Rapture of the desert

by Violet Winspear

  "You smile as if you care greatly for your career."

  She came out of her reverie and glanced up at the proud, slightly melancholy face, into those eyes that glinted like magnets and seemed intent on divining her thoughts. "It has been my life," she said simply. "You see, milord, I am a dancer."

  "I know." He said it so casually. "I saw you dance in Russia about ten months ago."

  She was so staggered by this revelation that she leaned back against the wall as if for support. "So that was why —"

  "Yes." A lazy smile gleamed in his eyes. "I was guilty of staring at you while you took tea with your pretty sister. I recognized you, of course. You have unusually shaded gold hair, almost tawny, like a sand cat."

  "Thank you," she laughed a little ironically. "It's the first time I've been likened to one of those."

  "They are elusive, graceful creatures, yet capable of tearing out a man's eyes."

  "Thank you again, Prince de Casenove." But this time there was a thoughtful note threading her laughter. "It's funny, but my grandmother used to refer to Dove and myself as the Persian tabby and the alley cat."

  "Ah, but that description of you is not apt." He spoke crisply. "You must see the sand cat with its jewel-like eyes, and its stealth when men are about, to appreciate my simile."

  "I doubt if I shall ever see one, unless the zoo has some on show." The smile faded completely from her eyes. "I mustn't dance for a year, so if the Company should go on tour to the Middle East I shall be left in England to pine."

  "May one ask —?"

  "I had an accident a few months ago. I fell down some steps, and now I am ordered not to perform a single pirouette for a whole, long, empty year."

  "Poor matushka." He seemed to mean it, but she didn't dare to look to see if that eyebrow was arched in irony. To a man such as he, who divided his time between French girls guarded by quick-tempered brothers, and the best stable horses, it could hardly seem of significance that her life felt empty because she was unable to carry on with the work she adored.

  He was just a playboy prince ... he wouldn't understand.

  "You will abide by the advice of your physician?" he said.

  "I suppose I must." She gave a little resigned shrug. " 'Rather a peppercorn today than a basket of pumpkins tomorrow', as they say in the country."

  "Strange is destiny." And then it was his turn to shrug. "And now to revert to this little game of chance which I suggested. Will you dine with me if we are trapped in here a sufficient time for it to create an item of news in the papers? If we are seen together, let us say at the svelte Adonis Club, it will be assumed that we were acquainted when we stepped together into this lift. But if we part after the intimacy of being alone like this, with no means of escape, there will be speculation of a snide sort."

  "On account of your reputation as a rake?" she said frankly.

  This time his eyebrow drastically quirked. "The British are so blunt! "

  "True," she agreed. "We don't wrap our proverbs in silk."

  "Such a pity," he said drily. "So, do you wish these newsmen to wonder how we passed the time in such close proximity?"

  "We can always tell them we played Russian roulette."

  "Perhaps in a way we do play it," he drawled. Whenever a man and a woman are alone there is a feeling in the air of a silent dicing with danger. Only between a man and a woman can there exist this awareness of a thousand subtle differences, each capable of arousing a thousand subtle sensations."

  A small, tense silence followed his words, and a thousand crazy thoughts rushed through Chrys's mind as her eyes skimmed the face and frame of her close companion. Beneath that impeccable shirtfront there lay a hard chest scarred by the bullet of an irate brother whose sister had succumbed to the dark, courtly, demonic attraction of this foreign prince, with Cossack instincts smouldering in his eyes, and there in the sculpture of his cheekbones and his lips.

  She prayed silently and swiftly for the engineers to hurry and get this lift moving again. She strained her ears and it seemed that far below them some kind of activity could be faintly heard, but there was no vibration in the steel enclosure itself, suspended in the frame of the hotel, in which the guests would be buzzing with the news that Prince Anton de Casenove was trapped with a young woman . . . the porter at that desk upstairs would know this, and by now the information would be all over the building and someone would have been bound to notify those daily devouring hawks of a spicy bit of news.

  "Are you afraid to accept my bet, in case you have to pay the price?" the prince murmured. Very deliberately he glanced at his wristwatch. "We have now been entombed for over an hour, and I have heard that when these express lifts go wrong it can be hours before they are set in motion again. We may have to spend the night together."

  "I'm shivering in my shoes," she said flippantly.

  "You may indeed do so, Miss Devrel, as the hours pass and it grows rather cold. I expect the fault in the mechanism will effect the heating of the lift as well. That is the trouble with modern amenities, they rely on the machine rather than on the man, and machines are quite careless about the feelings of a hungry, cold couple, almost strangers to each other, and locked together as if in space, while the world continues to vibrate around them. The situation is piquant, no?"

  "Something terribly funny for you to relate at the card table next time you play, milor. I expect you will add a little relish to the tale, or will it be taken for granted that you seduced me?"

  "Are you wondering if I will do so?" That black eyebrow mockingly etched itself against the pale bronze of his brow. "According to Freud, women of virtue are more curious than their more voluptuous sisters, and the victims of their own imaginations. What makes you think that I could be bothered to try and charm a Miss Fire and Ice? Neither element is all that comfortable, especially to a man who was anticipating a choice meal, perfectly served, within the historic Regency walls of the Ritz restaurant. By contrast a tussle with a reluctant virgin strikes me like snow across my face from the very steppes themselves, stinging like fire and ice."

  "I'm sure," she flashed, "that you're accustomed to the type who fall at your feet like harem slaves, hair unbound and eyes pleading for the thousand delights of the Khama Sutra! "

  Silence followed this little flash, fraught with a tension that broke in soft, indescribably amused laughter from his lips. "I wonder what I have done to deserve such a little spitfire for a companion in an air-locked lift? Perhaps I am being punished for my past sins, eh?"

  "Well, I don't see why I should be punished with you," she retorted.

  "Why, has your life been blameless, Miss Devrel?" "I've worked too hard to have had much time for playing around, Prince de Casenove."

  "Such a pity, matushka. A little play does no harm, but now you tell me that you are forced to give up your career for a while."

  "A year! " She said it bitterly, as if it were a lifetime. "Everything was going as I planned, and then at Easter I was rushing to catch a train home for the weekend when my foot turned and I — I fell down all those steps." Her young mouth brooded and the fire and ice of temper and misery shimmered together in her blue eyes. "I daren't go against the surgeon's decision. I don't want to spend years on my back for the sake of yearning to dance — oh, life is so complicated at times ! "

  "Like the machinery of a lift," he drawled, "or the machinations of fate herself. Destiny is a woman, say the Arabs, and so she is perverse. What will you do with your life for a year ?"

  "Work in an office, I expect. Or become companion to some dotty travelling aunt of my sister's fiancé."

  "And you relish neither of these as a means of toeing the line, let us say, until you can rise again upon your toes ?"

  "Hardly! A whole year away from the barre and the stage could ruin my line, my strength of leg, my entire future as a soloist. I might have to start again at the foot of the ladder."

  "And that could be very frustrating," he agreed.

  She loo
ked quickly at his face, and felt rather shaken by his understanding of her predicament. Her eyes questioned him, and with that courtly inclination of his head he enlightened her:

  "My grandmother was known as Miroslava — which means beauty. You may not have heard of her, but a Russian prince saw her dancing in a Cossack village on the steppes and she so entranced him that he took her to the city to be trained as a dancer in ballet at the Maryinsky Theatre, which was very famous in those

  days. She became a great favourite there until the prince, my grandfather, married her in secret. You may not know that in Czarist days a man with noble blood in his veins was strictly forbidden to marry a commoner, so Miroslava and he had to pretend to be only lovers. Then came the uprising, and because she was known to have associated with a prince, Miroslava had to flee from Russia. My grandfather, an imperial officer in the Czarina's guard, was killed in the fighting.

  "Miroslava and her servant eventually reached a strange haven, a desert province called El Kezar, where they stayed and came under the protection of a true Sheik of the desert, who always treated her son by a Russian prince as his son . . . my father, of course."

  "Your father was born there, in the desert?" Chrys was interested despite her inward determination to stay aloof from this man.

  "Not exactly on the tawny sands," he drawled, "but in a desert house given to Miroslava by the Sheik. I believe he wished to make her his wife, but she could not forget the prince. He was her one and only love."

  "It all sounds very romantic," said Chrys. "But you don't appear to be so single hearted."

  He gave a soft laugh. "Others might jump to that conclusion." He gestured at the shoe bag in her hand, with silver wedding bells printed all over it.

  She had to smile herself. "Oh dear! " she said.

  "You are thinking that the reporters will take me for the prospective bridegroom?"

  "There is a chance of it, knowing how quickly they will leap to conclusions in order to fill the daily papers."

  "Indeed I do know! And you think it would discompose me to be thought a man who has been trapped at last by the wiles of a woman, eh?"

  "Won't it, milor?"

  "In the circumstances it might not be such a bad thing if we are thought to be on — intimate terms." He pinned her gaze with his and would not allow her to glance away from him. "In this modem age what a man

  does with his 'girl-friend' is not a subject for much

  speculation. But if the young woman is a stranger to

  him — comprenez-vous?"

  Only too well, she nearly retorted. She would have to be caught in a lift with a man who imposed on her such an awareness of him. Had he been an Englishman, they might well have stood here, in polite silence, until the lift was put into action again. But Anton de Casenove was everything an Englishman was not! He was far too aware of the fact that she was a female, and that in itself was disconcerting. He was too dark-browed, too mocking and worldly to be acceptable as a companion in adversity.

  He was altogether too aware of how her mind was working, and the sort of thoughts his near presence was engendering.

  "Will it be so hard to endure if you are taken for my bride-to-be?" he asked, in an amused tone which at the same time held a hint of menace.

  "It's in my disposition to dislike being mistaken for any man's bride-to-be," she replied, and though she spoke coolly she knew that a slight panic stirred in her eyes as they ran over his crisp dark hair, strong slanting cheekbones, and bold mouth with its shades of perpetual mockery. He looked as though he might make a ruthless lover . . . a man who made his own rules and lived by them.

  "You have never played the game of love, with its gambits and its thrills . . . its height and its pitfalls ?" He drawled the words, but his eyes were intent on her face.

  "I prefer to be my own person," she said icily. "Love is depending on someone else for happiness."

  "And you regard that as a precarious state of living?"

  "I'm afraid I do."

  "Perhaps you are a little too afraid of certain aspects of life?"

  "Meaning that I'm a shrinking violet from the facts

  of living?" Her eyes flashed an indignant warning at him. "I hope you don't see this situation as an opportunity to put me wise! "

  "You prefer to remain innocent, eh?"

  "Independent is the correct word, milor."

  "And you imagine that by remaining independent you can stay isolated from the emotions which are as much a part of a woman as her eyes and her hair. You may be able to control your hair, and even to keep your eyes from revealing all your thoughts, but are you so sure you have your emotions tamed?"

  "They have not yet overruled me. A dancer is like a soldier, milor, discipline is her second name."

  "You are still a woman," he said suavely. "And still a very young one, and life is always waiting to surprise us. Did you imagine when you came to take tea at the hotel that you would step into a lift and suddenly find it beyond your control to make it move? There are certain events in our lives over which we have no control at all. Destiny weaves a strange and varied pattern, not an orderly one."

  It was true, of course. Something she couldn't argue with, but none the less frustrating.

  "Are you a fatalist?" she asked him.

  As he considered her question he let his gaze rove the steel-lined walls of their prison. "I believe I am," he said. "Usually when I am in London I stay at the Savoy, but this time I felt like a change, so I accepted the recommendation of a friend to stay at the St. Clement's. We might never have met had I gone to my regular hotel."

  "I'm sure I would have survived such a loss to my education," she rejoined.

  "You are very much on the defensive," he said, "and I saw you shiver just then. Are you beginning to feel cold?"

  " "I'm perfectly all right —"

  "No, you are very much on edge. You know, as I know, that if we are forced to spend the night alone

  like this, it will be assumed that you spent the night in my arms. Your tawny gold hair is truly remarkable —unbound it should reach to your waist."

  "I'm not about to demonstrate! " Quickly and protectively Chrys lifted a hand to the braided chignon at the nape of her slim white neck. Her hair was uncut because some of her dancing roles called for long hair and she disliked wearing false pieces which might detach themselves during a strenuous pas de deux with a male partner. When released from the chignon her hair reached past her lowest rib, thick and fair, and a feature of her person of which she was admittedly rather proud.

  The colour came into her cheeks that this man — literally a stranger to her — should almost threaten to unloosen her hair and make it look as if he had made love to her!

  "I wonder,' she said scornfully, "if it has ever occurred to a single man on this earth that there are women who can endure to go through life without panting to be kissed and mauled?"

  "Mauled, Miss Devrel?" His eyes narrowed until their greyness was lost in the shadow of his lashes. "Is that how you regard lovemaking, as an undignified wrestling match, with the loser locked in a painful hold?"

  "Isn't it exactly like that?" She stood very straight against the wall of the lift, and avoided his worldly, beautiful, wicked grey eyes. From a child she had danced the magic of the ballets, where love was an enchantment, with a dreamlike quality about it. She could not believe that real life love was like that.

  She shrank physically from the very thought of being captive in the arms of a demanding man, at the mercy of his wilful strength.

  "I think I should hate to be married more than anything else on this earth." She said it fiercely. "I'm not like Dove. I don't want my wings clipped by any man."

  "What if you should fall in love?" he murmured.

  "Love only happens if you want it to. Love doesn't approach unless you beckon to it."

  "Are you quite certain of that, matushka?"

  "I am certain of what I want, and what I don't want."

  "Then
why are you so afraid to commit yourself to a dinner a deux with me, if we should be obliged to spend the next few hours together?"

  "I'm disinterested, Prince Anton."

  "No, Miss Devrel, you are afraid to put your own theory to the test. If you remain aloof from men, then you are unlikely to fall in love. But if you permit yourself the company of a man —"

  "You think you are so irresistible ?" she gasped.

  "No man is that, Miss Devrel, but when we walk from this lift certain whispers are going to follow at your heels. People will wonder why you were here at the hotel in the first place. They will suppose that you came to call on me."

  "My sister can easily repudiate that little speculation! "

  "Will you wish the smoke of a little fire to drift in her direction ?"

  Chrys stared at him .. and there stole into her mind a picture of Jeremy Stanton's mother, that awful, snobbish woman whom Dove was daring to take on for love of the son.

  "You are a devil, Prince Anton," she said. "You know how to hit a sensitive nerve."

  "Yes." The word was quietly enough spoken, but suddenly he stirred, moved, and sent rippling through the air a breath of danger as from a leopard caged.

  A cage that stayed firmly suspended in mid-air, while down there on the ground people looked at each other, and knew by now from the porter on the penthouse floor that a girl was alone in the lift with Anton de Casenove . . . the man whom an angry Frenchman had shot through the heart . . . the man with a reputation as dangerous as his face.

  "Come, agree to dine with me demain soir. Forget

  for once that you hate men."

  She looked at him expecting mockery, and saw instead a pair of grey eyes veiled in the smoke of the cheroot he had just lit up.

  "You are very sure of yourself, milor," she said.

  "Do you think so, Miss Devrel?" His smile was enigmatical. "Only destiny really knows what tomorrow may bring."

  "It's tonight I'm worried about! "

  "Is it?" he drawled. "Don't you take me for a gentleman?"

  "Would you advise me to bet on that, milor?"