No More Sweet Surrender

His dark eyes gleamed.

And when she leaned in to take his mouth again, he didn’t say a word. He only kissed her back. Long and sweet. Endless. Heat spiraled into pleasure and rolled through her, making the body so recently racked in such old anguish begin to hum again. As if he was making her brand-new.

Miranda was the one who wanted more, who pulled her hands from his to hold his face between them, that strong, hard jaw scraping gently, erotically beneath her palms. She was the one who moved closer, then closer still, unable to get enough of his taste, his touch, the sheer, dizzying magic of his mouth on hers.

But he still didn’t move to hold her, to touch her, and eventually she couldn’t take it any longer.

“Why aren’t you touching me?” she demanded.

His rare, real smile lit up his face and charmed her straight through to the bone, as he lifted a hand to graze his knuckles over her cheek, like she was somehow precious to him. She wanted to sink into it—into him. She wanted to simply disappear into that smile, that touch.

“I don’t want to be another thing that scares you, Miranda.” Something moved over his face, like a shadow, but then disappeared so fast she thought she must have imagined it. “No matter what happens.”

“I want you,” she said with quiet conviction. Because she knew that, if nothing else. She knew it in the way she knew that she needed breath to live, and she didn’t want to examine that, analyze it. She just wanted him. Maybe she always had. Maybe that was why all of this felt so inevitable. “Not the watered-down version you trot out for the damaged woman who sobbed out a sad story on your floor.”

“This is not ‘watered down,’” he said, that rich current of laughter in his voice then, and flirting with that hard mouth. “This is patient. I’m not at all surprised you can’t recognize it.”

“You look at me and make me think you’ll burn me alive where I stand,” she whispered, not caring if it made her seem needy, desperate. Not caring about anything but the way she knew he could touch her—the way she wanted him to touch her. The way he’d simply...swept her up, from the first moment she’d met him. “That’s what I want, Ivan. I don’t want you to treat me like...like I’m ruined.”

“You already think I’m a wild, untamed animal,” he pointed out bluntly, though that gleam in his eyes was brighter. Hotter. It made her flush. Squirm slightly where she knelt before him. “Why would I want to go and do something that will inevitably prove it to you?”

“I don’t think you’re an animal,” she retorted, and as she said it, she realized that it was true. And that she hadn’t thought anything of the kind in a long time. It was astonishing. Dizzying. And it meant a whole host of things she didn’t want to think about. Not here. Not now. She slammed the door shut on all of them and looked at him instead.

“A caveman,” he continued in that same blunt voice, as if he knew what she was thinking and didn’t care. “A Neanderthal. Testosterone-poisoned.”

“I said all of those things, yes.” Miranda searched his face, which he kept perfectly blank. But she knew better. She knew he was fighting back the same desire that was coursing through her, making her burn all over again every time she inhaled. She could sense it like some kind of aura that surrounded them both. “Don’t tell me this is your revenge. I called you a caveman and so now you’re going to act like a Victorian maiden?”

“Yes.” But his other hand moved then, tracing a lazy line up the length of her spine, making her turn molten hot, making goose bumps break out over her arms. “I plan to punish you with lukewarm, perfectly competent sex.”

By the time he finished the sentence his hand had made it to the nape of her neck, and he left it there, a hot, hard, delicious weight. A kind of sensual promise. She shivered against it, into it, and that crook in the corner of his hard mouth deepened.

“I’ve already had that,” she reminded him, breathlessly. “I’ve only had that.”

He smiled again, and it was far wickeder this time, and seemed to shoot off sparks inside of her that flipped into explosions and made her belly tighten around that same deep, low ache that she understood, now, only he could ease.