Golden Paradise Part 9

His laugh only further ignited Lisaveta's indignation. "I suppose a man who kept five Persian houris for his exclusive enjoyment at Kokand," she snapped, "finds this all amusing. But I refuse to be your entertainment!"

Good G.o.d, he thought, how far had that story traveled. But he only said in a calm tone, "You needn't get agitated. Accept my apologies for Choura. She was... er... an oversight. I'll straighten everything out and be back shortly."

"An oversights Her voice was almost a whisper. "Like a forgotten package, you mean?" Her golden eyes were the color of the sky before a thunderstorm. "Or an inconvenience?"

"Lord, Lise, relax. There's an explanation. I'll straighten things out."

"Haven't you been listening to anything I said?" Lisaveta cried. "I don't want everything straightened out, I don't want you to continue talking to me in that serenely undisturbed tone as though you were taking confession, and I do not wish to be here!" Each word was punctuated with a blow to his chest.

Stefan's troopers regarded Lisaveta's vehemence with varying degrees of amus.e.m.e.nt. They all viewed women as diversions to a warrior's life, and from appearances their Prince was going to be highly diverted when he took the Countess to bed.

At the moment, however, Stefan knew he had to deal with Choura first, and arguing with Lisaveta wasn't accomplis.h.i.+ng any useful purpose. "Do I have to have you tied up?" he inquired in the placid tone that grated so on Lisaveta's nerves.

Her eyes opened wide in aghast speculation. He wouldn't, would he? She realized he was closely related to these Kurdish troopers with their wild and barbaric looks. He lived at times in their way under a warrior code, but did he actually mean "tied up" when he said it in that quiet tone? And if he did-the small unpleasant thought surfaced-for what purpose? "Tied up?" she blurted out, her breath unconsciously in abeyance, antic.i.p.ating his answer.

"Will you accompany Nakun into the house or do you have to be restrained?" He could have been asking her if she preferred a lemon ice or champagne during a set change at a bail, for all the emotion in his voice.

Lisaveta glanced for a swift moment at the swarthy native tribesman dressed in black turban, tunic and full-cut trousers, standing patiently in his soft Asiatic boots at Stefan's side, waiting further orders. She rapidly took in the array of his weaponry: crossed bandoliers; saber belt and pistol holster; the s.h.i.+ned and oiled new Winchester taken as booty from a dead Turk slung across his back; the matching set of silver-engraved daggers tucked into his belt. With the pragmatic deduction of an intelligent woman she murmured, "You needn't tie me."

"Splendid," Stefan cheerfully said, as though no one had been discussing bodily restraint, as if the topic of conversation were ba.n.a.l and unthreatening, as if the word splendid fitted this horrendous situation at all.

"I'll 'splendid' you," Lisaveta hissed, as Stefan lowered her into Nakun's arms, "just as soon as I get the chance."

Stefan's smile was wolfish. "In that case, I won't keep you waiting long." He touched her cheek with a caressing fingertip. "Darling..." But his voice when he spoke to Nakun the next moment was coolly commanding. "Lock the door," he said, "in my study, when you leave."

Chapter Seven.

The elaborate clock in the study depicting tides and changing constellations was exquisite, but its hands moved annoyingly slowly. At frequent intervals, Lisaveta would interrupt her angry pacing to check its progress and find no more than a minute had pa.s.sed since she'd last looked. She'd already admired the magnificent view from the expanse of windows lining one wall, noted the craggy mountain landscape and snowcapped peaks in all their awesome splendor, stood transfixed while an eagle swooped in sweeping arabesques across the emptiness of s.p.a.ce between her mountain and those distant ones and understood with absolute certainty she could never find her way down the craggy peaks and survive. Unlike the free-flying eagle, she was Stefan's captive.

After that sobering observation she'd sat down abruptly, her eyes unfocused on the panoramic grandeur of blue sky and rugged mountaintops, her mind attempting to deal with the finality of her position. When no ready answer materialized in the chaos of her mind, when no escape seemed possible from this mountain aerie, she'd resumed her pacing again, her rapid strides as agitated as her thoughts.

Despite Stefan's imposing palace and polished manners, he was, beneath his civilized veneer, as much a native warrior as his men. He looked the same: hawklike, swarthy, bristling with weapons. She recalled her first sight of him, when she'd thought she'd been captured by another savage tribesman. Only his Chevalier Gardes uniform had distinguished him from his cohorts that day near Kars. And while she'd learned much of the subtlety and nuance of his charismatic personality in their days together, his tribesmen, too, might be as complex and charming.

She was disturbed and perplexed.

She was indecisive about her unsubtle and profound attraction to Stefan.

She was a bit fearful, too, so far removed from the world on this remote mountaintop.

But she was-beneath and beyond and above the confusion of her feelings-primarily angry.

That fact was startlingly clear when Stefan walked into the room twenty minutes later.

A rose jade figurine of a Tang emperor's celebrated concubine, a special favorite of Stefan's for the cutwork in her trailing gown, narrowly missed his head as he ducked out of the way. The jade depiction of Li s.h.i.+ Mia thrown at him was followed rapidly by his inkwell, several of his malachite paperweights, and before he could bob and weave across the distance separating them and wrench a silver wine ewer from Lisaveta's grasp, he'd lost the crystal container to his Cellini inkwell and two of his animal-shaped paperweights.

He wondered if perhaps Choura's anger had been easier to deal with. She'd been pacified by a handsome gift of roubles, a promise to send her two racers from his stables and a soothing combination of lies and compliments. When she was smiling once again, he'd had to carefully decline her offer to join a menage trois in his bed. "Perhaps some other time," he'd said politely.

And with that promise, her money and two prime horses, she was content. She would be escorted by some of his men to the nearest village, from which she'd find her own way home. Her smile when she'd left had been satisfied and her parting remark perhaps more prophetic than he wished.

"She won't be as easily bought off, Stash, my beauty," she'd said, wrapped in an emerald green shawl to match the jewels in her ears. She blew him a kiss and smiled. "I wish you luck."

He could use a little now, he thought, tightly holding both Lisaveta's hands and trying to sidestep her kicking feet. "d.a.m.n you, Stefan, I won't be treated like this," she panted, out of breath from her struggles. "I'm... not... some... Gypsy girl... you can buy... for a few roubles... and spirit away to your... mountain lodge."

"Fifty thousand," he said, moving slightly to one side to avoid her slippered foot.

"Fifty thousand!" she exclaimed, ceasing her combat for a moment to digest the enormity of Choura's price. "Are you mad? The Emir of Erzurum never paid over twenty thousand for the very best Circa.s.sian women."

Taking advantage of her momentary pause, he quickly said, "I did it for you. She's gone."

"Why?" It was a small explosive exhalation of sound as spontaneous as her astonishment.

He didn't know, so he couldn't answer, but a response was required to her question so he evasively said, "I forgot she was here. I've been gone for three months." He shrugged then the way he often did when she pressed him to gauge his feelings, and added one of those plat.i.tudinous lies that often served as satisfactory conclusion to an evasion. "She was probably ready to go anyway. Choura dislikes solitude."

"And yet," Lisaveta murmured, "she waited here for three months?" Jealousy underlay her remark, overwhelmed her like a gale at ten thousand feet in these mountains, for she knew very well why a woman who disliked solitude would wait three months for Stefan. He was worth a three-month wait-or a three-year wait.

"She probably couldn't find her way back down," he lied, treading warily, infinitely pleased she was talking to him again instead of screaming at him or throwing his treasured pieces of sculpture at his head.

"She probably didn't want to," Lisaveta quietly said, her golden eyes holding his in a steady gaze.

"I didn't want her here," he said, his simple statement a bald declaration of his feelings, his eyes unflinching. "I sent her away for you. I left Nadejda entertaining her parents at my palace tonight for you. Is that enough?" He released her hands, gazed at her for a moment as though looking for the answer himself, then walked away to the windows.

Bracing his hands on the molding above his head, he stared out on the majestic landscape that had always served as solace for him, the stark rugged mountains that had been sanctuary for him at times he needed peace.

But today his thoughts were in turmoil, his emotions disturbed, his fiancee left behind without concern for the consequences, Choura dismissed more callously than he liked. For Lisaveta.

"So," he said, turning back, his own feelings resentful now, "is it enough? Tell me." There was demand in his voice, an unconscious authority.

Standing in the center of his masculine study, Lisaveta heard the new chill in his voice, saw the beginning of a scowl draw his brows together and awkwardly felt on the defensive. "You should have let me go," she said, adding when he didn't move or respond, "It would have been better for both of us."

"I didn't want to."

"G.o.d's spoiled child," she softly declared, for the Orbeliani motto was familiar throughout the Empire for its arrogance.

Stefan raised one brow fractionally. That precept had been his family's guiding principle for centuries; he could no more ignore the privileged culture in which he'd been reared than she hers. In many ways she was as unorthodox as he, and he said exactly that without rancor or censure.

For a short silence Lisaveta seemed to consider his statement. Her life, of course, had been more male than female in education, in the freedom and independence encouraged by her father, in her choice of scholarly discipline. She was, she supposed, not precisely conventional, and their meeting that first night at Aleksandropol... She smiled. "We both perhaps have taken what we wanted," she answered.

She was without guile, he thought, one of her numerous charms.

"I did fancy you that very first night, didn't I?" she said.

His smile was as angelic as a young choirboy's. "I detected a slight interest."

"So I can't be a.s.sessing blame exclusively."

"If you wish to be perfectly honest, no," he said, "but I dislike the word blame for anything that's pa.s.sed between us. I prefer happiness... or joy-''

"Or paradise on earth."

He grinned. "A good approximation."

"I should thank you, then, for sending her away."

He moved toward her, his smile intact, his hands open in peace. "If you like," he said.

"And thank you for spending fifty thousand roubles because of me."

"Plus two racers from my stud," he added, close enough now to touch her outstretched hands. "I should feel flattered."

"I certainly hope so," he murmured, taking her small hands in his.

"And how many days do we have?"

"Twenty."

Her smile diminished slightly. "I might have to leave sooner for Papa's ceremony in Saint Petersburg. I've a personal invitation from the Tsar. I should stop at my home in Rostov first. My cousin Nikki's expecting me..." Her voice trailed away because the observance honoring her father's work translating Hafiz had seemed until this moment of great importance.

Stefan wasn't going to touch that... not after reaching harmony once again, not this minute when he held her hands in his and their holiday in the mountains was just beginning. "Fine," he said, his own smile lush with warming pa.s.sion, knowing he had days ahead to change her mind or adjust her travel timetable. "Whatever you want."

Drawing her close, he stood for a small s.p.a.ce of time with her body touching his, savoring the first tentative prelude to pleasure, feeling at peace, at home...alone with the woman who'd come to preoccupy his mind and senses, isolated on his mountaintop with the woman he wanted to spend the next twenty days making love to.

"I'm sorry about the abduction," he said softly, his hand reaching up to take the first hairpin from her hair, "but I didn't want to lose you."

Lisaveta touched the bridge of his nose, tracing down its arrow-straight length as if she marked him for herself, as if that small gesture were possession. How nice it would be, she thought, if it were possible to gain possession so easily, if one could simply say, "I want you too, for always. For the pleasure you give me and for your smiles, for the laughter we share, for the enchantment of being in your arms." But she was sensible enough to say instead, her voice teasing and hushed, "I'll make you do penance for the abduction."

His hand stopped just short of his desk, where he'd been placing the pins from her hair, and arrested in motion, he looked at her from under his dark brows and smiled. "How nice," he said.

"You needn't sound so pleased," Lisaveta murmured, mocking irony in her tone.

"Darling," Stefan whispered, taking her into his arms and drawing the length of her body against his so she felt the extent of his arousal, "your whims are my command."

A flare of excitement raced through Lisaveta. Although she knew as well as he that his amorous words were playful, a rush of gratified power spiked through her. She did indeed command him. "Are they really?" she said, moving her hips enticingly, testing the measure of her advantage.

"Right now, dushka," Stefan whispered, taking her face between the palms of his large hands, "for want of you I'd sell my soul."

And jettison your fiancee? she wondered, the wretched consideration coming from nowhere to spoil the moment. Perhaps if she'd asked right then he would have said yes to please her and please himself. But she didn't ask, because she wanted him too much and was afraid of his answer. A man in Stefan's position didn't marry for pa.s.sion; Militza had made his intentions plain.

"My price isn't that high," she said, her arms wrapped around his waist, a curious contentment invading her mind. He was here with her; because of enormous effort he was here with her; his fiancee was alone at his palace and there was satisfaction in that. She wouldn't be more greedy. "I don't want your soul, although I think I should be worth at least as much as Choura."

While her tone was teasing, Stefan gazed at Lisaveta with a slightly altered expression. Was she like all the others after all? he wondered. Although he'd never begrudged gifts to his lovers, he'd found Lise's generosity of spirit unique. Was she perhaps only more subtle in her demands? His voice when he spoke was quiet and restrained. "Of course, darling, you're worth much more. What would you like?"

"You'll think me foolish," she prefaced, blus.h.i.+ng at what she was about to say.

"Never, sweetheart," he replied, admiring the innocent color on her cheeks, knowing he would give her whatever she wanted regardless of her request. He was not an ungenerous man. Her large tawny eyes were looking directly into his despite her blus.h.i.+ng hesitancy, and he thought again how her frankness appealed to him.

"I want you to love only me, to forget all those other women," she blurted out, a desperate and unfathomable urge impelling her, inexplicable and beyond her control. She hurried on when she saw the startled look in his eyes. "I mean now... for these days we have together." When he didn't answer, she added softly, "The fiction will do, Stefan, and don't ask me why, but it's important to me." Had she been asked to define her feelings she would have been at loss to explain. She loved him, she thought with a cymbal-cras.h.i.+ng revelation, neither annotated nor detailed but explosive and deafening inside her head. And she wanted her love returned.

For a woman who was not only a scholar but an expert in a man's field, for a woman who'd decided to ride across the battleground of Kurdistan in the midst of war, for a woman who'd traveled up his harrowing mountain trails with a minimum of vapors or complaint, she looked suddenly as vulnerable and artless as a young maid. She didn't want extravagant gifts or large sums of money; she wasn't intent on binding him in a female way he'd learned at a very young age to avoid. She wanted only his love.

And for the only time in his extremely varied experience with women, his heart was touched, not simply by the navete of her request but by her utter candor. "Gladly," he replied, his emotions evident in his voice, "with intemperate feeling and pleasure."

When her face lighted up at his response, her joy and happiness immediately apparent, a warmth of unprecedented feeling washed over him. Gently lifting her face to his, he said very, very softly, "I plight you my love on this mountaintop," pledging surety to her and with that pledge, unknown to Lisaveta, offering his love for the first time in his life.

He lifted her in his arms then, as though his patience had a finite limit, and carried her out of his study and up the small curved staircase. The polished wooden railing resembled a sinuous grapevine, curling upward as it would in nature, minutely detailed with beautifully carved tendrils, leaves and fruit; the treads were covered in lush gra.s.s-green carpet, silken and luminous. So close to nature were these creations of man she almost expected to gaze up and see stars in the sky.

"Where are the stars?" she playfully murmured.

As if he read her mind, as if they were so completely in harmony he knew what she was thinking, he answered, "In ray room."

Past the top of the vine-draped stairs, at the end of a narrow hallway hung with candlelit icons and illuminated paintings reminiscent of glittering jewels, Stefan pushed open double wooden doors, hinged and ornamented with bra.s.s serpentine animal forms, and stepped into a room he'd known since childhood.

Toys were stacked on shelves and tabletops; a wooden rocking horse painted dapple gray in primitive craft style with large staring eyes and an unusual smile gazed at them from a window embrasure; a special gla.s.s case held ma.s.sed armies of miniature soldiers. The polished wood floor was covered with fur rugs, as was the plain four-poster bed, although the elaborately embroidered, lace-trimmed white pillow covers were an incongruous sight in this young boy's room.

The dormer windows were curtained in plain blue linen, made less plain by the entwined Bariatinsky-Orbeliani family crests woven in gold thread and picked out with sapphire jewels. While austere in design, Stefan's room spoke eloquently of his family's enormous wealth, from the sable rugs to the cabochon emeralds in his rocking horse's eyes.

And the stars.

When he pointed up with a smile so she'd look, Lisaveta saw a lapis lazuli arched ceiling set with diamond stars.

"You have a fortune in your ceiling," she couldn't help but say. Even though her mother's family was in the exclusive ranks of the Empire's wealthiest and the Lazaroffs were far from paupers, she'd never seen anything like the lavishness of Stefan's households.

"My mama's Persian background," Stefan explained. "The Orbelianis had a different standard of wealth than the rest of the world." He didn't reply with either apology or pretension but simply made a statement of fact. "I wanted to see the stars at night when I went to sleep, I told Mama when I was very young and this lodge was being built."

"Does Choura like your diamond stars?" She couldn't restrain her remark although she'd valiantly suppressed it twice before it came tumbling out. Her jealousy was stridently real and Choura was wildly beautiful by anyone's standards, an untamed dazzling enchantress.

"I haven't brought her here." He'd never brought any woman to this room. It was exclusively his in a selfish introverted way. He'd never wanted to share his past or his feelings-all openly visible here in his mementos and childhood toys. He'd preserved the shelter of this room intact against the personal disasters that had decimated his family. His happiest memories of childhood were inventoried and catalogued by each particle and belonging in this room, and until today he'd never wanted to expose those intimacies to anyone.

Lisaveta's gaze was skeptical.

"Her room was on the main floor facing the courtyard," he matter-of-factly said, secure in the truth. "I'll show you if you-"

"No," she said. "No, don't show me." The thought of Stefan and... her... in any room made her feel green-eyed with resentment. "So she never saw this?" It wasn't that she didn't believe him, only that she found it hard to believe.

Stefan set her down carefully in an oversize chair upholstered in royal blue damascene, squatted down in front of her so their eyes were level and said, this man who was known to prize his personal privacy, "Ask me everything and then you'll be content."

"Don't patronize me, Stefan."

"I'll answer honestly." And that, too, was a startling admission from Stefan, who by virtue of necessity in the sheer number of his amorous liaisons considered evasion an essential.

Lisaveta sighed, her expression rueful, her golden eyes innocent as a young girl's. "I'm sorry. Do you think me excessively possessive?"