None of this should have been happening.
His goals were very clear. First he would seduce her. Then he would toss her aside, brutally and publicly, tainting anything further she ever said about him as the unhinged rantings of a woman scorned. Simple. Easy. Exactly what she deserved after all these years.
Except nothing was going as planned.
He’d expected to want her, because he had a weakness for smart and haughty and unimpressed with him, apparently, wrapped up in one aristocratic, obstinate package. He’d always wanted the things he shouldn’t, the things not only likely to destroy him, but also certain to do so in the most painful way possible. It was a Korovin family trait. But he’d also expected to hate her, disdain her and her Ivy League snootiness at the very least, and he didn’t quite understand how that hadn’t happened. Or why he’d found himself telling her things he’d never told anyone before.
Or what had sprung up and taken him over like this, making him all but unrecognizable to himself. He was not a man who formed attachments. He knew better. He’d loved his parents as any son did, despite their coldness, and they had died. He’d wanted to love his uncle, until the drinking and brutality made that impossible. He had deeply admired his first trainer, the man he’d considered his savior, until he’d tried to steal the bulk of Ivan’s money after the championships had started mounting up. And he loved Nikolai, still and always, and look what he’d done to him. Look what Nikolai had become.
Damn her.
“I will see you in ten days’ time,” he’d told her, unnecessarily, standing in the open door of the car, holding her captive between him and it.
“Yes.” But she’d been hiding from him even as she’d tilted up her chin and met his gaze, that dark jade too black, too dark.
“Miranda …”
But there’d been nothing to say, and he couldn’t have said it even if there had been. How could he have? She was Miranda Sweet. His loudest critic. His enemy. They’d set all of this in motion that night in Georgetown, and there was no stopping it. There was no changing course. Not now. The benefit gala drew closer by the day, and with it, the end of all of this. His revenge and her comeuppance. As planned from the start.
“Do you really think they’ll hound me?” she’d asked then, her voice too quiet. Too unsure. He’d hated it. He’d wanted her spark back, her fire. He’d wanted her to feel this wildness, this madness, that lived in him now. He’d wanted her any way he could have her, no matter what it did to either one of them.
“The paparazzi?” Ivan had asked her then. He’d reached over and played with ends of her dark red hair, unable to keep himself from touching her, letting the silken strands slide through his fingers, letting the ways he wanted her burn through him, blaze hot, make him hard and edgy and wild with need. He hadn’t wanted to leave her in New York. He hadn’t wanted to leave her at all. “Yes. It will be a feeding frenzy, I imagine. Don’t leave your apartment unprepared.”
They’d discussed it on the flight back from France, when she’d sat with a throw wrapped tight around her and had avoided looking at him directly. As if she’d feared corrosion, or something far worse. They’d gone over what she should expect, what she should do. What he wanted her to do. What she should and shouldn’t say.
But he couldn’t stand the way she’d looked at him then, standing there on the tarmac, as if this was all some kind of betrayal. As if he’d done this to her. As if she hadn’t agreed to it herself.
“You could have said no, Miranda,” he’d reminded her, his voice harsher than necessary. But he hadn’t been able to stop himself. He’d seen the way she’d tensed. As if it had hurt. As if he’d hurt her. And he’d loathed himself anew.
“Could I?” she’d asked, that razor-sharp edge back in her voice then, and he’d found he preferred it, even as it cut deep. “After you pointed out it would make me a hypocrite either way? I think we both know you were well aware I would do exactly what you wanted me to do, even then.”
“When was this?” he’d asked in much the same way, while the heat between them roared. “I apologize, Professor. I must have missed your momentary lapse into obedience.”
Her smile then had been venomous, but he’d told himself that was better than the hurt. That terrible pain he couldn’t have fixed even if he’d wanted to—even if he hadn’t felt the lash of it himself.
“Goodbye, Ivan,” she’d said then, and climbed into the car. “May the next ten days feel like very long years.”
Ivan bit back a smile now, remembering that bite in her voice.
“I don’t think she is as easily subdued as you’d like to think,” he told Nikolai, and didn’t try as hard as he should have to keep that reluctant admiration out of his voice.
His brother’s brows lowered, as his frigid gaze moved over Ivan’s face, seeing far too much. “Then you have work to do,” he replied. “The benefit gala—”
“I know the plan,” Ivan snapped. “It was my idea, if you recall.”
“I recall it perfectly,” Nikolai said, as if he was worried. For Ivan. “Do you?”
His gaze met Ivan’s, bold and challenging. If he had been another man, Ivan would have taken that look as an invitation to a brawl. And the way he felt right now, he would have obliged, years of guilt or no. Instead, he looked away, back out the windows, furious with no outlet.
“That’s what I thought,” Nikolai said.
And Ivan had no response for him. No argument. There was only the empty sky, stretching out in all directions, and he didn’t know his own mind.
He didn’t know what he wanted.
Or, worse, he did.
Later, Ivan stood out on one of the many terraces outside the house he’d bought in Malibu not long after he’d signed on to play Jonas Dark. It was perched on a bluff overlooking the great expanse of the Pacific Ocean, almost entirely made up of glass walls, some of which simply slid aside to let the natural beauty in. The complacent California sun was sinking toward the gleaming, golden-tipped water through layers of stunning reds and deep oranges, Miranda was across a continent from him, and he felt emptier than he had in years.
He didn’t want this. He’d never wanted this. It was weakness.
She was a weakness.
He saw her gorgeous smile, so unaffected and true, making the whole of Cannes disappear in a single flash far brighter than any of the cameras. He heard the sound of her cultured American voice, the fascinating way she put words together, the sweet sting of them. He felt her in his arms, that slight, delicious little tremor that shook through her when he touched her, her fingers laced tight with his as if keeping the kinds of promises she was afraid to acknowledge. He tasted her mouth, addictive and wild. He had a promise to keep to her, and he had every intention of doing exactly that. Again and again. And not only because it was part of his damned plan.
Ten days already felt like years, and not a one of them had passed.
I’m not done with you yet, Professor, he thought, as if she could hear him. As if it would change anything if she could.
“There’s something you need to see,” Nikolai said.
“I feel certain I won’t like it,” Ivan replied, turning to see