The Mistresses Collection. Оливия Гейтс

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СКАЧАТЬ maniac. I skipped two grades in school. But there was this boy.” Her smile was so sad it made his heart twist hard in his chest. “We saw a movie the week after we graduated from high school. He drove me home in his car and then he kissed me. It was my first. I forgot myself completely.” She pressed her lips together, hugged her legs tighter to her torso. “And when I walked into the house, my father called me a whore and beat me up so badly I had to stay in bed for three weeks.”

      Ivan couldn’t help the sound he made then. He shook his head when she looked at him, so very carefully, as if she was waiting for him to turn on her. Which, of course, she was. And you will in the end, won’t you? a small voice inside of him asked. If you keep to the plan … But he shoved that aside.

      “You are not talking about a man, Miranda,” he said quietly. “You must know this. A creature who would do such things is the worst kind of coward. My uncle was the very same sort.”

      “But you fought him.” Her voice was bitter. A slap of pain, of self-recrimination. “You stood up to him.”

      “I was six feet by the time I was twelve. What do you imagine you could have done? What use would fighting have been to you when he could break your bones? Where was your brother?”

      She shook her head, her eyes a misery, and again, it hurt him not to reach for her, not to try to soothe her with his hands—as if that would help.

      “At my college graduation, I was ready for them,” she said after a moment. She swiped at her eyes with the backs of her hands. “I’d been accepted into my graduate program. I had housing, a stipend. A job to help pay the bills. So I finally stood up to him.” Her eyes swam with tears. “I told him he was an abusive bully who’d made all our lives hell and I wanted nothing more to do with him. I thought my mother and my brother would applaud.”

      Ivan sighed, knowing where this was going. “Miranda …”

      “My father walked out of the restaurant,” she said very precisely, as if careful enunciation might keep her from crying. “I thought my mother would choose me but instead she told me I was dead to her, and I haven’t spoken to either of them since.” She let out a sound too hollow to be a laugh, and a tear traced a sluggish path down her cheek. “My brother thinks I’m delusional. He sends me hateful emails when he sees me on television. He thinks I need a strong hand to keep me in my place. I got a few messages from him when I was in New York and guess what? He thinks you can do the job nicely.”

      Ivan sat forward slightly, and waited until her eyes met his.

      “Come here,” he said. Very quietly.

      She shivered, and not entirely in fear, he thought. But then she shook her head, tears swimming in her eyes again.

      “I can’t. I just can’t. You make me …” She dragged a hand through her hair, scraping her hair back from her face. “You make me forget myself again, and I can’t, Ivan. I can’t.”

      “You can.” He opened up his hands and laid them, palms up, on his knees. “Just as soon as it occurs to you that you have already said far nastier things to me and about me than you have ever said to a man like your father, and I have yet to harm you in any way. Just as soon as that marvelous brain of yours analyzes what that means. What it suggests about how safe you are here. With me.”

      “Ivan—”

      “I have very strong hands,” he said in the same tone, flipping them over on his knees, then back, inviting her to study them. “I’ve spent my entire life studying fighting. I have black belts in three martial arts systems. I’ve won every MMA championship I ever entered. You think that makes me more violent, more dangerous, than the average man?”

      “Of course it does. It would have to.”

      “You’re wrong.”

      She didn’t like that, clearly, but she shifted position against the white couch, dropping her knees to the side and no longer hugging herself in that way, as if she was protecting herself from a blow. Her eyes moved over his hands, then back to his face.

      “The more I train, the more I learn, the less I fight,” he said quietly. “The less I have to fight.”

      He watched her take that in, start to think about it. He felt a trickle of relief when he saw that frown of hers again, carving that familiar line between her brows. This was the Miranda he knew. This was his Professor.

      He told himself that was only relief he felt. Nothing more. Nothing deeper, more dangerous.

      “Come here,” he said again, softer this time.

      “I don’t think I want to.”

      “I think you do.”

      He still didn’t move, and after a very long time, when the sun began to sink into vibrant golds and reds across the wide horizon and the house lights came on around them, low and warm, she exhaled a long and shuddering breath. And then, very slowly, very carefully, she moved back toward him across the polished wood floor. She stopped when she was directly in front of him, and knelt there, frightened eyes big in her delicate face.

      He indicated the hands he still held there, open on his knees, and she swallowed convulsively. She took another deep breath. Then she reached out and placed her hands in his, one after the other, her fingers cold and stiff. He closed his fingers over hers carefully. Slowly. Giving her ample chance to pull away.

      “I’d fight your demons for you, Professor,” he whispered. “But they’d put me in jail.”

      She trembled, but she didn’t pull away.

      “I thought my old boyfriends were bad at sex,” she whispered in a rush, not looking at him. “But it wasn’t them, was it? It was me. There’s something wrong with me. He— I’m ruined.”

      “You’re perfect,” he told her very distinctly. “And you’re safe with me. I promise you.”

      She shook her head, but she didn’t move her hands, and they were warming against his, her skin heating from the contact with his. She didn’t seem to notice that she was also breathing more steadily, more easily, breath by breath. That he was calming her with his touch.

      “You don’t know that,” she said after a moment, looking down at the floor. “Look what happened today.”

      “Look at me.” His voice was commanding then. Sure. Her head jerked up but she met his gaze. He felt her shiver slightly, and he didn’t let go. “I’m not a teenage boy or a coward. I told you. I can control myself. You can’t hurt me. And I won’t hurt you.”

      He squeezed her hands slightly in his when she began to make a face, and her gaze slid back to his, reluctantly. So reluctantly, and he saw the fear there. And more than that, the hope. It moved in him, shaming him. Making him wish for things he knew he’d never have all over again. Making him wish they were different people. Making him wish they’d met a different way, played a different game.

      And as she stared back at him, that terrible tension draining from her face little by little, her skin becoming less pale, looking more and more like Miranda by the moment, he told himself that it was true. That he could keep that promise, despite what he had to do.

      That he would.

      But СКАЧАТЬ