No More Sweet Surrender

It was pathetic. Not to mention dangerous.

And it didn’t matter anymore. It couldn’t. She’d been so naive—expecting that a man who’d made his life a temple to the physical wouldn’t be...incredibly, impossibly tactile. All about skin, bodies, touch. Of course he was. Of course he’d overwhelmed her. In retrospect, she should have known it would happen. She suspected he’d known exactly what he was doing—and she should have anticipated that, too.

But she knew now. And he couldn’t have the same effect on her if she was expecting it, could he? No matter what she felt for him. No matter what.

The air changed, then, though there was no noise. No warning. Only that ineffable, inexplicable shift. Her skin prickled. There was the slightest chill down her spine, and her stomach flipped, then knotted.

And when she turned her head, he was there.

CHAPTER NINE

IVAN stood in the open doorway, seeming to fill it. His arms were crossed over his mouthwateringly bare chest, his tattoos sinuous and seductive over all of that hard male flesh, his black eyes trained on her just the way she’d seen them in all of those hot, naked dreams that still moved in her, making her head spin. Or perhaps that was the ordinary, inevitable effect of Ivan standing only a few feet away wearing nothing but a pair of loose black trousers low on his hips, leaving even his feet bare.

Miranda’s mind went blank. Her body exploded into a host of reactions she would have thought meant the onset of an intense and sudden illness had she not known better. Had she not understood by now that it was him. It was all Ivan. This desert in her throat, this flood of scalding heat between her legs. This breathless whirl of sensation, this spinning wilderness in her head.

Ivan.

Their gazes clashed. Burned.

Miranda thought there should have been a storm—sudden thunder, torrents of hail, the sizzle and pop of summer lightning—but the California sky was a calm and sleepy blue all around them.

It was Ivan. He was the storm, and Miranda was terribly afraid he was already inside of her, changing her, uprooting her and destroying her, without his having to do anything more than look at her like that.

His hard mouth curved, though she didn’t make the mistake of thinking he was truly amused. Or even really smiling, come to that.

He lifted one of his hands and crooked his finger at her in the universal signal to come, just as he had once before in a Parisian dressing room.

Like he was some kind of Russian prince after all, beckoning the peasants near, wearing so little, wanting only her instant obedience in return.

Expecting it.

“Do you think I’ll come running?” she asked, not moving. Hardly daring to breathe. Afraid her feet would betray her of their own volition.

That curve of his mouth hardened, made her chest feel tight. “Feel free to crawl.”

Miranda reminded herself that she was brave. That she was strong. That he was, as he’d once told her himself, only a man. Not a monster, despite what she’d long wanted to believe about him. Not capable of making war on her unless she let him. He was only as in control of this—of her—as she allowed.

“I’ve had a long flight,” she said. She smoothed her hands down the front of her floor-length black sundress, hoping it hid her nerves but suspecting from the way he tracked the movement that it did the opposite. She pushed on anyway. “I want something to drink. Maybe a nap. I don’t have the energy for this.”

“‘This?’” he echoed, and now he did sound amused.

“You.”

Ivan’s dark eyes narrowed slightly. He didn’t move. He simply stood there like the warrior he was, and he was, she thought, the most intimidating man she’d ever seen. The most formidable. And he terrified her, but not, she’d come to understand over the past ten days, in any of the familiar ways.

Miranda made herself walk toward him. She told herself there was no need to be the least bit intimidated, and still, that thunder rolled inside of her, that lightning crackled deep beneath her skin. That storm raged inside of her, mocking the perfection of the day.

You can do this! she congratulated herself. You can’t control him, but you can control yourself—

Ivan reached out again when she drew up next to him, and caught her by the elbow.