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. Now Nikolai prided himself on being a stripped-down, shut-off machine who wanted almost nothing.
For this, too, Ivan blamed only himself.
On the laptop screen, the professor was frozen in place, her mouth deceptively soft, her delicate hands framing some point in midair. And Ivan knew, now, how she tasted—how she felt against him. He knew exactly how he’d make her pay for the things she’d said about him. All the deals he might have lost because of her campaign against him, the potential donors who balked at the idea of giving money to a man better known as a barbarian than a philanthropist, all thanks to her.
He told himself that would make the revenge he took all the sweeter.
“There are many ways to want,” he said now, quietly.
Nikolai snorted. “And far more ways than that to lose.”
“You don’t need to worry about me, Nikolai,” he said gruffly. “I know what I’m doing.”
But he was more than a little afraid that he was a liar.
Ivan Korovin, naturally, was staying in a palatial suite in the nicest hotel in Georgetown, far from the bustle and clamor of the conference. Miranda strode confidently across the lobby and into the private elevator that led to the penthouse suite, where she leaned against the wall and would have crumpled in on herself a little bit if she hadn’t been aware of the cameras, no doubt recording her every move. Anyone could be watching. Even him. The thought of his brooding black gaze on her, when she couldn’t see him in return, kept her defiantly upright.
The elevator doors opened smoothly and delivered her into a private, gilt-edged foyer, dizzy with frescoed walls and marble floors. Miranda stepped out into it, her heels loud against the hard floor, and then froze as the doors slid shut behind her. Flashes from earlier in the day scorched through her. Ivan’s hands. His mouth. That look.
Why are you really here? a small, suspicious voice asked inside of her, and she didn’t have an answer. Not one she liked.
She reached out as if to call back the elevator, but the great door at the other end of the foyer opened then, and it was too late. A terrifying man with a face like a honed and deadly blade glared at her, and she swallowed. His eyes were the harshest, coldest blue she’d ever seen, and burned like ice against her skin. But she somehow kept herself from stepping back, or showing any of the nerves that made her knees feel a little bit too weak beneath her.
“My name is Miranda—”
“Yes,” he said, cutting her off coldly, in another Russian-accented voice, though this one was a great deal less like chocolate and far more like a Cyrillic-infused knife, straight to her jugular. “We know who you are. We would not have let you up in the elevator if we did not.”
He led her through the overwhelmingly grand suite, his disapproval as obvious as it was silent. Miranda became more nervous with every step. She shouldn’t have come here. What could Ivan Korovin possibly have to say that was worth subjecting herself to this? But she followed as expected, and eventually she was ushered into a cozy, quiet sitting area that featured pretty views over the city through huge, ostentatiously curtained windows.
Ivan stood there, his strong back to her, far more impressive than his luxurious surroundings. The imposing security guard disappeared, closing the door behind him. Ivan seemed bigger here than in her memory. More intimidating, somehow—or perhaps it was only that she knew, now, how very dangerous he really was. To her. It was no longer an academic exercise. It was distressingly personal. And even so, as she had earlier today, she immediately felt something ease in her when she saw him.
Safe, that voice whispered inside of her. She couldn’t understand it. Surely he was the most dangerous of all? Surely this entire day had proved that?
He turned to meet her gaze, his own that deep, mesmerizing midnight, and a dark current seemed to hum too loud in her, drowning out her confusion. Then a devastating pulse of awareness reverberated down her spine and sent out shock waves as he closed the distance between them and beckoned her toward one of the elegant gold-and-cream sofas with a wave of his hand. He moved like liquid, ruthless and sure. He was a nightmare made real, and she couldn’t understand why her body didn’t seem to know it.
She ignored the invitation to sit. She called it self-preservation.
“Why does a man like you need bodyguards?” she asked, not aware she meant to speak.
His dark brows arched high. “By ‘a man like me,’ do I assume you mean rich? Famous?”
“Deadly,” she replied. She fought to control her own expression when his hardened, when he seemed to move closer to her without having moved at all. “Shouldn’t a man with your particular skills be able to handle himself?”
“Most