Free No More Sweet Surrender by Caitlin Crews Page A

returned to his plane, as if he was addressing the help. Horrible, awful man. “They can accomplish a great deal in an hour-long flight. Do not argue with anything they suggest, please. I picked them for a reason.”
    “This is completely unnecessary,” Miranda said, in a scrupulously polite undertone that felt like glass against her tongue, so badly did she want to scream at him for that little performance in the dressing room. Scream, yell. Something.
    But there were people around, and she’d agreed to this charade. They’d even signed a few documents on the plane ride to France, just to make sure everything was perfectly clear. And more than that, her demons were her business. He didn’t get to know them, which she feared he would if she let herself scream at him. He didn’t get to know her —no matter what darkness he’d churned up in her with his little act for the cameras, what nightmares that performance would inevitably wreak upon her. It didn’t matter anyway. She was going to play this role, get close to him for her own purposes and then do exactly as she liked with what she learned.
    It will be worth it , she chanted to herself. It will.
    “I don’t need stylists,” she told him now, impressed with how in control she sounded, when she still felt so raw inside. When she could still feel his hands on her body, like third-degree burns. “I don’t need anything except a very large glass of wine and some privacy.”
    “I told you I have exacting standards,” he said, not even glancing up from his cell phone as they climbed from the car.
    And then he did, and she wished he hadn’t, as that too-knowing gaze of his pinned her where she stood on the tarmac, hot and black and wildly consuming. She froze. She could hardly do anything else. His hand was warm and tough where he held her elbow so lightly, so gently, and she hated that she could feel it like an electric shock, sizzling through her. Just like in the dressing room, panic and reaction warred inside of her, and it took all she had to tamp it all back down.
    “My game.” His gaze burned into her. Merciless and hot. “My rules.”
    And she’d agreed, hadn’t she? No one had made her do this. No one had forced her into any of it. She’d chosen to get in his car in Georgetown. She’d walked into his hotel suite all on her own. She’d agreed to this plan, she’d signed her name.
    She just didn’t understand why a single touch from him and she lit up inside, melting and clenching, as if he’d done much more than caress her so lightly in that dressing room. As if she’d wanted him to.
    As if she was the kind of woman who wanted.
    “Do you want the relationship we agreed upon?” she asked in a pointed undertone, pulling her arm out of his grip, entirely too aware that he lazily permitted it. “Or do you simply want to see me surrender to you in every possible way?”
    His mouth curved, hard and fierce, searing into her, connecting hard to her core. Her belly. The swell of her breasts. Then deepened, as if he could see all the ways she wanted him despite herself, as if he knew exactly what she’d felt, what she still felt. What she so desperately did not want to feel at all.
    But the fear of what she wanted, the fear of what she felt, the fear that these were all baby steps toward losing control and the horror she knew followed that kind of folly—that was hers. Yet somehow it made the fire inside of her burn all the brighter, as if to taunt her. She blamed him for that, too.
    “Ah, Professor.” It was the closest to laughter she’d ever seen him come, and something about it terrified her, as if that was a cliff she didn’t dare fall over. As if that really would be the end of her, once and for all. “You say that as if I must choose.”

CHAPTER FIVE
    T HE team of stylists presented his angry, posh professor to him with a flourish when his plane landed in Nice an hour or so later.
    Ivan swept a critical gaze over her as they brought her