“By the likes of me,” Ivan said, his voice a kind of harsh, terrible growl, and that hurt even more. “Rough and uneducated brute that I am. I understand. It is a tremendous sacrifice indeed. You might as well fling yourself on the nearest bonfire for relief, such is the extent of your suffering at my hands.”
“I don’t mean that,” she blurted, flustered, something about that awful look on his face twisting through her, making her ache in new and strange ways, making her doubt herself and hate herself all the more, and she wasn’t even sure why. Or why she couldn’t seem to stand the thought of this man in pain. “I mean—at all. In general. Not just by you.”
She could not possibly be saying what Ivan thought she was saying.
It was impossible. He knew it was impossible—he’d been the one touching her in Paris, for God’s sake. He’d kissed her in Georgetown. He’d watched her fight it, yes, but then lean into it, soak it up. He’d drunk in all her exquisite responses, the shivers she couldn’t hide and the tremors she fought to repress, the glaze in her eyes, the softening of her body when she’d stood tucked up beneath his arm. And he forgot, then, that all of that had been supposedly calculated on his part. He just knew it was real on hers.
“Exactly what are you saying?” he asked, searching her face for clues.
He saw only that delicious heat, climbing up her cheeks, and the sheen of acute embarrassment in her dark jade gaze, making them seem blacker, deeper. She swallowed, and then pressed her lips together, firmly, as if fighting to calm herself.
“What I just said.” She shrugged, a defensiveness to the movement that he imagined she had no idea betrayed her as much as it did. Why he found it fascinating was something else entirely. “I believe in mind over body. That’s what matters to me. My mind. Everything I’ve done to get to where I am is because of it.” She looked at him as if she expected an argument, and when he only regarded her in silence she sat up straighter, taller. Gathering herself. “I graduated from high school at sixteen. I entered my Ph.D. program before I was twenty. I was always focused on work. Touching is …” The flush on her cheeks deepened. Her eyes looked almost glazed. Panicked, Ivan thought. “Has always been completely incidental to my life in every way.”
“So you are frigid.”
He knew, categorically, she was no such thing. But did she know it? Was it possible she didn’t? Or was this some kind of twisted mind game women like her played with men like him?
“Of course not.” Her eyes cleared slightly, then narrowed as she looked at him. As if she was offended by the question.
“Are you a virgin, then?” He couldn’t help the way his mouth curved at the idea, as if he was the very caveman she’d accused him of being. He shouldn’t have cared. He shouldn’t have wondered, suddenly and with far too many detailed images, what it would be like to be her first. “Chaste and untouched?”
“Yes,” she replied, her voice tart. Offended, perhaps. Or simply annoyed. “And I am also a unicorn. Surprise!”
“Then tell me what you mean,” he said, ignoring the sarcasm. Almost enjoying it, if he was honest. “Because the mind and the body are not separate entities, Miranda. Surely they taught this in one of your Ivy League schools. You cannot choose between them. They are one and the same.”
“I’m sure that you think so.” She did that dismissive thing with her hand again, waving it at him as if to encompass everything he was. He wanted to catch it with his. Bite it. Put it to far better use. “You would.”
“Tell me,” he said then, as mildly as he could, which was perhaps not so mildly after all, “how do you suppose I became the greatest fighter in my generation? Because that is what I am. How do you imagine I forced myself to train when I was no more than a collection of agonies and bruises, and there was nothing ahead of me but more of the same?”
“Masochism?”
Ivan eyed her for a moment. Training had not brought out the masochist in him, but she might.
“My mind.” He almost smiled at her expression. “Yes, Professor. I have one.”
“If you say so,” she replied, sweet and acid all at once.
“So tell me about these lovers of yours instead,” he said then, lounging back in his chair. He didn’t know why he cared what lies this woman told herself. How could it possibly affect what would happen between them—what he would make happen? And yet here he was asking anyway. “The ones for whom touch was as unimportant as it is for you.”
“Some men are motivated by intellect,” she said loftily, clearly insinuating that he was not one among them. Reminding them both of his place—but he couldn’t tell if it was a deliberate slight or not. He let it go. “And there are more important things than sex.”
He only looked at her, brows high.
“I never said I didn’t have sex,” she said, scowling at him. “Only that it wasn’t the central focus of the relationships I’ve had.”
“I understand,” he said, almost amused then. He felt very nearly benevolent, while anticipation nearly crippled him with its intensity. “None of them satisfied you. No wonder you think such things.”
She sighed. “Because you, of course, believe that you deeply satisfy every woman who’s ever crossed your path, is that right?” She rolled her eyes. “What a shock.”
Ivan discovered, to his great surprise, that he was enjoying himself.
“My woman,” he said, very distinctly, “is, by definition and my personal preference, satisfied.”
Miranda looked unimpressed. “I think you should consider the possibility they were all faking to preserve your obviously gigantic ego.”
“Shall I prove it to you?” he asked silkily. And he wanted to. He did. More than was either wise or safe.
His challenge sat there for a moment. Her dark red hair caught the light, gleaming like a simmering fire, and he wanted her the way it seemed he always did. Despite his own intellect and reason, the very things she clearly thought he lacked. Perhaps she was right—perhaps, around her, he reverted to the animal she already believed he was.
“Why would you?” she asked, and he heard that catch in her throat, betraying her all over again. “I’m not your woman.”
“I could still make you come,” he told her quietly, not only to see her jerk in her chair, though he could admit he enjoyed that far more than he should have. “And I will. It is inevitable.”
“Back again to sex,” she began, in that professorial way of hers, as if her cheeks weren’t that intriguing shade of scarlet. As if she wasn’t breathing too fast or moving in her chair like that, as if she ached the way he did.
As if she thought he couldn’t tell.
“This is all about sex,” he said, cutting off the lecture before she could start. “That’s what the world wants to see. That’s what we’re giving them.”
“That’s the game.” But her soft mouth trembled slightly, and there was that anxious line between her brows. “It’s not real.”
“You’re forgetting all of this chemistry,” he said. He tapped his fingers against the papers spread across the table when she frowned at him. “Do you really believe this would look as good as it does if there was no connection between us?”
“Of course it would,” she whispered. As if she was trying to convince them both. Almost as if she was desperate. As well she should be, he thought, and not that it would save her either way. Not now. “You’re an actor.”
“Yes, Miranda,” he said gently. He deliberately held her gaze with his, daring her to deny it. “But you are not.”