No More Sweet Surrender

“And more than that, Miranda,” he said in that way of his, a formidable punch wrapped with that Russian flavor, “you are in love with me.”

The whole world collapsed, sucked into a giant black hole of her shame and horror and a sheer terror that felt a lot like some kind of exultation—but she still stood there, her bare feet against the polished floor, her face wet from her own tears, her entire life a sad, sick joke that had led straight here. To this tragic little farce.

She wanted to deny it. She wanted to scream. She wished she could simply die where she stood, saving her the trouble of attempting to survive this. She’d known for a while now that he would break her heart. She hadn’t expected him to simply reach out and rip it still beating from her chest.

She should have remembered this was Ivan Korovin. He was capable of anything. That was why she loved him in the first place.

“You told me in your sleep,” he said, watching her as he moved closer, a dark menace in beautiful clothes. “And you screamed it yesterday as you fell into pieces all around me.”

Her heart seemed to beat with spikes attached, sending painful shock waves through her each time. She sucked in a breath, then another. And then she simply stopped fighting. What was the point? She’d already lost everything that mattered to her. The career she’d thought made her who she was, but was no more than a house of cards built on trashing this man. And now him, too, but she’d expected that. She’d signed up for it in advance. It didn’t make it easier. But it was still happening.

“Yes, well.” She laughed then, aware that it sounded ever so slightly hysterical against all of his white walls and moody, abstract paintings. “I’ve never been particularly smart, have I? Not where you’re concerned.”

“I don’t want you to go,” he said again, his voice harder this time, nearly ferocious.

And it hurt. It all just hurt.

“Because you don’t know how to lose,” she managed to say. “But this is how it’s going to happen, whether you like it or not. Whether it breaks your undefeated record or not. This is what we agreed.”

* * *

And Ivan lost his cool.

“I don’t care about the agreement,” he said. Though the first time he said it, he used far uglier words. “I don’t care about winning.”

But she only shook her head, unmoved despite the emotion he could see staining her face, making her stand so tautly. “Ivan—”

“You can’t tell me you love me and then walk away!” he threw at her, dimly aware that he was louder than usual. Much louder than was safe. “You can’t cry in my arms and tell me things you’ve never told another living soul and then just...go back to New York as if none of this ever happened!”

“Why not?” she demanded, her eyes too bright again, her voice rough. “It’s what you want!”

“You should know by now, Miranda, that I never get what I want,” he snapped at her, totally unhinged now, completely lost to himself, as if he’d never had any training. As if he was nothing but this wild storm she’d made inside of him. “I suffer. I do my duty. I win on command. But what I want is never part of the package.”

“Ivan,” she began again, her voice broken, as he surged toward her and made her back up a few steps, as if she could see that wildness in him. But her wide eyes, dark jade and anguished, drank him in anyway.

“You have haunted me across years,” he told her hoarsely. “You have challenged me and provoked me, and that was before I met you. I didn’t expect to like you. I didn’t expect to crave you.” He wasn’t shouting anymore, but it felt the same, out of control and the closest he’d been to desperate since he was a boy. “Tell me how to let you go, Professor. Tell me how to pretend none of this ever happened. Tell me how to pretend that I can’t see that you hate the very idea of it yourself.”

“You wanted to humiliate me in public,” she challenged. “But not in any straightforward kind of way. You wanted to seduce me into submission first, because it would hurt more.”

“You are writing a nasty, damaging book about me,” he retorted. “All insinuations and fantasies and lies. Another book.”