The Mistresses Collection. Оливия Гейтс

think she could know how that had exploded inside of him. What it meant. He wasn’t sure he wanted to think about it himself. He bent his head to hers, burying his face in the sweet hollow of her neck and shoulder, and set the demanding rhythm his body craved.

      And she met it. Threw back her head and gloried in it.

      Which made him that much crazier.

      She wrapped her arms around his neck, pressing those maddeningly perfect breasts into his chest. She nearly undid him. She was hot and soft and melting all around him, and he was desperate for her. For this.

      I will never get enough, he thought very distinctly.

      He heard her small, erotic moans in his ear and turned his head to capture that mouth of hers again.

      There were no games here, in this meeting of tongues and lips. As the fire that burned through them seared them both, reducing them both to nothing more than dancing flames. And still he moved in her, filled with her in ways he couldn’t begin to explore, mad with need, wild with delight at her perfect, slick fit.

      Mine, he thought when she grew taut against him, when her fingers dug into his skin and her eyes closed tight. Mine, he thought when he reached between them and found the center of desire, making her cry out his name before she hurtled once more over that cliff.

      All mine, he thought, when at last he followed her over the edge, her own name like an answered prayer on his lips.

      This was what shifting felt like, Miranda told herself the next morning, when she woke and realized there had been no nightmares. That he’d wiped them away, or helped her face them at long last. Or perhaps it was that she’d done the actual shifting some time ago, and this was what happened afterward. Either way, she was lost.

      Wholly, unutterably lost, but she couldn’t find it anywhere in her to mind. There was that little whisper of warning that moved in her, dark and distracting, but she didn’t listen to it. She couldn’t.

      There was only Ivan. At last.

      “I—” she’d begun in that heady rush of the forty-eight precious hours that followed that first night, leading up to the premiere she’d come to California to attend. “I think I …”

      But she couldn’t finish. She couldn’t quite say it.

      “I told you I was good, Professor,” he replied with that casual arrogance that made her smile, stretched out across the massive bed in his minimalistic bedroom, with nothing to soften its modern, masculine edges but the Pacific Ocean just beyond the walls of glass. Nothing to interrupt the fact of his magnificence, his perfectly honed body displayed like treasure on the sumptuously dark brown sheets.

      She was sprawled across his chest, overcome with all these things she felt. They were cracking her wide open, making her question everything. She traced the three letters tattooed over his heart.

      “What does this say?”

      “Mir,” he said gruffly. A guarded look in his eyes. “It’s the Russian word for peace.”

      Her eyes filled up, her own heart ached for him, and he took her hand away from the tattoo. She remembered the balcony in Cap Ferrat, when he’d spoken of a better way to fight.

      “Do not make mountains from molehills,” he ordered her.

      “Relax,” she’d replied, hurt when she shouldn’t have been. Just because she’d shifted into this other, more emotional place, it didn’t mean he had. It didn’t mean he would. She knew she had to come to terms with that. “This is just sex.”

      He’d pinned her with one of those brooding looks of his then, his eyes so dark it was like nighttime, and something clutched inside of her. He was a fighter with peace etched over his heart. He was more alone than anyone she’d ever known—maybe even more than she was, and something in her howled for him.

      “As long as it is not insipid sex,” he’d said after a long moment. And then he’d pulled her head to his and made her forget again. For a while.

      Ivan found himself talking. A lot.

      They sat out on a terrace overlooking the sea, the sun falling over them like a caress, and he told her about long, Russian winters that felt as if they’d never end, that stayed in a man’s bones even all these years later.

      “I like hot places,” he said, even smiling. “The hotter and drier the better.”

      She laughed. “I don’t blame you.”

      They lay in his bed, still panting from another round of the kind of sex that he thought might alter him permanently, and he told her about fighting.

      His first championship title fight. What it was like to come to the United States for the first time. How quickly he’d realized that not being fluent in English was as dangerous as not being prepared for a match—that it left him open to attack.

      “You make it sound as if you were surrounded by attackers,” she said, her fingers moving lazily through his hair.

      “I was,” he said. “I am. And only sometimes in the ring.”

      They walked along the edge of his bluff that overlooked the sea and he told her about his little-boy memories of the Soviet Union, and his far sharper and more dangerous memories of what had happened after it fell, when he was only ten and forced to grow up. Fast. How he’d lost his parents and gained his uncle. How he’d had nothing to do with all of his fear and pain and anger but fight. For his life. For Nikolai’s.

      “That must have been terrifying,” she said, frowning out at the ocean as if she was glaring at his past. “Not just losing your parents, but your whole way of life. Your whole world in one year.”

      “It made me who I am today,” he replied, his voice harder than necessary, almost as if she’d forced him to discuss this when he knew full well she hadn’t. He could not seem to keep himself from her. She had asked for the unwatered-down version, and he wanted to give it to her—a wholly new and unfamiliar urge. “For good or ill.”

      He heard the little sigh she gave then, despite the breeze that lifted the ends of her dark red hair and made it seem to glow in the sunlight.

      “Do you think we’ll spend the rest of our lives cleaning up the mess?” she asked softly. “When it wasn’t even our mess?”

      He knew what she meant. “I think the past informs everything we do. Ghosts are with us, whether we acknowledge them or not.”

      She glanced back over her shoulder at the house, then looked at him, her dark jade gaze troubled.

      “Like your brother.”

      He felt that jolt in him, and questioned again why he was doing this. Why he was sharing anything at all with her, much less these particular things. Much less himself, when he’d never told any of this to women he’d been genuinely dating from the start. There was so little time left. He had accomplished what he’d set out to do. He’d seduced her. Their fake relationship was established. All that was left was the very public, hopefully televised dumping, which would render her mute. At last.

      He should have been oozing triumph from every pore. He certainly shouldn’t have been sharing his private business. His private pain.

      But he couldn’t seem to help himself.

      He turned slightly and saw what she must have—Nikolai out on one of the higher balconies, arms crossed, watching. Always watching. He could feel his brother’s typical disapproval like its own, stiff breeze.

      “If my brother is a ghost,” he said quietly, “the fault is mine.”

      She only looked at him curiously, as if the guilt that was so much a part of him didn’t make any sense.

      “I left him,” Ivan choked out. “To the tender mercies of our uncle. He escaped into the military when he could, and he thought so little