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his perspective. She liked the box she’d put him in all these years. She shoved it all aside, and tried to focus on the point of this. The reason she was here—and it wasn’t to let him take her down in his inimitable way. Again.
    “Exactly what opportunities do you see in this mess?” she asked instead, fighting to keep her voice level.
    He watched her for another long, intense moment, and Miranda had to order herself not to fidget as she stood there before him. A wild panic surged through her then, alarm bells tolling out a frantic melody, her stomach in a twist, because she had the terrible feeling that whatever was about to happen would ruin her forever, far more comprehensively and irrevocably than any kiss had done. She knew it . She could feel it hanging there in the air between them.
    And worse, she suspected he knew it, too. As if this was all just one more nightmare waiting to happen, and she the fool who had walked right into it.
    Don’t be ridiculous! she snapped at herself. Why was she reduced to hysteria in the presence of this man? Miranda had always prided herself on her calm reason, her logic. She’d studied so hard, and from such a young age, to be a scholar—to save herself from moments like this one by thinking her way out of them.
    She had weapons, too. She needed to remember that.
    But even as she hastily tried to arm herself, his midnight eyes only seemed darker, that temptation of a mouth something near enough to stern, and she had to fight to restrain a shiver. Anticipation or anxiety? She honestly didn’t know. His mouth curved, though it was not a smile, not at all, and it danced through her all the same.
    “I think we should date,” he said.

CHAPTER THREE
    “D ATE ?”
    She repeated the word in obvious horror, and then again, as if the idea of dating him was profoundly, soul-rendingly disgusting to her.
    Ivan imagined that to someone like Miranda Sweet, who he had made it his business to know had been raised in a leafy green American Dream suburb redolent with affluence, it was. She was all Ivy League ivory towers, impressive vocabulary words, intellectual pursuits—the kind of plump, thoughtful life that one could achieve only if one had never wanted for anything. While he had fought his way out of Nizhny Novgorod after the collapse of the Soviet Union with his bare hands and nothing else, save his determination to do anything—absolutely anything—to survive and escape.
    Of course she found him disgusting. It was almost amusing, really.
    Almost.
    That intriguing mouth of hers opened and then closed, and he found himself remembering the heat of it, the intoxicating kick he couldn’t seem to shake from his head. Or from the rest of him. Given how unimpressed she was with him, famously so, he should not find her so attractive. He hated that he did—hated even more that Nikolai had noted it. He suspected it spoke to the kind of deep, unmendable flaws that he’d thought he’d fought his way away from, literally, years before.
    But then again, when had he ever wanted anything safe? Safety would have been staying in Nizhny Novgorod with his brutal uncle, eking out a living as best he could when the Soviet Union fell all around them. Safety would have been doing something other than fighting. Anything else. No one fought the way he had unless they’d had to; he knew that. He’d lived it. And he had never been anything like safe in all of his life. He wouldn’t know how to want such a thing.
    But he knew what he was good at: winning. And this particular fight would take logic first, then seduction. The very underhandedness she’d accused him of—because why not live down to her expectations? Why not present her with the very Ivan Korovin she’d been conjuring up on her own all this time? It was only that fascination of his that might trip him up.
    “I should have realized,” she said eventually, her voice cool, though her eyes were much darker than before, hinting at some