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But he couldn’t seem to help himself.
He turned slightly and saw what she must have—Nikolai out on one of the higher balconies, arms crossed, watching. Always watching. He could feel his brother’s typical disapproval like its own, stiff breeze.
“If my brother is a ghost,” he said quietly, “the fault is mine.”
She only looked at him curiously, as if the guilt that was so much a part of him didn’t make any sense.
“I left him,” Ivan choked out. “To the tender mercies of our uncle. He escaped into the military when he could, and he thought so little of himself that he volunteered for a unit that took chunks of his soul every time he went on a mission. For a time he thought he could drink what he was missing back in, but that didn’t work. His wife left him. She took his child. He lost everything.”
“He hasn’t lost you.”
Ivan didn’t know what twisted in him, rolling over like an earthquake, shaking things loose that he hadn’t known could move. For a moment he thought the whole world shifted—this was California, after all—but Miranda still stood there, looking up at him, so pretty in something flowing and red that teased over her body to skim her thighs. So it was only him, and he didn’t know what that meant, or how to handle it.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, because he had no idea what was happening, and trying to cram it back down where it belonged seemed like the best course of action. “It’s my fault he was put in the position of having to make those decisions. If I’d stayed—”
“You would have had to make the same decisions that he did,” she interrupted him with a shrug. “Just as he could have followed your example, presumably. If he didn’t, that’s sad, but it’s not your fault.”
Ivan said nothing. He was, he thought in some astonishment, incapable of speech. That thing in him shook harder. Seismic overload, turning everything to rubble. Cities collapsing. Landscapes changing. He was surprised he didn’t fall to the ground.
Miranda looked at him, then frowned in concern. She reached over and put her hand on his arm, and he had the strangest sensation, then—that this small, slight woman was holding him up. That she could carry him, if she wanted. If he let her.
“Ivan,” she said gently. Insistently, her gaze never leaving his, and causing, he realized, the same kind of trouble all through him. He should have taken precautions. He should have listened to his brother. He should have paid more attention to what she was doing to him—because now, he was very much afraid, it was far too late. “You do know that, don’t you?”
* * *
The red carpet for Ivan’s Jonas Dark premiere didn’t overwhelm Miranda this time. She didn’t care about the cameras. She didn’t care about the roar of the crowd or the attempts at intrusive questions. She was aware of nothing but Ivan. She saw the way he looked at her that was only theirs. All of the stories he’d told her, all the ways he’d shared himself, as if he wanted to be as open to her as she was to him... It made her imagine he was not as alone as he sometimes seemed.
Or that she wasn’t.
She was dressed in the shimmering blue dress she’d worn as little more than fabric in that dressing room in Paris. It clung to her breasts and then fell like water to the floor, reminding her somehow of the sea. The back was a wide V, allowing him to brush her skin with his fingertips whenever he liked, catapulting them both back to Paris. To what could have been.
“Do you know what I wanted to do to you the last time you wore this?” he asked, murmuring into her ear as they entered the theater.
“I wanted you to do it,” she told him, smiling. “I dreamed about it for nights on end.”
“Lucky for you this is Hollywood,” he replied, that fire in dark gaze. “Where all your wildest dreams can come true.”
And he was as good as his word.
He didn’t wait for them to go back to his Malibu house. The moment they entered the limousine that was to take them from the premiere to the after-party, he pulled her to him.
“No kissing,” he told her sternly, making her melt with the heat lurking in his voice and gleaming in his gaze. “We have to look presentable.”
