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

And he thought he could make her come. He’d said so with the same matter-of-fact confidence he’d used to tell her to listen to her messages and then get in his car in Georgetown. As if the outcome was never in any doubt.

She couldn’t seem to get that out of her head.

“You’ll be drop-dead gorgeous,” the nearest stylist told her in an accent that hinted at New York and reminded Miranda of home in this castle-like villa so far away from anything she knew. “Just like Cinderella.”

This was a business arrangement, not a fairy tale. But she couldn’t say that. She had to pretend. She had to smile as if Ivan was Prince Charming and her fairy godmother all wrapped up into one devastating male package, complete with wealth and celebrity and the breathless attention of the entire world. She had to laugh and agree. She had to act as if she found Ivan as fascinating as they all obviously did.

And if she wasn’t precisely pretending to be fascinated any longer—if that was far more encompassing and real than she wanted to admit even to herself, if it lived in her and grew with every breath and she was starting to worry it might be taking her over—

It wouldn’t be the first time Miranda had to pay a steep price for something she should have known better than to want in the first place. The only good thing to come of having so badly miscalculated once before was that she certainly wouldn’t be likely to do it again. She’d lost her family the last time. She wouldn’t lose anything else, not if she could help it.

This time she’d be smart enough to keep her mouth shut.

When Miranda finally made it down into the villa’s main reception room, she felt like a stranger to herself—and looked it. She’d hardly recognized the alien creature she’d seen in all the mirrors, though she’d oohed and aahed as necessary and declared everything glamorous .

All part of her job, she supposed. Her performance.

At the bottom of the stairs, a man waited with two cell phones clutched in each hand, a headset clamped to his ear and acrobatically spiked hair, his impatience visible.

“Hi,” she said, feeling awkward when he didn’t speak. “I’m Miranda—”

“Your goal today is to maintain total silence,” he said, his attention flicking to one of his phones, his thumbs moving rapidly over the keyboard. “But without looking like you’re not talking.” She must have made some kind of noise because he looked up, and his expression shifted from disinterested to patronizing. “I handle Ivan’s publicity. Which means you need to follow my script.”

“I’m not an actress,” Miranda said coolly. She forced herself to smile. “So.”

“No cute comments about kissing,” the man shot back as if she hadn’t spoken. “The whole world knows you can talk. You haven’t stopped talking in years, into every available microphone. But we’re selling a love story here.”

“And in this love story the great vast swell of my emotions has rendered me mute?” Miranda asked drily. “How romantic.”

The man’s eyes narrowed.

“Craig.” Ivan’s voice came from the open doorway to one of the sitting rooms, a slap of sheer, raw command. “I have it from here.”

Craig stared at Miranda for a moment, and she stared back as if he was an overly entitled freshman in one of her core classes, and she didn’t have any idea how long that would have gone on—but one of his phones began to shrill, and he stepped away to answer it.

Which meant there was nothing to do but look at Ivan. She took her time about it, one hand still gripping the banister, and when she finally got up her nerve he had moved even closer. Too close.

He looked even more absurdly handsome than he usually did plastered across all those Jonas Dark billboards, and about ten times as dangerous. He was in a sleek black tuxedo, which Miranda had seen him in a hundred times before, in a hundred different magazines, posters, advertisements. Yet it was different, somehow, standing here with him in this perfect villa in this particularly beautiful corner of the Côte d’Azur. Dressed as she was in an over-the-top concoction of a formal gown and her face meticulously made up to look like someone else’s. Someone who belonged in this life, this moment. With this man. That had been her stylists’ main objective, hadn’t it?

To make a Columbia professor look like the sort of woman a major movie star like Ivan Korovin would actually be seen with.

His dark eyes swept over her now, taking his time and taking in the lush, vibrant sweep of the gown she wore. It was a strapless column of bright red, a shade she would have avoided because of her hair, but of course, no one had asked her for her opinion on the color. Or the cut, or the fit, or anything else. Ivan had chosen it, so she would wear it. That was the deal. She should find that offensive, no doubt. But this close, all she could seem to concentrate on was how magnetic he was, how impossibly compelling—she could feel it, heating up the air between them, making it seem to crackle.

Once again, she felt like his Parisian mistress from another time. Bought, dressed, adorned. Something deep inside of her turned over, way down there in the dark, and began to glow.

“I hope you approve,” she said, and her voice was too soft. Too uncertain.

Too much like a lover’s.

“Stand up straight,” he told her, though his voice was more husky than stern, and then he reached over to physically inch her shoulders down from where she’d tensed them up behind her ears. She hardly even reacted to his hands on her bare shoulders now, and she congratulated herself. It was like a tiny spark, not a full-on wall of fire. Progress . “This is not something you toss on to go to the supermarket. This is couture. Treat the dress with respect, and it will return the favor.”

She opened her mouth to say something, anything that didn’t involve personal revolutions or Parisian mistresses, anything at all—but his dark eyes finally met hers with the force of a midnight collision, and she found she couldn’t say a word.

“Come,” he said after a moment, as if he’d taken a moment to soak her in, too. As if the intensity all around them that they were both so studiously ignoring was as loud and heavy in him as in her. “The car is waiting.”

He held out his arm and she took it, and everything felt raw, then. Too much. Too formal. Too real . Miranda didn’t understand how that was possible, when this was their most over-the-top moment yet. They were on their way to walk a red carpet. To parade down an aisle so that fans could cheer and reporters could take pictures and ask preapproved questions. So that pictures of them looking glamorous and together would be plastered across the globe, subject to any number of tabloid fantasies. What was less real than that?

And yet.

Something in her chest clutched tight. It was the fancy clothes, maybe. The dress and the jewelry they’d given her to wear with it, that she knew he’d chosen for her as well. Her hair was swept up into a sleek chignon to show off the dangling diamond earrings and the necklace was a masterpiece of intricate stones and stunning metals, making her seem to sparkle with elegance and style. Something about the idea of him picking them out for her to wear with this dress, to make her into this impossibly sophisticated version of herself, made her heart seem to stutter in her chest.

And more than all the rest of it, Ivan walked beside her, like every girl’s dream of the perfect fantasy prince.

Like her dream, anyway, she could finally admit to herself—a dream she’d packed away a long, long time ago and had been afraid to pull out into the light ever since. First because it had had no place in her father’s vicious, terrible home. And then, later, because it had seemed so silly and embarrassing a dream next to all of her important, serious studies. All of the intellectual things she’d wanted to do. Her theories, her books. Her dreams of a tenured professorship. She’d thought she’d had to choose. She’d chosen.