Golden Paradise

by Susan Johnson

  "Will he drown her?" Lisaveta maliciously inquired. This was the common method of disposal for members of the Sul­tan's seraglio. "Or will I simply be added to your harem?"

  Stefan was tired and hungry; he'd been riding for more than she hours after a night with little sleep and his fatigue was achingly real. He was not presently inclined, especially after find­ing Choura still vividly in residence, to politely accept sarcasm from the woman causing him all his discomfort. "I was saving your skin," he bluntly said, "protecting you from Choura's knife."

  "I can protect myself, thank you," Lisaveta replied, haughty and incensed; Stefan had not only left a fiancée behind but had a woman in reserve here, as well.

  "Not unless you move real fast," he sardonically mur­mured. "She could carve you up in under thirty seconds."

  "Do women fight over you often?" Her barely contained fury was evident in her voice. It was enough to know her own feelings were disastrously involved—against her will and bet­ter judgment—but to see Stefan's women conveniently avail­able wherever he lived, and to hear him plainly suggest they might fight a rival for his affection, was galling.

  "No," he quietly said, his own self-control additionally provoking in face of her outrage. "Now if you'll excuse me briefly."

  "And if I won't?" Her objection was anger only and having the last snappish word—or perhaps most of all, wishing she had the power he did to bend the world to his will.

  He looked down at her for a long moment, his expression benign, as if an angry child were thwarting him. "Nakun will see you to my study," he said, neither answering her question nor acknowledging her challenge. "Please make yourself comfortable." With the merest nod he signaled one of his men.

  "I don't want to make myself comfortable, Stefan." She tried to control her voice as he did, so she wouldn't sound so adolescent. "I want to go home. I refuse to be your…captive," she finished in sputtering frustration. "And if you think for a minute," she added, trying to squirm out of his steely grasp, "that I'm going to quietly submit to your goddamn—" her voice was rising now because he was beginning to smile "—suzerainty like some docile Gypsy girl—"

  He laughed. Docile was the last word he would have chosen to describe Choura.

  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 God, 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 amusement. 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 accomplishing 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, anticipating 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 shined 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 banal 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 passed 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 space 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 Shi 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 ménage à 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. "Damn 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 Circassian 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 platitudinous 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 fiancée 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."

  "God'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 assessing blame exclusively."

  "If you wish to be perfectly honest, no," he said, "but I dislike the word blame for anything that's passed 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 passion, 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 space 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 you
r fiancée? 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 passion; 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 fiancée 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, blushing 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 blushing hesitancy, and he thought again how her frankness appealed to him.