No More Sweet Surrender

She ignored the invitation to sit. She called it self-preservation.

“Why does a man like you need bodyguards?” she asked, not aware she meant to speak.

His dark brows arched high. “By ‘a man like me,’ do I assume you mean rich? Famous?”

“Deadly,” she replied. She fought to control her own expression when his hardened, when he seemed to move closer to her without having moved at all. “Shouldn’t a man with your particular skills be able to handle himself?”

“Most lunatics use guns,” he said with a certain calm resignation that sent a chill spiraling through her. “And fists are somewhat inadequate from certain distances, I find. But I appreciate your interest in my security arrangements, Dr. Sweet. I’m sure it is benevolent.”

She didn’t like how he said her name. Or, if she was brutally honest, she didn’t like how very much she did like it—he said it as if he was tasting it with that wicked mouth of his. But she wasn’t here to sink any further into that mire. She couldn’t. How had she wandered off on this tangent when there was so much to discuss—and all of it far more important that his damned mouth?

But even as she thought about that mouth, it seemed to relent. “And in any case, that was my brother.”

“Your brother?” Although now that she thought about it, the other man had been like a far colder, far more terrifying Ivan, hadn’t he? It boggled the mind.

“Nikolai acts as my bodyguard when he feels it necessary,” Ivan said. His dark brows rose. “Would you like me to explain to you the peculiar swamp of Korovin family dynamics? Would that make you feel more at ease? You look as if you are about to faint.”

“I’m fine,” she snapped. And then couldn’t contain what was swirling inside of her another second. “This is a complete disaster, and it’s your fault. I told you it would affect my career and I was right. And that was before we made the news!”

The kiss had gone viral. Every person Miranda had ever met, it seemed, had called or e-mailed or texted to inform her that they’d seen the clip of it. Online or e-mailed to them. Then on television. Of Ivan’s hands all over her and her seemingly enthusiastic acceptance of it and, worse, her response to it. To him.

I am a very possessive man, he’d told her in that dark, stirring voice of his, picked up by all those cameras. He’d looked down at her as if she was edible and he was starving. She’d watched it herself on her own laptop in her hotel room. Over and over. She’d watched him kiss her so thoroughly, almost lazily, as if he had all the time in the world and every right. With such raw, carnal power that she’d felt it explode inside of her all over again. She’d watched herself simply … submit. Surrender. And then melt all over him like wax against a flame.

There was no way she could lie to herself about what had happened, about how she’d responded to him. It had been right there in front of her. He’d been the one to kiss her and he’d been the one to pull back when he was done, but she’d been the one draped against him, boneless and glassy-eyed and evidently mindless.

Opposites Really Do Attract! the online gossip sites had shrieked. Mortal Enemies in Not-So-Mortal Combat? Korovin’s Kiss KOs the Competition!

Ivan Korovin is sexy with a capital S! her agent had texted while she was obediently sitting in the back of Ivan’s chauffeured car, too upset with the situation to be as outraged as she should have been at his high-handedness. He’s a bestseller on two feet!

Clearly, Ivan Korovin kissing anyone with a pulse would be a story. She’d seen that story a thousand times herself—Ivan with this model or that starlet. She’d discussed that story in detail, dissecting the dramatic tales his various women always told in the wake of their affairs with him. But Ivan Korovin kissing the starchy professor best known for calling him “a barbaric King Leonidas without the excuse of a Sparta”? Miranda didn’t need her agent to tell her how salacious that story was.

“It seems we are thrown together in this, like it or not,” Ivan said then, breaking her out of the dark spiral of her thoughts with his far darker, far richer voice. “Perhaps it would be better if we tried to think of it as an opportunity.”

He was dressed in casual black trousers slung low on his narrow hips and a soft, charcoal-gray T-shirt that strained over his rock-hard biceps and clung to his well-honed gladiatorial torso. A darkly inked tattoo in an intricate pattern wrapped around the tight muscles of his left upper arm, twisting around to end just above his wrist. His thick, dark hair was damp, which felt like a kind of unearned, unwanted intimacy. It made her imagine him in the shower. It was almost too much to bear.

Even doing no more than simply standing there, he looked distractingly, aggressively male, powerfully masculine, like some kind of potent, lethal work of art. She felt the force of it—of him—as if his very presence a few feet away was the same as his mouth on hers, tutoring her in all those layers of fire and need she’d never imagined existed.

He looked like the warrior he was. She should have been actively repelled by him, and she couldn’t understand why she wasn’t. Why she still felt as if this untamed, uncivilized menace of a man was safe even when he very clearly, very obviously wasn’t.

“An opportunity to do what?” she asked, her voice thicker than it should have been. She saw his eyes narrow, and knew he’d noticed it. She crossed her arms as if to ward him off. “Celebrate the end of my career? Who on earth will take me seriously now that I’ve been seen in such a compromising position with the poster boy for all things violent?”

There was a long, simmering silence. He only looked at her, his dark eyes seeming even blacker than before, his hard face with its much-broken nose forbidding in the soft light of the sitting room lamps. Miranda found it hard to swallow, suddenly, and even harder to breathe, and she was forced to remind herself that he was a very, very dangerous man. A violent man. By trade and training. Possibly also by inclination.

These were all things that should have been foremost in her mind.

“I make action movies,” he said in a cold, distinctly hostile tone. There was no sign of temper on that ruthless face of his, which somehow made the lash of it all the worse. “I also practice sambo, among other martial arts, like the rest of my countrymen. It is our national sport. If that makes me the poster boy for all things violent, Professor, I would suggest to you that it’s your poster. You’re the one who’s made me into a monster. I am only a man.”

She felt something course through her then that was too close to guilt, to the sickening heat of shame, and she didn’t understand it. She didn’t want to understand it, just as she didn’t want to feel that betraying flood of heat behind her eyes. She didn’t want to think about her work from his perspective. She liked the box she’d put him in all these years. She shoved it all aside, and tried to focus on the point of this. The reason she was here—and it wasn’t to let him take her down in his inimitable way. Again.

“Exactly what opportunities do you see in this mess?” she asked instead, fighting to keep her voice level.

He watched her for another long, intense moment, and Miranda had to order herself not to fidget as she stood there before him. A wild panic surged through her then, alarm bells tolling out a frantic melody, her stomach in a twist, because she had the terrible feeling that whatever was about to happen would ruin her forever, far more comprehensively and irrevocably than any kiss had done. She knew it. She could feel it hanging there in the air between them.

And worse, she suspected he knew it, too. As if this was all just one more nightmare waiting to happen, and she the fool who had walked right into it.

Don’t be ridiculous! she snapped at herself. Why was she reduced to hysteria in the presence of this man? Miranda had always prided herself on her calm reason, her logic. She’d studied so hard, and from such a young age, to be a scholar—to save herself from moments like this one by thinking her way out of them.

She had weapons, too. She needed to remember that.

But even as she hastily tried to arm herself, his midnight eyes only seemed darker, that temptation of a mouth something near enough to stern, and she had to fight to restrain a shiver. Anticipation or anxiety? She honestly didn’t know. His mouth curved, though it was not a smile, not at all, and it danced through her all the same.

“I think we should date,” he said.

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