easy tank top she wore beneath the wrap seemed even rattier than they really were in comparison to the confection of cashmere she’d found in one of the shopping bags from Paris.
It felt like a caress. Which in turn, made her think of Ivan, and his clever fingers against her skin. Her lips. It made her imagine what else he could do with those strong and battered fighter’s hands—
“Please try not to scowl so much,” Ivan said from the open doorway then, making Miranda’s heart leap in her chest though she managed, somehow, to keep from jumping in her seat. “People will begin to imagine that I am not satisfying you in bed, and all of this hard work will be for nothing.”
Miranda didn’t look up at him. She didn’t react. She flipped through the pages in front of her and congratulated herself on her far more measured, reasonable response to him today. No wild bursts of uncontrollable flames to light her up from the inside out. No embarrassing blushes. He only took getting used to, clearly. Soon she’d hardly notice him at all.
“Good morning,” she said mildly, taking a delicate sip of the coffee she’d forgotten about until this moment. She placed the china cup back down on the table very precisely, next to the French press at her elbow. “Do you consider yourself particularly narcissistic, or is it simply a natural result of your current line of work?” She smiled when she heard him sigh. “This certainty of yours that the entire world is fascinated by what you might or might not be doing in bed? It’s not healthy.”
She turned her head to look at him. It was a mistake.
Ivan lounged in the doorway to her bedchamber, glistening from a recent shower, wearing nothing more than a towel low on his hips, all of that perfectly molded male flesh just … there.
Right there.
That tattoo of his in all its black-inked, intricate glory, coiled down one side of his perfect chest like some kind of warning. It was a massive, somehow elegant serpent, sleek and deadly, and it swept down the side of his torso and then around to his back, as if it was wrapped around him like a kind of totem, ready to strike. There was the tattoo she’d seen beneath his T-shirt in Georgetown, encircling his bicep in some mysterious design of brambles and swirls then twisting down the length of his arm. And still another one, of three Cyrillic letters directly over his heart. It looked like MNP.
It was as if she’d fallen down hard and knocked the air right out of her lungs. Miranda’s pulse felt loud and hard, so fierce she could feel it behind her eyes. In her teeth. And lower, deeper, like a kettle drum, shaking her apart.
He only smiled that smile she now knew he used when they were being watched, all sex and promise. The fact that it was fake did not detract from its potency in any way, the way Miranda thought it should. The way she wished it would, in some despair.
“You were saying?” he asked, a rich vein of satisfaction in his voice. He moved toward her then, and stopped beside her chair, reaching out to run his fingers through her hair. It was a lover’s caress. It seemed almost natural, and she had the strangest urge to lean into his hand—but then she remembered where they were.
And who she was.
“What are you doing?”
It 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.”
