The Mistresses Collection. Оливия Гейтс

he’d promised when they were boys. He’d taken him from their uncle when he’d been able to do it. But first he’d had to leave him. And they were both still paying for that.

      “Is this your version of handling this situation?” Nikolai asked in a low voice, breaking the heavy silence between them. His gaze flicked over Ivan’s expression, which was when Ivan realized he was scowling.

      “It is under control.”

      Nikolai’s frigid eyes met Ivan’s. Held.

      “I can see how under control you are, of course,” he said, not even attempting to hide the sardonic lash in his voice. “As you run across Cap Ferrat as if pursued by the devil himself. Don’t trust your brother, trust your own bad eye, is that it?”

      “If you are neither my brother nor the president of our foundation while we are here,” Ivan growled at him, “because you insist upon acting as the bodyguard I don’t need, then I beg of you, Nikolai, play your part. And spare me the Russian proverbs.”

      “As you wish, boss,” Nikolai replied coolly. Not at all subserviently.

      Ivan dismissed him, breaking into a light jog for the rest of the way back to the villa. He knew why Nikolai was here—why he’d taken on the role of bodyguard the night that kiss had gone viral, when he’d been supposed to highlight his role as president of the Korovin Foundation in the run-up to the benefit gala in Los Angeles in June. His little brother was worried about him. As if he couldn’t properly seduce and then discard one irritating woman—who wanted him, no matter what lies she might tell to the contrary.

      He ran faster. He wanted to think about other things. He wanted to shower and change, and then he wanted to take his fake girlfriend out to experience a perfect, romantic, entirely feigned day in the glare of the French sunshine and as many cameras as possible.

      Because he could control that. And her. And he very badly wanted to feel as in control as he normally felt. His rules trumped her Greenwich, Connecticut, pedigree, her years of fancy, expensive education. His rules meant he could touch her like she was already his. Like he’d already won. It was his game, and she didn’t need to know how close he’d come to taking her two separate times yesterday. How close he was to forgetting why he was doing this at all.

      All she had to do was obey.

      The nightmare struck again in the night.

      It was always the same. Laughter and a giddy kind of hope, the summer evening pouring in from the wide-open windows of a small car. The hum of the cicadas, the hot, humid dark all around. And a sweet, perfect kiss that went on and on and on, making her heart swell, then beat happily inside her as she walked up a stone pathway toward a pretty brick house. And then it all turned, the way it always did, into horror. Angry faces, terrible words. Shouting. Blood and pain. Her desperate, terrified screams that no one ever heard.

      Miranda bolted awake with those same screams in her ears and scraping at the back of her throat. There were tears coursing down her face; her heart galloped in her chest and it took her a long, long time to settle herself again. To breathe normally. It was the middle of the night in a foreign country and she was still so much more afraid than she wanted to be, than she thought she should have been. She blamed Ivan Korovin for that—for tearing her back open. But there was nothing to do at 4:13 a.m. but curl up in her decadently comfortable bed, piled high with exquisite linens and the softest feather pillows, and wait for the terrible images to fade. For the sun to rise and save her from her own head. Her own past.

      She sat on the balcony outside her bedchamber now, a pile of tabloid magazines spread out before her on the small table, the glorious Cap Ferrat morning sun bathing her in gold and clearing her head. Doing its job.

      She’d kind of lost it there yesterday, if she was honest. It was all that touching in Paris and in front of those reporters. All those feelings that went along with it that she’d been so unprepared for. Of course, the nightmare had felt even worse than usual. Of course, it had struck back. She should know her old enemy better by now, she thought then.

      And her new enemy, too.

      She stared down at the tabloid pictures of her with Ivan, in the sleek little convertible and snuggled up next to him outside the hotel. If she didn’t know otherwise, she would have thought exactly what everyone else looking at these pictures would think: that this was a scorching affair. That she had been swept away, straight off her feet, by this man, despite all of their well-documented acrimony. Fairy Tale in France! one of the headlines screamed, and it wasn’t hard to guess which one they meant. Ivan was the obvious prince, widely regarded as charming by his legions of adoring fans, and that made Miranda some kind of Cinderella.

      She didn’t much care for the comparison. Especially because it felt so horribly apt.

      She pulled the light caramel-colored sweater-wrap she wore tighter around her, luxuriating in the slide of the breathtakingly soft cashmere against her arms. Ivan might be an autocratic, demanding, shockingly arrogant man, but he certainly knew how to pick out clothes. Her own cutoff denim shorts and the 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