Page 157 of Ruthless Rustanovs

Ivan found her in the solarium, just as Gregory had said.

Since this room received the most sun in the house, he’d expected to find her curled up in a seat.

Reading, or playing a game on her phone.

The house didn’t having any televisions…

the reception was non-existent up here in the mountains.

Same for Wi-Fi. So reading, exercising, and playing games were pretty much the only available activities unless you had a job to keep you occupied.

No wonder Thompson Wolfson had opted out of spending his winters here, choosing instead to gamble away the months in places like Vegas.

But Sola wasn’t up to anything nearly so quiet.

When he walked in the room, Ivan was hit by a wall of sound.

Opera, he realized, after the singer belted out a few bars.

But it definitely wasn’t the kind of opera he’d had to struggle to stay awake through in the past. This music was backed by synthesizers that sounded like sci-fi laser guns blasting in the background.

If that wasn’t strange enough, Sola was in the middle of the large room, moving from place to place with each bar sung. Turning this way and that while lip-synching, as if testing out the various positions.

He watched her bemusedly for a few seconds until she turned and spotted him standing in the doorway. She yelped and then her mouth moved with words he couldn’t hear. He tilted his head to the side and shook his head, mouthing, “Too loud!”

She scurried over to the sound system he’d never bothered to use and switched the music off.

But it was still ringing in his ears when she asked, “Hey, what’s up? What are you doing here?”

All of the bruising had faded from her face now, and even though she wasn’t wearing any make-up, he was struck by her prettiness. It was like she was lit up from the inside with a kind of light he’d never known.

He folded his arms across his massive chest, to keep himself from following through on the compulsion to reach out and remove her glasses. “The question is, what are you doing here?” he returned, voice terse with restraint.

“What?! Oh wait, hold on…” She reached up and pulled two orange foam earplugs from her ears. “Forgot I had these in.”

He lifted his good eyebrow. She’d come here from California with just the clothes on her back and, apparently, a pair of earplugs. He was beginning to realize this woman had very strange priorities.

“What exactly were you doing?” he asked again.

“Oh, I’m…practicing, I guess you’d say. I’m a directing grad when I’m not serving time as a prisoner by proxy. I’m trying to figure out as much blocking for my thesis production as I can, so I can hit the ground running when I go back to school in the spring.”

An unfamiliar sensation assailed him. The thought of her not being able to complete her studies because of the bargain they’d struck didn’t sit well with him. And he shifted from foot to foot, feeling the oddest compulsion to apologize.

“So you’re here, because…?” she prompted.

She didn’t meet his eyes as she asked this question, he noticed. Instead, she looked around the room, as if trying to find something to get her out of even this small conversation with him.

But he wanted her direct gaze. The one she’d given him that first night when she looked at his face and into his eyes without flinching. So he tried again.

“You are directing opera in the spring?” he asked in his best, most clear English. “Is it a new work? I’ve never heard this before.”

That did it. Her face lit up and she gave him her full attention.

“Yes! It’s a new work. Set in space. So, I guess you could say it’s literally a space opera.

One of the writing grads in the playwriting program wrote the script, and it’s brilliant.

I already know exactly who to cast in it, and I’ve been working with a production designer on the set.

Hopefully if I do enough groundwork, I won’t be too far behind when I return to school. ”

He wondered if she had any idea how cute she looked when she did that. Thought aloud, with her whole face scrunched up, her eyes widening and narrowing with excitement.

“Are you an opera fan?” she asked.

“No,” he answered, before remembering his old rules about telling women exactly what they wanted to hear in order to get them into bed. Before he could keep the light from dying on her face.

“Oh.”

“It’s just that I’ve seen too much of it. My family had a box at our local opera house in St. Petersburg, and I was made to attend every production from the age of six.”

“Well, that sounds really messed up,” she said with a teasing lift of her dark eyebrows. “I can tell you had a really hard childhood. Box seats at the opera, wow…”

A hot fizz of anger bubbled in his head. He didn’t like being dismissed by her. Or being made to feel like a spoiled brat.

Even if it was true.

“I think rich and poor alike can agree opera is sometimes boring.”

“Not the way I’m going to stage it,” she answered with a grin. “My thesis is all about making opera accessible and interesting. And finding ways to keep production costs down, so regular people can attend. Maybe even with children.”

He shook his head, having never met a woman so passionate about her future plans. “Why does bringing opera to the common people excite you so much?” he asked, truly wanting to know.

In his experience, opera attendance was often used to further set the rich apart from the poor.

Box seats and season tickets were a luxury only the wealthiest could afford in Russia, and he assumed it was the same here in America.

He recalled seeing a few scruffy-looking individuals in the standing-room only section from his box seat vantage point, but the majority of opera attendees in Russia were from the same social strata as him.

She started to reply but stopped.

“Like you really care,” she muttered, dropping her gaze away from him.

“But—”

“Did you come in here for a reason or what? I’m kind of in the middle of something…”

Hostile words, but then her gaze drifted slowly down his body. And Ivan found himself responding to the heat that flared in her eyes before she quickly looked away.

He stepped closer. Liking the way it felt to have a woman look at him again with raw interest. Especially since he was interested in her. Very, very interested.

“I came here to tell you something, Sola,” he said, his voice sounding hoarse even to his own ears.

He cleared his throat and retried, threading his voice with a little more authority as he informed her, “Hannah and Gregory have the night off for the full moon holiday. You will eat the dinner Hannah has made for us with me in the kitchen.”

“Ah…” He watched her throat work up and down as she swallowed. “No, thank you.”

“It is not a request,” he informed her.

“Well, it should have been. So, no. I won’t.”

She carefully stepped away from him.

And he very intentionally stepped closer to her, invading her personal space the way he used to when he was in the habit of challenging and fighting grown men.

Of course he’d never put his hands on Sola. At least not with the intention of hurting her.

But he had the same feeling he used to get when he threw the first punch in the ring, when he said, “You have been watching me. Every day you watch me swim, but yet you refuse to have dinner with me.”

Sola’s face fell, and she suddenly looked very flustered.

“Yes…I mean, no…I mean, I haven’t been…” She took a deep steadying breath. “Look, Hannah and Gregory have the night off and you’re telling me to have dinner with you and I’m saying no. Because I don’t want to. Not with you.”

“Because of my face,” he sneered. “You are attracted to my body, but my face repels you…”

“No,” she replied, her tone tight as a drawn string.

“Your face has nothing to do with it. It’s still your attitude.

Because guess what, I’ve been attending a really expensive art school in California for the last four and a half years, and I’ve had enough of spoiled trust fund babies to last me a lifetime. ”

“You think me spoiled and petty?” he said angrily. Then he did the opposite of what one should do when an opponent lands a good, solid blow: Ivan panicked and swung wildly.

“Well, you are judgmental and bitchy. And the kitchen will be closed to you unless you agree to eat with me. I will lock it.”

“Okay, cool,” she answered with a disgusted shake of her head. “Well, I guess you just proved my point.”

Frustration cut a bitter path across his chest, tugging his lips up into yet another sneer.

He had no idea how to handle a woman like this.

It should have been relatively easy. Clearly she liked his body, and he was dying to find out what was hidden beneath that oversized tweed jacket she always wore and those glasses.

They’d be stuck together in this house all winter.

He wanted her. And she wanted him. He could tell.

As it stood, they should have been fucking like bunnies for the last few days, at least.

Yet she couldn’t even bring herself to share a meal with him.

“You are here in this house, and not in a cell, because I allow it,” he said. “You will eat when I say you will eat. And I say you will eat dinner with me at six o’clock, like early-eating Americans.”

He realized immediately after he spoke that he must have been truly angry.

Not only because of the nastiness of his tone, but also because he was dropping articles and betraying his impeccable English education.

He sounded like nothing more than a caricature of a Russian immigrant speaking heavily accented, broken English.

“Oh I see. And if I refuse, do you want me to go back to the cell?” she asked, her tone sounding quite serious. “Can I at least get my coat first, or are you taking that away, too?”

He stared down at her for a few long moments. Seething.

Then with a noise somewhere between a yell and a growl, he turned away, no longer able to trust himself to stay in this room with her for a second longer.

Lest he say something else, something she’d use to further prove her point about him being like the spoiled rich kids she went to school with.

One who didn’t deserve to have dinner with her, let alone touch her.

Ivan had conquered men. Both inside the ring and out. Countless men had resorted to begging beneath his unrelenting fists. Yet he was unable to handle one woman...a girl, really.

So he left. All the while wondering what disturbed him more. That he couldn’t figure out how to get Sola into his bed…

…or that every word she’d said about him was 100% true.