Miranda was still frowning down at the phone in her hand when the room phone shrilled loudly from the bedside table. She jumped, and that was when she noticed that the red light on the hotel phone was blinking, too, indicating even more messages to go along with the mounting numbers on her cell phone.
Fifty. Sixty-two.
Her heart gave a great thump in her chest. Then again. The hotel phone shrilled insistently. Feeling shaky again, and not sure why or what, exactly, she was afraid of, she forced herself to lean over and snatch it up.
“Hello?”
“Professor.”
It was Ivan Korovin, as if she’d conjured him with her wayward thoughts. She flushed hot and hated herself for it, but she would know that voice anywhere. The erotic flavor of his native Russian, that commanding tone that was purely his. It snaked through her, wrapping around her, pulling tight inside and out. She couldn’t think of a single reason why this man should be calling her. Something pulsed, hard and hot and deep in her belly, and she hated herself for that, too.
“We have nothing to discuss,” she said, proud of herself for sounding so calm. So in control. She glanced down at her phone and swallowed. Seventy-three. Eighty-nine. What was going on?
“On the contrary,” he said, and the tone he used then made her realize somewhat belatedly that there were layers of steel to him, ruthlessness and authority, that he’d been holding in reserve before.
“We have a great deal to discuss,” he continued in the kind of tone that suggested he expected nothing less than swift and immediate obedience, from her and anyone else hapless enough to stumble into his path. Hadn’t he spoken in much the same tone to Guberev? “My car is waiting for you downstairs.”
“I can’t imagine what would make you think I’d go anywhere with you,” she said almost conversationally, as if she didn’t feel the obviously insane urge to simply do what he wanted, no questions asked. But she knew where that sort of blind obedience led, didn’t she? Nowhere a smart woman wanted to go. And she had no idea what had happened to her today, what she’d become when he’d touched her—what he’d made her with that kiss that still seemed to ricochet through her body, sending up showers of sparks even all these hours later—but she had always prided herself on being smart. It had saved her once before. It would now. It was her greatest—and only—weapon. “Frankly, I don’t think I’ve heard a more spectacularly bad idea.”
There was a short, loaded pause. She could almost see that dark, fulminating gaze of his, could imagine it running over her skin like heat. She despaired of herself as her body reacted, readying itself for a possession she had no intention of allowing.
“I take it you have not checked your messages, then?”
Her heart seemed to explode against her ribs. She even looked wildly around the room in a panic, as if she thought he might leap out from behind the drapes.
But she was alone. And he, apparently, was psychic.
“How do you know I have messages?” she demanded, and she was too thrown to care that she sounded as unnerved as she felt. That her voice actually shook, and he could undoubtedly hear it as well as she could.
“Listen to a few of them.” It was another command, and harsher this time. Her heart was still pounding too hard for her to protest. “Then I suggest you get in the car.”
“You play a dangerous game, brother.”
Ivan did not have to look up from the screen of his laptop to identify the voice speaking in Russian from the doorway. He knew it as well as his own.
“Guberev?” he asked as his brother Nikolai came to stand behind him.
“Handled. He won’t be an issue again.” Ivan could sense Nikolai’s cold smile then; he didn’t have to turn to see it. “He promised me personally, and you know how I feel about promises.”
For a moment, they both watched the screen on the coffee table. It was an old video of Professor Miranda Sweet on one of those interchangeable American gossip programs, talking. Always talking. And Ivan was her favorite subject.
“Ivan Korovin is a man, not a myth,” she was saying, so cool and composed, looking unassailable and far too correct. It made him want to reach through the screen and mess her up, somehow. With his hands. His mouth. It made him want to take her on a tour of the terrible things he’d lived through, the things he’d done and had done to him, that she cheapened, somehow, with these attacks. “We tell ourselves his treatment of women in the Jonas Dark films is just part of the character he plays, but then we breathlessly follow his questionable exploits with Hollywood starlets as if it’s some kind of extended reel of those same films—”
Ivan reached out and clicked the pause button, then picked up his drink and swirled it around in the heavy crystal tumbler. Sometimes he wondered, in the darkest places inside of him, if it were true. If she was right. If she saw something in him he’d thought he’d excised from himself when he was still young. If he was a brutal pig of a man like the uncle who had raised him—all drunken fists and unrestrained savagery. Even if he’d spent the whole of his adult life distancing himself from men like that.
No doubt that was the reason he’d concocted this little plan to destroy her. At last.
He owed her nothing less. She wasn’t merely his most vocal enemy, so quick to tear him down in public. That would have been bad enough. But Professor Miranda Sweet made him question who he was. She made him doubt himself, when he was the only thing he’d ever had to depend upon. It was unforgivable.
And he wanted her, finally, to pay. That kiss might have been a mistake, but the opportunities it had presented to him once he had time to think, to strategize, felt far more like fate.
“This is begging for trouble,” Nikolai said, walking around to the front of the sofa and fixing Ivan with that frigid glare of his. “You are far too fascinated with a woman you need only to seduce and then discard.”
Ivan knew, intellectually, that his brother was a threat. His years as a soldier, the things he’d done, all he’d lost—these things made him dangerous. Unpredictable and lethal. A hard, damaged man. But he still saw only his younger brother when he looked at him. And his own guilt.
He shrugged as if he was unconcerned. “Surely the fascination will only help in the seduction.”
Nikolai’s cold eyes moved over Ivan’s face. “There are some fights even you can’t win, Vanya.”
He used the old nickname that Ivan only tolerated from family—and Nikolai was the only one left. Ivan eyed his younger brother appraisingly. Nikolai had not answered to his own family nickname in many years now. His demons were so much closer to the surface, raw and hungry. They always had been. Ivan’s tended to lurk deeper, and bite down harder. He could feel their teeth in his flesh, digging deep, even now.
“Your faith in me is touching,” Ivan said after a moment, trying not to step on his brother’s many land mines, scattered all around them. He could almost see them with his own eyes and, as ever, felt nothing but the same old guilt for his part in setting them in the first place.
“There are so many who believe that Hollywood mask of yours,” Nikolai said. “But I know you. I know she makes you bleed, little though you might show it.”
Ivan sighed. “You think I will be bested by a woman who is all bark and no bite, Nikolai? Have I fallen so far?”
“That is not the fight that worries me,” Nikolai said in a low voice, his shadowed gaze clashing with Ivan’s. He jerked his chin at the computer screen, his mouth flattening. “You should not want what you cannot have.”
Nikolai refused to talk about it, so Ivan no longer asked about the wife who had left Nikolai some five years ago and taken what scant happiness his brother had ever known with her—what little happiness that might have been left after all his harsh years in the Russian special forces.