“By telling him I’m yours?” The icy emphasis she put on the last word poked at him, made him want to heat her up—and he knew how, now, didn’t he? He knew exactly how to kiss her, how to taste her, how to angle his mouth over hers for a wilder, better fit. “How medieval. Your what, may I ask?”
“I believe he thinks you are my lover,” Ivan said silkily, testing out the word on his tongue even as he tested the idea in his head, and despite the fact he knew it was as insane as it was impossible. Self-sabotage at its finest. This woman was poison. But he couldn’t seem to stop goading her, even so. “Not my goat.”
“I didn’t ask you to charge in on your white horse and save me,” she said, her fascinating gaze a shade or two darker, which Ivan took to be the remnants of that same fire he couldn’t seem to put out of his head. Her cultured American voice remained smooth.
She sounded like those dark gray pearls she wore in an elegant loop around her neck, smooth and supple and expensive, impossibly aristocratic. She was well out of the reach of a desperately poor kid who’d grown up hard in Nizhny Novgorod when it was still known as Gorky, the Russian word for bitter—which was precisely how he recalled those dark, cold years. Maybe that was why she got beneath his skin; it had been a long time now since anyone had dismissed him the way this woman did. He didn’t like it.
Or, he reminded himself pointedly, her.
“I didn’t need your help,” she continued, all offended dignity, as if he hadn’t seen that look in her eyes in the moment before he’d involved himself. As if he hadn’t seen that painfully familiar flash of something too much like helpless misery wash over her expressive face.
But she wasn’t his responsibility, he told himself now. She had made herself his enemy, and he should remember that above all things.
“Perhaps not.” He shrugged as if it was no matter to him, which, in fact, it shouldn’t have been. “But I know Guberev. He is an ugly little man, and he would have done far worse if I had not stepped in.” His brows rose in challenge. “How are your arms where he grabbed you, Professor? Do they hurt?”
She looked confused for a moment, as if she hadn’t yet taken the time to catalogue her own pains. She slid her hands up over her arms, hugging herself gently, and the idea of Guberev’s marks on her skin, Ivan discovered as she winced slightly, bothered him. A lot.
“I’m fine,” she said. She dropped her hands back to her sides, shifted her weight from one foot to the other, and Ivan had spent too much of his life reading body language not to understand that she was far less composed than she appeared. He shouldn’t have taken any kind of satisfaction in that, either. “And while I appreciate your urge to help, if that’s what it was, you’ll understand that I can’t condone the method you used.”
“It was extreme, perhaps,” he allowed. It was certainly that. Why had he kissed her? Like so many bullies, Guberev was at heart a coward, as Ivan well knew, having been forced to contend with the slimy little man in the mixed martial arts world for years. What Guberev might want to do to a weaker creature like this woman, given the chance, he would not dare to do in the presence of someone stronger. That Ivan was there should have been enough. Why had he taken it further? “But effective.”
“Effective for whom?” she asked, that smooth voice finally betraying her tension. “You may have single-handedly derailed my entire career. I can only assume that was your goal. What better way to undermine the things I say about you than to render me no more than one of the sexual playthings you famously run through like water?”
As if he had to fight like that, dirty and underhanded. He was Ivan Korovin. He was a champion and a movie star and neither by accident, despite her insinuations. He’d put in hours upon hours of grueling training to become the fighter he was. He’d become fluent in English and had minimized his accent within three years of leaving Russia. He did not undermine. He preferred the direct approach. He was famous for it, come to that.
“Did you become one of my sexual playthings?” he asked darkly. “I feel certain I would remember it.”