Читать книгу The Mistresses Collection - Оливия Гейтс - Страница 66

IVAN stood in the open doorway, seeming to fill it. His arms were crossed over his mouthwateringly bare chest, his tattoos sinuous and seductive over all of that hard male flesh, his black eyes trained on her just the way she’d seen them in all of those hot, naked dreams that still moved in her, making her head spin. Or perhaps that was the ordinary, inevitable effect of Ivan standing only a few feet away wearing nothing but a pair of loose black trousers low on his hips, leaving even his feet bare.

Miranda’s mind went blank. Her body exploded into a host of reactions she would have thought meant the onset of an intense and sudden illness had she not known better. Had she not understood by now that it was him. It was all Ivan. This desert in her throat, this flood of scalding heat between her legs. This breathless whirl of sensation, this spinning wilderness in her head.

Ivan.

Their gazes clashed. Burned.

Miranda thought there should have been a storm—sudden thunder, torrents of hail, the sizzle and pop of summer lightning—but the California sky was a calm and sleepy blue all around them.

It was Ivan. He was the storm, and Miranda was terribly afraid he was already inside of her, changing her, uprooting her and destroying her, without his having to do anything more than look at her like that.

His hard mouth curved, though she didn’t make the mistake of thinking he was truly amused. Or even really smiling, come to that.

He lifted one of his hands and crooked his finger at her in the universal signal to come, just as he had once before in a Parisian dressing room.

Like he was some kind of Russian prince after all, beckoning the peasants near, wearing so little, wanting only her instant obedience in return.

Expecting it.

“Do you think I’ll come running?” she asked, not moving. Hardly daring to breathe. Afraid her feet would betray her of their own volition.

That curve of his mouth hardened, made her chest feel tight. “Feel free to crawl.”

Miranda reminded herself that she was brave. That she was strong. That he was, as he’d once told her himself, only a man. Not a monster, despite what she’d long wanted to believe about him. Not capable of making war on her unless she let him. He was only as in control of this—of her—as she allowed.

“I’ve had a long flight,” she said. She smoothed her hands down the front of her floor-length black sundress, hoping it hid her nerves but suspecting from the way he tracked the movement that it did the opposite. She pushed on anyway. “I want something to drink. Maybe a nap. I don’t have the energy for this.”

“‘This?’” he echoed, and now he did sound amused.

“You.”

Ivan’s dark eyes narrowed slightly. He didn’t move. He simply stood there like the warrior he was, and he was, she thought, the most intimidating man she’d ever seen. The most formidable. And he terrified her, but not, she’d come to understand over the past ten days, in any of the familiar ways.

Miranda made herself walk toward him. She told herself there was no need to be the least bit intimidated, and still, that thunder rolled inside of her, that lightning crackled deep beneath her skin. That storm raged inside of her, mocking the perfection of the day.

You can do this! she congratulated herself. You can’t control him, but you can control yourself—

Ivan reached out again when she drew up next to him, and caught her by the elbow.

“Miranda.”

That was all. Just the lightest of touches, a brush of his hand. Her name.

But that was all it took.

The world sizzled, burned to white, then simmered red. Like everything simply burst into flame, incinerating her. Leaving her nothing but red-hot embers and that driving, incapacitating need.

For him. For more.

She didn’t know who moved first. Who closed the distance between them. But his mouth was on hers, hard and hot. Her hands were buried in his thick dark hair as she kissed him back, greedy and wild. There were no cameras here. No one to watch them, record them. Report back.

So there were no brakes. No boundaries. Nothing to stop the impossible rush of pure sensation.

Miranda stopped fighting and wrapped herself around that hard, tough body of his. That warrior’s physique, so roughly hewn and finely muscled. Finally, her breasts crushed into the great wall of his chest. Finally, she explored that breathtaking sweep of hot, chiseled male beauty that was his back, his waist, with her own hands. Finally.

He kissed her like a starving man. And she was just as hungry. Just as desperate.

She felt the world tilt and spin, more than usual when he was near, and he was lifting her up, pulling her legs around his waist, then taking her mouth again.

As if she was his in every possible way.

And she exulted in it. She loved the hardness of his strong, callused hand against her cheek, giving him total control over the depth and fire of the kiss. His other hand was hot and delicious against her bottom, holding her against the hardest part of him, making her feel shivery and glazed with heat. She loved the thrust of his tongue, the press of his lips, the way he teased and took in turn. He stood there like a rock, holding her so easily, as if she was made of something as insubstantial as cotton, and that made her tremble all the more.

He was so massive. So incontrovertibly male. Sinew and muscle like marble, as if he’d been carved from stone, and yet he was so hot to the touch. So hot.

He began to walk, still kissing her with all of that intensity, all of that insistent fire, and she was aware of only a jumble of things around her as he carried her into his house. There was blue everywhere—endless sky and sea through the glass on all sides, a huge abstract painting on a whitewashed wall. Wide-open rooms in that sleek modern style with unusual pops of color here and there.

But mostly she saw that hard face of his, taut with the same mad desire she felt eating her alive. Then everything shifted again and she was flat on her back on some kind of soft white rug near a fireplace that dominated one stark wall, and he was coming down over her with the kind of fluid ease and heart-stopping masculine grace that reminded her, forcefully, that his body was a sleek machine under his command, and he could make it do anything he wished.

Anything at all.

He stretched out beside her, running one of his hands down the length of her slowly, as if claiming her. Learning her. A languorous sweep from the side of one breast to the indentation of her waist, over the curve of her hip, then down the outside of her leg. It was like being bathed in lightning; electrified. One searing burst then another, the voltage of it jolting through her, making her close her eyes against the madness of this. The insanity.

He whispered that phrase again. “Milaya moya.”

“I don’t think I want to know what that means,” she whispered, hardly recognizing her own voice when she heard it, so glutted was it with the wildness inside of her, the riot of the storm he’d raised. The storm that showed no sign of easing.

When she opened her eyes, she met his. Black, searing hot—and she trembled at the passion there. The stark sensual intent.

“Sweet.” His voice was a rasp in the quiet room. Like a touch all its own, another devastating caress. Something moved across his face then, almost like a kind of anguish, then was gone. “It means ‘my sweet.’”

And then he took her mouth again, demanding and possessive, and it was long moments before she realized that as he did, he was also lifting up her dress. He tugged it above her knees. Then up to her waist. The cool air moved over her flushed skin and she froze. Reality trickled back in, and with it, a sudden sharp pang of uneasiness.

“Ivan—”

But his hand was on the bare skin of her thigh, so hot, so possessive. The storm inside her raged on, and she bit her lip. Ivan shifted and looked down at her, his clever eyes searching hers.

Slowly, inexorably, his hand moved higher. He held her gaze. Watching. Waiting.

Miranda’s breath sawed in and out. Raw. Almost painful. But she didn’t say a word. She didn’t tell him to stop. She couldn’t seem to form a single syllable. It was as if he’d shorted out her brain.

His hand crept higher and he shifted again, moving down over her with that surprising, distracting grace of his, until he kissed her thigh, right next to where his hand rested, so close to the very heart of her need.

“Ivan.” It was so hard to speak. It was so hard to feel all of this, to feel it and not simply pass out from the pleasure. Or the deeper emotion she wasn’t equipped to handle. Or the rising panic she was struggling to ignore. She didn’t know how to feel this much—how to handle this kind of passion, this storm. “I don’t …”

“You don’t what?”

He was licking her skin, tracing a lazy path of fire along her thigh, and even as she registered the fact that he was pushing her legs apart and settling himself between them, he was there. He threw a single dark look at her, black like silk and as effortlessly seductive, intently sexual, deliciously male, and then pressed his mouth against her, hard.

As if she wasn’t wearing that tiny scrap of satin between her legs at all. As if she was already naked.

Miranda arched against him, up off the floor, the pleasure like a shock wave, coursing through her, setting her alight. She felt him in her breasts, her toes. Her skin seemed to burst into flames. He curved his hands around her bottom, holding her to him, taking her. Simply taking her as if she’d always been his.

She couldn’t understand how he could wreck her like this—how he could make her feel such huge, unwieldy things, so big they were crowding her out of her own body, so giant she could hardly breathe, love and lust and electric want—

“I don’t—”

But she was panting with that terrible, impossible need and her own slick, hot response, and he simply moved her panties out of his way, then licked his way into the center of her, where she was already molten hot and he seemed to know intuitively exactly how to drive her wild.

Exactly how to make her body arch up again, her entire being focused on the sheer mastery of that hard, perfect mouth, the things that he could do, the things that he was doing—

It was too much. It was overload. Chaos. She felt strung out, lit up. How could she survive this much pleasure and still be herself? How could she be sure she would live through this at all? How could anything feel this good?

“I don’t like—”

“This?”

He did something new with his mouth, licked into her harder. Deeper. She heard a far-off scream of pleasure almost too acute to bear and only dimly understood she’d made it.

“Or this?”

He slid two long, hard fingers deep into the core of her, as if he already knew all of her secrets, as if he’d already had her a thousand times. And Miranda writhed beneath him, mindless, unable to do anything at all but feel it coming toward her, this wildness like a terror in her veins, her flesh. This impossible crisis, inexorable and his to command. Just as she was.

“I can’t—” she began.

“You can. I promised.”

And then he took the heat of her in his mouth again, performed that magic that was only his and threw her straight over the edge of the world.

That was one promise kept, Ivan thought with deep male satisfaction as she shuddered in his arms and he had to restrain himself from simply sliding into her then and there, putting the proper end to all of this torture.

God, the ways he wanted her. He was man enough to admit, here, while she still shook herself apart in his arms, that he had wanted her long before he’d met her. That he had entertained any number of fantasies about that snooty little frown of hers that meant that overeducated brain of hers was working overtime, that entrancing sweep of dark red hair that begged for his hands, that beautiful mouth of hers that criticized him so resolutely and was so hot and wild on his.

He had barely begun to scratch the surface of those fantasies. And he was running out of time.

But he wanted her with him, every step of the way. He wanted her fully aware of it when he took her, every inch and every thrust, not blissed out with what he was fairly certain, with no little smugness, was her very first orgasm.

A feeling wholly new to him moved through him then as he looked down at her. He couldn’t recognize it. He wasn’t sure he cared to. She still breathed so heavily. Her eyes were still shut tight, her face flushed red. She was making the slightest, smallest sound; it was so close to a moan, and it made him want her even more.

He settled himself beside her, propping himself up on his elbow and drew her name on the bare skin of her arm in Russian. Milaya moya. His from the start, little though she might know it. And despite what was to come.

But when her eyes finally opened, that dark jade gone green, she looked distressed. Panicked. And when she focused on him, she went pale.

“No,” she said, but her voice was strained. Choked.

She pushed against him wildly and he let her go at once, going perfectly still as she rolled and then scrambled away from him. She threw herself back against the nearest bright white couch, her dark red hair and black dress a punch of color against the pale cushions, the stark room; poignant and loud. She tugged her dress down to cover her legs and then she pulled her knees up to her chest and hugged herself.

Like a scared child, not like the woman he knew. Not his bold, fearless professor, who had never met an opponent she couldn’t argue down, no matter how foolhardy that argument might be.

“Miranda.” He made his voice calm. Soothing. “What is the matter? There is nothing to be afraid of here.”

“This can’t happen,” she said in a heartbreakingly small voice, that was not in any way hers, and then she buried her head against her knees.

A dark suspicion uncurled inside of him, making him deeply, almost incapacitatingly furious. At himself. Her insistence on the separation of mind and body. Her bloodless previous relationships, all talk and so little sex. Her hatred of what he stood for from afar, her stunned, uncertain fascination with him in person. The way she kissed him, as if she couldn’t believe he was real, as if she’d never felt anything like it before. As if some part of her was afraid. Ivan seethed. How had he managed to overlook that? But he knew. He’d been focused on the game. And that glorious heat, that want. That incandescent fire. On having her, not reading her as he should have.

He forced himself to breathe, to focus. To concentrate on here, now. Miranda.

“But it’s already happened,” he said quietly. “And here we are, all in one piece. Safe.”

“Ruined,” she whispered, more to her legs than to him, but he heard her all the same, and it felt like a sucker punch, hard and fast to the back of the head, taking him down to his knees. “You’ve ruined me.”

“I don’t have that power, Milaya,” he told her, not permitting his voice to betray a single shred of the fury that roiled inside of him. The fury or the deep sympathy he wished he could express in more than just a few paltry words in his third language. “And neither does anyone else.”

He heard a sound that was like a sob, and it broke what was left of his useless old heart into a thousand pieces. He pulled himself up into sitting position, but he didn’t go to her, though every part of him wanted to. He watched her delicate head, bent over her knees. Watched her lithe body shake slightly. Listened to the way she breathed, ragged and shallow. And he waited.

Outside, the afternoon wore on. The light thinned, the shadows began to form. The wind picked up, making the palm trees dance slightly. And still he waited.

Eventually, she lifted her head, her face wet with tears and her eyes, those beautiful, defiant eyes, too wide and much too troubled. He hated it. He wanted her dark, clever jade. He wanted that green flash of outrage, that dazed black of passion. Not this.

“This is all I have,” she told him, her voice harsh and tight with emotion. She brought up one hand and held it against her forehead, the side of her face, indicating the whole of her head as if she was no more than a brain in a jar. “This is all I have. I can’t … I don’t …”

“You did.”

Her eyes streaked to his, and she swallowed hard. “You don’t understand.”

“Then tell me.”

“How can you think this is safe, Ivan? You’re the least safe person I could possibly imagine—”

“I keep having to remind you that I am widely considered to be the greatest fighter of all time,” he said, cutting her off, his gaze intent on hers. “I still train every day with my brother, who did things so secret and so terrible in the Russian army that they dare not speak his name aloud. And I could beat him with my eyes closed.” He let that sink in. Then continued in the same quiet tone. “This is what I do. There is no power on this earth that can get to you through me, Miranda. Not one.”

She looked away, out across the vast living room toward the sea that glimmered through the glass walls on three sides. That deep, brooding Pacific blue. Ivan thought he’d lost her, and he couldn’t understand the way that felt, the things that surged in him, outraged and very nearly frantic at the very idea. He refused to accept that he couldn’t reach her, couldn’t help her. That whatever had done this to her could best him, too.

He refused to think about all the reasons why he shouldn’t be reacting this way. About how he was supposed to be breaking her apart, not building her back up.

Breathe, he ordered himself, and it took a lifetime of training, of battles hard won, to simply do it. To let her gather herself, swipe her hair back from her face and then begin to speak, as if she was talking to the ocean and he wasn’t there at all.

“He beat all of us,” she said in a low voice. “My mother. My brother. Me. We all lived in terror of setting off one of his moods, of triggering one of his rages, and it didn’t occur to me until much later, when I escaped, that there was no behavior good enough to please him—that he couldn’t be pleased, ever. That he wanted to do the things he did, or he would have stopped. He didn’t stop. He never stopped.”

“Your father,” Ivan indicated when she didn’t, and wondered why he’d imagined that money protected anyone from anything. When people remained people, and bullies remained bullies. He should know. He’d fought so hard to get away from his uncle only to find the world was filled with monsters just like him.

She nodded jerkily, still staring out the windows, her pretty face haunted.

“He was the most physical man I knew,” she whispered. “He was so big. He broke things with his hands. And he was always touching me. My head, my back, my arms—little reminders when we were out in public. That no matter how many times he smiled in church or joked around while he was coaching my brother’s soccer games, he could turn on us in an instant. And he did.”

Ivan still didn’t speak. She turned to face him then, her dark eyes searching his face as if looking for something. Disbelief? Pity? He didn’t know, and so he only gazed back at her, knowing nothing showed on his face but calm, easy compassion, no matter how it killed him to stay so quiet when what he wanted to do was find whoever had done this to her, the man who should have loved her the most, and break him into pieces. With his own big hands.

“I had one date,” she told him, her voice a painful little whisper in the quiet room. “I was sixteen. I’d decided early on that there was only one way out of there, and I was determined to take it. I studied like a maniac. I skipped two grades in school. But there was this boy.” Her smile was so sad it made his heart twist hard in his chest. “We saw a movie the week after we graduated from high school. He drove me home in his car and then he kissed me. It was my first. I forgot myself completely.” She pressed her lips together, hugged her legs tighter to her torso. “And when I walked into the house, my father called me a whore and beat me up so badly I had to stay in bed for three weeks.”

Ivan couldn’t help the sound he made then. He shook his head when she looked at him, so very carefully, as if she was waiting for him to turn on her. Which, of course, she was. And you will in the end, won’t you? a small voice inside of him asked. If you keep to the plan … But he shoved that aside.

“You are not talking about a man, Miranda,” he said quietly. “You must know this. A creature who would do such things is the worst kind of coward. My uncle was the very same sort.”

“But you fought him.” Her voice was bitter. A slap of pain, of self-recrimination. “You stood up to him.”

“I was six feet by the time I was twelve. What do you imagine you could have done? What use would fighting have been to you when he could break your bones? Where was your brother?”

She shook her head, her eyes a misery, and again, it hurt him not to reach for her, not to try to soothe her with his hands—as if that would help.

“At my college graduation, I was ready for them,” she said after a moment. She swiped at her eyes with the backs of her hands. “I’d been accepted into my graduate program. I had housing, a stipend. A job to help pay the bills. So I finally stood up to him.” Her eyes swam with tears. “I told him he was an abusive bully who’d made all our lives hell and I wanted nothing more to do with him. I thought my mother and my brother would applaud.”

Ivan sighed, knowing where this was going. “Miranda …”

“My father walked out of the restaurant,” she said very precisely, as if careful enunciation might keep her from crying. “I thought my mother would choose me but instead she told me I was dead to her, and I haven’t spoken to either of them since.” She let out a sound too hollow to be a laugh, and a tear traced a sluggish path down her cheek. “My brother thinks I’m delusional. He sends me hateful emails when he sees me on television. He thinks I need a strong hand to keep me in my place. I got a few messages from him when I was in New York and guess what? He thinks you can do the job nicely.”

Ivan sat forward slightly, and waited until her eyes met his.

“Come here,” he said. Very quietly.

She shivered, and not entirely in fear, he thought. But then she shook her head, tears swimming in her eyes again.

“I can’t. I just can’t. You make me …” She dragged a hand through her hair, scraping her hair back from her face. “You make me forget myself again, and I can’t, Ivan. I can’t.”

“You can.” He opened up his hands and laid them, palms up, on his knees. “Just as soon as it occurs to you that you have already said far nastier things to me and about me than you have ever said to a man like your father, and I have yet to harm you in any way. Just as soon as that marvelous brain of yours analyzes what that means. What it suggests about how safe you are here. With me.”

“Ivan—”

“I have very strong hands,” he said in the same tone, flipping them over on his knees, then back, inviting her to study them. “I’ve spent my entire life studying fighting. I have black belts in three martial arts systems. I’ve won every MMA championship I ever entered. You think that makes me more violent, more dangerous, than the average man?”

“Of course it does. It would have to.”

“You’re wrong.”

She didn’t like that, clearly, but she shifted position against the white couch, dropping her knees to the side and no longer hugging herself in that way, as if she was protecting herself from a blow. Her eyes moved over his hands, then back to his face.

“The more I train, the more I learn, the less I fight,” he said quietly. “The less I have to fight.”

He watched her take that in, start to think about it. He felt a trickle of relief when he saw that frown of hers again, carving that familiar line between her brows. This was the Miranda he knew. This was his Professor.

He told himself that was only relief he felt. Nothing more. Nothing deeper, more dangerous.

“Come here,” he said again, softer this time.

“I don’t think I want to.”

“I think you do.”

He still didn’t move, and after a very long time, when the sun began to sink into vibrant golds and reds across the wide horizon and the house lights came on around them, low and warm, she exhaled a long and shuddering breath. And then, very slowly, very carefully, she moved back toward him across the polished wood floor. She stopped when she was directly in front of him, and knelt there, frightened eyes big in her delicate face.

He indicated the hands he still held there, open on his knees, and she swallowed convulsively. She took another deep breath. Then she reached out and placed her hands in his, one after the other, her fingers cold and stiff. He closed his fingers over hers carefully. Slowly. Giving her ample chance to pull away.

“I’d fight your demons for you, Professor,” he whispered. “But they’d put me in jail.”

She trembled, but she didn’t pull away.

“I thought my old boyfriends were bad at sex,” she whispered in a rush, not looking at him. “But it wasn’t them, was it? It was me. There’s something wrong with me. He— I’m ruined.”

“You’re perfect,” he told her very distinctly. “And you’re safe with me. I promise you.”

She shook her head, but she didn’t move her hands, and they were warming against his, her skin heating from the contact with his. She didn’t seem to notice that she was also breathing more steadily, more easily, breath by breath. That he was calming her with his touch.

“You don’t know that,” she said after a moment, looking down at the floor. “Look what happened today.”

“Look at me.” His voice was commanding then. Sure. Her head jerked up but she met his gaze. He felt her shiver slightly, and he didn’t let go. “I’m not a teenage boy or a coward. I told you. I can control myself. You can’t hurt me. And I won’t hurt you.”

He squeezed her hands slightly in his when she began to make a face, and her gaze slid back to his, reluctantly. So reluctantly, and he saw the fear there. And more than that, the hope. It moved in him, shaming him. Making him wish for things he knew he’d never have all over again. Making him wish they were different people. Making him wish they’d met a different way, played a different game.

And as she stared back at him, that terrible tension draining from her face little by little, her skin becoming less pale, looking more and more like Miranda by the moment, he told himself that it was true. That he could keep that promise, despite what he had to do.

That he would.

But then she tilted her head forward and kissed him.