Captive of Desire

by Alexandra Sellers

  “Shut up!” he repeated in a harsh cry, and the ecstatic pain shooting suddenly through her body cut off her words like a knife, as she gasped on a moan that she hardly recognised as her own.

  She had not understood, she had had no idea what it could be. Even last night had not prepared her for this. Pleasure suffused her trembling body, and she was drugged with sensuous surprise.

  The hooded expression left Mischa’s eyes as he looked into hers, and they blazed at her, passion and love nakedly triumphant as he watched passion make its first mark on her face.

  “Lady,” he whispered hoarsely, “Lady, my Lady.” And he shook when her body arched in answer to his.

  When the long crescendo began her hands stopped their exploration of his body and gripped his shoulders tightly. She no longer knew herself. She moaned and cried his name aloud and strained against his body and against the invisible barrier.

  “Please,” she gasped, “please, please, Mischa,” not understanding what she was saying, knowing only that this was pleasure beyond endurance. In the moment when her endurance reached its limit he cried her name aloud, and then the invisible barrier broke against the torrent of sensation, and it coursed through her heaving body like molten gold, flowing into every cell, engulfing her. She cried his name on a high, keening moan until his mouth covered hers again in triumph and possession.

  When it was over, they did not let each other go, but clung together, their bodies entangled, while minutes reached for infinity.

  At length Mischa’s long fingers began to stroke the damp hair from her forehead, and he bent to kiss each eyelid. His eyes were still dark with emotion. “After eight years,” he said, “one begins to live.” And she knew that for him, too, the world had changed in these past days, that love had transformed him as much as it had her.

  “I love you,” she said. “I couldn’t live without you. I haven’t been alive for twenty-five years, but I’m alive now, and I don’t know how I got through life without you.” Her voice trembled, and she broke off to stroke his cheek and hair. Mischa caught her hand in his and kissed her palm as he had done eight years ago on a dark, hopeless stairwell.

  “The memory of you kept me alive during those eight years,” he said. “Even though I did not believe I would ever see you again, I had to stay alive while you were in the world.”

  She reached up to kiss him, and his arms encircled her tightly as his mouth took hers, and nothing could ever come between them.

  “Why were you angry with me?” she said gently when he lifted his lips to kiss her forehead.

  He said simply, “Your friend told you he loved you and then kissed you and said you were sacrificing your love for your work.” He dropped another kiss in her palm. “I thought you had lied to me for the sake of a story.”

  “No,” she said.

  “No,” he repeated. “I saw the truth later, in your eyes. Forgive me.”

  “John is a photographer on the Herald,” she said. “We used to date, but then you came....”

  He caught something unconscious in her voice. “So close?” he said. “After eight years, I came so close to losing you?” And he wrapped his arms tightly around her as though her body was his barrier against unbearable pain, and to let her go would kill him.

  ***

  Late in the morning they were awakened by a knock on the door, and still half asleep, Laddy felt Mischa slide out of bed beside her.

  “Roger Smith,” she guessed drowsily on a smile. “Rhodri’s archaeologist. Wanting breakfast, I’ll bet.”

  “I will tell him we are out of supplies,” Mischa said, tying his robe as he bent to kiss her. “Don’t go away.”

  “Uhm-uhmm!” she agreed, without opening her eyes, drifting drowsily.

  The sound of voices went on, and eventually Laddy realised she was straining to discern who the second voice belonged to. But she didn’t recognise it, and with a sudden feeling of alarm she swung to a sitting position and reached for her clothes.

  She dressed quickly and was doing up the buttons on her shirt when Mischa came back to the bedroom. She looked up with a smile, but at the sight of him her smile died.

  Mischa was standing in the doorway, his face white, his eyes dark, and he was looking at her as though he had never seen her before in his life.

  “Mischa!” she screamed. “What’s happened? Who was it?” She started to run towards him, but she came up before the blank wall of his eyes, and she stopped, staring at him in horror. “Who was it?” she repeated.

  He said tiredly, coldly, without emotion: “It was Duncan Foster of the Times. It seems you are a better actress than I thought.” And at the look in his eyes she quailed.

  “What?” she gasped.

  “If I had known you would go to these lengths I’d have given you a story two weeks ago and saved us both the trouble.”

  She said, slowly and calmly because she must be losing her mind, “What are you talking about? I hardly know Duncan Foster. And I certainly....”

  “Perhaps you don’t,” Mischa said. “But Mr. Foster knows you. And he knows there were pictures and a story about Mikhail Busnetsky in the first edition of the London Evening Herald this morning.”

  She stared at him. “In the Herald?” she repeated incredulously. “You?”

  Mischa smiled at her without warmth, saying nothing.

  “It can’t be true,” she said. “It’s barely ten o’clock. The Herald’s hardly in the streets.” Fifteen minutes, she thought. And fifteen minutes was enough time for Duncan Foster’s editor to phone him and, since he was already in Trefelin, for Duncan Foster to get here.... And there was only one way the story could have got into the Herald.

  “John,” Laddy said with quiet conviction. “He guessed or he got it out of Rhodri somehow.... But you said pictures?” She looked up to find Mischa’s gaze on her as before, cold and withdrawn, and stopped speaking.

  He said, “I told Mr. Foster that I would hold a press conference at two o’clock. Perhaps you will come to it.” And he stepped aside politely, as though to let her through the doorway, but Laddy didn’t move.

  “I did not give John that story,” she said passionately. “You’ve got to stop suspecting me every time something goes wrong! You’ve got to trust me—or don’t you understand what that word means anymore?” And she remembered his voice saying, Betrayal is worse than looking at your own death, and she wondered how many times in those dark prisons he had heard betrayal on someone’s lips.

  “I understand the word,” he said with ironic emphasis, and she closed her eyes for a moment against pain.

  “Then if you love me, you must trust me, Mischa, otherwise it isn’t love.”

  There was a look in his eyes then that filled her with terror, because she knew that he had looked at a cellmate with just such a look after learning that he was a KGB plant, and before she could stop herself she cried,

  “Don’t!”

  He raised his eyebrows inquiringly at her, still without saying a word, and now she felt sick, bruised, as if he had beaten her; she could no longer look at him. Turning her head away, she asked dully, “Do you love me, Mischa?”

  “No,” he said quietly, but she had heard the answer long before he said it, a thousand years ago she had heard it, and its echo reached her now only distantly.

  “Why did you lie to me?” she asked.

  And he replied, “I did not lie. You are the first woman I have known in many years. It would have been hard for me not to believe I loved you.”

  “But easy for you to realise your mistake?” she asked.

  There was no answer.

  “I love you,” she said quietly. “I love you more than my life. I never loved anyone till I loved you, and now I love the whole world. How could I sell out your peace of mind for a story that might sell a few thousand more copies of a newspaper? How can you believe it?”

  A knock on the front door made her jump, but Mischa calmly turned his back on her and walked to answer it.
By the time he had closed the door on another journalist she had joined him in the kitchen.

  “Hold me,” she begged. “If you hold me you’ll know the truth, you’ll—”

  He laughed without humour. “If I touch you I have no doubt that you can convince me of anything. I might believe I could breathe underwater if you told me so while I had you in my arms.”

  “You love me,” she said, but he stared at her, unmoved, and there was no getting through the barrier behind his eyes.

  “You want to believe it,” she accused him. “You don’t want to know the truth, you prefer to believe a lie. Why? Why, Mischa?”

  He said dryly, “Self-preservation.”

  “Self-preservation?” she repeated, feeling as though he had struck her. “Against me?”

  “Against you,” he confirmed, and at the look in his eyes she could easily believe she was the deadliest enemy he had in the world. Her heart began to beat painfully, like the wings of a dying bird.

  “How can you want to preserve yourself against love?” Laddy asked, her voice an unbelieving whisper. This was beyond her comprehension; she felt as though she had spent her whole life searching for love. She said, “I love you. What is more important than that?”

  But he had gone into a region where she could not reach him. When he looked at her she could almost believe he didn’t know who she was. How could the love of a stranger matter to him?

  “Mischa,” she said earnestly. “I didn’t tell him. I didn’t file the story. John must have—” She broke off, remembering. “Last night, when I thought I saw something—that must have been John, taking a picture! He would have recognised you, he was at the airport—”

  Distantly, cynically, Mischa Busnetsky was smiling at her.

  “Last night,” she repeated. “Don’t you remember?”

  “I remember. A woman would have to be a fool not to cover her tracks. And you are no fool.”

  Yes, she was; she had been a fool ever to think herself safe in his arms. She should have known that nothing was safe in this world.

  “I am, though, you know,” she contradicted him quietly. “My father always said that the first sign of a foolish woman is that she falls in love with a—” Laddy broke off. “Bastard” was the word her father had used, but she could not say it to him, she could not apply the word to Mischa Busnetsky. Abruptly she laughed, a long peal of self-deprecating laughter. “And the second sign,” she said, her tone harshly cynical under her laughter, “is that she refuses to admit it.”

  Mischa reached for the door. Knowing he meant to open it and make her leave, Laddy flung herself against it, pressing her back against the panels with an urgency that bruised her shoulder blades.

  “Don’t send me away!” she begged him passionately, her hand reaching out to clasp his arm; and feeling the hot tears on her cheeks, she understood that her laughter had turned to weeping. “I’ll die if you send me away. Mischa, I can’t live without you.” She had never believed it possible that she would say that to anyone, but she heard herself say it without surprise, learning only as she heard it that it was true.

  For a moment, fire flickered in his eyes and she thought she had won, but as quickly as she thought it, the fire died. He touched her without passion, moving her away from the door and opening it.

  “You are a fighter,” he said with a calm indifference, as though sizing up her qualifications for a resume. “You will survive.”

  And there was nothing to do but walk out the door he held open for her.

  Chapter 12

  “Harry,” Laddy said breathlessly into the phone, “are you running a story about Mischa Busnetsky this morning?”

  “Dear girl, of course I am,” Harry replied. “And a very nice piece of work it is, too. I perceive it has not blown up in your face.”

  What on earth was this? He was sounding as though she had filed a story. Slowly, she said, “What exactly did you run, Harry?”

  She heard the sound of deep inhalation and could almost see his compressed, frowning eyebrows.

  “Just a teaser about the exclusive and one of John’s photos.”

  Laddy stopped breathing; even her heart seemed to stop for a suffocating moment. “The exclusive?” she repeated.

  “Dear girl, this world-weary editor is trying to wrap up the city edition of a newspaper just now,” Harry said, friendly but impatient. “We are running the first part of your excellent interview with Busnetsky starting tomorrow. You could hardly have hoped for greater celerity. What else would you like to know?”

  She could not believe her ears. She actually took the receiver away from her ear and looked at it as though it had a life of its own.

  “Harry!” she said stupidly after a moment. “Harry, where did you get the interview copy?”

  “Were you afraid John would funk it? He handed your package to me as neatly as you could have wished, this morning early. If that’s all—”

  If her heart had forgotten to beat before, it was working double time now to make up. Laddy hung up the phone and gazed sightlessly around the blue sitting room of Tymawr House, her brain whirling. John had not only taken a picture of Busnetsky, he had also given to Harry copy purporting to come from her. And there was only one way he could have come by that....

  Slamming and locking the door behind her, Laddy ran breathlessly across the meadow and burst through the door—unlocked as always—of her little cottage. She did not stop running until she got to the desk that held her portable typewriter by the sitting-room window.

  The neat file that held the draft of her articles on Mischa Busnetsky was gone.

  * * *

  Richard and Helen Digby arrived by helicopter at one o’clock that afternoon and let it be known that the press conference would be held in the house. When Laddy arrived just before two o’clock, chairs had been brought into the sitting room, and they and the blue-flowered settees were all turned to face two straight-backed armchairs behind a small table. Except for the microphones bunched together on the table top and the TV cameras, it looked like a room set up for a lecture.

  There were many more media people waiting for Mischa Busnetsky this afternoon than had met Rhodri Lewis last night, Laddy saw as she took an empty seat in a corner of the room as far away from the small table as possible. And though, no doubt, many of those here had originally arrived in Trefelin to talk to Rhodri Lewis, she saw a few faces of people who could only be here because of Mischa and who had therefore rushed down for the press conference.

  Not the least of those whose object could only be Mischa Busnetsky was the correspondent from the Russian news agency Novosti.

  Pavel Nikolaivich Snegov was in comfortable conversation with the man next to him when Laddy entered the room, but immediately after she sat down in her corner he was there, nodding and smiling at her, and interrupting the reporter in the chair in front who had turned around to speak to her.

  Laddy neither liked nor trusted Pavel Nikolaivich Snegov. She was quite certain that he knew all about her and her father, and as she looked into his cold, smiling eyes she wondered fleetingly whether Pavel Snegov had come down to Trefelin last night because of the story of the archaeological discovery or because that story gave him a good excuse to be in Trefelin to watch Mischa Busnetsky. It was easier to fool the press than the KGB, she had no doubt.

  “And so you have outwitted us all not once, but twice!” Pavel Nikolaivich Snegov said grandly, one reporter to another, as he sank into the empty chair beside her, and however much she feared and disliked him, Laddy could hardly ask him to go away.

  “Outwitted?” she repeated with a raised eyebrow. “You can hardly call it that?”

  “My dear Miss Penreith,” he said cozily, smiling at her in excellent imitation of a Dutch uncle, “to have tracked down this taciturn man when all the press of England are unable to find him and to be given an interview? If this is not outwitting us, what deserves the term?” He looked as though he wanted to pat her hand to complete th
e confiding image. “Hmm?” he pressed.

  Laddy regarded him thoughtfully, wondering what his game was. “Well, certainly I seem to have been ahead of the rest of the media,” she said quietly, “but are you telling me he had managed to keep his whereabouts a secret from you?”

  She managed to inject amused disbelief into her tone, but her heart sank. Suppose it was true; suppose Mischa had managed to escape the vigilance of the Soviet spy network. Then it was not merely the press he had been so desperate to avoid till he was stronger, not merely the press that this morning’s article had brought down on his head...?

  Amid the chaos of her thoughts, she became aware that the buzz of conversation in the room had died, and in the silence Richard’s voice greeted the ladies and gentlemen of the press.

  “Mr. Busnetsky is still unwell and tires very easily,” Richard said. “He will answer questions for one half hour and no more. After that I will be available for further questioning if you wish.”

  The noise of a footfall sounded in the expectant hush, and feeling as though her eyes were being dragged up by a force more powerful than her own will, Laddy met Mischa Busnetsky’s gaze across the room.

  His eyes rested on her for only a moment, moved away to the man on her left and stopped abruptly. He stared at Pavel Snegov for a long, long moment and then flicked his gaze, cool and dismissing, back to Laddy. His lips tightened, and he turned to the table and hung his jacket on the chair back before seating himself behind the mikes.

  He wore a white shirt without a tie, open at the neck and rolled up at the cuffs, and a navy waistcoat and navy trousers that emphasised his tall leanness, his flat waist.

  “With one or two exceptions,” Mischa Busnetsky said in a deep, tired voice, “I do not know you—” his glance flickered imperceptibly to the corner where Laddy sat beside Pavel Snegov “—so you must forgive my not acknowledging you by name. Mr. Foster, I know your name, however, and I am sure you will initiate me into this Western rite gently.” He nodded smilingly at Duncan Foster of the Times, and everybody laughed, liking him; those who had expected Mischa Busnetsky to be withdrawn and laconic were relaxing under this evidence that they would be met halfway.