No More Sweet Surrender

And when he destroyed her, the way he’d always planned he would, he told himself he wouldn’t even care.

* * *

Miranda stepped off the plane into what was, in June, already the arid height of summer in Los Angeles. The dry heat was like a hard slap, fierce and uncompromising. The ubiquitous palm trees stretched toward the hot blue sky overhead, and the hills were toasted gold and brown, looking mellow and easy despite the temperature as they sloped into the waiting sea.

Miranda herself was determined. Resolute. France had been a disaster, she’d decided in her ten days of Ivanless solitude, and largely of her own making. She’d lost her head and then, somehow, herself. She’d let all of this become far too complicated.

It was a business deal, not a fairy tale. Fairy tales were stories for lost children, not grown women. It was time she acted like the adult she was.

“Do you think it is wise to declare war on me?” Ivan had asked her over the phone, not long after he’d left her to the paparazzi in New York City. Not long after Miranda had decided to reclaim some small part of what she’d lost. What she’d surrendered.

“You are the undefeated champion in the mixed martial arts ring and on various movie screens,” Miranda had replied coolly. “But in the court of public opinion, I think we’re tied.”

“That, Miranda,” he’d barked, “is because I have not been fighting you. Yet.”

But he couldn’t help but fight, whatever he did. And she knew him now. Better than she wanted to. So well, in fact, that it had invaded her already fractured sleep. Nightly. She woke up in the small hours, breathless. Yearning. Shaking from the aftereffects of the disturbingly passionate images that chased each other through her head, too vivid and too carnal. Too infused with longing and lust. Too real.

Dreams of Ivan chased her usual nightmares in a loop. Long-ago summer evenings mixed with the sweet Cannes breeze, Cap Ferrat shattered beneath the inevitable pain and fear, Ivan himself appeared in scenes of that same old nightmare as if he’d taken that over, too, and all of it was swept through with that wild, unshakeable need.

None of that mattered, she told herself now, sitting quietly in the back of yet another one of Ivan’s endless fleet of cars. She stared out the window as the car drove north along the famous Pacific Coast Highway, taking her much too quickly through beach communities like Venice and Santa Monica that she knew from a thousand television programs and heading straight into the legendary heart of Malibu.

It should not have surprised her that Ivan lived in a house of glass and architectural whimsy, perched on the edge of a rocky outcropping over the mesmerizing shift and roll of the ocean. It was bold and demanding, much like the man. It did not fade into its surroundings, nor did it lord itself over them. It simply was. It commanded attention and respect.

I’m in so much trouble, she thought as she was driven to the front door at the top of the sweeping private drive, surrounded on all sides by proudly jutting palm trees, sweet-smelling bushes of fragrant jasmine and great tangles of bougainvillea vines in magentas and purples, a riot of bright color and soft scent before the punch of that hard, cold house beyond.

The equivalent of that smile of his, the public one, and the formidable truth of him to back it up.

She climbed from the back of the car, reluctantly, and stood there for a moment as it pulled away again, headed for the separate building she assumed was the garage. She looked around as the breeze flowed in from the sea and the hills, cutting the heat, smelling of smoke and rosemary, the faint hint of eucalyptus. Salt and flowers.

She was in so much trouble.

She’d spent all of this time locked away in her apartment five flights above the busy Manhattan streets, desperately trying to distill her experience in France into cool, incisive, purely academic sentences. Trying to describe what it was like to spend all of that time in such close proximity to a man like Ivan in the detached vocabulary of her profession. Trying to write the damned book that would make all of this worthwhile.

And had instead found herself staring off into space, reliving every time he’d brushed his fingers over her neck, her hand, her cheek. Feeling it as if it was happening all over again, as if, were she to close her eyes, she would open them to find him there in front of her as if summoned by the force of her yearning, all of that dark promise burning in his eyes as he gazed at her.