“I’m sorry, Quinn,” she said to the other man, “but I need to make sure everything’s okay with my sister.”

“Of course,” he agreed, though it was clear he hated to let her go. “It was positively delightful dancing with you, and please don’t hesitate to take me up on my offer to bring you up the coast to that private beach I mentioned.”

With a final smile for Quinn, she let Ian direct her through the crowd and into a small, empty kitchen off to the side of the ballroom.

Ian hadn’t thought this through, he’d simply taken the first available opportunity to get her alone. Now, as he stood close to her again, close enough to smell her perfume, close enough to see the pulse beating at the side of her neck, close enough to see the little flecks of blue in her green eyes, he lost the thread of everything but how much he wanted her.

More now, he was stunned to realize, than ever before.

One night hadn’t quenched his thirst for her. One night hadn’t gotten her out of his system. On the contrary, the passionate hours they’d spent together had only made him increasingly desperate for more of her.

“Ian? Don’t you need to give me your phone so that I can talk to my sister?”

Shit. He never lied. But he hadn’t been able to think straight when he’d seen her dancing in Quinn’s arms, so he’d simply said the first thing that popped into his head. “There isn’t a phone call.”

“There isn’t?” She frowned again, looking up at him in confusion. “They why did you drag me off the dance floor?”

“Because I needed to ask you what the hell you were thinking, wearing that dress tonight!”

The room was so small it almost sounded like he was yelling at her. But the control by which he’d always lived his life was currently in such shreds—precisely the way her clothes had been last night when he’d torn them off of her in his office—that he couldn’t moderate it.

The last thing he expected Tatiana to do in response was to give a little twirl. As the thin, sparkling gold fabric swirled around her knees, she said, “I was thinking that it’s a pretty dress. Don’t you like it?”

“It should be illegal.” The urge to touch her was so strong it nearly broke him. “All a man can think of when he sees you in that dress is tearing it off you.”

“Thank you,” she said as if he’d just given her a great compliment. “But why do you care if other men see me in this dress?”

“Because you’re—”

The word mine hung in the air between them, as potent as it had been when he’d said it to her the night before in bed, right before he’d claimed her.

Damn it, he was getting everything wrong with her again and again and again...when all he really wanted to do was figure out a way to make things right.

“I’m sorry about this morning,” Ian said. “I handled everything badly.” He shook his head and admitted, “And now I’m handling everything badly again. What I’m trying to say, what I need you to know, is that I didn’t push you away because of anything you did wrong. Every bit of blame for the situation lies in my court.” Not only for losing control and taking her to bed, but also for not being the kind of man who could give her the true love she deserved.

He couldn’t read her expression as he fumbled through the apology. What was she thinking? And why wasn’t she just saying it to him the way she always had before?

Of course, that was when his phone actually rang.

“I know that’s the ring tone that means something’s wrong. You should go take care of it. There are probably millions of dollars on the line right now.”

She was letting him off the hook, just like that, and perhaps he should have been grateful. But he’d spent enough time with her these past three days to know this wasn’t her. She should be getting up in his face and asking him why he was being an asshole. Hell, she should even be grabbing him and blowing his mind apart with a kiss to prove without a shadow of a doubt that they were meant to be together.

Anything but this.

Anything but giving up on him. On them. Even if he’d done everything he could this morning to push her into doing just that.

“The call can wait. I brought you in here to talk.”

She looked as frustrated as he felt. “What do you want me to say, Ian? That I was really hurt this morning? That I felt like a fool? That I hated going from feeling as happy as I’d ever been one moment to sobbing my eyes out the next?”

“I swear to you, Tatiana, the last thing I ever wanted was to make you cry.”

“I know that. It’s one of the reasons I fell in love with you. Because you care so deeply, with everything you are, even when you’re trying so hard not to.” She shook her head. “All day long I’ve been trying to figure out what I feel, knowing it would be so much easier if I could stay angry with you. But then I watched you get up on that stage and say all those beautiful, heartfelt things. How am I supposed to stay mad at you? How am I supposed to fall out of love with you? And even if I could do either of those things, how could I ever forget how good making love with you is...or stop wanting to be with you again? I know you must have had lots of fun and meaningless one-night stands.” There was desperation in her voice as she said, “Tell me how to do it, too. You must know how.”

Ian reached for a lock of her hair, couldn’t stop himself from touching her even when he knew he shouldn’t. “You’re right, I’ve always known how. But with you?” He moved even closer. “I don’t have a clue.”

* * *

Tatiana reeled from Ian’s nearness, from the need she could see so clearly on his face...and from the fact that the most honest man she’d ever met had actually faked a phone call to steal her away from Quinn and get her alone.

She’d come to the fundraiser tonight planning to make him see he couldn’t resist her, but now that it seemed to have worked, she couldn’t play any more games with him.

Love would never be a game to her.

“I wore this dress to get back at you,” she admitted in a soft voice.

“I know you did, sweetheart.” The endearment slipped from his tongue as easily, as sweetly, as it had when they were making love. And just as it had last night, it warmed her all over. “You’re beautiful in it. So damned beautiful.”

“I wanted you to see everything you could no longer have.” She’d thrown caution completely to the wind when she’d decided to make love with him last night, and though she knew a wiser, safer, more rational woman wouldn’t make that same choice again now, how could she do anything else but say, “But you can, Ian. You can still have me if you want me.”

“Of course I want you. But you want the fairy tale. You want Prince Charming to carry you off on his noble steed. You want romance and flowers and poetry. And it’s not too much to ask for, Tatiana, not when it’s everything you deserve.”

“Then why can’t it be you?”

“It just can’t.”

“If it’s because of what happened with your ex-wife, haven’t you and I spent enough time together already this week for you to know I’m nothing like her? I’m honest to a fault. I don’t want your money. I don’t need status. I don’t want you for everything that you have. It’s who you are that interests me, Ian.” Maybe it was crazy to lay it all out for him now, especially after everything he’d said to her that morning, but she couldn’t see how keeping it inside would be any better. “I know everyone makes mistakes, but I’m certain that being with you wasn’t a mistake. I was waiting to have sex until I was in love, and even if not everyone does that, it was right for me. I waited this long for you and now that I’ve found you, I’m not giving up. And even if I have to keep waiting, I will.”

“No,” he said, the one word full of such inner conflict it tore at her heart. “You shouldn’t wait for me. There are a million guys out there who would be a better fit for you.”

“I can’t imagine anyone fitting with me better than you.”

As emotion and heady sensuality swirled around them both, Ian told her, “I would take you to bed again tonight, tomorrow, and the night after that, if I thought sex was enough for you. But we both know it isn’t. And I can’t hurt you any more than I already have.”

She could feel, could see, his frustration, and wanted so badly to soothe it, even though she knew she was the cause of it. But how could she when she still didn’t understand why he was so adamant about pushing her away? “How do you think you’re going to hurt me, Ian?”

“Being with me—it will change you.”

“Of course it will. The first time I met you in Napa, everything already started changing. And now that I know you better, now that we’ve finally made love—”

“I’m not talking about good changes, Tatiana. You were with me all week. You know how many hours I work. You need, you deserve, someone who will be there for you. Someone who won’t think twice about putting you first, now and always.”

She could have reminded him that he’d left his staff meeting to track her down on Wednesday morning, but because she was certain he’d brush that piece of evidence away, she simply said, “When I’m filming, I work crazy hours, too. I understand what your life is like, that our schedules will take a lot of work to figure out. But I’m okay with that.”

“You might think that now, but you’d end up hating me. This warmth you feel for me would grow colder and colder until all that’s left is ice between us.”

Pieces of everything she’d seen Ian do during the past week, everything she’d heard him say about love, all swirled together into the answer. “Is that what you think happened with your ex?”

Thankfully, this time, he didn’t put her off, didn’t keep her out. “Yes.”

“She was warm once?” She shook her head. “I can’t see it.”

“Not like you. No one is as warm, as open, as you. But she wasn’t what she is now, either. I made her that. I turned her into what she is now.”

“You’re a very powerful man, Ian. And you might be able to control companies and industries through your will and determination and brilliance. But even you can’t make someone become a total bitch. You can’t turn someone with true warmth inside of her into a glittering, self-absorbed block of ice. I get that maybe Chelsea was a softer version of herself when you first met and started dating, but I can guarantee that cold, hard part of her was already there, just waiting to spring out.”

“I would have seen it.”

“Or maybe you didn’t want to see it. Maybe you were in a place in your life where you were ready to share it with someone and create a family the way your parents did with each other, so it was easier not to see it. Especially if she was trying her best to make sure you didn’t.”

Tatiana could see him turning her suggestions around in his head, and maybe if he were anyone else, she would have kept pushing, kept trying to make him see things her way.

But Ian Sullivan wasn’t a man anyone would ever be able to push around. And because it was yet another one of the reasons she loved him so much, she simply said, “Having seen you in action all week long, I know not only how hard it is to change your mind, but also that I’m not going to do it tonight. So since I don’t want to begin and end today fighting with you, I’m going to say good-night now.” Before he could stop her, she went up on her toes and kissed him. One soft, sweet, gentle kiss into which she poured her entire heart. “I’ll see you on Monday at your office.”

And then she made herself walk away.

CHAPTER TWENTY