No More Sweet Surrender

When she came back to herself, he was naked, and so was she. It took one breath to realize that, and another to comprehend that he had settled himself between her legs, the head of him teasing her entrance.

She didn’t have time to be afraid. She didn’t have time to throw herself across the room again, or cry. He was so big, so hot, and there was that ruthlessness of his that made her weak. It made her want to melt all around him. It made her want with parts of herself she’d never known before.

He braced himself on one hand and slid the other around to lift her bottom closer to him. One more breath, ragged and wild. His dark gaze on hers, formidable and dangerous, even now. Especially now.

“I don’t want to be ruined,” she whispered.

“There is more than one kind of ruin,” he said in a gruff, thrilling voice that made her want to bask in him like sunlight. “This is the good kind.”

And then he slid into her in one slick, devastating thrust.

* * *

She went wild beneath him, and the feel of it, her silky limbs wrapped around him, her soft skin flushed from his mouth and hot to the touch, almost did him in. She arched against him, pressing that lithe body of hers to his in a glorious stretch, and it took everything he had to keep from losing himself there and then.

If he was a good man, a sensitive man, he would love her softly. Sweetly. Make her come around him again and again, languorous and endless.

But he wasn’t that man, and anyway, she didn’t want the watered-down version of him. She wanted the real him. All of him. Ivan didn’t think she could know how that had exploded inside of him. What it meant. He wasn’t sure he wanted to think about it himself. He bent his head to hers, burying his face in the sweet hollow of her neck and shoulder, and set the demanding rhythm his body craved.

And she met it. Threw back her head and gloried in it.

Which made him that much crazier.

She wrapped her arms around his neck, pressing those maddeningly perfect breasts into his chest. She nearly undid him. She was hot and soft and melting all around him, and he was desperate for her. For this.

I will never get enough, he thought very distinctly.

He heard her small, erotic moans in his ear and turned his head to capture that mouth of hers again.

There were no games here, in this meeting of tongues and lips. As the fire that burned through them seared them both, reducing them both to nothing more than dancing flames. And still he moved in her, filled with her in ways he couldn’t begin to explore, mad with need, wild with delight at her perfect, slick fit.

Mine, he thought when she grew taut against him, when her fingers dug into his skin and her eyes closed tight. Mine, he thought when he reached between them and found the center of desire, making her cry out his name before she hurtled once more over that cliff.

All mine, he thought, when at last he followed her over the edge, her own name like an answered prayer on his lips.

* * *

This was what shifting felt like, Miranda told herself the next morning, when she woke and realized there had been no nightmares. That he’d wiped them away, or helped her face them at long last. Or perhaps it was that she’d done the actual shifting some time ago, and this was what happened afterward. Either way, she was lost.

Wholly, unutterably lost, but she couldn’t find it anywhere in her to mind. There was that little whisper of warning that moved in her, dark and distracting, but she didn’t listen to it. She couldn’t.

There was only Ivan. At last.

“I—” she’d begun in that heady rush of the forty-eight precious hours that followed that first night, leading up to the premiere she’d come to California to attend. “I think I...”

But she couldn’t finish. She couldn’t quite say it.

“I told you I was good, Professor,” he replied with that casual arrogance that made her smile, stretched out across the massive bed in his minimalistic bedroom, with nothing to soften its modern, masculine edges but the Pacific Ocean just beyond the walls of glass. Nothing to interrupt the fact of his magnificence, his perfectly honed body displayed like treasure on the sumptuously dark brown sheets.

She was sprawled across his chest, overcome with all these things she felt. They were cracking her wide open, making her question everything. She traced the three letters tattooed over his heart.