on my arm must live up to certain expectations, a certain standard. We are not talking about a cocktail party filled with self-satisfied academics at your university or uppity Greenwich, Connecticut, yacht club members—we are talking about the world stage.”
She’d reminded herself then that she’d already hated him on principle alone for years, so it wasn’t as if there had been any further to fall.
“And on this world stage of yours, fashion is everything?” she’d asked, unable to keep the derision from her tone and not, she’d admitted to herself, trying too hard.
He’d only watched her, those impossibly dark eyes seeing far too much, brooding and amused at once.
“On my particular stage,” he’d replied, not quite mocking her, not quite putting her in whatever he thought her place was, she’d decided; not quite, “fashion is a statement of intent. A declaration of purpose. It is taken very seriously, like it or not.”
“Fine,” she’d said stiffly. She’d reminded herself of her greater goals, the plans she’d been so eager to put into action. The book she would write, exposing him, that would make all of these humiliations, large and small, worthwhile. That would allow her to continue reaching out to those, like her, who were tired of his brand of lauded violence. “If you want to throw your money around, that’s your prerogative.”
“Thank you,” Ivan had said in that too-dark voice of his. She’d had the wild notion that he knew the way that sardonic tone moved over her skin, into her flesh. The way it had teased at her, like the lick of a dark flame. His black gaze then had mocked them both. “I do so appreciate your permission.”
And that was how, barely seventy-two hours later, Miranda found herself standing half-dressed in a wildly famous Parisian haute couture house. It had all happened so fast. She told herself that was why her head was spinning—that and the time change. Or, perhaps, those old, terrifyingly familiar nightmares that had woken her in a heart-pounding, gasping panic each night since Georgetown. She stared at herself now in the range of mirrors splayed before her, clutching what she’d been assured would one day be a fantastically glamorous gown to her chest, as if that could preserve what was left of her modesty, wondering if the sleeplessness showed as much as her bare skin did.
Not that it mattered. She might as well have been a piece of the elegant furniture for all the notice anyone took of her.
Ivan was sprawled across the opulent settee that took up a good portion of the private, luxuriously appointed dressing room, all scarlets and golds, deep carpets and magnificent draperies, while couturiers and their obsequious underlings fawned all over him. They plied him with champagne and small silver trays of hors d’oeuvres, laughed uproariously at his passable French and treated Miranda exactly the same way he had since they’d arrived hours earlier: as the nameless, no doubt interchangeable mistress he was dressing for his own amusement today, her feelings on what pieces were selected to adorn her unsolicited and unimportant.
She hardly recognized her own reflection. She felt as if she was in some kind of time warp—that if she stepped outside, it could be the decadent Paris of any past century, and she the kind of fallen woman who would consent to the seedy arrangement they were pretending to have. She shook her head slightly, as if that could clear it of leftover nightmares and time-change grogginess. As if that could make this okay.
Was she really dressing for a man’s pleasure, at his command? Had she really climbed in and out of outfits at a wave of his hand, marching in and out from behind the privacy screen erected in the corner at a word or two from him, trying on this or that depending on his expression? Had she really let him pick out an entire wardrobe for her this morning, as if she’d come to him naked and with nothing?
It had been one thing to imagine it in her head, this calculated fake relationship with very clear goals that had seemed almost inevitable, even reasonable, in that suite of his in Georgetown. But it was something else entirely to make herself do it. To let all these haughty French strangers assess her so coolly, to let them think they knew exactly how she would pay for the piles of ready-to-wear pieces Ivan had decreed acceptable for his woman, all of it packed away already into glossy shopping bags as he turned his attention to the crucial matter of the gowns she would wear on two red carpets and at his benefit over the next six weeks.
It’s the jet lag, she told herself, again and again. It’s making you maudlin. It’s making everything seem so much more than it really is, so much harsher somehow, and the nightmares certainly haven’t helped.
But what she heard was that Russian-spiced voice of his, calling her my woman in his offhanded way, the sound of it echoing around and around in her head until her chest felt tight.
Ivan glanced up then, and caught her gaze in the gleaming bank of mirrors. She could see that focused fire in the depths of his black eyes, and was aware, anew, of the length of her naked back that was exposed to him, the glorious, shimmering blue fabric they’d pinned onto her yawning open almost all the way down to the top of her panties, which were the only thing of hers she wore.
She might as well have been naked, suddenly. She felt naked.
Like she was no more than an object, displayed for his brooding perusal.
Which was, of course, exactly what she was today, Miranda reminded herself sharply. Exactly what she was supposed to be. They’d agreed. She had agreed.
This was too much. It was too disturbing. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t do this—
His lips moved then, distinctly. And though he only mouthed the word, for her eyes alone, Miranda heard it like a thunderclap. As if he’d shouted it.
Public.
“We agreed we would only put on our little act when there were cameras around,” she’d said nervously when they were somewhere high above the Atlantic Ocean, and Ivan had settled into the wide seat across from her with a glass of wine in his hand.
Too close, she’d thought in a rising panic. He wore a white button-down shirt, crisp and untucked, that only hinted at the impressive strength beneath. And those intriguing tattoos—the one she’d seen on his arm and the teasing hint of another she could see in the open neck of his shirt, inked black on his golden skin. He’d been sitting much too close, and he’d been much too compelling, and she’d had no time to process any of this.
She’d returned home from Washington the day after their kiss to find paparazzi camped out outside her apartment building high on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. She’d holed up indoors, grateful that Columbia’s commencement ceremony had been the week before and that she’d finished teaching all of her classes for the semester. She’d pretended that none of this was happening, that everything was as it had been, that she’d never met Ivan Korovin. Or kissed him. Much less made this devil’s bargain with him.
And when the denial had run its course, she’d planned out her new book and calmed herself with bright and happy visions of her future. When he was out of her life. When she could analyze and shape and process all of this as she wished. When she could discuss that kiss in her own terms, on all the networks that had been clamoring to interview her.
When the nightmares faded away again, the way they had before she’d met him, and let her sleep.
She hadn’t been ready for him so soon after Georgetown. She hadn’t been prepared for the shock of it when he’d greeted her in the sleek silver car that had whisked them both to the airport, much less the scorching force of him once they’d found themselves alone in the sitting area of his private jet, his men up in the front or disappeared into the staterooms.
“We did not agree.” He’d drunk from his glass with apparent unconcern. “You made an announcement. I sense you do so often.”
She’d ignored that last part.
“Does that mean you don’t agree, then?” she’d asked tightly, aware only when his gaze had flicked down to her hands that she’d been clenching them