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But when she lifted her gaze to his—that slap of dark jade that he found intrigued him far more than it should, far more than he was comfortable admitting, even to himself—he understood that she had no intention of thanking him.
She was furious. At him.
He wasn’t surprised. But he was too much the fighter, still and always, not to see a flare of temper in another and want to meet it. Dominate it and control it.
Her.
After all, he thought with a certain grimness, he owed her. She’d been making his life difficult for going on two years now. Was there any name she hadn’t called him? Any lie she wasn’t prepared to tell to make her point, no matter what it cost him? Her voice echoed in his ears even now, painting him in the worst possible light, turning public opinion against him, announcing to anyone who would listen that he was exactly the kind of monster he’d spent his life fighting—
Oh, yes. He owed her.
“What,” she asked, her voice dripping with a mix of ice and fury, as if he was nothing more than a naughty student misbehaving in one of her classes, as if she was unaware of her own peril, “was that?”
“Did I startle you?” he asked idly, as if fighting off deep boredom. As if he’d already half forgotten her. It made her dark eyes glint green with outrage. “I thought it best to act swiftly.”
She moved up from her seat and on to her feet. She was not one of those drearily serious American women who feared heels, apparently. Hers were sleek and sharp and at least three inches high, and she looked entirely too comfortable in them as she stood there with a certain bravado meant, he knew, to tell him without words that she refused to be dominated by him.
But it was too late. He knew she tasted like fire.
“You grabbed me,” she bit out with that same controlled flash of temper that made him think of long, icy winters. And how they melted into summer, all the same. “You manhandled me. You...”
Her face flushed then, and Ivan found himself unaccountably fascinated by the stain of red that worked its way from her smooth cheeks down to her elegant neck. Kisses could lie, he knew. But not that telltale flush of color, making her eyes glitter and her breath come quicker. He 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.”
