Captive of Desire

by Alexandra Sellers

  Because the only opposing argument was the simple question of ethical behaviour. And she knew that the man who had stolen papers from her desk would think nothing of stealing a credit that was not rightfully his. Laddy shook her head in bewildered disbelief. And this was a man whom three weeks ago she thought she knew well enough to love.

  She was reading the papers’ various reports of Mischa Busnetsky’s press conference—only one of them giving any play at all to his refusal to hear a question from the correspondent from Novosti—when there was an urgent knocking on her front door. As though there could be no other human being in the world, she was immediately convinced that it was Mischa, and scattering the newspapers and tripping over the hem of her bright red towelling robe, Laddy rushed into the kitchen to let him in.

  Rhodri Lewis and Roger Smith, looking like two rats caught in a rain barrel, grinned sheepishly at her in the pouring rain. Laddy burst out laughing and stood back, holding the door open.

  “Goodness, what happened to you? Come in, come in, you look drowned.”

  “I’m afraid we’ll dirty your floor,” Roger Smith warned her, as though she would not be able to see that for herself, but Rhodri took her instantly at her word and leapt through the doorway, shaking the water from his head like a dog.

  “It’s tile,” Laddy assured Roger Smith, who had scarcely been out of Rhodri’s sight since his arrival from the National Museum Tuesday morning, and still hesitant, the archaeologist stepped into the kitchen and allowed her to close the door.

  “We were coming to ask you for elevenses,” Rhodri announced with a wide grin that glinted in his eyes through rain-studded eyelashes. “We were coming up the dry waterfall bed, you know, which was very foolish on such a wet day. We could hardly move on those wet stones—we were caught halfway up and halfway down, and then it began to rain very hard.”

  Under his thin jacket Rhodri was wet through, and so, obviously, was Roger Smith.

  “Well, what you need now is a hot shower—both of you,” Laddy said, smiling down into Rhodri’s irresistible grin. “Suppose you go first, while Roger stokes up the fire and I find you both something to wear.”

  Roger Smith was embarrassed, but it was obvious that he could not go back to the tent he had set up in the cave in his present condition, and he put a cheerful face on it, taking off his wet outer clothes and expertly adding more coal to the fire.

  In the bedroom Laddy changed into a sweater and cord jeans and set out her blue jeans and a sweatshirt for Rhodri. They would be too big, of course, but he had to have something while his own clothes were drying. For Roger Smith she pulled out a pair of loose chinos, the only other pants she had in the minimal wardrobe she had brought with her.

  Elevenses ran into an early lunch and the clothes hanging around the fire slowly dried, but the pouring rain did not let up.

  They talked about Rhodri’s cave, and Roger Smith proved to be so keen on the subject that Laddy pulled out her tape recorder to get down what he was saying.

  “The odd thing is the reindeer,” he told her. “Although Magdalenian man, as far as we know, painted animals often, the treatment of this reindeer intrigues me. The artist seems to have given him great prominence, you know.”

  “Does that mean that Rhodri’s cave might not be Magdalenian?” Laddy asked.

  “Well, it might. But other points of comparison—superficial ones until we get the chemical bods down here—show these drawings to be very similar to the ones in France. Except for the prominence of the deer.”

  “Tell her what you think!” Rhodri demanded, bouncing on the sofa in his excitement, and Laddy’s ears perked up. She smiled at Roger expectantly, saying nothing.

  “Well—” he paused and ran his hand over the back of his head “—it’s possible, if the cave is very extensive, if perhaps there’s another rockfall deeper in the cave—and I haven’t done a great deal of exploring on my own—it’s possible that in fact the reindeer is not as prominent as we now think him.”

  Laddy’s gaze rested on Roger Smith for a long moment, then for several seconds flicked back and forth between the two faces watching her.

  “If that magnificent beast does not have the prominence we think, it can only be because elsewhere in the cave are far richer, far more prominent paintings,” she said slowly at last.

  Rhodri crowed: “I knew she’d get it!”

  “Right!” said Roger Smith simultaneously.

  “And that means,” continued Laddy, “that it would be such a rich discovery that every archaeologist north of the equator would be clamouring to work on the site.”

  “Right again,” said Smith. “Fortunately the year is only half gone, and the museum still has some of this year’s funding to be starting with. There’ll be a team coming down tomorrow to start the preliminary work.”

  Laddy’s smile broke into incredulous laughter. “This is extraordinary!” she exclaimed. “You must be walking on air, Rhodri, aren’t you?”

  “Well, you know,” he said, smiling broadly, “sitting in there with that reindeer all night—before you found me—I thought it was a little strange. Not like the ones in France.”

  “In fact,” Laddy said, as the light dawned, “this is Rhodri’s theory!”

  Roger Smith was not entirely pleased with this, but he said, “He drew my attention to the unusual prominence of the reindeer, certainly.”

  “Is this for publication?” Laddy demanded, completely infected now by Rhodri’s suppressed excitement. “Can I do a story in tomorrow’s paper?”

  “As long as you stress that it’s theory only, based on very insufficient evidence,” Roger Smith said, while Rhodri hugged himself and beamed at her, “I don’t see why not.”

  The downpour continued steadily into the afternoon, and Rhodri began to fret over not being able to see Mischa to tell him the news.

  “Come and help me make tea,” Laddy said, “and then you can borrow my mac and run across and see if he’s in.”

  “He’s got a mac, hasn’t he?” Rhodri demanded. “Why hasn’t he come here? He always comes for lunch, doesn’t he?”

  Laddy filled the kettle without replying. She didn’t want to talk about Mischa’s absence, and besides, she had something to say to Rhodri while Roger Smith was out of the room.

  With her blue jeans belted tightly, rolled down at the waist and up at the ankles, and her sweat shirt hanging on his small frame, he might have been the well-scrubbed orphan in any one of a hundred sweetly revolting movies, except for his thin dark face and the intense intelligence of his eyes.

  If you didn’t have Brigit and Mairi, Laddy thought suddenly, I’d adopt you tomorrow.

  “Listen, Rhodri,” she said softly, “they haven’t named the site yet, have they?” He shook his head, frowning curiously. “In tomorrow’s Herald I’m going to have a good stab at naming it for you,” she said. “Once it’s got a name, you know, it just might stick. So what shall I call it tomorrow? The Lewis Cave? Rhodri’s Cave?”

  Laughter leapt in his eyes. “Rhodri’s Cave,” he said unhesitatingly. “Can you really do it?”

  “Well, we’ll see, won’t we?” she said, and they smiled at each other like conspirators.

  She could not prevent him from setting out to bring Mischa over for tea, but he came back in a moment, reporting the door locked and the cottage dark.

  “I suppose he went up to Tymawr for breakfast and got caught there, same as we did,” Rhodri said comfortably, digging into his scrambled eggs. It was early for such a meal, but they had had an early lunch, too, and as Rhodri said, rain made one hungry. “But he’ll be back soon now, because it’s clearing,” Rhodri finished. “You will have to sleep at our house tonight, Roger. Everything in the cave will be too wet.”

  By four-thirty the rain had stopped, and both Roger Smith and Rhodri insisted that their clothes were dry enough to put on. Laddy stood in the doorway as the slight blond figure and the slighter, shorter dark one set out across the meadow towards Tref
elin, then closed the door and sat at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee, watching out the window for another, taller figure to appear.

  But Mischa did not come.

  * * *

  She awoke in the pitch blackness, calling and weeping, and imagining that it had all been a dream. That waking dream enclosed her as she stumbled through the darkness of sitting room and kitchen, through the chill wet air of the night, through another kitchen and another sitting room to the bright darkness of Mischa Busnetsky’s bed.

  “Hold me,” she begged, trembling in the endless warmth of his bed, of his body, and his hungry sleeping arms reached out for her, and she knew it had all been a nightmare. “I had a dream,” she whispered. “Love me, please love me.”

  His mouth searched for hers in the darkness, moving down from her temple across the corner of her eye, to her cheek, to her parted lips, hungry, urgent, demanding. His hand caressed her neck, his thumb forcing her head back over his arm, and then for a moment in the darkness there was a still waiting, before his mouth covered hers.

  With a small keening noise of need she arched against him, reaching her arms around his body, and realizing with mingled shock and pleasure that he was naked.

  Under the loose top of her pyjamas his hand found her breast, pressing its fullness with passionate force as she cried out, then breaking off to brush the sensitive hollow of his palm over its soft tip. When he felt it swell into sensual awareness his lips left hers, and through the cotton of her pyjamas she felt the heat and damp of his mouth on her breast, and pleasure rippled through her body.

  Lifting his mouth, he buried his face in the neckline of her pyjama jacket, and she wanted his mouth on her breast, then, with desperate need.

  His hand found the top button in the darkness and struggled for a fruitless moment to undo it. He laughed, above her, where she could scarcely see his shape, but she heard the rich thread of passion in his voice.

  “I am the beggar at the gates,” he said, in his deep, sleep-thick voice. His other arm moved from under her, and for a moment the weight of his two large hands was between her breasts. “Am I not?” he said.

  “No,” she moaned, for if anyone would be reduced to begging she knew it would be herself.

  “No,” he said with sudden violence, and she heard a tearing as his hands parted and then his mouth was against her naked breast.

  With agonizing deliberation his lips and hands began to move over her body, teasing, tantalizing, bringing her to pitch of sensuous excitement. His hands stroked her head, his fingers pressing and caressing her scalp and her thick hair till she learned that her hair was composed of nerve ends. His mouth delicately traced the shape of her nipples till her breathing was a series of gasps through her open lips. He stroked her body, her long legs, with a suppressed passion that was almost savage, calling up the answering savagery he had taught her before.

  In the end his mouth against her became a torment and she felt that if he did not take her now, she would go mad.

  “Please,” she begged, pulling at his arms, his back. “Please, Mischa, love me, love me now,” she whispered, and was rewarded in the darkness with the sudden weight of his long body against hers.

  “Yes,” he said quietly into her ear, the added sensation of his warm breath against her overloading her system so that she thought she would explode. “Oh yes, my Lady, I will love you. But I want you to tell me something.”

  His voice was low and filled with promise, and she responded to the tone, hardly conscious of the words.

  “Anything,” she whispered smiling. “Anything at all.”

  “What information did Comrade Snegov ask you to get from me tonight?”

  “What?” asked Laddy in distant perplexity. What she had heard was gibberish to her.

  Mischa repeated the question slowly, word for word, and the first thin trickle of fear slid down her back like a shard of ice. She remembered then that not all of her nightmare had been a dream. Some of it had been real. In spite of the heat of Mischa’s body against hers, she shivered.

  She raised her hand and found his cheek in the darkness.

  “Mischa, what are you saying?” she whispered, horrified.

  “Tell me,” he urged roughly. His thumb was on her lips, and his mouth came down and kissed hers with hungry anguish. “Tell me, and then we will love each other one last time to remember.” His hand caressed her. “I will not judge you, Lady, not tonight. Tomorrow, perhaps. But tonight we will only love.”

  “You think I’m a spy—a Soviet spy?” she asked, her voice high, her mind coldly clear now. “Why—because Pavel Snegov sat next to me at your press conference yesterday?”

  Freezing suddenly, and shaking, Laddy struggled out of his arms. For a moment it seemed he would keep her there, then he let her sit up while he reached to turn on the bedside lamp.

  She blinked at him for a moment in the soft light. His eyes were burning into hers as though he had been able to see her all along, as though he did not need the light to see.

  After a moment, he said flatly, “So you do know that he is a spy.”

  All the buttons were missing from her pyjama jacket. Shivering, she pulled the cloth over her breasts and held it tightly.

  “The whole world knows it!” she exclaimed harshly. “But if everyone who has ever talked to Pavel Snegov is also a spy, don’t forget that that includes you!”

  “Everyone who drops casual information in a spy’s ear is not necessarily a spy,” Mischa said.

  She shouted, “Have you forgotten who I am? Who my father was? From the time I was twelve years old I knew better than to drop information into the ear of anyone like Pavel Snegov!” She looked at him and saw the truth behind his eyes. “But you haven’t forgotten, have you? You’d never forget a thing like that. You knew that if I were dropping information into Snegov’s ear, it would have to be deliberate, done in cold blood. It would have to be.” She dropped her eyes from his and turned her head away. “But you believed it,” she said softly, shaking her head as she felt the tears begin. “You believed it, without evidence, without reason, without proof. You believed that everything I said to you was a lie—my love, my....” She broke off, turning to look at him. He was resting on his elbow, beside her on the bed, unmoving, his mouth drawn tight, his eyes watching her. The wrinkled blue sheet lay lightly over his hips, revealing rather than disguising his long lean frame under it.

  In sudden anguish she turned and kicked her own legs out from under the thin sheet and sat on the edge of the bed, her back to him, her face in her hands. On the floor at her feet were her pyjama bottoms, their red and white stripes twisted and angled. Laddy bent to pick them up and pushed her legs into them, then stood and pulled the elastic up around her waist with a snap.

  Tears were streaming down her face, but she stood straight in the lamplight as she turned to face him.

  “Well, here’s something you don’t know!” she said bitterly. “And I’ll give you this for free: your country, your compatriots killed my father three years ago, and they killed him because of you! They killed him because he’d obtained your manuscripts, and because if he’d stayed alive he would have published them. They searched the house after he was dead. I knew someone had searched it, but I didn’t know what they wanted. They wanted the file on you,” she said bitterly, staring down at his dark, unwavering eyes. “Yes, they took that, but they didn’t get the manuscripts. My father had hidden them too well. So well that it was three years before they were found. Then I found them, your precious manuscripts, and that’s when I knew what had killed my father—your countrymen, and your manuscripts. I sat there looking at a lot of paper covered with words—your words—and I had to accept that in my father’s judgment they had been worth his life.

  “Well, I did accept it,” she said, her voice thick with sobs. “I did accept it, and when you were released I only thanked God that you had come safe back to me. The memory of my father never stopped me loving you. But it will now. It
will now. Because you aren’t the man he thought you were. His death was nothing but a joke.

  “You think Pavel Snegov was getting information from me yesterday? Let me tell you something about your own countrymen, since you seem to underestimate them so badly: Pavel Snegov doesn’t need to ask me a damn thing! He probably knows everything about me right down to the shade and brand of my toenail polish! He has not forgotten, if you have, who my father was!”

  Mischa lay motionless, his eyes dark with what she had told him, the muscles of his face tight, his skin pale in the lamp shadows.

  “I didn’t know,” he said.

  But she interrupted, not wanting to hear: “No, you didn’t know, and you didn’t have any faith either, did you? I loved you,” she said. “I loved you more than anything that moved on this earth. I would have taken anything from you and still have kept coming back for more. I sat waiting for you for hours tonight with my little explanation of how innocent I was, and I was going to make you understand that I hadn’t betrayed you. I never judged you for believing what you did, I couldn’t judge you, but I was going to make you see the truth. I thought if I did that, that you would know that you still loved me.” She sobbed once, running an impatient hand over her nose and her wet cheeks, staring at him. “But I know now you were right. You never loved me, even if you believed you did. Never. If you had, you could not have thought even for a moment that I would betray my father and myself by coming to your bed to betray you. I thought there was nothing I wouldn’t take from you, but I was wrong. That’s the one thing I can’t take.”

  The sobs had stopped now, the tears drying on her cheeks. Her heart ached as though there were a knife in it. Suddenly everything went out of her: life, love, spirit; only pain was left.

  She gazed into the dark eyes she had loved so much and felt as though she had been ripped away from the being who gave her life.

  “If your object was to get rid of me, you chose the only method in the world that could have worked,” she said quietly. “I don’t care now what you believe of me. You won’t have to tell me again to keep off your property. I don’t want to be anywhere near you.”