she found this latest rejection a delightful intellectual challenge instead of another crushing defeat, what had really bothered Miranda was that she hadn’t been able to regulate her temperature. Too hot, too cold, like some impossible fever—and she couldn’t get Ivan Korovin’s frank midnight gaze out of her head. The way he’d looked at her, as if she was dessert and he wanted to indulge. Like he’d been imagining doing it right then and there in the conference hotel lobby, no matter what barely civilized things he might have said.
How could one man make her feel safe and out of control at the same time?
Eventually, the worst of the storm passed. She leaned her head back against the door and blew out a long breath. She kicked off her shoes and tied her long hair back into a low ponytail, wishing she’d booked herself on the train back to her home in New York City tonight. She’d planned to sleep in the following morning and then head back to her office on the Columbia University campus, where she’d taught since being awarded her Ph.D. there three years ago, reinvigorated from the conference and plotting out how she’d use what she’d learned in her latest article.
She hadn’t planned on that awful Guberev. Much less Ivan Korovin.
Or that devastating mouth of his.
A long, hot bath will do the trick, she told herself now, rubbing her hands over her face, trying to banish all of her ghosts. Old and new. All those nightmares in the making. Along with a nice big glass of wine.
This was nothing more than a delayed reaction to Guberev and the sickeningly familiar sensations he had unleashed within her. And all of those memories of her childhood—but that was nothing Miranda particularly wanted to confront head-on tonight.
Unbidden, then, she remembered the way Ivan Korovin, of all people, had pulled her against him. So gently. So easily. He hadn’t been what she’d expected, what she’d imagined him to be. What she’d spent a lot of airtime telling people he was. That rich, dark voice, like the finest chocolate, that had seemed to warm her no matter how cold the words he used. That stern, black gaze of his that had seen too much. The way he’d held her, as if she was precious enough to save. As if she really was his. That had been dizzying enough. And then that kiss …
She sank down on the soft bed that took up most of the efficient room—almost involuntarily, as if his kiss was still that potent in her memory. She was obviously more shaken up than she’d thought. She remembered that she’d switched her phone off before her segment earlier and pulled her bag to her now, rummaging through the outside pocket. Finding her cell phone, she powered it up and sat there, waiting, flexing her bare, stiff toes into the carpeted floor beneath her and staring out the window into the Georgetown night.
Breathe, she ordered herself. But she couldn’t seem to pull in a deep enough breath, and all she could see was that considering gleam in Ivan’s midnight gaze. Something licked in her then, dark and secret, and she felt herself flush with an unwelcome heat. She told herself she was overtired.
She glanced down at her phone as the welcome screen appeared, and watched as the tiny icon noting the number of missed calls appeared.
And rose.
And kept rising.
Next to it, another icon showing her number of emails did the same. Ten. Twenty. Thirty-five. Forty. Her heart began to beat fast and hard, as if to match.
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