Maureen Child - Mistresses - Enemies To Lovers - No More Sweet Surrender / A Deal with Di Capua / Her Return to King's Bed

“Are you ready for tomorrow?” Ivan asked. But there were whole other worlds in his gaze then. The heat between them, the dark night all around them, and so many speculative eyes on them. She could feel all of that, and his hands on her body, and the near miss of his chest a whisper away from hers.

For a moment she didn’t know what he meant.

“The red carpet,” she said finally, hoping he hadn’t noticed her hesitation. Hoping even more he didn’t think she’d been so distracted by him that she’d forgotten herself. Even if she had.

“Are you ready?” he asked again, his dark eyes cool and distant as he scanned the crowd around them. Always in character, save that one moment in Nice. Always seeking out the cameras, as if he could sense them.

It was all too much. The music, the crowd. Ivan. The carelessly commanding way he held her to him, making her body act in ways she didn’t understand or want. All of this was too much, and she couldn’t seem to think her way out of it the way she wanted to do. The way she needed to do.

“I don’t care about the red carpet,” she said quietly. “You do. What I care about is finding out about you, and despite our bargain you’ve deliberately kept me at arm’s length. Mostly.”

“My parents died in a factory fire when I was seven and Nikolai was five,” Ivan said abruptly, turning his head to look directly at her, his steps slowing, though he still moved to the music. And he still held her in that impossible grip of his, as if he had no intention of ever letting go. “We went to live with our uncle. He liked nothing but vodka and sambo. Nikolai eventually took up the vodka. I preferred sambo.” His gaze was so hard. So pitiless. She could feel it drilling into her, through her. Hurting her. “And I quickly learned to hate my uncle, so I got very good at it. I wanted to make sure that one of those drunken nights, when he thought he could beat us both into a pulp simply because we were there, he’d be wrong. And, eventually, he was.”

Miranda was afraid to move, to breathe. He looked away for a moment, pulling her with him as he wove in and out of the nearby couples. If anything, he looked colder and more forbidding, more remote, and Miranda didn’t know why that made her ache for him. As if she of all people, his enemy, could give him solace even if he’d allowed it.

“That’s why I started fighting,” he said after a long moment. He looked back at her, and made no particular attempt to conceal the bleakness in his gaze. “Are you happy to know this, Miranda? Does it change me in your eyes? Make me something less than a caveman?”

“It makes you human,” she replied without thinking, and his smile then was sharper than that look in his eyes, and as desolate.

“Exactly what you want least, I imagine,” he taunted her, and that hurt, too. It all hurt, and she wondered where this was going—and what would be left of her when it ended.

Worse, for one long breath and then the next, she didn’t even know what he meant.

And then she did, and that was the worst part of all. That he knew exactly how invested she was in maintaining her negative opinion of him.

And that he was right.

Miranda’s team of stylists descended on her the next morning, not unlike a plague of locusts, while last night’s nightmare still pulsed in her and her throat was still raw from waking up crying out loud.

“It can’t possibly take all day to get ready to walk a few feet across a sidewalk!” she’d protested when Ivan had announced at breakfast how soon the preparations for the Cannes red carpet would begin.

She hadn’t added, How hard could it be? But it had curled there between them in the clear morning air out on the terrace all the same.

“Are you basing this on your extensive experience of red carpet events?” he’d asked. He’d sounded as if he was smirking, though his hard face had remained impassive, his black gaze intent on hers.

“I bow to your superior knowledge,” she’d said, trying not to sound snide. It was unsuccessful. “As ever.”

And then she’d fled back into the villa, happy to get as far away from his too-incisive eyes as she could.

She was shooed into a chair in her bedchamber’s spacious bath and made to sit there while her team of five buzzed all around her. Her hair was teased and shaped, her brows plucked and tweezed, her nails buffed and painted.

It would have been boring, had she not had so much Ivan in her head. I could make you come , he’d said. And then he’d put his hands on her, day after day. He’d held her close. He’d danced with her and made her crave him in ways she’d never craved anything before—in ways she hadn’t even known were possible. And despite all her experience to the contrary, despite everything she knew to be true about herself and her body, she almost believed he could do what he’d said he could.

It felt like some kind of revolution.

She should not have talked about sex with him in any capacity. Why not invite the wolf in from the cold, while she was at it? Introducing sex into the conversation meant it would stay there, humming between them, clouding everything, making her nightmares that much more vivid, that much more terrifying. She didn’t know what she’d been thinking. It was just that the kind of sex she suspected Ivan was talking about had never been much of an issue for her before, one way or another. She’d been so young when she’d escaped her father’s house for the safety and sanctuary of college, and she hadn’t ever really caught up with her Yale classmates, socially or emotionally.

Graduate school had been different. Miranda might have been a bit of a late bloomer, but it had seemed to matter less at Columbia. She’d eventually had what she’d always considered perfectly nice relationships with two men she met through her studies, one for about ten months, one for just over a year. She’d gotten to know each of them over very long periods of time—years, in fact. She’d become comfortable with them long before there had been any touching, or even any dating. She’d thought sex, when they’d had it, was nice. A good way to feel connected in a very specific way to a very specific person. Very nice , she’d thought, but certainly not worth all the commotion.

It had never once occurred to her until this moment that maybe the two men she’d had sex with simply … weren’t any good at it.

That was like a second revolution, smack on top of the first, all of it fusing together somehow and turning into some sort of internal avalanche.

Ivan, clearly, would be good at it. He fairly oozed “good at it.”

Miranda eyed herself in the bathroom mirror as one of the stylists toiled away on her face, adding a bit of drama to her cheekbones and extra fullness to her lips, and hoped no one would notice how flushed she’d become.

She pulled in a ragged sort of breath, and thought of his hands on her back, his arm over her shoulders. That sheer physical intensity of his. He had been touching her—kissing her—before they’d ever exchanged a word. He was the inverse of everything she knew. No wonder she felt so inside out.

And every time he looked at her, some part of her wanted to burst into flames and burn down into ash and soot. Like he compelled her to yearn for it. For him. Which was almost more disconcerting than the fact that she melted into all of that fire anyway.

She didn’t know what that meant, she thought as she tipped her head back and let one of the women work on her eyes with pencils and eyelash clamps and a palette of shadows. But she hadn’t hated all of this mandatory touching as much as she’d thought she would, no matter how many times she tried to talk herself into an appropriate state of outrage.