Golden Paradise

by Susan Johnson

  With his hand lightly holding her elbow, Stefan moved with Lisaveta the short distance across the polished marble landing to where the two ladies stood. "Countess Lazaroff," he said, his voice touched with his usual nonchalance, "I'd like you to meet my Aunt Militza and my—" He hesitated the smallest in­stant.

  "Fiancée," the fair-haired woman interjected firmly, her smile tight.

  "Princess Nadejda Taneiev," he said, as though he hadn't spent the last eight days in bed with Lisaveta, "may I present the Countess Lisaveta Lazaroff."

  "You wouldn't be Felix's daughter?" Militza asked, ignor­ing Nadejda's anger and Lisaveta's embarrassment, her casual inquiry similar in tone to her nephew's when introducing his newest paramour to his fiancée.

  "Yes," Lisaveta and Stefan answered simultaneously, she in nervous response, he because he found himself strangely con­cerned his aunt like her.

  "I knew your father years ago. He was a delightful dancer."

  Lisaveta couldn't help but smile, even though her temper was beginning to rise at Stefan's deceit or omission or whatever word best described his failure to mention he was engaged. Not that she was some naive adolescent who expected an offer of marriage after their intimacy—after all she had wanted him as much, if not more. But she expected a certain degree of hon­esty. She didn't realize that showed her naïveté. Honesty was hardly an essential in matters of amour; play words were more useful, love words, pretty turns of phrase universally applied.

  "I didn't know he danced well," she replied, admiring Ste­fan's aunt's warm smile. So her father's accomplishments weren't confined to scholarly pursuits; this new image was pleasant. "I never saw him dance," she added.

  "He was a favorite of all the ladies before your mama de­cided she wanted him. Did you meet Stefan at Maribelle?" Lisaveta's mother had once owned an estate by that name near Aleksandropol.

  "Actually, no. Maman sold it before she died. I met Stefan on the plain between Kars and Aleksandropol." Lisaveta paused, not knowing where or how to begin.

  "She was abducted by the Bazhis," Stefan interjected. "We had given chase—"

  "And you rescued her," Nadejda said in a malevolent tone.

  At Nadejda's vitriolic sarcasm, Stefan's gaze swung from his aunt to his fiancée.

  Despite her own fury at Stefan's oversight in informing her of his fiancée, Lisaveta was still deeply grateful to him. What­ever her reservations concerning his character, he had rescued her. "He saved my life," she said calmly.

  "And you naturally rewarded him."

  "Nadejda," Stefan said. The single word was an order to si­lence.

  "Why don't we go up to the house for tea?" Militza inter­jected, shamelessly pleased Stefan had reprimanded his fiancée. She'd been forced to endure the girl's uncharitable company for Nadejda had unexpectedly arrived in Tiflis with her parents on a visit to the Viceroy.

  Felix Lazaroff's daughter was very beautiful, Militza thought, although not to Stefan's usual taste in women, which gravitated toward glamorous blondes. This girl was refined and delicate, her features touched with the ingenue, although her height was a shade above the average. Stefan usually preferred small women. How interesting, she speculated. As interesting as his cryptic note mentioning he might bring home a guest. Haci had defined the word guest for her, but more interesting yet was the fact Stefan invited the Countess to his home. A staggering first.

  Months ago she'd watched with constrained silence as Ste­fan coldly selected a fiancée, appalled at his final choice. Nadejda was absolutely without endearing qualities. She was certainly striking, if one favored cool, fair-haired beauties from wealthy, powerfully connected families. But Stefan could have had anyone. When she'd said as much to him rather wrath-fully when he'd come back to Tiflis engaged, he'd only shrugged and said, not in explanation but in simple statement, "I only had a week furlough."

  Lisaveta was desperately trying to formulate a suitable reply to Militza's suggestion of tea, for she wanted nothing less than to have to socialize with Stefan's malicious fiancée, when Ste­fan interposed. "Perhaps we could wash up first," he said, stalling for time, thinking hell and damnation, what bloody bad luck. Nadejda should have been in Saint Petersburg, two thousand miles away. "The roads are awash with dust this time of year," he added.

  Thank you, Lisaveta thought gratefully, but then Stefan was adroit at lying, wasn't he, she decided, his "surprise" fiancée glaring at her. All she wanted to do was get away from this un­comfortable situation, find a coach traveling north very soon and leave Stefan Bariatinsky to the mercy of his fiancée.

  Since they had dallied on the outskirts of Tiflis the previous night, reluctant to bring their passionate holiday to an end, neither Stefan nor Lisaveta was in fact at all begrimed by travel. Stefan's white Chevalier Gardes uniform was pristine while Lisaveta's simple white pique summer gown was bandbox fresh.

  Ignoring the graphic evidence before her eyes, Aunt Militza said with a practiced courtesy, "Of course, you must rinse off the dust of your journey. We'll see you on the terrace in half an hour." This latter statement was delivered in a tone very like Stefan's when issuing orders to his men, Lisaveta thought, having witnessed the departure of his troop from Aleksandro­pol.

  And surprisingly Stefan deferred with a nod of acknowl­edgement. There was an authority higher than his, Lisaveta re­alized, or at least in some circumstances there was. Or at least for trivialities like teatime there was.

  "Come, Nadejda," Militza declared firmly, "you can help me with tea."

  Nadejda hesitated briefly, her eyes moving dismissively over Lisaveta to rest on Stefan. She was weighing the risks of refus­ing when her violet shaded eyes met forcibly with Stefan's dark gaze.

  "We'll be along directly," he said, without modulation, and it was that precise lack of inflection perhaps, the utter quiet of his tone, that decided her. After all, Stefan Bariatinsky was the catch not only of this season but of ten seasons past, as well, and she had been raised to be a practical woman.

  For a moment after the two women departed, the only sound was the whisper of the wind through the gigantic cypress trees lining the ornate staircase. Grafted from those planted by Catherine the Great during her triumphant tour through the Crimea nearly a century before, they dwarfed even the mag­nificent villa on the crest of the hill.

  "Why didn't you tell me?" Lisaveta said, speaking first, her voice a low, intense, restrained resonance.

  She was tanned, Stefan thought, gazing down at her. The crisp white pique must heighten the color of her sun-kissed skin. He hadn't noticed before. And the slight breeze was blowing tendrils of her chestnut hair across her bare shoul­ders. Silk on silk, he mused.

  "Why?" she repeated, refocusing his attention from more pleasant thoughts.

  "I didn't think it mattered," he simply said, which was the truth. His fiancée was quite separate from his love life.

  "Didn't matter?" Lisaveta's golden eyes were stormy.

  He wanted to say the information was extraneous to their relationship but he wasn't that crudely impolite. Instead he said, "The opportunity didn't arise."

  "In eight days?"

  He sighed then, a faint, almost negligible sigh encompass­ing a vast experience with irate women and unanswerable questions. "I'm sorry," he apologized.

  She looked at him with scorn and anger and incredulity. Af­ter eight days of unremitting passion, after eight days of laughter and conversation, after nights when neither had slept because their need for each other was too intense, that was all…. "You're sorry"! For what? That I found out?"

  He was primarily sorry Nadejda was in Tiflis, but that too would have been unprincipled to admit, so he opted for a less callous reply. "I should have told you. I'm sorry."

  "Yes, you should have."

  "Would it have mattered?" he asked then very quietly, touching her arm lightly in an intimate, familiar caress.

  His low voice and the gentle intimacy of his fingertips on her skin sent a shiver of warm resp
onse coursing through her body. "Don't touch me," Lisaveta said in a tone meant to be harshly emphatic but hushed instead and much too soft.

  "She doesn't matter." Stefan's voice too was hushed, and he moved a step nearer.

  "She should."

  He only shrugged, the convoluted reasons for his choice of fiancée beyond brief or rational explanation. "Don't be an­gry." His voice was husky, his dark eyes much too close now, just as his powerful body was. Lisaveta moved a step back.

  "They might be watching."

  "We're only talking."

  "I'm not as blasé as you."

  "I'll teach you." He smiled then and added in a hushed un­dertone, "And you can teach me more of Hafiz."

  She tried to keep from smiling, she tried to remind herself he was an unprincipled libertine and much too beautiful for his own good. She reminded herself his reputation was legendary, she shouldn't respond to his warm suggestive smile. But he winked at her, his lush, dark lashes falling and rising in a lazy indolent gesture. "We're only on poem nineteen."

  All the heated nights and days of lovemaking came pouring back into her memory… with his teasing smile like now, and his teasing hands and lips and expertise. She couldn't resist smiling back. "Scoundrel."

  "Never," he said. "A moralist's term, and I didn't hear you complain before."

  "I hadn't met your fiancée before."

  "My palace has two hundred and eighteen rooms."

  "You're much too pragmatic."

  "A soldier's training. Forgive me, dushka…and forgive her intrusion. I'm truly sorry." He brushed his finger gently along the curve of her shoulder. "I hope she won't upset you. I'd like you to stay and visit." His voice was as warmly coaxing as his smile. "You'll like Militza. She's outspoken but delightful, and I've a month's leave."

  This was the first he'd mentioned her staying or the length of his furlough. Perhaps he'd assumed she'd stay, perhaps women always stayed as long as he wished. After the paradise of the past eight days, she understood why that might happen. How­ever, she too was pragmatic and much too sensible to allow herself to become simply another of the parade of women passing through Prince Stefan Bariatinsky's life. "Thank you, but no. I must return home to my estate as soon as possible."

  "Stay a few days."

  She shook her head.

  He gazed at her, his expression unreadable. "You won't?"

  "I can't."

  "Why?"

  "I've things to do."

  "Even though I risked my life to save you from the Turks?"

  She smiled. "Does that work often?"

  He grinned. "Every time."

  "Except one."

  "Truly?"

  She nodded. "Truly."

  "You'll stay until tomorrow, won't you?" His voice was as courteous as a young boy's, his dark eyes innocently polite. "Aunt Militza will be inconsolate if she doesn't have a first-person account of your adventures, and she is a friend of your father's," he added with gentle emphasis.

  Lisaveta hesitated, weighing logic against her charged feel­ings, the apparent sincerity of Stefan's request against the his­tory of his past. "Just tonight?" she inquired, gauging the extent of her risk.

  "That's it."

  "If I don't have to be more than civil to your scowling fiancée."

  "Agreed," Stefan quickly said, intent on having Lisaveta stay on any terms. Tonight he'd change her mind. He was confi­dent.

  The view was superb from the terrace, the sun pleasantly shaded by a rose trellis, the wind negligible, a samovar of great beauty the centerpiece of a magnificently arrayed tea table, when Lisaveta joined the party of three some twenty minutes later.

  Teatime turned out to be interesting. It was also enlightening.

  Stefan, it seemed, had known Nadejda only three days be­fore he proposed.

  Lisaveta had never met a true society miss.

  Aunt Militza had met one too many and intended doing her best to see that Nadejda didn't enter her family permanently, though she was wise enough to keep her plans to herself.

  "Were you raped, my dear?" Aunt Militza pleasantly in­quired after the weather and state of the roads and progress of the war had been exhausted as topics of conversation. She of­fered Lisaveta a plate of pastel-frosted petits fours as though she were asking a perfectly mundane question. At the stunned look on Lisaveta's face, Aunt Militza pointedly added, "I mean by the Bazhis, of course."

  Stefan choked as unobtrusively as possible on his mouthful of pâté and glared at his aunt. Nadejda hardly needed any prompting to anger. She'd already been rude to Lisaveta a dozen times. Swallowing quickly, he said, "Rest easy, Auntie, our troop arrived in time."

  "How fortuitous," Militza replied, smiling as if the sun had finally broken through after a month of torrential storms. "Isn't that fortuitous?" she repeated, turning toward Nadejda, her smile intact.

  "Stefan is known for his good fortune," Nadejda retorted, her lips pursed, her eyes cold enough to chill the equator.

  But her words were the truth. He was, in fact, looked upon by superstitious people as leading a charmed life. Many of the soldiers in the Tsar's army touched Stefan for luck, viewing him as a pagan deity of sorts. He'd never been wounded, never harmed in all the years of leading his troops into battle, al­though he was always conspicuously in the lead of his cavalry, dressed not in battlefield uniform but in the striking white dress uniform of the Chevalier Gardes. His men would follow him anywhere, and on more than one occasion his bold charges had changed the course of battle.

  "As is our entire family," Stefan's aunt cheerfully declared. "Although Lisaveta must have a guardian angel, too, travel­ing alone in a war zone. Why ever were you out there?"

  Lisaveta explained in some detail why she'd been in Karak­ilisa and why she'd left so precipitously.

  "A harem?" Aunt Militza said, obviously fascinated. "How exciting."

  "Only from a distance," Lisaveta plainly replied, "I assure you."

  "How disgusting," Nadejda said, her inflection managing to include Lisaveta in her assessment.

  "And Hafiz?" Stefan's aunt went on as though Nadejda hadn't spoken. "He's one of my favorite poets. You must see Stefan's collection."

  "I haven't seen it, Stefan," Nadejda pouted. "Why haven't you shown it to me?"

  "You wouldn't like it, Nadejda," Militza said bluntly. Turning back to Lisaveta, she asked, "Don't you think Hafiz compares favorably with Ovid?"

  "I think, Stefan, that if you have a collection you favor, I should know of it," Nadejda declared peevishly, arresting the consumption of her sixth frosted cake to state her annoyance. "At Madame Lebsky's Academy I won a first prize for po­etry. Madame Lebsky said she'd never heard a better iambic pentameter."

  Stefan was briefly at a loss since conversations about his collection of erotica were not usual in mixed company at tea.

  He frowned at his aunt over his fiancée's blond head. Nadejda, momentarily distracted by the recalled beauty of her verse, was inwardly focused, her eyes half-closed in contemplation.

  Stefan's aunt only smiled at him warmly as though she were beyond reproach.

  "Darling," Nadejda said, her resentment forgotten with the memory of her cleverness in poetry, "would you like to hear my prize-winning poem?"

  There was only one suitable answer, he knew, and he gave it.

  They were instantly regaled with breathy drama and coy smiles to a rhyming description of a lake at sunset. Nadejda's metaphors were sugary, her similes strangely food focused. Long moments of heavy-handed rhyme later, Stefan worried he'd ever be able to enjoy a sunset again without visualizing caramel syrup dripping over the horizon.

  Polite applause followed the poem's conclusion, however, a pleased preening smile graced Nadejda's flawless face, and an insidious sinking feeling settled in Stefan's stomach. He'd only squired his fiancée to receptions and balls the week he was on leave in Saint Petersburg, and their conversations had been in­terrupted and minimal in such circumstances. Was she truly s
o vacuous?

  "Thank you, Nadejda," Militza said dismissively, although her tone was scrupulously cordial. "Stefan, why don't you take Nadejda for a stroll so that Lisaveta and I won't bother you with our discussion of Ovid."

  Militza's suggestions were always delivered as well-mannered commands, but Stefan balked this time, his temper and pa­tience on edge in his unaccustomed role of chivalrous fiancé to a woman who wrote such dreadful pedestrian poetry. "The Countess Lazaroff and I have some business to discuss, I'm afraid," he said. "She requires some bank drafts for her jour­ney home. If you'll excuse us until dinner." He rose abruptly in no frame of mind to be further thwarted by his aunt or any female.

  He needn't have concerned himself with his aunt's response. She was delighted to let her nephew go off with his new lover on whatever flimsy pretext he chose, and her smile was bea­tific when she gazed up at him towering above her. "By all means, Stefan, the Countess must be assured of her financial resources after having been left destitute on the steppes. Should we put dinner off until ten?"

  Stefan's emphatic "Yes" and Lisaveta's "No" clashed starkly.

  "My financial affairs won't be difficult to arrange," Lisave­ta explained with a calm she was far from feeling. "I'm sure a banker in Tiflis will accommodate my needs. And if my name isn't recognized, either Papa's or cousin Nikki's will be suffi­cient." Lisaveta refused to fall into any of Stefan's plans. If he couldn't abide his fiancée's company, she wasn't going to be a convenient alternative, and if he thought he could snap his fingers and have her follow him, he had a lesson to learn. "Thank you, Stefan," she said with serene sweetness, "but your concern is unnecessary," and she reached for her teacup.

  His arm shot out across his aunt's chair, his fingers closing around Lisaveta's wrist with her fingers just short of her tea­cup. "No reason, mademoiselle, to involve Nikki when my banker is amenable. And you forget," he said, his voice softly emphatic as he pulled her to her feet, took the lace napkin from her hand and placed it on the table, "your father's papers, which Haci saved from the Bazhis, need your attention."