“She does, doesn’t she?” the general lazily agreed, an audacious light kindling in the flat gray eyes. “And you’ve just given me an idea.” He laughed crudely, having a cheerfully perverted mind. “Never mind the kiss. Lift up her skirts, Colonel,” he ordered.
Apollo looked once briefly at the general, met a hard, uncompromising stare, and pushed aside Kitty’s full moiré skirts.
His breathing stopped.
Under Kitty’s voluminous taffeta skirts, welded tight, barbarously golden, medievally anachronistic, girdling her creamy flesh, was a chastity belt.
The general’s smooth voice broke through Apollo’s stupor. At the sound Apollo dropped the skirt back into place, and then, because he was near suffocation, he refilled his lungs.
Outrage filled his brain. He wanted to kill the general at once, and if it were only his life he was risking, he would have. He had nerveless confidence in his ability to extradite himself from any tight situation, but he couldn’t risk it with Kitty. If he had to travel fast and brutally, she’d never be able to keep up. So, with roaring affront echoing like the wails of whirling dervishes, he said with rigid, icy calm, “Interesting.”
“I thought so.” The general was smug.
Apollo thought himself sophisticated enough to have seen about everything in the unblushing, flourishing world of erotica, but until now this little subtlety had escaped him. “Yes, very clever,” he said. His golden eyes swept Kitty’s body with deliberate slowness, and then a hint of malice crept into his deliberately bland voice. “Is it really necessary?” he asked gently, and saw Kitty crimson from breast to brow.
“She only wears it when she goes out of the suite or when we have guests,” Beriozov explained, smiling thinly. “It’s the only way to ensure fidelity with such faithless creatures. So you see,” he continued agreeably, “it’s not such a monstrous thing. A temporary safeguard occasionally, nothing more.”
All this time Kitty sat quietly rigid, trying to ignore, to black out the pleasantly deriding voice discussing her. She had learned over the past weeks to put up outer defenses which couldn’t be breached. That ability to withdraw within herself was all that saved her sanity.
But Apollo’s presence, his touch, his voice, every vital nerve in his body was disastrously affecting her, and no matter how she tried, her heart beat violently when he was near.
“The belt,” the general went on pleasantly, “you understand, limits the lady’s availability, but that’s not to say she can’t pleasure you in other ways.” His eyebrows rose with a clumsy heaviness. “Her mouth.” He laughed. “Such a pretty mouth … what a marvelous idea, Colonel.” Beriozov’s hand was shaking but he managed to pour himself a half glass of liquor. “I feel in a generous mood, my boy. I think we’ll let the countess express her thanks for your company this evening.” He smiled a faint, chill smile. “You aristocratic ladies have been taught your manners, haven’t you—and know how to be pleasant to a guest? Get down, Countess. Hurry. Hurry!” His chiding voice was cruel now, his eyes like chips of ice. “Pleasure our guest with that pretty mouth.”
Kitty caught her breath. Without moving, she softly said, “No.”
Apollo began to add his protest. Midword he stopped, seeing the general’s pearl-handled pistol languidly waving in their direction. “I say yes, Countess, and I’m the one with the weapon.” Kitty’s heart sank.
Apollo tried again. “General, the countess has been gracious enough. Further diversion is not necessary.” The barrel of the pistol wavered back and forth. From such a short distance there would be no hope of saving Kitty if he aimed at her. She’d be blown into the wall.
“Your modesty does you credit, Colonel, but in truth, it’s my pleasure being served. The countess is so … reluctant. She must be taught a lesson.” The pistol steadied suddenly, the drunken eyes sharpened briefly. “Down, Countess Radachek, if you know what’s good for you.”
Silently Kitty slid from Apollo’s lap to the floor, forcing herself to keep from crying, from screaming and breaking down completely. Tortured in countless trivial ways over the last few weeks, this was heartbreakingly the very worst—but escape … freedom … so very near this time. She knelt between Apollo’s legs.
Apollo gripped the arms of the chair with both hands, the triphammer of his heart beating against the framework of his ribs. He felt Kitty unbuckle his belt and unbutton his trousers, her fingers brushing like gossamer over the stiffness of his arousal. He inhaled quietly, immobile except for the thick, jutting shaft which strained upward. Kitty’s body touched the inside of his legs, her sumptuously heavy breasts, free of the confining dress, were warm against his thighs. Her elaborate upswept coiffure had fallen loose from some of its jeweled pins; gilt tendrils framed her face and rested on the bareness of her shoulders. Her large eyes, not quite daring to meet his, were agonized.
“Touch him, Countess,” the general ordered. Her lashes fell, and after only the briefest hesitation, her hand moved. Very delicately, with the lightest possible touch, her fingers strayed over the pulsing organ and freed it from the confines of his uniform.
The Red commander’s heavy lids rose fractionally at the sight. “You must please the ladies, Colonel. Katherine won’t be able to take it all. Do your best, dear. I know you aristocratic belles can be accommodating.” He laughed crudely, infinitely cynical, drunk as a peasant on feast day.
Kitty hadn’t moved.
“Such timidity, Countess.” The general chuckled maliciously. “One would think you didn’t know what to do—but we know better, don’t we?” And he guffawed uproariously at his own heavyhanded humor, his pistol glinting ominously in the artificial light.
Apollo’s fists clenched and he ground his teeth in frustration. Kitty was distracting in all the worst ways for clear thinking; that damn handgun could go off any minute in that drunken sot’s grasp—and the urge to kill was pressing hard on the limits of Apollo’s self-control.
Beriozov’s drunken laughter ceased as quickly as it had begun. “I’m bored with your false modesty, Katherine. You know what to do,” the general barked, the veins throbbing in his thick neck. “Do it!”
Kitty shuddered, then took the swollen shaft in her hand. It was so hard she had to hold it back firmly. Moving her mouth down, she hovered over it for a long moment while Apollo held his breath, despising himself for wanting her anywhere, anytime, anyplace, detesting what she had become under the general’s tutelage. Then, gradually, Kitty lowered her lips onto the pulsing tip. Apollo couldn’t prevent a groan from escaping his throat.
He tried everything while she ministered to him. He counted the crystals in the chandelier, tried to concentrate on the frigid temperatures outside, silently recited the German alphabet backward, anything to force his mind from Kitty’s persistent, excruciating touch. But the flicking tongue didn’t stop, nor could he ignore the soft, pliant lips wrapped around him. No matter how he tried to distract himself, the blond head between his legs kept moving gently up and down, and the aching, agonizing pleasure screamed through his body, building and racing to an inevitable conclusion. With a tortured gasp, he gave up; his arms swooped down. Capturing her head between his urgent hands and cursing his weakness, he thrust upward violently.
When it was over, a deep exhalation of regret quietly broke from him. Reaching down, he lifted Kitty’s face, but she averted her eyes. Gruffly he offered her a half-empty bottle of wine.
Kitty accepted the bottle, her eyes evasive as she raised the wine to her lips.
“Bravo, Countess. Your performance was superb. Don’t you agree, Colonel?” Tossing aside the pistol, the general’s blunt, powerful hands mockingly applauded.
“Indeed,” Apollo replied, but the cynical drawl didn’t quite take. Quickly rearranging his clothes, Apollo tossed down half a glass of vodka to wash away the bitter feeling of disgust—disgust with himself for succumbing and irrational disgust with Kitty for her expert touch.
The general’s sturdy arms pulled Kitty u
pright and back onto the sofa. His cool gray eyes swept her with casual indifference, taking in the half-nude, flushed, moody beauty as one would check a minor possession lent to a friend. “Smile, Countess,” he chastised flippantly. “You were very good. Smile.” He snapped his fingers.
All Kitty could think of was Apollo’s eyes condemning her. Why did Beriozov have to insist on offering her to Apollo, of all people? He had never done that before. In fact, he had always been particularly possessive. Oh, damn! Did it really matter anymore—all these subtleties of captivity in this horror of what Russia had become? Tonight had been the final humiliation; this time she hadn’t been able to withdraw, detach herself, pretend, as she had for weeks, that it was happening to someone else. “I can’t,” she said in a low voice.
The general looked at her closely, not sure he had heard properly. He thought rebellion had been whipped out of her long ago.
Suddenly Kitty’s eyes came up with a defiant snap and met his directly. “I won’t.” She sat disheveled, dishonored, half-naked, yet beautiful in her stiffly upright posture, obdurate in all the pride and dignity of her spirit. For a long moment their glances held, and then General Beriozov guffawed drunkenly.
“The countess is pouting.” Another burst of laughter broke from him and, quirking his brow in a parody of insouciance, he addressed Apollo. “A woman’s temperamental way, eh, Colonel? For all their favors, they must be humored occasionally.” He lifted his glass in toast. “To the fair sex, Colonel. Countess”—he turned his glass to Kitty—“to the gentle sex. May the gates of paradise be always open.”
“To women,” Apollo growled, his voice tense with distaste. He, too, emptied his glass.
10
When Apollo had devised the scheme of drinking the general under the table and stealing Kitty away, he hadn’t reckoned with the hard head of a Siberian peasant, weaned on cheap, government-monopoly vodka and raised in a climate where one was forced to stay inside nine months of the year, partaking of the one available amusement—the vodka bottle.
It was touch and go near the end. Apollo, his eyes lifting to gauge the distance to the sofa, decided he might have to slit the bastard’s throat after all, orderly or no orderly, if Beriozov didn’t pass out soon. But blood will tell, and a thousand-year tradition of hard-drinking Kuzan males rose to the occasion. Where a Siberian peasant might have perseverance and bulldog tenacity, a Kuzan had positive genius when it came to drinking more than anyone else.
The general finally slid quietly to the floor right in the middle of an argument over the Fokker’s and Camel’s maneuverability in an Immelmann.
Apollo came to his feet in a movement so swift Kitty was startled. Bending over the bulky form, he hissed, “Where’s the orderly?” Apollo knew that, whether Red Army or White, there wasn’t a general who readied himself for bed.
“In the dressing room,” Kitty whispered, still shaky.
“Call him,” he said quietly, moving from the inert body of the general to face Kitty. He reached over to pull up her dress, murmuring, “After the general’s put to bed, I’m going to dismiss the orderly for the night. Think he’ll leave?” he questioned, helping Kitty slip the straps over her shoulders. Somehow a clothed woman made it easier to think, even if his head wasn’t at its clearest.
“I hope so.”
“Doesn’t matter. I can always slit his throat.”
Unprepared for that response, Kitty looked at Apollo wide-eyed and gasped, “Oh, no—must you?”
His answer was perfectly matter-of-fact. “Killed six already today on this ‘mission of mercy.’ Surely one more can’t signify.”
Kitty’s hand went to her mouth and she breathed, “Six?”
“Jesus Christ Almighty,” he snarled softly, “do you want to stay here?”
“No, no,” Kitty hurriedly replied, pushing aside any misgivings she might have about murder
“Call him, then.”
After Apollo and the orderly had settled the general into bed, Apollo drew three gold roubles from his pocket. Handing them to the general’s batman, he said, “Countess Radachek and I thought we might have a nightcap. I’m sure the general won’t be needing you anymore tonight. Do you think you could find somewhere else to sleep?” Apollo lifted his dark brows suggestively. “Just until morning, you understand.”
The batman recognized lust when he saw it and while his nature wasn’t particularly benign, the three gold roubles were more than sufficient to make him temporarily kind. He immediately thought of the little chambermaid down the hall and only hesitated a second to pose the query: “If the general should call out for me—?”
Apollo looked at him speculatively from under half-lowered lids. “I’m sure Countess Radachek can handle it.”
In two seconds the door to the servants’ entrance closed on the orderly’s back.
Kitty slumped into Apollo’s arms and collapsed against his strength, shuddering convulsively. The harrowing tension of the last few hours, the shameful humiliation, the fear, the terrible despair that all would fail through some awful quirk of fate, was suddenly released and a pouring surge of tears swam over her rigid restraint of the last hours, days, weeks, washing unchecked down her pale cheeks.
“Oh, Apollo …” she whimpered brokenly, quiet sobs making a staccato of her anguished cry. “Thank God you’re here. Thank God, thank God—”
“There, there. …” Apollo soothed, holding the weeping woman gently. “You’re safe … everything’s fine.” And although he intended to be comforting, the words came out a shade stiffly. Niggling doubts remained. How had she come to this? Just how adaptable had Kitty been in her new position? Had it been simply a way station until something different came along—in this case, himself, but, perhaps, anyone?
Kitty’s sensuality those days in December—her unique, open, ardent sensuality—made Apollo skeptical. She had warmed his bed willingly enough those days he was a guest in her home. How many like him had there been before or after? How opportune had the general’s offer been to a refugee with nowhere to go? How ill disposed was the lady to her current situation—or how eager? She had performed tonight despite the general’s presence—was she a devotee of sex with danger? Was that kind of titillating sensation now her specialty?
He could still imagine the sharp, hard feel of her nipples in his palms; tonight, and when she had been seated on his lap, her moistness had dampened them both. How many times had she and the general … He wrenched his mind from his heinous thoughts, but a whisper within him persisted, a small bitter flame of accusation and jealousy. He meant to deal with this calmly, but, irrationally, he could not. “Why did you stay here?” he asked abruptly in a tight voice, his reproach evident even in the lowness of his tones.
Kitty looked up in astonishment and met Apollo’s somewhat grim golden eyes. Sadly she thought how easy it was to be a man and only have yourself to consider. I wanted to make sure your child lived, she wished to say, but something in the disapproving line of his jaw held her back.
“I couldn’t get away,” she said simply.
“Surely sometime you might have. He’s drunk every night.” A mild rebuke, distaste evident in every syllable.
Kitty drew away and Apollo let his arms drop. Right now, Kitty thought with a kind of numbness, she was tired unto death. Taking a small breath, she said, “Save me your piety.”
“Why the hell,” said Apollo with fury, “why the hell couldn’t you get away? You had your freedom of the city!”
“My suicidal impulse isn’t very strong.”
“Or,” he retorted harshly, “you preferred staying.”
“No!” Kitty hurled back angrily, and then almost instantly she shrugged resignedly, her gaze going opaquely closed. Is this what she had hoped and dreamed for, is this what rescue meant after all she had gone through—another opinionated, arbitrary male?
“Damn you to hell,” Apollo growled, his eyes bitter. “You have no better explanation?”
“You’re d
runk,” Kitty replied, lifting her eyes suddenly. “And you’ve already made up your mind. Leave it, can’t you?” she said softly.
“Why should I?” Apollo demanded in a clear, forbidding voice. “I want—”
She interrupted him, her eyes dark and angry. “I know what you want. You want me to apologize for wanting to live. You want to goad me into making admissions about my faint courage. If I won’t do that, you want some excuse—any plausible, tenuous excuse—to salve your affronted masculine honor. I’m quite conscious of what I did and how I’ve lived these last few weeks, of all my misdemeanors and impieties—but I’m traveling light now. No principles, no philosophy; only survival. You and I disagree about the means of survival, that’s all.”
“Life at any price,” Apollo said dryly.
“More or less,” Kitty returned steadily.
“Just like a woman,” he snorted dismissively.
Just like a woman carrying a baby in her womb, Kitty thought, but pride kept her silent. “Think what you will,” she said to the steely, restless warrior now assessing her with a world of malice in his pale eyes. “I at least claim the right to make up my own mind.” She stopped and shrugged wearily again, her own nerves betraying her. Suddenly she was too tired and too dispirited to argue over priorities, or to debate further the nuances of male and female attitudes toward survival. She’d concede him his victory; he could think anything he pleased if they could only escape from this prison, now, tonight. Shaking a little from fear and fatigue, Kitty drew herself straighter and said as calmly as possible, “Could we go? I’ll get ready.” She didn’t wait for an answer but turned to enter the general’s bedroom.
Before she reached the door, Apollo’s arm shot out, bringing her back by a painful grip digging into her wrist and jerking her hard against the muscular length of him. “What do you need in there?” His voice was unduly harsh. Its anger chilled her.
The tremulous sensations that always accompanied close contact with Apollo shuddered down Kitty’s spine, even as she recoiled from the ice-cold rage in his expression. “The key on his wrist,” she replied rigidly. “Now let me go; you’re hurting me.”
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