“Out of the question.” He didn’t even pretend to consider it. “I do very minimal press, and no biographies. Ever.”
“Yes, I know.” Miranda bit back a sigh and schooled her expression into something that might pass for detached. Unmoved. Uninvested. “You refuse to talk about your past. You refuse to discuss your personal life. You refuse, and because of that, you’re everybody’s favorite mystery. Well, if I’m going to risk my reputation, you can’t refuse me. I want total access.”
“Why would I grant such a thing to someone who has already built her so-called career on tearing me to pieces in the public eye?” he asked with soft yet unmistakable menace. “Why would I give you ammunition?”
Miranda didn’t much care for the so-called-career comment, but she also didn’t mistake the steel in his tone. It would not do to forget who and what this man was. What he could do.
“You cannot possibly think me that much of a fool, Professor. Can you?”
“Consider it your chance,” she said, her mind racing.
“My chance to do what?” he asked drily. “Deliver myself willingly into your tender claws?”
“To prove me wrong.”
He let his gaze drag over her. Her mouth, her neck. Her breasts. Lower. It was deliberate. Obvious. And even so, she felt the heat of it. The kick.
“I have had more appealing offers.” He was so arrogant. Every inch the wealthy, famous man. It set her teeth on edge, but she pushed on.
“Then think of it as a challenge.” She raised her brows when his midnight gaze met hers again. “Convince me that I’m wrong about you. Convince me that I’ve been wrong about you all along. Isn’t that what you think?”
“It is what I know. It is also true.”
The way he said that seemed to hum in her. Like foreboding. Miranda shoved the feeling aside. She wanted this, suddenly, as if she’d come up with the idea herself. She wanted it fiercely.
“Show me,” she said quietly, terrified he could hear how much she wanted him to agree in her voice. Terrified he was perverse enough to do precisely the opposite because of it. “Everything. And I’ll pretend to date you. I’ll do whatever you want.”
Ages could have passed then, as he regarded her calmly from across the table in that unnerving way of his, those dark eyes of his missing nothing. He only lounged there, looking as if he was lazily mulling over what she’d said—but Miranda knew better now. There was nothing lazy about him. He was like a snake poised to strike, and twice as deadly.
“There will be rules,” he said after a while, his gaze intent on hers. “If you break them, no book. For example, if you find you cannot handle the attention we’ll get? No book.”
“Fine.” She hardly dared breathe. Was he really going to do this? Let her this close to him? Tell her things he’d steadfastly refused to tell anyone else? Let her shape it how she wished? She couldn’t believe it. “I have rules, too.”
“Of course.” He ran his fingers over his mouth, and it tugged at her as if it was her mouth he was touching in exactly the same way. “Such as?”
“No touching unless there are cameras around,” she said. Too fast. Much too fast. His black eyes shone with a dark amusement. “There have to be boundaries.”
“That is your first concern?” He sounded entirely too pleased. “Not what I think the role will entail? Not what it is like to live life in so many flashbulbs? Not what we will do if this game of pretend shifts into something else entirely?” That hard curve that flirted with a smile was mesmerizing. “Interesting.”
“Don’t psychoanalyze me,” she said, meaning to snap at him, but it came out much softer. Too much softer. As she was already losing herself, before the game had even begun. “And there will be no shifting.”
“Is that another rule?”
“A very strong preference.”
“Let me tell you my most important preference,” he said in that smoke-and-chocolate voice, and if she hadn’t known better, if she hadn’t been sitting there unable to look away from him, she would have thought he was touching her. Running his hands all over her. Making her his that easily. “I like to be in charge. Accept that and this will be far easier for you.”
She could imagine it, then. Him. All of that wildness and darkness and fire. In vivid color. She who had always thought of sex in muted tones, pleasant pastels … what was he doing to her? She knew better than to let the nightmares in. To invite them.
“You can be in charge of our fake relationship all you like,” she said, her voice betraying her, too husky and too warm. Filled with all the things she didn’t want to admit were in her head, and leaving shivery trails all through her body. “Just so long as you answer my questions. All my questions. No stonewalling. No diversions. You have to give me what I want, or I walk. That’s the only deal I’m prepared to make.”
She thought she sounded tough. Cool. Competent. Nothing more than a dedicated researcher, outlining her terms.
“As you wish, Professor,” he said then.
He did not sound in the least compliant. His dark eyes shone with a potent mixture of amusement and triumph, hard and hot. It connected with her belly, her breath.
“Okay,” she said, while her heart did cartwheels in her chest and she couldn’t seem to tear her gaze away from him, no matter what. “Then I guess we have a deal.”
Ivan’s black eyes blazed.
And Miranda was left with the unsettling notion that she’d done exactly what he’d expected her to do. That he’d led her straight here and she’d walked directly into his trap.
As if he’d known precisely what she would do, what she would say, when she’d come to him tonight.
As if he’d planned it.
IVAN insisted on starting this game of theirs immediately. And in Paris.
“That is unacceptable,” he’d told her that first night in Washington when Miranda had protested that she could simply meet him in a few days in Cannes, where, they’d agreed, they would use the annual film festival as an opportunity to show off their brand-new fake relationship. “We will go to Europe together, of course.”
He’d dismissed her protest with a certain casual ease and expectation of instant obedience that had knotted her stomach. Miranda had not cared for the uneasiness that had moved through her then, whispering suspicions she’d been afraid to look at too closely. What had she gotten herself into with this man? But she’d been afraid she knew.
“What do you plan to wear on the red carpet?” he’d asked in the same tone. He’d waved a hand dismissively over the tailored black trouser suit she wore that until that moment she’d thought was both professional and pretty. “This?”
Miranda had refused to curl up in humiliation, as she’d been fairly certain he’d intended she do. She’d wondered if that was what he was really after—if this was his revenge, to strip her down and try to embarrass her. If so, she’d thought, eyeing him across the coffee table, refusing to cower, he was in for a surprise. She’d survived far worse than this. She would survive him, too.
“I own dresses, thank you,” she’d informed him. Through her teeth. “I’ve even attended fancy events before, believe it or not.”
“This is not a negotiation, Professor,” Ivan had replied,