was terrible. She could hardly speak. She felt as if she’d been doused in kerosene and his strong hand against her scalp, playing with her hair, was a lit match.
“Paparazzi like to take boats out into the water, pretend to be fishermen or tourists and use their telephoto lenses to take pictures of private balconies just like this one,” he said matter-of-factly. “You can say whatever insulting thing you like, but try not to show it on your face, please.”
His voice was a low, insinuating murmur, and she couldn’t seem to handle all of that naked, damp male skin, all of those sleek muscles, his fascinating tattoos, the whole of him like perfect, hammered steel.
“Oh,” she said. Idiotically.
He let his hand drop from her hair, moving to take the seat opposite hers at the small table. It was not an improvement. He thrust his strong legs out in front of him, and she had to fight to keep from moving her chair back. He was sure to read it as some kind of capitulation. A silent surrender. And with him lounging there across from her, she had no choice but to stare at his acres upon acres of pectoral muscles, his fiercely chiseled abdomen. That lethally coiled serpent, somehow beautiful despite its deadliness, announcing exactly who and what he was, and what he could do.
It was not unlike staring into a blazing light. Complete with little black spots swimming before her eyes.
“I assume you do this deliberately,” she said, forcing herself to speak past the dazed, silly feeling that made her head spin so fast. She was impatient with herself, with this absurd, outsized reaction to him. Why was one weakness or another always her first response when challenged? She’d frozen in Georgetown. She’d simply stood there and waited to be rescued, which appalled her on some deep, primal level. Why couldn’t she be as strong as she thought she was when it counted?
“What am I doing?” he asked. He picked up one of the tabloids and looked at it, his expression unreadable as he studied the article in front of him. “I am almost afraid to ask.”
“This,” Miranda said, waving a hand at all of his bared skin. “You go out of your way to accent your physicality. It’s psychological warfare at its finest. I assume that’s your goal.”
He lowered the paper and eyed her from across the table.
“Are we at war, Miranda?” he asked mildly, but she wasn’t fooled by that tone, or the way he rolled her name around in his mouth, as if it was something sugary.
“I was under the impression that you view everything as a war.” She didn’t know where the seriousness in her voice came from, or why she’d shifted into it so abruptly. She suspected it was all of that naked flesh. It made her … cranky. The sun fell all over him like a caress, making him gleam golden. He looked, again, like some kind of god. Pagan and merciless, and she shouldn’t find that so intriguing. So impossibly tempting. “And if this is a war, that means I’m the enemy, and you can treat me however you please, doesn’t it?”
His dark eyes met hers and held. Miranda was aware of the gleaming sea in the distance, the faint, sweet breeze, the deep green of the trees. The smell of flowers and fresh-cut grass, and the sun falling over the balcony, bathing them in that perfect blue and gold French light.
“Is this a complaint?” he asked after a long moment. He jerked his chin at the papers in front of him, but he didn’t drop her gaze. “Because you are not a prisoner, last I checked, and these pictures indicate that all of this is having the desired effect.”
“I never said I was a prisoner.”
He shrugged in that way of his, so unconcerned. The more lethal than charming prince of all he surveyed.
“You will know when you become my enemy, Miranda. Your life in tatters all around you will be your first clue.”
“My life is already in tatters around me,” she pointed out, not bothering to keep the bite from her voice. “I just happen to be going along with it for my own purposes. And you haven’t held up your end of the bargain yet.” She tapped her finger against the nearest tabloid. “I notice that there are a lot of pictures out there, salaciously ruining my reputation, kicking up the scandal you wanted. And meanwhile, you have yet to tell me a single thing about yourself.”
She could see the storm brewing there, behind those impossibly dark eyes of his, though his expression remained calm—and would photograph, no doubt, as if he was gazing at her in some or other sensual form of rapture.
“If you want to know something, ask it,” he said lightly, though she could hear the steel blade beneath a seemingly mild tone like that. She could see it in that warrior’s face of his. “If you are waiting for me to spontaneously volunteer something, it will be a very long wait.”
“Why are you giving up Hollywood for philanthropy?” she asked.
He shifted in his chair, and rubbed those letters over his heart with one hand absently.
“There are other ways to fight,” he said after a moment, in an odd tone. “Perhaps better ways.”
“Why did you start fighting?”
His brows arched slightly, and there was a kind of very old, very deep hardness in his gaze then.
“I was good at it.”
She blew out a breath when he didn’t elaborate. When she could tell that he wouldn’t. “That’s not an answer.”
“It is the correct answer to that particular question.” His voice was implacable, and there was something terrible and ruthless in his gaze. Although she wondered, suddenly, what was behind all of the harsh power he carried with such seeming ease. All of that heavy steel. Was it that darkness she saw glimpses of now and again? Or something else—something worse?
“That’s not much of an answer, either.”
“Perhaps you should ask better questions.”
“If you can’t tell your own story,” she said softly, “how can I trust that you’ll tell me anything at all?”
“I know what you want to hear,” Ivan said, and there was no doubting that deep, inky darkness in him then, something sharp and sad and fierce in his black eyes, in his rich voice. “Was I born the vicious monster you see before you today, made of equal parts temper and violence, a perfect fighting machine? Or did I perhaps do only what I had to do out of desperation, using my fists to escape far worse? I already know what you think of me, Professor. I have no doubt that you expect a tale that perfectly matches the character you’ve had in your pampered head all these years.” That hard mouth moved, as if he was biting back something far worse than the bitter words that fell like bullets between them on the small table. “But only one of those things is what actually happened.”
“Is this how you keep your promises, Ivan?” she asked, fighting to keep her expression smooth, her posture easy against the hard chair. As if she hadn’t felt every last one of those bullets. As if she didn’t feel riddled with them. “I’m bending over backward to do the things you want me to do, and you can’t even answer a simple question?”
“Yes, of course,” he said, and there was that hard edge to his voice then. “This is a great and terrible sacrifice for you. I keep forgetting.”
She hated the way he said that, as if she’d insulted him. And hated even more that she cared whether or not that was true. When had that happened? What could it mean? She was afraid she wouldn’t much like the answers to either of those questions, and so she shoved them aside.
But she couldn’t pretend he hadn’t pushed her off balance again, without even seeming to try. Dizzy, confused—she was sick of feeling this way. She wanted to believe it was just the jet lag. The relentlessness of her recurring nightmares that she knew were because of him. She told herself it was.
“Of course it’s a sacrifice,” she choked out heedlessly. Foolishly. He only looked at her in that dark, cold way, and she felt it inside of her like a blow. And hated that, too.