No More Sweet Surrender

“Ah, Vanya,” Nikolai said, something like a sigh in his voice, and that look in his cold blue eyes that suggested Ivan had let him down. Again. “You don’t have the guts to do this after all, do you?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Your actions say it all.” Nikolai shook his head. “This should not have been hard. Seduce the professor. Then finish with her as publicly as possible tonight, making certain that no one will ever take her seriously again.”

“Nikolai.” His own voice was harsh, but he knew it was aimed at himself. For coming up with this plan in the first place. For making it happen. For making his brother—who had been let down and lied to by everyone he’d ever known, who’d been abandoned so many times he now expected it as a matter of course, who had nothing and no one in the world except Ivan—one more promise he wanted to break. “I know the damned plan.”

“You couldn’t wait for her to show up in your hotel, you were so excited to enact your revenge,” Nikolai said then, his voice something other than cold—which set off all kinds of alarms inside of Ivan. “You promised you would make her pay.”

“You’re giving me a headache,” Ivan growled. “I know all of this.”

“And it’s already worked beautifully,” Nikolai continued, unperturbed by the scowl Ivan was directing at him. “You’ve got your revenge. So why not drive it all the way home? The way you promised?”

Finally, something that should have been obvious from the start occurred to Ivan, and those alarms within grew louder. Deafening.

“Nikolai...” He searched his brother’s face. That hard face so much like his own, those cold, broken eyes he barely recognized. “Why are you talking to me in English?”

But even as he said it, he knew.

He saw that grim, painful sort of triumph in his brother’s eyes. More than that, he heard that soft sound from behind them.

He knew before he turned.

Miranda stood there, ashen. Her mouth was parted slightly, and two hectic spots of color appeared on her cheeks as she stared at him. As if he’d slapped her.

“Miranda...” he said, but she held up a hand, as if she couldn’t bear it, and for a moment her lovely face crumpled in on itself. He thought it might kill him. But he knew better than to move toward her, to hold her.

“I shouldn’t be surprised.” Her voice was small, but it didn’t shake. She looked at Nikolai briefly, then her gaze slammed into Ivan’s. “I’m not surprised, as a matter of fact. It makes perfect sense that you would do exactly this. It’s who you are, isn’t it? You decimate your opponents. You never lose.”

“Miranda,” he began again. He hated that tone in her voice, that stunned sort of pain. “Please.”

“And I suppose I owe it to you,” she continued as if she hadn’t heard him. She was standing so straight, so perfectly straight and unbearably fragile, and he had the sudden notion that she might shatter into pieces if she so much as breathed. “I’ve learned that, if nothing else. I was wrong about you, and I regret it.” She swallowed, hard, her gaze nothing but black as she stared at him. “But I can’t take it back. I can’t change it. So if you have to do this thing—if you have to humiliate me in public, here...” She stopped for a moment, then sucked in a ragged-sounding breath. “If that’s what you need, Ivan, I’ll do it.”

“This is not what I need,” he said furiously, painfully. “This is not what I want.”

“It’s your plan,” she said, so simply, so quietly, it broke his heart.

Her eyes were glazed with what he knew were tears, but she didn’t cry. She only waited. For him to tell her what to do—how best to participate in her own downfall. He saw the tiniest hint of a tremor move over her, but she repressed it almost at once, and he wondered what it cost her to stand there like this—for him.

He wanted to pull her into his arms. He wanted to be the man who saved her, who protected her—not the man who hurt her. He wanted to be the man he imagined he was when she smiled at him. The kind of man who would never make her feel the way she did right now. The man he’d always thought he was, not the man she’d believed him to be all these years. He wanted to kill his own brother for putting that terrible look on her precious face. And himself for letting it happen.