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“Is that what this is about?” she asked, fighting to keep her voice even, though there was no pretending she was anything like calm or cool any longer. “Sex? Am I some trophy to you?”
“That would require that being with you is some kind of reward,” he returned, all silken mockery and that razor’s edge beneath.
There was no reason at all for that to sting. Miranda told herself it didn’t—it was just this long, strange day and not nearly enough sleep. Everything stung, there had been far too much touching, and she still hadn’t forgiven herself for the things she’d let him do in that dressing room in Paris. The things she’d felt. And wanted. All of which had been bad enough before he’d called her entire hard-won career foreplay.
“I deserve an award myself,” she told him, battling to keep from raising her voice—sure that he would take too much pleasure in it if she did, as if it was evidence against her. “I’m no actor, and yet I’m parading around in clothes that aren’t mine, with pounds of makeup on my face, pretending to think it’s sexy and thrilling while you trash my entire career with one throwaway sentence—”
“Did that bother you, Professor?” he asked, his gaze suddenly harsh and intense. He pushed away from the door and moved toward her, rangy and muscled, smooth and liquid. He was mesmerizing. And a very clear threat. She knew that, she felt it in every cell, in the wild heat that enveloped her and set her heart to its panicked beating once again—but she didn’t move. “Did you find it upsetting to have your life’s work dismissed so easily? Made into a vicious little punch line for the masses to devour?”
She didn’t like the shimmering ribbon of shame that unspooled inside of her then, making her feel too hot with it. Too low. She couldn’t handle how close he was now, but she refused to let herself back away, despite every shrieking alarm inside of her that urged her to fling herself in the opposite direction. To run, screaming, while she still could. He still wore that shirt that showed far too much of his skin, that swirling hint of the tattoo on his chest, and he didn’t stop moving until he was so close she had to tilt her head back slightly to meet his intent black gaze, despite the high sandals she wore.
“So this really is about revenge for you,” she said, pretending he wasn’t looming over her, pretending even more that her heart wasn’t drumming frantically against the walls of her chest—pretending it was as simple as fear, as intimidation, when she knew very well it was a complicated mess of both. And more.
“Call it whatever you like,” he said in that intense, demanding way. “Was it revenge the first time you called me all of those names in that book of yours? Caveman Number One? The Nouveau Neanderthal? When you took it upon yourself to imagine—on camera—the most insulting reasons possible for any woman I might have dated to leave me?”
“You admit it, then.” Miranda pretended she didn’t feel the slap of his words, the unfortunate truth of them. She remembered that sense she’d gotten in Georgetown, that he’d planned all of this, that he’d known she would walk right into his trap. And she had. “This is nothing more than an elaborate exercise in petty, adolescent revenge.”
Why had she picked him all those years ago when she was working on her dissertation? There had been no shortage of widely adored, badly behaved sports heroes cluttering up the cultural consciousness, any one of whom could have made her point. Why had she zeroed in on this one?
But she knew why. She had turned a page in a magazine one afternoon and there he was, gleaming and intimidating and nearly naked, all of those muscles rippling and overwhelming, and she’d felt the punch of it. Of him. All of that rampant maleness, none of it in the least bit controlled... And she’d hated him for that feeling, for the things she felt curling inside of her, hot and wild and messy. Maybe she still did.
She sniffed now, shoving that sense of shame aside, her second thoughts so long after the fact, the probability that this was a trap she’d agreed to let him close on her. “And all because your feelings are hurt that I suggested one of your starlet girlfriends left you because you suffered from testosterone poisoning?”
