The Mistresses Collection. Оливия Гейтс

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СКАЧАТЬ CHAPTER TEN

      MIRANDA didn’t let herself think. There’d been enough of that.

      She simply kissed him again and again, angling her mouth over his the way he’d taught her, and it was sweet and right and then, once more, that fire.

      That wild, unquenchable fire that, she understood now, had always been leading her here. To him. The only man who made her burn. Who made her want to burn. Who she believed would keep her safe no matter what happened when she was nothing more than ash. Who might even fight off her nightmares, if she let him.

      Hadn’t he just proved it?

      He pulled back, though he didn’t move his hands, and she knew, somehow, that he was afraid of scaring her off again. It made her heart kick hard against her ribs. Then ache.

      “You don’t have to kiss me,” he said, frowning slightly.

      She wanted to sob. It felt like she might—or simply explode all around him, and neither one was what she wanted. So she took refuge in her favorite suit of armor.

      “Of course I don’t have to.” She raised her brows at him. “That would be coercive and repellent. Much like our public displays of feigned affection.”

      He watched her for a long moment. Then blinked. For a breath, Miranda thought he might force her back into the fragile space she could still feel all around them, clinging to them—that he might say something else so devastatingly perfect, so miraculously right, that she would collapse before him all over again—

      “Yes,” he said, the rich rumble of his mocking voice moving through her, like a shiver, his dark eyes shrewd as they tracked over her face, then down to where she gripped his hands too tightly—and didn’t let go. “I noted how repelled you were. It was your defining characteristic in all of those tabloid pictures.”

      This time, she felt that sardonic lash like the gift it was.

      “Ivan.” She waited for those midnight eyes to slide to hers again. So guarded as they searched hers, as if he was waiting for her to dissolve into sobs all over again, despite her brusque tone of voice. “Be quiet.”

      His dark eyes gleamed.

      And when she leaned in to take his mouth again, he didn’t say a word. He only kissed her back. Long and sweet. Endless. Heat spiraled into pleasure and rolled through her, making the body so recently racked in such old anguish begin to hum again. As if he was making her brand-new.

      Miranda was the one who wanted more, who pulled her hands from his to hold his face between them, that strong, hard jaw scraping gently, erotically beneath her palms. She was the one who moved closer, then closer still, unable to get enough of his taste, his touch, the sheer, dizzying magic of his mouth on hers.

      But he still didn’t move to hold her, to touch her, and eventually she couldn’t take it any longer.

      “Why aren’t you touching me?” she demanded.

      His rare, real smile lit up his face and charmed her straight through to the bone, as he lifted a hand to graze his knuckles over her cheek, like she was somehow precious to him. She wanted to sink into it—into him. She wanted to simply disappear into that smile, that touch.

      “I don’t want to be another thing that scares you, Miranda.” Something moved over his face, like a shadow, but then disappeared so fast she thought she must have imagined it. “No matter what happens.”

      “I want you,” she said with quiet conviction. Because she knew that, if nothing else. She knew it in the way she knew that she needed breath to live, and she didn’t want to examine that, analyze it. She just wanted him. Maybe she always had. Maybe that was why all of this felt so inevitable. “Not the watered-down version you trot out for the damaged woman who sobbed out a sad story on your floor.”

      “This is not ‘watered down,’” he said, that rich current of laughter in his voice then, and flirting with that hard mouth. “This is patient. I’m not at all surprised you can’t recognize it.”

      “You look at me and make me think you’ll burn me alive where I stand,” she whispered, not caring if it made her seem needy, desperate. Not caring about anything but the way she knew he could touch her—the way she wanted him to touch her. The way he’d simply … swept her up, from the first moment she’d met him. “That’s what I want, Ivan. I don’t want you to treat me like … like I’m ruined.”

      “You already think I’m a wild, untamed animal,” he pointed out bluntly, though that gleam in his eyes was brighter. Hotter. It made her flush. Squirm slightly where she knelt before him. “Why would I want to go and do something that will inevitably prove it to you?”

      “I don’t think you’re an animal,” she retorted, and as she said it, she realized that it was true. And that she hadn’t thought anything of the kind in a long time. It was astonishing. Dizzying. And it meant a whole host of things she didn’t want to think about. Not here. Not now. She slammed the door shut on all of them and looked at him instead.

      “A caveman,” he continued in that same blunt voice, as if he knew what she was thinking and didn’t care. “A Neanderthal. Testosterone-poisoned.”

      “I said all of those things, yes.” Miranda searched his face, which he kept perfectly blank. But she knew better. She knew he was fighting back the same desire that was coursing through her, making her burn all over again every time she inhaled. She could sense it like some kind of aura that surrounded them both. “Don’t tell me this is your revenge. I called you a caveman and so now you’re going to act like a Victorian maiden?”

      “Yes.” But his other hand moved then, tracing a lazy line up the length of her spine, making her turn molten hot, making goose bumps break out over her arms. “I plan to punish you with lukewarm, perfectly competent sex.”

      By the time he finished the sentence his hand had made it to the nape of her neck, and he left it there, a hot, hard, delicious weight. A kind of sensual promise. She shivered against it, into it, and that crook in the corner of his hard mouth deepened.

      “I’ve already had that,” she reminded him, breathlessly. “I’ve only had that.”

      He smiled again, and it was far wickeder this time, and seemed to shoot off sparks inside of her that flipped into explosions and made her belly tighten around that same deep, low ache that she understood, now, only he could ease.

      “And what do I do when my vastly superior touch renders you a sobbing mess on my floor yet again, as it inevitably will?” he asked gently, his tone teasing. He traced a feather-light pattern along her cheek again, then over her lips, then down to her collarbone, bathing her in light. In yearning. “I am, in fact, that good.”

      It was, Miranda realized as she blinked back the heat behind her eyes, the nicest thing this man—any man—had ever done for her. Made her feel normal. Made her feel … unruined. As if she wasn’t damaged at all.

      “Do I have to beg you to prove it?” she asked, her voice catching.

      “I believe I told you that one day, you would.”

      “I don’t know how to beg,” she said, her pulse rocketing СКАЧАТЬ