No More Sweet Surrender by Caitlin Crews

I’m going to feed you from my fingers and you’ll lick them clean. And when we get back here, in private, you can tell me all about the ways you hated it and how much you dislike me, but we’ll both know the truth, won’t we?”
    His hand came up again, and she thought he might push her hair back from her face or touch her cheek, but he paused. Everything went wildly electric—white and searing. It was too hot between them, blinding and impossible, and she knew that if she breathed too hard, it would all be over. He would touch her and she would explode and she had no idea what might happen after that.
    Or, worse—she did know. She knew exactly what would happen. And she didn’t have any idea how that could be true, or why what charged through her then was as much that age-old fear of hers as it was desire. For him. As if they were made up of the same thing.
    Or why she had the strangest notion that he might be able to tell the difference.
    “We’re not in public now,” she told him from some place inside of her she hadn’t known was there, her voice the faintest whisper of sound. “There are no cameras, no people. You can’t touch me.” She swallowed. “You agreed.”
    “I know the rules.”
    But he didn’t move.
    One breath. Another. And Miranda knew they were poised on a razor’s edge, no matter what he said about rules, or what she’d said about shifting . Or what she told herself she wanted from this twisted little game.
    What she did want. She did.
    He dropped his hand and then he stepped back, as if it was harder than it should have been, and she told herself she was relieved.
    “Some day, Miranda,” he said, that fire in his gaze, that dark promise in his voice, kicking up that exquisite shiver all along her body, “you will beg me to break those rules. You will beg me to make that shift.”
    “I would rather die,” she vowed. Melodramatically, it was true.
    He smiled then, and it connected hard with her belly, her sex. With that great riot he’d stirred up inside of her, that she didn’t have the slightest idea how to handle.
    “I very, very rarely lose control of myself,” he said, another kind of promise, throwing kerosene on all of those fires again, making her think that soon there would be nothing left of her to burn. “It is one of the reasons I am who I am. Can you say the same?”
    And that was the scariest part of all of this, Miranda thought, staring back at him in all of that breathless tension, her body yearning for him in ways that boded only ill.
    Until today—until him— she’d thought she could. She’d prided herself on it.

CHAPTER SIX
    T HE next morning, Ivan ran. Hard.
    Nikolai kept pace with him through all five grueling miles, and was breathing only slightly more heavily than Ivan was when they came to a stop below the Grand Hotel, near one of the rocky beaches that sloped down into the gleaming sea. It was the sort of place he’d dreamed about when he was a boy and should have been appreciating now that it was commonplace for him, and yet all Ivan could think about was one snooty woman whose carefully orchestrated downfall should have been child’s play for him. He needed only to touch her, take her. He knew it. And he’d had the perfect opportunity to push that particular envelope yesterday—yet hadn’t.
    He had no explanation for that. But it had kept him up half the night.
    Ivan didn’t speak as they walked back through the hotel’s extensive grounds toward the villa. Beside him, Nikolai’s silence was as eloquently disapproving as ever, for all it was ferociously cold and ruthlessly contained. Ivan almost missed the half-mad, hair-trigger creature his brother had been before Ivan had abandoned him to go off and fight the whole world.
    But that Nikolai was long gone, lost to his own darkness for years now, and Ivan, too, was the civilized, Americanized version of his old self. Stripped down from his fighting weight, the better to grace Hollywood