He smiled then, but it was a different kind of smile, and Miranda told herself it didn’t matter that there were shadows in his eyes then, that hint of darkness that she’d seen before and didn’t want to explore any further. His hand moved as if he might touch her face, but he dropped it back to his side, and she told herself she didn’t feel that as a loss. She didn’t. He was simply acting. Playing his role. Her own hand rose to her neck, as if taking the place of his, and some small light flared in his eyes then, as if he recognized what she’d done.
“Did you think I would make this easy for you?” he asked then, rough and soft all at once, that darkness still heavy in his gaze. “If you want that book, Miranda, you’ll have to work for it. And I can tell you right now, you probably won’t like it.”
“I already don’t like it,” she said, but it came out a whisper, and was much too dark. As if he was getting under her skin from the inside out.
“Then you’d better prepare yourself.” He was even closer suddenly, so close it felt as if he was touching her, or was it that she wanted that? With parts of herself she wasn’t sure she recognized? In ways she hadn’t known she could want anything? “Tomorrow we go into Cannes.”
His head tilted to that dangerous angle, as if he was kissing her again. His mouth was right there, wicked and delicious, and she couldn’t seem to think of a reason why she shouldn’t reach across the space between them and taste it.
But that way lay madness, and she knew what came after. Why couldn’t she remember that? Why was she torturing herself?
“My hands are going to be all over you,” he promised, his voice dropping low, from silk to something like velvet, rough and lush all at once. “And yours will be all over me. I’m going to feed you from my fingers and you’ll lick them clean. And when we get back here, in private, you can tell me all about the ways you hated it and how much you dislike me, but we’ll both know the truth, won’t we?”
His hand came up again, and she thought he might push her hair back from her face or touch her cheek, but he paused. Everything went wildly electric—white and searing. It was too hot between them, blinding and impossible, and she knew that if she breathed too hard, it would all be over. He would touch her and she would explode and she had no idea what might happen after that.
Or, worse—she did know. She knew exactly what would happen. And she didn’t have any idea how that could be true, or why what charged through her then was as much that age-old fear of hers as it was desire. For him. As if they were made up of the same thing.
Or why she had the strangest notion that he might be able to tell the difference.
“We’re not in public now,” she told him from some place inside of her she hadn’t known was there, her voice the faintest whisper of sound. “There are no cameras, no people. You can’t touch me.” She swallowed. “You agreed.”
“I know the rules.”
But he didn’t move.
One breath. Another. And Miranda knew they were poised on a razor’s edge, no matter what he said about rules, or what she’d said about shifting. Or what she told herself she wanted from this twisted little game.
What she did want. She did.
He dropped his hand and then he stepped back, as if it was harder than it should have been, and she told herself she was relieved.
“Some day, Miranda,” he said, that fire in his gaze, that dark promise in his voice, kicking up that exquisite shiver all along her body, “you will beg me to break those rules. You will beg me to make that shift.”
“I would rather die,” she vowed. Melodramatically, it was true.
He smiled then, and it connected hard with her belly, her sex. With that great riot he’d stirred up inside of her, that she didn’t have the slightest idea how to handle.
“I very, very rarely lose control of myself,” he said, another kind of promise, throwing kerosene on all of those fires again, making her think that soon there would be nothing left of her to burn. “It is one of the reasons I am who I am. Can you say the same?”
And that was the scariest part of all of this, Miranda thought, staring back at him in all of that breathless tension, her body yearning for him in ways that boded only ill.
Until today—until him—she’d thought she could. She’d prided herself on it.
THE next morning, Ivan ran. Hard.
Nikolai kept pace with him through all five grueling miles, and was breathing only slightly more heavily than Ivan was when they came to a stop below the Grand Hotel, near one of the rocky beaches that sloped down into the gleaming sea. It was the sort of place he’d dreamed about when he was a boy and should have been appreciating now that it was commonplace for him, and yet all Ivan could think about was one snooty woman whose carefully orchestrated downfall should have been child’s play for him. He needed only to touch her, take her. He knew it. And he’d had the perfect opportunity to push that particular envelope yesterday—yet hadn’t.
He had no explanation for that. But it had kept him up half the night.
Ivan didn’t speak as they walked back through the hotel’s extensive grounds toward the villa. Beside him, Nikolai’s silence was as eloquently disapproving as ever, for all it was ferociously cold and ruthlessly contained. Ivan almost missed the half-mad, hair-trigger creature his brother had been before Ivan had abandoned him to go off and fight the whole world.
But that Nikolai was long gone, lost to his own darkness for years now, and Ivan, too, was the civilized, Americanized version of his old self. Stripped down from his fighting weight, the better to grace Hollywood screens. Expected to be urbane and amusing as well as brutal. Fluent in the language, in the tabloids, in his own contributions to the culture. But he was still the same Ivan he’d always been, underneath. Some part of him never let go of the fact he was nothing more than the son of a factory worker, no more or less than that.
He wasn’t sure he recognized the man who looked at him from Nikolai’s arctic-blue eyes any longer. He’d pulled his brother out of Russia eventually, as he’d promised when they were boys. He’d taken him from their uncle when he’d been able to do it. But first he’d had to leave him. And they were both still paying for that.
“Is this your version of handling this situation?” Nikolai asked in a low voice, breaking the heavy silence between them. His gaze flicked over Ivan’s expression, which was when Ivan realized he was scowling.
“It is under control.”
Nikolai’s frigid eyes met Ivan’s. Held.
“I can see how under control you are, of course,” he said, not even attempting to hide the sardonic lash in his voice. “As you run across Cap Ferrat as if pursued by the devil himself. Don’t trust your brother, trust your own bad eye, is that it?”
“If you are neither my brother nor the president of our foundation while we are here,” Ivan growled at him, “because you insist upon acting as the bodyguard I don’t need, then I beg of you, Nikolai, play your part. And spare me the Russian proverbs.”
“As you wish, boss,” Nikolai replied coolly. Not at all subserviently.
Ivan dismissed him, breaking into a light jog for the rest of the way back to the villa. He knew why Nikolai was here—why he’d taken on the role of bodyguard