The Mistresses Collection. Оливия Гейтс

won’t.”

      Ivan followed Nikolai through the sprawling cliffside house to his media center, where a huge television screen dominated the whole of one wall. Nikolai pressed a few buttons on a remote control and the screen filled with Miranda, as if Ivan had conjured her into being with his thoughts alone. His terrible longing for one more thing he couldn’t have.

      She looked sleek and calm, standing in front of her apartment building as if she routinely held press conferences there. As if she was happy to do so, in fact. She did not appear broken or wounded in the least. She was smiling prettily at the cameras as if she’d never been more comfortable in her life.

      “This is alarming,” Ivan noted drily.

      “Just wait.”

      They were throwing questions at her, some speculative, some surprisingly knowledgeable, some insane. Some simply rude.

      “Don’t you hate Ivan Korovin?” someone yelled at her, the braying male voice rising above the rest of the din. “Didn’t you once vow that your goal in life was to take him down?”

      Miranda’s smile deepened. Became a mystery.

      “There are so many ways to take a man down,” she said, that particular smile a weapon Ivan hadn’t known she carried. But he felt it all the same, like a knife to the jugular. “Aren’t there?”

      They loved that. They howled at her, and Ivan hardly heard what they asked. He only saw the way she looked into the cameras and knew, without a single shred of doubt, that she was looking straight at him. He could see the challenge in her dark jade gaze, through the cameras, across the vastness of this wide country. He recognized an opponent when one stepped into his ring, then stepped to him.

      Her smile hinted at wickedness, played with something naughty, yet never quite crossed over that line. It was vaguely familiar, he thought. It was very nearly masterful.

      It was, he realized in sudden astonishment, his.

      She’d obviously learned it from him in France, and he found himself torn between a reluctant admiration and a cold, encompassing fury that she would use it against him like this. No matter that he planned to do far worse to her.

      “The barbarian was at the gate,” she said then, so very smoothly, undermining him that easily.

      With that single word—barbarian—she reminded the world that she’d always thought he was a Neanderthal, and let them know that she, at least, still believed he was one. As if the whole world was in on the same joke with her. Ivan felt his teeth clench hard, and forced himself to breathe.

      She shrugged, looking straight in the camera, her gaze clear. “So I let him in.”

      He had certain promises to keep to her, Ivan thought then, that fury pumping through him and then, as it always did, turning him fiercely calculating and endlessly, diabolically patient, just as he’d always been right before he’d won another fight.

      Just as he’d been before he’d crushed whatever opponent dared challenge him into an apologetic pulp.

      He’d keep his promise. He’d make her scream out his name like he was her god. Like the barbarian she believed he was already. He would take great pleasure in making her pay.

      And when he destroyed her, the way he’d always planned he would, he told himself he wouldn’t even care.

      Miranda stepped off the plane into what was, in June, already the arid height of summer in Los Angeles. The dry heat was like a hard slap, fierce and uncompromising. The ubiquitous palm trees stretched toward the hot blue sky overhead, and the hills were toasted gold and brown, looking mellow and easy despite the temperature as they sloped into the waiting sea.

      Miranda herself was determined. Resolute. France had been a disaster, she’d decided in her ten days of Ivanless solitude, and largely of her own making. She’d lost her head and then, somehow, herself. She’d let all of this become far too complicated.

      It was a business deal, not a fairy tale. Fairy tales were stories for lost children, not grown women. It was time she acted like the adult she was.

      “Do you think it is wise to declare war on me?” Ivan had asked her over the phone, not long after he’d left her to the paparazzi in New York City. Not long after Miranda had decided to reclaim some small part of what she’d lost. What she’d surrendered.

      “You are the undefeated champion in the mixed martial arts ring and on various movie screens,” Miranda had replied coolly. “But in the court of public opinion, I think we’re tied.”

      “That, Miranda,” he’d barked, “is because I have not been fighting you. Yet.”

      But he couldn’t help but fight, whatever he did. And she knew him now. Better than she wanted to. So well, in fact, that it had invaded her already fractured sleep. Nightly. She woke up in the small hours, breathless. Yearning. Shaking from the aftereffects of the disturbingly passionate images that chased each other through her head, too vivid and too carnal. Too infused with longing and lust. Too real.

      Dreams of Ivan chased her usual nightmares in a loop.

      Long-ago summer evenings mixed with the sweet Cannes breeze, Cap Ferrat shattered beneath the inevitable pain and fear, Ivan himself appeared in scenes of that same old nightmare as if he’d taken that over, too, and all of it was swept through with that wild, unshakeable need.

      None of that mattered, she told herself now, sitting quietly in the back of yet another one of Ivan’s endless fleet of cars. She stared out the window as the car drove north along the famous Pacific Coast Highway, taking her much too quickly through beach communities like Venice and Santa Monica that she knew from a thousand television programs and heading straight into the legendary heart of Malibu.

      It should not have surprised her that Ivan lived in a house of glass and architectural whimsy, perched on the edge of a rocky outcropping over the mesmerizing shift and roll of the ocean. It was bold and demanding, much like the man. It did not fade into its surroundings, nor did it lord itself over them. It simply was. It commanded attention and respect.

      I’m in so much trouble, she thought as she was driven to the front door at the top of the sweeping private drive, surrounded on all sides by proudly jutting palm trees, sweet-smelling bushes of fragrant jasmine and great tangles of bougainvillea vines in magentas and purples, a riot of bright color and soft scent before the punch of that hard, cold house beyond.

      The equivalent of that smile of his, the public one, and the formidable truth of him to back it up.

      She climbed from the back of the car, reluctantly, and stood there for a moment as it pulled away again, headed for the separate building she assumed was the garage. She looked around as the breeze flowed in from the sea and the hills, cutting the heat, smelling of smoke and rosemary, the faint hint of eucalyptus. Salt and flowers.

      She was in so much trouble.

      She’d spent all of this time locked away in her apartment five flights above the busy Manhattan streets, desperately trying to distill her experience in France into cool, incisive, purely academic sentences. Trying to describe what it was like to spend all of that time in such close proximity to a man like Ivan in the detached vocabulary of her profession. Trying to write the damned book that would make all of this worthwhile.

      And had instead found herself staring off into space, reliving every time he’d brushed his fingers over her neck, her hand, her cheek. Feeling it as if it was happening all over again, as if, were she to close her eyes, she would open them to find him there in front of her as if summoned by the force of her yearning, all of that dark promise burning in his eyes as he gazed at her.

      It was pathetic. Not to mention dangerous.

      And it didn’t matter anymore. It couldn’t. She’d been so naive—expecting that a man who’d made his life a temple to the physical wouldn’t be … incredibly, impossibly tactile. All about skin, bodies, touch. Of course he was. Of