"Was it a pleasant surprise?" he drawled, leading her to a wicker table set among the jasmine-draped trees, with deep wicker armchairs at either side of it. He drew out one of the chairs and Chrys had to walk close to him in order to sit down in the chair. She felt tangibly the masculine strength and warmth of him, the casual mockery, and the princely magnetism. As she sat down that magnetism seemed to cause a strand of her hair to cling against him. She felt him take the strand in his fingers and though he did no more than
stroke it back against her neck, she felt as if he touched the entire surface of her skin and left it tingling.
She was glad when he sat down in the opposite chair, sprawling his long legs across the tiles, and taking the ease of a tiger in the sun. Even his eyes held a lazy smoulder as they watched her pour the tea from the long spout of the silver pot into the cups of pale china stamped with tiny coronets.
She handed him his cup and saucer, and then sat back with her own, half closing her eyes with the relish of the tea.
"It is good, eh?" he murmured. "Especially when the throat is dry."
As always there seemed a double meaning to his words, but she chose not to take any notice, though she felt the faint quivering of her nerves as she sat there with him, among the angel's trumpet with its flared blossoms, the henna and saffron plants, and the great clumps of roses.
"Did you know that in the days of the Arab lords these courtyards were made for the woman ?" He leaned forward to take a coconut cake from the silver dish. He bit into it with his white teeth, and he kept on looking at her with those smoky eyes, and she could smell the scent of the camphor trees, and there was a coloured facet dancing on the leaves . . . like the dancing dangerous light in his grey eyes.
"It's a beautiful courtyard," she said. "It must evoke for you, milor, a pleasant image of all those lovely women of the harem."
"Does it not evoke for you an image of their master?" he drawled.
"Perhaps." She shrugged carelessly. "An enormous man, I think, with jewelled fingers and a rumbling laugh, and one of those spade beards with a dash of silver in it."
"And how would you have felt about being his —guest?"
"Quite safe, I'm certain. I'm not opulent enough to
make a very desirable candidate for the harem."
"Come, you thought quite the reverse on the train, and I should have relished seeing your face, cherie, when you were presented with the Hand of Fatma from a man whom you thought to be one of the local Sheiks."
Chrys glared at him. "It was all very amusing, wasn't it? But not quite such fun for poor Maud. I'm only here for her sake. I'd give anything to be elsewhere."
"With the big Dutchman, no doubt?"
"Yes! He hasn't the droit du seigneur attitude towards women that you have! A girl can talk with him in a friendly way, without the constant worry that he will do something unexpected. You, milor! Why, it's like taking tea with a tiger! "
He laughed lazily "So I set you on edge, eh? You don't know from one moment to the next what to expect from me. I wonder what you are expecting right now? I can see how tensed you are, and yet I am doing my best to play the kind and generous host."
"Your generosity is only matched by your despotism!" The words broke from her lips and would not be controlled . . . it was almost as if she were driven to provoke him, but when she saw the narrowing of his eyelids over the glitter of his eyes, the rigid tensing of his forearm muscles, and the flare to his nostrils, she knew that she had gone too far. For an electrifying second they stared at each other, and then he had loomed to his feet and thrusting aside his armchair he came to where she sat and without ceremony he yanked her to her feet.
"I have been as patient with you as I intend to be. I have taken from you the final insolence! You little dancing girl! " His fist held her hair so that when she tried to wrench herself away from him the painful tug at the roots of her hair drove her back against him. She felt his hard bare chest under the tunic, and she looked up at him wildly and saw the raw little flames in his eyes a moment before he tipped her over his arm
and forcibly kissed her.
She wanted not to feel a thing, but to be hie cold stone in his arms, but instead, for an eternity of breathless, riotous, unimaginable seconds, she was lost .. . lost to herself and to all the world outside and beyond this desert courtyard. He was brutal, and then he was indescribably warm and wanting. The desire to hurt and crush gave way to the keener pleasure of kissing her eyes, the backs of her ears, the soft curves of her neck, and her shoulders.
Something thudded close to her ribs, and the sensation was so pleasantly puzzling until she realized that it was his heart beating against her. It was then that her legs literally folded beneath her and with a low and throaty laugh he lifted her and carried her into the house, up a shallow flight of curving steps to the place he had called the seraglio . . . mockingly, of course, but as always with an underlying hint of the truth.
"Call me tyrant again, you sand cat," he growled against her earlobe.
"Let me go —" she pleaded, but the words had no strength, no reality, not the faintest desire to be obeyed..
"Is that really what you want, dorogaya?" His eyes were on her lips, studying them as if through smoky fire. "I swear if I let you go those long white legs of yours will melt you at my feet, and that was always an attitude which you swore never to assume."
"You've had too many women at your feet," she said, and there was a tremor to her voice, and to look at him was to feel again the pang of almost intolerable pleasure which his lips on hers had awakened in her body. She had so wanted to be the one woman whom his touch did not disturb. She had wanted to be cool and unruffled, and able to walk out of his arms without a hair out of place.
Instead . . . the contrast panicked her and she began to struggle in his arms. "Anton, this has gone on long enough! Put me down! "
"If you say so." He dropped her among the cushions
of a divan, and then with that leopard-like grace of movement which she would recognize in a crowd of a thousand men, he knelt beside the divan and leaned towards her and his eyes were smoky-grey and drowsy, and there seemed an incoherent purr in his throat as he took her arm and ran his lips all the way to the crook of her elbow, where they stayed, warm as a flame against the smooth, soft skin.
" ', hair of gold! , crimson lips! , face made for the luring and the love of man! ' " Only he could speak such words and make them alive and meaningful. "Wilde was more the poet of love than Byron or Shelley. Don't you think, my little sand cat?"
She gazed at him in the lamplight and there was a golden, barbaric quality to his looks in that moment. Cossack and prince, and an of the desert. She could feel the fascination of him stirring through her veins and the old desire to resist him awoke in her . she must stop this before she became just another name on his list of conquests.
"You are very accomplished in the art of seduction, Anton. Have you plans for Saffida as well as for me, the cool English ballet dancer whom you swore would melt with your charm? Saffida is very pretty —"
"Saffida is a child," he cut in, his eyes narrowing again to that steely glitter, striking across her face and her throat like a knife-edge. "Your implication is not worthy of you, Chrysdova. The one thing above all which I admired in you was your integrity — do you think that I have not a scrap of it? Do you think me such a rake ?"
His eyes searched hers, demanding an honest answer, and looking at him she was suddenly aware of all the nice things about him. Nice! The word shocked her in association with him, and yet there was an undeniable truth to it. Sometimes when he smiled . . . ah, it was crazy to dwell on the attraction of him . . . it was asking for a broken heart to let herself be drawn again into those warm, strong arms.
"You make toys of women," she flung at him. "While they please you everything is wonderful, but their very surrender makes it easy for you to say that all women are the same as your mother was. I won't be your toy! I won't be like them! I wo
n't be made a fool of by those wicked and beguiling eyes of yours. I won't! "
She flung her hands over her own eyes, to shut out his face, and to hide the sudden tears that choked her. She heard him say her name in a roughly tender voice, and then she was pulled against him, her wet face was pressed to his chest and his hand was stroking her hair. "No! " She pushed at him, and the bare skin of his chest was under her hand, and the shocking feel of the scar where a bullet had passed through him. Anton, who was so alive and warm and arrogantly maddening, had almost died, never to be known to her. It seemed incredible, astounding, that she might never have known him. It seemed impossible that by a hair's breadth they had almost never met.
"Look at me," he ordered. "I won't force you, dorogaya, I will merely ask you to stop staring at my chest and to look at my face instead. Come, I am being serious. I want you to look at the man who is going to tell you this minute that he loves you. That he has done so since the night he was trapped with you in a lift. Adorable dorogaya, for heaven's sake lift your face to mine before I go mad as only a Cossack can! "
She looked at him because she had to, because she desired to, but unbelievingly He quirked an eyebrow in that inimitable way of his. "You have heard of love, I take it?"
"But you don't believe in it," she retorted.
"I thought not, but it seems that the heart has a will
of its own. I could no more let you go after that night we were trapped together than I could let go my own life. Mitoslava did not have to persuade me to follow you here. It was destined that I do so. You know it, too. It is there in your blue eyes. Rapture of the desert, cherie."
"No —" She shook her head. "I won't listen to you. I won't be swayed away from all that I've worked for, for the sake of an affair with a prince! I'm flattered —"
"You will be spanked in a moment, if you go on about affairs and careers, and all those boring things " He pulled her so close to him that she lost her breath, and in his eyes looking down into hers there was such a heart-shaking look of love that she could hardly bear it.
"Don't do this to me," she pleaded. "It isn't fair! You're so accomplished in making a fool of a woman, and I — I don't know how to handle the situation."
"Don't you?" He smiled down at her wickedly. "You marry me, dorogaya, and you live with me a year in the desert, and if at the end of that time you still have this craving to dance, then —"
"You mean — you would allow me to dance?" She touched his face, almost shyly. Such a wonderful face ... it ought to be masked against all those women who would always look at him and desire the excitement of him.
"Of course," he drawled. "We will dance together at the Adonis Club. You remember how well your steps matched mine —"
"Oh, you devil! " Her fingers bent against his cheek, as if she would actually claw him, and then a smile slowly etched itself on her lips. "I have a choice, it would seem. I can be your slave, or I can be a dancer. I wonder which I ought to choose. Both are taskmasters."
"But only one will leave you lonely at night, and in the years ahead, Chrysdova, when the tawny hair loses its lustre and the sapphire eyes no longer sparkle — as they are sparkling right now." He bent his head and he slowly and lingeringly kissed her lips. "Will you deny me?"
"May I have time to think about it, Anton?" She pressed her cheek to the dark cross of hair on his chest, and felt at her fingertips the deep heartbeat, and the
deep scar.
"Yes," he agreed. "You have exactly a minute."
"Only a minute?" She smiled against him. "How arrogant of you to expect me to give up a career in just one minute. It took me years to achieve it, and now I must sacrifice it for a man."
She heard him laugh very softly. "I promise that you won't regret your sacrifice, dorogaya. Think of all we shall share together. Desert rides and desert dawns. The sands whispering a thousand secrets when I hold you in my arms — as my bride. Come, little white-skinned devil, will you deny me ?"
Chrys looked into those smoke-grey, wickedly beautiful eyes, and she thought of what Dove had said to her. "For heaven's sake don't fall in love with the man! "
Chrys smiled and let her arms enchain his warm, brown neck. It was too late for warnings, too late for denials ... already she was giving herself to her desert prince.
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