Golden Paradise (7 page)

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 fiancée 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 relationship 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 encompassing 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 passion, 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 shiver 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 fiancée 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 blasé 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 fiancée 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 assumed 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 passing 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 fiancée."

"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 petits 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 unobtrusively as possible on his mouthful of pâté 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 superstitious 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 assure you."

"How disgusting," Nadejda said, her inflection managing to include Lisaveta in her assessment.

"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 fiancée'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 fiancée to receptions and balls the week he was on leave in Saint Petersburg, and their conversations had been interrupted and minimal in such circumstances. 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 fiancé 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 assured of her financial resources after having been left destitute 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 fiancée'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 fiancée. It would serve him right. She would simply deny the fictitious papers in embarrassing 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.