Golden Paradise Part 3

"She was abducted by the Bazhis," Stefan interjected. "We had given chase-"

"And you rescued her," Nadejda said in a malevolent tone.

At Nadejda's vitriolic sarcasm, Stefan's gaze swung from his aunt to his fiancee.

Despite her own fury at Stefan's oversight in informing her of his fiancee, Lisaveta was still deeply grateful to him. Whatever her reservations concerning his character, he had rescued her. "He saved my life," she said calmly.

"And you naturally rewarded him."

"Nadejda," Stefan said. The single word was an order to silence.

"Why don't we go up to the house for tea?" Militza interjected, shamelessly pleased Stefan had reprimanded his fiancee. She'd been forced to endure the girl's uncharitable company for Nadejda had unexpectedly arrived in Tiflis with her parents on a visit to the Viceroy.

Felix Lazaroff's daughter was very beautiful, Militza thought, although not to Stefan's usual taste in women, which gravitated toward glamorous blondes. This girl was refined and delicate, her features touched with the ingenue, although her height was a shade above the average. Stefan usually preferred small women. How interesting, she speculated. As interesting as his cryptic note mentioning he might bring home a guest. Haci had defined the word guest for her, but more interesting yet was the fact Stefan invited the Countess to his home. A staggering first.

Months ago she'd watched with constrained silence as Stefan coldly selected a fiancee, appalled at his final choice. Nadejda was absolutely without endearing qualities. She was certainly striking, if one favored cool, fair-haired beauties from wealthy, powerfully connected families. But Stefan could have had anyone. When she'd said as much to him rather wrath-fully when he'd come back to Tiflis engaged, he'd only shrugged and said, not in explanation but in simple statement, "I only had a week furlough."

Lisaveta was desperately trying to formulate a suitable reply to Militza's suggestion of tea, for she wanted nothing less than to have to socialize with Stefan's malicious fiancee, when Stefan interposed. "Perhaps we could wash up first," he said, stalling for time, thinking h.e.l.l and d.a.m.nation, what b.l.o.o.d.y bad luck. Nadejda should have been in Saint Petersburg, two thousand miles away. "The roads are awash with dust this time of year," he added.

Thank you, Lisaveta thought gratefully, but then Stefan was adroit at lying, wasn't he, she decided, his "surprise" fiancee glaring at her. All she wanted to do was get away from this uncomfortable situation, find a coach traveling north very soon and leave Stefan Bariatinsky to the mercy of his fiancee.

Since they had dallied on the outskirts of Tiflis the previous night, reluctant to bring their pa.s.sionate holiday to an end, neither Stefan nor Lisaveta was in fact at all begrimed by travel. Stefan's white Chevalier Gardes uniform was pristine while Lisaveta's simple white pique summer gown was bandbox fresh.

Ignoring the graphic evidence before her eyes, Aunt Militza said with a practiced courtesy, "Of course, you must rinse off the dust of your journey. We'll see you on the terrace in half an hour." This latter statement was delivered in a tone very like Stefan's when issuing orders to his men, Lisaveta thought, having witnessed the departure of his troop from Aleksandropol.

And surprisingly Stefan deferred with a nod of acknowledgement. There was an authority higher than his, Lisaveta realized, or at least in some circ.u.mstances there was. Or at least for trivialities like teatime there was.

"Come, Nadejda," Militza declared firmly, "you can help me with tea."

Nadejda hesitated briefly, her eyes moving dismissively over Lisaveta to rest on Stefan. She was weighing the risks of refusing when her violet shaded eyes met forcibly with Stefan's dark gaze.

"We'll be along directly," he said, without modulation, and it was that precise lack of inflection perhaps, the utter quiet of his tone, that decided her. After all, Stefan Bariatinsky was the catch not only of this season but of ten seasons past, as well, and she had been raised to be a practical woman.

For a moment after the two women departed, the only sound was the whisper of the wind through the gigantic cypress trees lining the ornate staircase. Grafted from those planted by Catherine the Great during her triumphant tour through the Crimea nearly a century before, they dwarfed even the magnificent villa on the crest of the hill.

"Why didn't you tell me?" Lisaveta said, speaking first, her voice a low, intense, restrained resonance.

She was tanned, Stefan thought, gazing down at her. The crisp white pique must heighten the color of her sun-kissed skin. He hadn't noticed before. And the slight breeze was blowing tendrils of her chestnut hair across her bare shoulders. Silk on silk, he mused.

"Why?" she repeated, refocusing his attention from more pleasant thoughts.

"I didn't think it mattered," he simply said, which was the truth. His fiancee was quite separate from his love life.

"Didn't matter?" Lisaveta's golden eyes were stormy.

He wanted to say the information was extraneous to their relations.h.i.+p but he wasn't that crudely impolite. Instead he said, "The opportunity didn't arise."

"In eight days?"

He sighed then, a faint, almost negligible sigh encompa.s.sing a vast experience with irate women and unanswerable questions. "I'm sorry," he apologized.

She looked at him with scorn and anger and incredulity. After eight days of unremitting pa.s.sion, after eight days of laughter and conversation, after nights when neither had slept because their need for each other was too intense, that was all... "You're sorry"! For what? That I found out?"

He was primarily sorry Nadejda was in Tiflis, but that too would have been unprincipled to admit, so he opted for a less callous reply. "I should have told you. I'm sorry."

"Yes, you should have."

"Would it have mattered?" he asked then very quietly, touching her arm lightly in an intimate, familiar caress.

His low voice and the gentle intimacy of his fingertips on her skin sent a s.h.i.+ver of warm response coursing through her body. "Don't touch me," Lisaveta said in a tone meant to be harshly emphatic but hushed instead and much too soft.

"She doesn't matter." Stefan's voice too was hushed, and he moved a step nearer.

"She should."

He only shrugged, the convoluted reasons for his choice of fiancee beyond brief or rational explanation. "Don't be angry." His voice was husky, his dark eyes much too close now, just as his powerful body was. Lisaveta moved a step back.

"They might be watching."

"We're only talking."

"I'm not as blase as you."

"I'll teach you." He smiled then and added in a hushed undertone, "And you can teach me more of Hafiz."

She tried to keep from smiling, she tried to remind herself he was an unprincipled libertine and much too beautiful for his own good. She reminded herself his reputation was legendary, she shouldn't respond to his warm suggestive smile. But he winked at her, his lush, dark lashes falling and rising in a lazy indolent gesture. "We're only on poem nineteen."

All the heated nights and days of lovemaking came pouring back into her memory... with his teasing smile like now, and his teasing hands and lips and expertise. She couldn't resist smiling back. "Scoundrel."

"Never," he said. "A moralist's term, and I didn't hear you complain before."

"I hadn't met your fiancee before."

"My palace has two hundred and eighteen rooms."

"You're much too pragmatic."

"A soldier's training. Forgive me, dushka...and forgive her intrusion. I'm truly sorry." He brushed his finger gently along the curve of her shoulder. "I hope she won't upset you. I'd like you to stay and visit." His voice was as warmly coaxing as his smile. "You'll like Militza. She's outspoken but delightful, and I've a month's leave."

This was the first he'd mentioned her staying or the length of his furlough. Perhaps he'd a.s.sumed she'd stay, perhaps women always stayed as long as he wished. After the paradise of the past eight days, she understood why that might happen. However, she too was pragmatic and much too sensible to allow herself to become simply another of the parade of women pa.s.sing through Prince Stefan Bariatinsky's life. "Thank you, but no. I must return home to my estate as soon as possible."

"Stay a few days."

She shook her head.

He gazed at her, his expression unreadable. "You won't?"

"I can't."

"Why?"

"I've things to do."

"Even though I risked my life to save you from the Turks?"

She smiled. "Does that work often?"

He grinned. "Every time."

"Except one."

"Truly?"

She nodded. "Truly."

"You'll stay until tomorrow, won't you?" His voice was as courteous as a young boy's, his dark eyes innocently polite. "Aunt Militza will be inconsolate if she doesn't have a first-person account of your adventures, and she is a friend of your father's," he added with gentle emphasis.

Lisaveta hesitated, weighing logic against her charged feelings, the apparent sincerity of Stefan's request against the history of his past. "Just tonight?" she inquired, gauging the extent of her risk.

"That's it."

"If I don't have to be more than civil to your scowling fiancee."

"Agreed," Stefan quickly said, intent on having Lisaveta stay on any terms. Tonight he'd change her mind. He was confident.

The view was superb from the terrace, the sun pleasantly shaded by a rose trellis, the wind negligible, a samovar of great beauty the centerpiece of a magnificently arrayed tea table, when Lisaveta joined the party of three some twenty minutes later.

Teatime turned out to be interesting. It was also enlightening.

Stefan, it seemed, had known Nadejda only three days before he proposed.

Lisaveta had never met a true society miss.

Aunt Militza had met one too many and intended doing her best to see that Nadejda didn't enter her family permanently, though she was wise enough to keep her plans to herself.

"Were you raped, my dear?" Aunt Militza pleasantly inquired after the weather and state of the roads and progress of the war had been exhausted as topics of conversation. She offered Lisaveta a plate of pastel-frosted pet.i.ts fours as though she were asking a perfectly mundane question. At the stunned look on Lisaveta's face, Aunt Militza pointedly added, "I mean by the Bazhis, of course."

Stefan choked as un.o.btrusively as possible on his mouthful of pte and glared at his aunt. Nadejda hardly needed any prompting to anger. She'd already been rude to Lisaveta a dozen times. Swallowing quickly, he said, "Rest easy, Auntie, our troop arrived in time."

"How fortuitous," Militza replied, smiling as if the sun had finally broken through after a month of torrential storms. "Isn't that fortuitous?" she repeated, turning toward Nadejda, her smile intact.

"Stefan is known for his good fortune," Nadejda retorted, her lips pursed, her eyes cold enough to chill the equator.

But her words were the truth. He was, in fact, looked upon by superst.i.tious people as leading a charmed life. Many of the soldiers in the Tsar's army touched Stefan for luck, viewing him as a pagan deity of sorts. He'd never been wounded, never harmed in all the years of leading his troops into battle, although he was always conspicuously in the lead of his cavalry, dressed not in battlefield uniform but in the striking white dress uniform of the Chevalier Gardes. His men would follow him anywhere, and on more than one occasion his bold charges had changed the course of battle.

"As is our entire family," Stefan's aunt cheerfully declared. "Although Lisaveta must have a guardian angel, too, traveling alone in a war zone. Why ever were you out there?"

Lisaveta explained in some detail why she'd been in Karakilisa and why she'd left so precipitously.

"A harem?" Aunt Militza said, obviously fascinated. "How exciting."

"Only from a distance," Lisaveta plainly replied, "I a.s.sure you."

"How disgusting," Nadejda said, her inflection managing to include Lisaveta in her a.s.sessment.

"And Hafiz?" Stefan's aunt went on as though Nadejda hadn't spoken. "He's one of my favorite poets. You must see Stefan's collection."

"I haven't seen it, Stefan," Nadejda pouted. "Why haven't you shown it to me?"

"You wouldn't like it, Nadejda," Militza said bluntly. Turning back to Lisaveta, she asked, "Don't you think Hafiz compares favorably with Ovid?"

"I think, Stefan, that if you have a collection you favor, I should know of it," Nadejda declared peevishly, arresting the consumption of her sixth frosted cake to state her annoyance. "At Madame Lebsky's Academy I won a first prize for poetry. Madame Lebsky said she'd never heard a better iambic pentameter."

Stefan was briefly at a loss since conversations about his collection of erotica were not usual in mixed company at tea.

He frowned at his aunt over his fiancee's blond head. Nadejda, momentarily distracted by the recalled beauty of her verse, was inwardly focused, her eyes half-closed in contemplation.

Stefan's aunt only smiled at him warmly as though she were beyond reproach.

"Darling," Nadejda said, her resentment forgotten with the memory of her cleverness in poetry, "would you like to hear my prize-winning poem?"

There was only one suitable answer, he knew, and he gave it.

They were instantly regaled with breathy drama and coy smiles to a rhyming description of a lake at sunset. Nadejda's metaphors were sugary, her similes strangely food focused. Long moments of heavy-handed rhyme later, Stefan worried he'd ever be able to enjoy a sunset again without visualizing caramel syrup dripping over the horizon.

Polite applause followed the poem's conclusion, however, a pleased preening smile graced Nadejda's flawless face, and an insidious sinking feeling settled in Stefan's stomach. He'd only squired his fiancee to receptions and b.a.l.l.s the week he was on leave in Saint Petersburg, and their conversations had been interrupted and minimal in such circ.u.mstances. Was she truly so vacuous?

"Thank you, Nadejda," Militza said dismissively, although her tone was scrupulously cordial. "Stefan, why don't you take Nadejda for a stroll so that Lisaveta and I won't bother you with our discussion of Ovid."

Militza's suggestions were always delivered as well-mannered commands, but Stefan balked this time, his temper and patience on edge in his unaccustomed role of chivalrous fiance to a woman who wrote such dreadful pedestrian poetry. "The Countess Lazaroff and I have some business to discuss, I'm afraid," he said. "She requires some bank drafts for her journey home. If you'll excuse us until dinner." He rose abruptly in no frame of mind to be further thwarted by his aunt or any female.

He needn't have concerned himself with his aunt's response. She was delighted to let her nephew go off with his new lover on whatever flimsy pretext he chose, and her smile was beatific when she gazed up at him towering above her. "By all means, Stefan, the Countess must be a.s.sured of her financial resources after having been left dest.i.tute on the steppes. Should we put dinner off until ten?"

Stefan's emphatic "Yes" and Lisaveta's "No" clashed starkly.

"My financial affairs won't be difficult to arrange," Lisaveta explained with a calm she was far from feeling. "I'm sure a banker in Tiflis will accommodate my needs. And if my name isn't recognized, either Papa's or cousin Nikki's will be sufficient." Lisaveta refused to fall into any of Stefan's plans. If he couldn't abide his fiancee's company, she wasn't going to be a convenient alternative, and if he thought he could snap his fingers and have her follow him, he had a lesson to learn. "Thank you, Stefan," she said with serene sweetness, "but your concern is unnecessary," and she reached for her teacup.

His arm shot out across his aunt's chair, his fingers closing around Lisaveta's wrist with her fingers just short of her teacup. "No reason, mademoiselle, to involve Nikki when my banker is amenable. And you forget," he said, his voice softly emphatic as he pulled her to her feet, took the lace napkin from her hand and placed it on the table, "your father's papers, which Haci saved from the Bazhis, need your attention."

She imagined he would prefer not involving Nikki, and as far as papers... He was thoroughly without scruple. There were no papers. For a moment Lisaveta considered exposing him before his rancorous fiancee. It would serve him right. She would simply deny the fict.i.tious papers in embarra.s.sing detail, but on second thought, he was offering her escape along with his own, and it didn't make much sense to suffer here over tea when freedom beckoned.

"I'm sure it won't take more than a few hours to sort them all and make certain nothing important is missing," he said, smiling, conscious she was acquiescing. "Should we say dinner at ten?" He waited, confident and a.s.sured, his intense dark eyes offering her... pleasure.

She waited perhaps five seconds before replying, because his a.s.surance annoyed her. "Thank you," she finally said. "I'd like to see Papa's reports, but we needn't put off dinner." She turned to Aunt Militza. "Eight will be fine."

Aunt Militza conceded equal points to the two protagonists. How interesting the Countess would be for Stefan. He was familiar only with acquiescence and command. Countess Lazaroff apparently was, as well. "Eight it is," she said. "Now run along. I'm sure Nadejda and I would be bored to tears with reports."

As Stefan and Lisaveta left the terrace Nadejda was saying, "Stefan must show me his collection for it will be mine, too, very soon, and poetry is such a love."