No More Sweet Surrender Read Free

couldn’t look away.
    “Kissed you,” he affirmed.
    He should not find an opponent fascinating . Especially not this opponent, who had judged him so harshly and unfairly condemned him years ago. This particular opponent whose well-timed, perfectly placed barbs always seemed to hit at exactly the right moment to make him seem like some kind of deranged comic book character—hardly the reputation he wanted to have when he needed to use his celebrity brand to bolster his brand-new charity foundation. He certainly should not make the fatal mistake of noticing she was a woman, and far more compelling than simply a voice of dissent.
    “That is true,” he said darkly. “I did all of those things.”
    “How dare you?”
    “I dare many things.” He shrugged. “As I believe you have noted in nauseating detail in your cable television interviews.”
    She glared at him, and Ivan took the opportunity to study this nemesis of his from up close. She was made up of those delicate bones and graceful, patrician lines that made his blood sing, entirely against his will. She was tall for a woman, and slim, though nothing like the kind of skinny he had been too poor for too long to associate with anything but desperation. But he could see, now, that she was neither as fragile nor as brittle as he’d assumed. Her hair was a long, sleek fall of a very dark red, captivating and unusual next to those mysterious eyes. The dark trouser suit she wore was both professional and decidedly, deliciously feminine, and he found himself reliving the brief, sweet crush of her small yet perfectly rounded breasts against his chest when he’d kissed her.
    It was the closest he’d come to pure want in longer than he could remember.
    He told himself he hated it.
    “Dmitry Guberev is a remarkably unpleasant man who thinks his new money makes him strong,” Ivan said curtly, deeply annoyed with himself. “He had a very short, very pathetic career as a fighter in Kiev, and is now some kind of fight promoter. I convinced him to leave you alone in the only way he was likely to understand. If you choose to take offense at that, I can’t stop you.”
    “By telling him I’m yours ?” The icy emphasis she put on the last word poked at him, made him want to heat her up—and he knew how, now, didn’t he? He knew exactly how to kiss her, how to taste her, how to angle his mouth over hers for a wilder, better fit. “How medieval. Your what , may I ask?”
    “I believe he thinks you are my lover,” Ivan said silkily, testing out the word on his tongue even as he tested the idea in his head, and despite the fact he knew it was as insane as it was impossible. Self-sabotage at its finest. This woman was poison. But he couldn’t seem to stop goading her, even so. “Not my goat.”
    “I didn’t ask you to charge in on your white horse and save me,” she said, her fascinating gaze a shade or two darker, which Ivan took to be the remnants of that same fire he couldn’t seem to put out of his head. Her cultured American voice remained smooth.
    She sounded like those dark gray pearls she wore in an elegant loop around her neck, smooth and supple and expensive, impossibly aristocratic. She was well out of the reach of a desperately poor kid who’d grown up hard in Nizhny Novgorod when it was still known as Gorky, the Russian word for bitter— which was precisely how he recalled those dark, cold years. Maybe that was why she got beneath his skin; it had been a long time now since anyone had dismissed him the way this woman did. He didn’t like it.
    Or, he reminded himself pointedly, her.
    “I didn’t need your help,” she continued, all offended dignity, as if he hadn’t seen that look in her eyes in the moment before he’d involved himself. As if he hadn’t seen that painfully familiar flash of something too much like helpless misery wash over her expressive face.
    But she wasn’t his responsibility, he told himself now. She had made herself his