She opened her mouth to say something, anything that didn’t involve personal revolutions or Parisian mistresses, anything at all—but his dark eyes finally met hers with the force of a midnight collision, and she found she couldn’t say a word.
“Come,” he said after a moment, as if he’d taken a moment to soak her in, too. As if the intensity all around them that they were both so studiously ignoring was as loud and heavy in him as in her. “The car is waiting.”
He held out his arm and she took it, and everything felt raw, then. Too much. Too formal. Too real. Miranda didn’t understand how that was possible, when this was their most over-the-top moment yet. They were on their way to walk a red carpet. To parade down an aisle so that fans could cheer and reporters could take pictures and ask preapproved questions. So that pictures of them looking glamorous and together would be plastered across the globe, subject to any number of tabloid fantasies. What was less real than that?
And yet.
Something in her chest clutched tight. It was the fancy clothes, maybe. The dress and the jewelry they’d given her to wear with it, that she knew he’d chosen for her as well. Her hair was swept up into a sleek chignon to show off the dangling diamond earrings and the necklace was a masterpiece of intricate stones and stunning metals, making her seem to sparkle with elegance and style. Something about the idea of him picking them out for her to wear with this dress, to make her into this impossibly sophisticated version of herself, made her heart seem to stutter in her chest.
And more than all the rest of it, Ivan walked beside her, like every girl’s dream of the perfect fantasy prince.
Like her dream, anyway, she could finally admit to herself—a dream she’d packed away a long, long time ago and had been afraid to pull out into the light ever since. First because it had had no place in her father’s vicious, terrible home. And then, later, because it had seemed so silly and embarrassing a dream next to all of her important, serious studies. All of the intellectual things she’d wanted to do. Her theories, her books. Her dreams of a tenured professorship. She’d thought she’d had to choose. She’d chosen.
Yet if she squinted, she couldn’t help but think as they swept from the villa toward the waiting limousine, this would look a great deal like the very fairy tales she’d taught herself not to believe in any longer. She was dressed like a princess, a beautiful gown and gorgeous jewels to match. The whole world already thought Ivan was some kind of prince. Was that what she’d see when she saw the pictures of this tomorrow? Was this the love story Craig the publicist was selling? Would she look carried away into some Disney movie, as if at any moment she might break into song?
Somehow, she shoved everything down deep inside of her, before she broke out into either tears or songs, or worse—both. Her job tonight, she reminded herself sternly, was to smile and gaze adoringly at Ivan. To pretend she was madly and totally in love with him. No more and no less than that.
Fairy tales weren’t real. Neither was the way she had to behave tonight.
And both were only temporary, in any case. They’d agreed.
She told herself that didn’t hurt at all.
“ARE you ready?” Ivan asked when it was finally time. When the long queue of cars they waited in to take their turn at the red carpet finally delivered them to the arrival point.
Miranda had the sudden, intense urge to say that no, she wasn’t. To call the whole exercise off. As if it hadn’t already gone too far. As if there was any hope of saving herself.
“Of course,” she lied.
His black eyes gleamed with something that looked a great deal like compassion, but couldn’t be. Her throat went dry.
“My first red carpet appearance made me much more nervous than my first title fight,” he said then. A quiet confession. Another voluntary bit of himself, and she held on to it with a grip that should have scared her. It did. “I knew how to hit, not pose. But you won’t be alone.”
Miranda swallowed. “No,” she agreed. “I won’t.”
Her reward was a smile—and not, she registered, stunned, that public one she’d grown so used to seeing over the past days.
This one was private. It was his. It was slightly crooked and not at all practiced. It was real. She knew it was real. She felt it kick hard inside of her, then send out echoes.
It made her want to look at nothing else, for hours. Days. Longer.
But then the car door was opening and Miranda had no choice but to be swept out along with him, into the baying crowd.
A roar went up when they saw Ivan. It was a wall of people—reporters and fans, the steady stream of celebrities and all of their handlers, everyone channeled down the red carpet gauntlet. Ivan’s publicist took charge of them immediately. He directed Ivan to this reporter, then that one. He ended interviews that went too long or veered into areas he didn’t like. He told them where to look, when to wave, when to amp up the smiles.
And they did exactly what they were told.
It was one more thing, Miranda thought when Ivan led her up the famous red-carpeted stairs, that looked effortlessly glamorous on television and, as she’d discovered herself while filming news segments, was a significantly harder task than it seemed.
“You survived,” Ivan said, gazing down at her. He’d pulled her to one side, out of the pack.
“I’m not at all sure about that.” Something about the oddness of the whole evening had her smiling up at him. Spontaneous. Unguarded. As real as his smile had been earlier.
He looked startled. Something moved through his dark gaze then that she would have called regret, if that had made any sense at all.
“Milaya,” he murmured, so soft it was almost a whisper. So soft it sounded almost like an apology, but that was impossible.
And then he slid his hand around the back of her neck, pulled her just that crucial bit closer to him with that bone-melting certainty and smooth male grace that was only his, and fit his mouth to hers.
Miranda felt as if she’d fainted. Or simply burst apart into a shower of tiny pieces.
There was nothing but Ivan.
No noise, no screams. No people. No red carpet, no Cannes.
Just that mouth of his against hers once again.
Finally.
She forgot to panic. She forgot everything. She tasted him, wanted him, lost herself completely in the drugging kick and clamor of him, and then, after ages and eras, or perhaps only minutes, he pulled away. But only a little. Only enough for her to come back to herself. His big, tough hands rested at the base of her neck, his thumbs still stroking the line of her jaw, as if he might simply move her mouth back to where he wanted it in a moment, and lose them both to that wild, magical heat all over again.
Her heart thudded hard. And then again.
Miranda understood then, with a kind of painful resignation, that the things she felt about this man were deeper and far more complicated than she wanted to admit. But that didn’t change the fact of them.
And it was only then, when she processed the way he looked at her, something calculating and shrewd in that black gaze, mixed in with the fire she recognized all too well, did she understand that he’d staged