The Mistresses Collection. Оливия Гейтс

His voice was a rasp in the quiet room. Like a touch all its own, another devastating caress. Something moved across his face then, almost like a kind of anguish, then was gone. “It means ‘my sweet.’”

      And then he took her mouth again, demanding and possessive, and it was long moments before she realized that as he did, he was also lifting up her dress. He tugged it above her knees. Then up to her waist. The cool air moved over her flushed skin and she froze. Reality trickled back in, and with it, a sudden sharp pang of uneasiness.

      “Ivan—”

      But his hand was on the bare skin of her thigh, so hot, so possessive. The storm inside her raged on, and she bit her lip. Ivan shifted and looked down at her, his clever eyes searching hers.

      Slowly, inexorably, his hand moved higher. He held her gaze. Watching. Waiting.

      Miranda’s breath sawed in and out. Raw. Almost painful. But she didn’t say a word. She didn’t tell him to stop. She couldn’t seem to form a single syllable. It was as if he’d shorted out her brain.

      His hand crept higher and he shifted again, moving down over her with that surprising, distracting grace of his, until he kissed her thigh, right next to where his hand rested, so close to the very heart of her need.

      “Ivan.” It was so hard to speak. It was so hard to feel all of this, to feel it and not simply pass out from the pleasure. Or the deeper emotion she wasn’t equipped to handle. Or the rising panic she was struggling to ignore. She didn’t know how to feel this much—how to handle this kind of passion, this storm. “I don’t …”

      “You don’t what?”

      He was licking her skin, tracing a lazy path of fire along her thigh, and even as she registered the fact that he was pushing her legs apart and settling himself between them, he was there. He threw a single dark look at her, black like silk and as effortlessly seductive, intently sexual, deliciously male, and then pressed his mouth against her, hard.

      As if she wasn’t wearing that tiny scrap of satin between her legs at all. As if she was already naked.

      Miranda arched against him, up off the floor, the pleasure like a shock wave, coursing through her, setting her alight. She felt him in her breasts, her toes. Her skin seemed to burst into flames. He curved his hands around her bottom, holding her to him, taking her. Simply taking her as if she’d always been his.

      She couldn’t understand how he could wreck her like this—how he could make her feel such huge, unwieldy things, so big they were crowding her out of her own body, so giant she could hardly breathe, love and lust and electric want—

      “I don’t—”

      But she was panting with that terrible, impossible need and her own slick, hot response, and he simply moved her panties out of his way, then licked his way into the center of her, where she was already molten hot and he seemed to know intuitively exactly how to drive her wild.

      Exactly how to make her body arch up again, her entire being focused on the sheer mastery of that hard, perfect mouth, the things that he could do, the things that he was doing—

      It was too much. It was overload. Chaos. She felt strung out, lit up. How could she survive this much pleasure and still be herself? How could she be sure she would live through this at all? How could anything feel this good?

      “I don’t like—”

      “This?”

      He did something new with his mouth, licked into her harder. Deeper. She heard a far-off scream of pleasure almost too acute to bear and only dimly understood she’d made it.

      “Or this?”

      He slid two long, hard fingers deep into the core of her, as if he already knew all of her secrets, as if he’d already had her a thousand times. And Miranda writhed beneath him, mindless, unable to do anything at all but feel it coming toward her, this wildness like a terror in her veins, her flesh. This impossible crisis, inexorable and his to command. Just as she was.

      “I can’t—” she began.

      “You can. I promised.”

      And then he took the heat of her in his mouth again, performed that magic that was only his and threw her straight over the edge of the world.

      That was one promise kept, Ivan thought with deep male satisfaction as she shuddered in his arms and he had to restrain himself from simply sliding into her then and there, putting the proper end to all of this torture.

      God, the ways he wanted her. He was man enough to admit, here, while she still shook herself apart in his arms, that he had wanted her long before he’d met her. That he had entertained any number of fantasies about that snooty little frown of hers that meant that overeducated brain of hers was working overtime, that entrancing sweep of dark red hair that begged for his hands, that beautiful mouth of hers that criticized him so resolutely and was so hot and wild on his.

      He had barely begun to scratch the surface of those fantasies. And he was running out of time.

      But he wanted her with him, every step of the way. He wanted her fully aware of it when he took her, every inch and every thrust, not blissed out with what he was fairly certain, with no little smugness, was her very first orgasm.

      A feeling wholly new to him moved through him then as he looked down at her. He couldn’t recognize it. He wasn’t sure he cared to. She still breathed so heavily. Her eyes were still shut tight, her face flushed red. She was making the slightest, smallest sound; it was so close to a moan, and it made him want her even more.

      He settled himself beside her, propping himself up on his elbow and drew her name on the bare skin of her arm in Russian. Milaya moya. His from the start, little though she might know it. And despite what was to come.

      But when her eyes finally opened, that dark jade gone green, she looked distressed. Panicked. And when she focused on him, she went pale.

      “No,” she said, but her voice was strained. Choked.

      She pushed against him wildly and he let her go at once, going perfectly still as she rolled and then scrambled away from him. She threw herself back against the nearest bright white couch, her dark red hair and black dress a punch of color against the pale cushions, the stark room; poignant and loud. She tugged her dress down to cover her legs and then she pulled her knees up to her chest and hugged herself.

      Like a scared child, not like the woman he knew. Not his bold, fearless professor, who had never met an opponent she couldn’t argue down, no matter how foolhardy that argument might be.

      “Miranda.” He made his voice calm. Soothing. “What is the matter? There is nothing to be afraid of here.”

      “This can’t happen,” she said in a heartbreakingly small voice, that was not in any way hers, and then she buried her head against her knees.

      A dark suspicion uncurled inside of him, making him deeply, almost incapacitatingly furious. At himself. Her insistence on the separation of mind and body. Her bloodless previous relationships, all talk and so little sex. Her hatred of what he stood for from afar, her stunned, uncertain fascination with him in person. The way she kissed him, as if she couldn’t believe he was real, as if she’d never felt anything like it before. As if some part of her was afraid. Ivan seethed. How had he managed to overlook that? But he knew. He’d been focused on the game. And that glorious heat, that want. That incandescent fire. On having her, not reading her as he should have.

      He forced himself to breathe, to focus. To concentrate on here, now. Miranda.

      “But it’s already happened,” he said quietly. “And here we are, all in one piece. Safe.”

      “Ruined,” she whispered, more to her legs than to him, but he heard her all the same, and it felt like a sucker punch, hard and fast to the back of the head, taking him down to his knees. “You’ve ruined me.”

      “I