she was happy to do so, in fact. She did not appear broken or wounded in the least. She was smiling prettily at the cameras as if she’d never been more comfortable in her life.
“This is alarming,” Ivan noted drily.
“Just wait.”
They were throwing questions at her, some speculative, some surprisingly knowledgeable, some insane. Some simply rude.
“Don’t you hate Ivan Korovin?” someone yelled at her, the braying male voice rising above the rest of the din. “Didn’t you once vow that your goal in life was to take him down?”
Miranda’s smile deepened. Became a mystery.
“There are so many ways to take a man down,” she said, that particular smile a weapon Ivan hadn’t known she carried. But he felt it all the same, like a knife to the jugular. “Aren’t there?”
They loved that. They howled at her, and Ivan hardly heard what they asked. He only saw the way she looked into the cameras and knew, without a single shred of doubt, that she was looking straight at him. He could see the challenge in her dark jade gaze, through the cameras, across the vastness of this wide country. He recognized an opponent when one stepped into his ring, then stepped to him.
Her smile hinted at wickedness, played with something naughty, yet never quite crossed over that line. It was vaguely familiar, he thought. It was very nearly masterful.
It was, he realized in sudden astonishment, his.
She’d obviously learned it from him in France, and he found himself torn between a reluctant admiration and a cold, encompassing fury that she would use it against him like this. No matter that he planned to do far worse to her.
“The barbarian was at the gate,” she said then, so very smoothly, undermining him that easily.
With that single word—barbarian—she reminded the world that she’d always thought he was a Neanderthal, and let them know that she, at least, still believed he was one. As if the whole world was in on the same joke with her. Ivan felt his teeth clench hard, and forced himself to breathe.
She shrugged, looking straight in the camera, her gaze clear. “So I let him in.”
He had certain promises to keep to her, Ivan thought then, that fury pumping through him and then, as it always did, turning him fiercely calculating and endlessly, diabolically patient, just as he’d always been right before he’d won another fight.
Just as he’d been before he’d crushed whatever opponent dared challenge him into an apologetic pulp.
He’d keep his promise. He’d make her scream out his name like he was her god. Like the barbarian she believed he was already. He would take great pleasure in making her pay.