The elaborate clock in the study depicting tides and changing constellations was exquisite, but its hands moved annoyingly slowly. At frequent intervals, Lisaveta would interrupt her angry pacing to check its progress and find no more than a minute had passed since she'd last looked. She'd already admired the magnificent view from the expanse of windows lining one wall, noted the craggy mountain landscape and snowcapped peaks in all their awesome splendor, stood transfixed while an eagle swooped in sweeping arabesques across the emptiness of space between her mountain and those distant ones and understood with absolute certainty she could never find her way down the craggy peaks and survive. Unlike the free-flying eagle, she was Stefan's captive.
After that sobering observation she'd sat down abruptly, her eyes unfocused on the panoramic grandeur of blue sky and rugged mountaintops, her mind attempting to deal with the finality of her position. When no ready answer materialized in the chaos of her mind, when no escape seemed possible from this mountain aerie, she'd resumed her pacing again, her rapid strides as agitated as her thoughts.
Despite Stefan's imposing palace and polished manners, he was, beneath his civilized veneer, as much a native warrior as his men. He looked the same: hawklike, swarthy, bristling with weapons. She recalled her first sight of him, when she'd thought she'd been captured by another savage tribesman. Only his Chevalier Gardes uniform had distinguished him from his cohorts that day near Kars. And while she'd learned much of the subtlety and nuance of his charismatic personality in their days together, his tribesmen, too, might be as complex and charming.
She was disturbed and perplexed.
She was indecisive about her unsubtle and profound attraction to Stefan.
She was a bit fearful, too, so far removed from the world on this remote mountaintop.
But she was-beneath and beyond and above the confusion of her feelings-primarily angry.
That fact was startlingly clear when Stefan walked into the room twenty minutes later.
A rose jade figurine of a Tang emperor's celebrated concubine, a special favorite of Stefan's for the cutwork in her trailing gown, narrowly missed his head as he ducked out of the way. The jade depiction of Li Shi Mia thrown at him was followed rapidly by his inkwell, several of his malachite paperweights, and before he could bob and weave across the distance separating them and wrench a silver wine ewer from Lisaveta's grasp, he'd lost the crystal container to his Cellini inkwell and two of his animal-shaped paperweights.
He wondered if perhaps Choura's anger had been easier to deal with. She'd been pacified by a handsome gift of roubles, a promise to send her two racers from his stables and a soothing combination of lies and compliments. When she was smiling once again, he'd had to carefully decline her offer to join a ménage à trois in his bed. "Perhaps some other time," he'd said politely.
And with that promise, her money and two prime horses, she was content. She would be escorted by some of his men to the nearest village, from which she'd find her own way home. Her smile when she'd left had been satisfied and her parting remark perhaps more prophetic than he wished.
"She won't be as easily bought off, Stash, my beauty," she'd said, wrapped in an emerald green shawl to match the jewels in her ears. She blew him a kiss and smiled. "I wish you luck."
He could use a little now, he thought, tightly holding both Lisaveta's hands and trying to sidestep her kicking feet. "Damn you, Stefan, I won't be treated like this," she panted, out of breath from her struggles. "I'm… not… some… Gypsy girl… you can buy… for a few roubles… and spirit away to your… mountain lodge."
"Fifty thousand," he said, moving slightly to one side to avoid her slippered foot.
"Fifty thousand!" she exclaimed, ceasing her combat for a moment to digest the enormity of Choura's price. "Are you mad? The Emir of Erzurum never paid over twenty thousand for the very best Circassian women."
Taking advantage of her momentary pause, he quickly said, "I did it for you. She's gone."
"Why?" It was a small explosive exhalation of sound as spontaneous as her astonishment.
He didn't know, so he couldn't answer, but a response was required to her question so he evasively said, "I forgot she was here. I've been gone for three months." He shrugged then the way he often did when she pressed him to gauge his feelings, and added one of those platitudinous lies that often served as satisfactory conclusion to an evasion. "She was probably ready to go anyway. Choura dislikes solitude."
"And yet," Lisaveta murmured, "she waited here for three months?" Jealousy underlay her remark, overwhelmed her like a gale at ten thousand feet in these mountains, for she knew very well why a woman who disliked solitude would wait three months for Stefan. He was worth a three-month wait-or a three-year wait.
"She probably couldn't find her way back down," he lied, treading warily, infinitely pleased she was talking to him again instead of screaming at him or throwing his treasured pieces of sculpture at his head.
"She probably didn't want to," Lisaveta quietly said, her golden eyes holding his in a steady gaze.
"I didn't want her here," he said, his simple statement a bald declaration of his feelings, his eyes unflinching. "I sent her away for you. I left Nadejda entertaining her parents at my palace tonight for you. Is that enough?" He released her hands, gazed at her for a moment as though looking for the answer himself, then walked away to the windows.
Bracing his hands on the molding above his head, he stared out on the majestic landscape that had always served as solace for him, the stark rugged mountains that had been sanctuary for him at times he needed peace.
But today his thoughts were in turmoil, his emotions disturbed, his fiancée left behind without concern for the consequences, Choura dismissed more callously than he liked. For Lisaveta.
"So," he said, turning back, his own feelings resentful now, "is it enough? Tell me." There was demand in his voice, an unconscious authority.
Standing in the center of his masculine study, Lisaveta heard the new chill in his voice, saw the beginning of a scowl draw his brows together and awkwardly felt on the defensive. "You should have let me go," she said, adding when he didn't move or respond, "It would have been better for both of us."
"I didn't want to."
"God's spoiled child," she softly declared, for the Orbeliani motto was familiar throughout the Empire for its arrogance.
Stefan raised one brow fractionally. That precept had been his family's guiding principle for centuries; he could no more ignore the privileged culture in which he'd been reared than she hers. In many ways she was as unorthodox as he, and he said exactly that without rancor or censure.
For a short silence Lisaveta seemed to consider his statement. Her life, of course, had been more male than female in education, in the freedom and independence encouraged by her father, in her choice of scholarly discipline. She was, she supposed, not precisely conventional, and their meeting that first night at Aleksandropol… She smiled. "We both perhaps have taken what we wanted," she answered.
She was without guile, he thought, one of her numerous charms.
"I did fancy you that very first night, didn't I?" she said.
His smile was as angelic as a young choirboy's. "I detected a slight interest."
"So I can't be assessing blame exclusively."
"If you wish to be perfectly honest, no," he said, "but I dislike the word blame for anything that's passed between us. I prefer happiness… or joy-''
"Or paradise on earth."
He grinned. "A good approximation."
"I should thank you, then, for sending her away."
He moved toward her, his smile intact, his hands open in peace. "If you like," he said.
"And thank you for spending fifty thousand roubles because of me."
"Plus two racers from my stud," he added, close enough now to touch her outstretched hands. "I should feel flattered."
"I certainly hope so," he murmured, taking her small hands in his.
"And how many days do we have?"
"Twenty."
Her smile diminished slightly. "I might have to leave sooner for Papa's ceremony in Saint Petersburg. I've a personal invitation from the Tsar. I should stop at my home in Rostov first. My cousin Nikki's expecting me…" Her voice trailed away because the observance honoring her father's work translating Hafiz had seemed until this moment of great importance.
Stefan wasn't going to touch that… not after reaching harmony once again, not this minute when he held her hands in his and their holiday in the mountains was just beginning. "Fine," he said, his own smile lush with warming passion, knowing he had days ahead to change her mind or adjust her travel timetable. "Whatever you want."
Drawing her close, he stood for a small space of time with her body touching his, savoring the first tentative prelude to pleasure, feeling at peace, at home…alone with the woman who'd come to preoccupy his mind and senses, isolated on his mountaintop with the woman he wanted to spend the next twenty days making love to.
"I'm sorry about the abduction," he said softly, his hand reaching up to take the first hairpin from her hair, "but I didn't want to lose you."
Lisaveta touched the bridge of his nose, tracing down its arrow-straight length as if she marked him for herself, as if that small gesture were possession. How nice it would be, she thought, if it were possible to gain possession so easily, if one could simply say, "I want you too, for always. For the pleasure you give me and for your smiles, for the laughter we share, for the enchantment of being in your arms." But she was sensible enough to say instead, her voice teasing and hushed, "I'll make you do penance for the abduction."
His hand stopped just short of his desk, where he'd been placing the pins from her hair, and arrested in motion, he looked at her from under his dark brows and smiled. "How nice," he said.
"You needn't sound so pleased," Lisaveta murmured, mocking irony in her tone.
"Darling," Stefan whispered, taking her into his arms and drawing the length of her body against his so she felt the extent of his arousal, "your whims are my command."
A flare of excitement raced through Lisaveta. Although she knew as well as he that his amorous words were playful, a rush of gratified power spiked through her. She did indeed command him. "Are they really?" she said, moving her hips enticingly, testing the measure of her advantage.
"Right now, dushka," Stefan whispered, taking her face between the palms of his large hands, "for want of you I'd sell my soul."
And jettison your fiancée? she wondered, the wretched consideration coming from nowhere to spoil the moment. Perhaps if she'd asked right then he would have said yes to please her and please himself. But she didn't ask, because she wanted him too much and was afraid of his answer. A man in Stefan's position didn't marry for passion; Militza had made his intentions plain.
"My price isn't that high," she said, her arms wrapped around his waist, a curious contentment invading her mind. He was here with her; because of enormous effort he was here with her; his fiancée was alone at his palace and there was satisfaction in that. She wouldn't be more greedy. "I don't want your soul, although I think I should be worth at least as much as Choura."
While her tone was teasing, Stefan gazed at Lisaveta with a slightly altered expression. Was she like all the others after all? he wondered. Although he'd never begrudged gifts to his lovers, he'd found Lise's generosity of spirit unique. Was she perhaps only more subtle in her demands? His voice when he spoke was quiet and restrained. "Of course, darling, you're worth much more. What would you like?"
"You'll think me foolish," she prefaced, blushing at what she was about to say.
"Never, sweetheart," he replied, admiring the innocent color on her cheeks, knowing he would give her whatever she wanted regardless of her request. He was not an ungenerous man. Her large tawny eyes were looking directly into his despite her blushing hesitancy, and he thought again how her frankness appealed to him.
"I want you to love only me, to forget all those other women," she blurted out, a desperate and unfathomable urge impelling her, inexplicable and beyond her control. She hurried on when she saw the startled look in his eyes. "I mean now… for these days we have together." When he didn't answer, she added softly, "The fiction will do, Stefan, and don't ask me why, but it's important to me." Had she been asked to define her feelings she would have been at loss to explain. She loved him, she thought with a cymbal-crashing revelation, neither annotated nor detailed but explosive and deafening inside her head. And she wanted her love returned.
For a woman who was not only a scholar but an expert in a man's field, for a woman who'd decided to ride across the battleground of Kurdistan in the midst of war, for a woman who'd traveled up his harrowing mountain trails with a minimum of vapors or complaint, she looked suddenly as vulnerable and artless as a young maid. She didn't want extravagant gifts or large sums of money; she wasn't intent on binding him in a female way he'd learned at a very young age to avoid. She wanted only his love.
And for the only time in his extremely varied experience with women, his heart was touched, not simply by the naïveté of her request but by her utter candor. "Gladly," he replied, his emotions evident in his voice, "with intemperate feeling and pleasure."
When her face lighted up at his response, her joy and happiness immediately apparent, a warmth of unprecedented feeling washed over him. Gently lifting her face to his, he said very, very softly, "I plight you my love on this mountaintop," pledging surety to her and with that pledge, unknown to Lisaveta, offering his love for the first time in his life.
He lifted her in his arms then, as though his patience had a finite limit, and carried her out of his study and up the small curved staircase. The polished wooden railing resembled a sinuous grapevine, curling upward as it would in nature, minutely detailed with beautifully carved tendrils, leaves and fruit; the treads were covered in lush grass-green carpet, silken and luminous. So close to nature were these creations of man she almost expected to gaze up and see stars in the sky.
"Where are the stars?" she playfully murmured.
As if he read her mind, as if they were so completely in harmony he knew what she was thinking, he answered, "In ray room."
Past the top of the vine-draped stairs, at the end of a narrow hallway hung with candlelit icons and illuminated paintings reminiscent of glittering jewels, Stefan pushed open double wooden doors, hinged and ornamented with brass serpentine animal forms, and stepped into a room he'd known since childhood.
Toys were stacked on shelves and tabletops; a wooden rocking horse painted dapple gray in primitive craft style with large staring eyes and an unusual smile gazed at them from a window embrasure; a special glass case held massed armies of miniature soldiers. The polished wood floor was covered with fur rugs, as was the plain four-poster bed, although the elaborately embroidered, lace-trimmed white pillow covers were an incongruous sight in this young boy's room.
The dormer windows were curtained in plain blue linen, made less plain by the entwined Bariatinsky-Orbeliani family crests woven in gold thread and picked out with sapphire jewels. While austere in design, Stefan's room spoke eloquently of his family's enormous wealth, from the sable rugs to the cabochon emeralds in his rocking horse's eyes.
And the stars.
When he pointed up with a smile so she'd look, Lisaveta saw a lapis lazuli arched ceiling set with diamond stars.
"You have a fortune in your ceiling," she couldn't help but say. Even though her mother's family was in the exclusive ranks of the Empire's wealthiest and the Lazaroffs were far from paupers, she'd never seen anything like the lavishness of Stefan's households.
"My mama's Persian background," Stefan explained. "The Orbelianis had a different standard of wealth than the rest of the world." He didn't reply with either apology or pretension but simply made a statement of fact. "I wanted to see the stars at night when I went to sleep, I told Mama when I was very young and this lodge was being built."
"Does Choura like your diamond stars?" She couldn't restrain her remark although she'd valiantly suppressed it twice before it came tumbling out. Her jealousy was stridently real and Choura was wildly beautiful by anyone's standards, an untamed dazzling enchantress.
"I haven't brought her here." He'd never brought any woman to this room. It was exclusively his in a selfish introverted way. He'd never wanted to share his past or his feelings-all openly visible here in his mementos and childhood toys. He'd preserved the shelter of this room intact against the personal disasters that had decimated his family. His happiest memories of childhood were inventoried and catalogued by each particle and belonging in this room, and until today he'd never wanted to expose those intimacies to anyone.
Lisaveta's gaze was skeptical.
"Her room was on the main floor facing the courtyard," he matter-of-factly said, secure in the truth. "I'll show you if you-"
"No," she said. "No, don't show me." The thought of Stefan and… her… in any room made her feel green-eyed with resentment. "So she never saw this?" It wasn't that she didn't believe him, only that she found it hard to believe.
Stefan set her down carefully in an oversize chair upholstered in royal blue damascene, squatted down in front of her so their eyes were level and said, this man who was known to prize his personal privacy, "Ask me everything and then you'll be content."
"Don't patronize me, Stefan."
"I'll answer honestly." And that, too, was a startling admission from Stefan, who by virtue of necessity in the sheer number of his amorous liaisons considered evasion an essential.
Lisaveta sighed, her expression rueful, her golden eyes innocent as a young girl's. "I'm sorry. Do you think me excessively possessive?"
"I think you've brought me unmitigated joy the week past is what I think." He grinned. "And I'm in no position to be passing judgment on character."
She smiled back, charmed by both his admissions. "True," she unabashedly said, happily accepting both his statements. "Why didn't she see this?" she asked then, because she wanted the detail behind his action, because she wanted the pleasure and luxury of hearing he hadn't cared for Choura as much as he did for her.
"I didn't say she didn't see this. She may have when I was gone. None of the doors are locked."
"Why?"
"Why aren't they locked?" A lifetime of evasion wasn't so easily jettisoned.
Lisaveta gazed at him with mock severity.
"It was my room," he said bluntly. "I didn't care to bring her here."
"Why?"
He shrugged. "I don't know." His reasons were not so easily disentangled from the muddle of his past. It had been a matter of survival, perhaps, for a man who'd seen his world destroyed while very young. His dark eyes held hers for a moment. "Introspection is a new concept for me, dushka. I'm sorry," he said, apologizing for the inadequacy of his answer. "It didn't seem right. Is that sufficient?"
"I'm sorry," she said, recognizing the effort he'd made in answering, "for being so insistent. It's as though I've no control over my jealousy."
"We're well matched then, sweetheart, because I must keep you by me… regardless…" He left the sentence unfinished, for each knew the difficulties evaded to bring them here together.
His shoulders seemed very wide only inches below her eye level, the breadth of his chest like a solid wall before her. His black eyes beneath his heavy brows were like a force of nature, so vibrant and intense was his glance. He was dynamic power and energy and a magnetic beauty she could no more relinquish than the earth could stop turning on its axis. With a curious finality she said, "And I want you selfishly for myself alone."
His voice was intense and gruff. "We're agreed then." She looked the most perfect woman he'd ever seen, rosy-cheeked, her golden eyes bright with spirit and passion, her slender form dwarfed by the custom-built chair made to suit his own enormous frame. Her traveling suit blended perfectly with the royal blue of the chair as if she'd planned her wardrobe for the eventuality of this moment. The dusty-rose linen, trimmed with white organdy collar and cuffs, buttoned in steel-gray mother-of-pearl, dramatized both her femininity and warmth and he wanted her in his bed with an urgency he'd never experienced before.
"I can't wait any longer," he said, the way a young boy might. "Have I answered everything now?" Anyone knowing Stefan would have been shocked at his grave diffidence. He was not a humble man.
"Have I told you how happy you make me?" Lisaveta replied, astonished at the exhilarating bliss she felt in his presence.
"And I can make you happier," he murmured, his smile roguish and familiar, his mood restored. Adoring women were a constant in his life. He was back on familiar ground.
"Arrogant man," she whispered.
"But you need me," he whispered back, reaching for the buttons on her jacket.
She stopped his hand. "We need each other." She waited with an arrogance matching his own.
"Yes," he said, engulfing the hand that stayed him but holding it gently in his warm palm. "We do."
They made love right there in the chair because it was most convenient for their unbridled passion. The second time, when their frantic need had diminished slightly so they needn't so selfishly take from each other, they tested the luxury of the sable rug.
Stefan carried her after to his bed and deposited her like the Princess she was on the crested lace-trimmed pillows and white ermine coverlet. Gazing at her lying flushed with pleasure, her rich chestnut hair in silky disarray across his pillows, her golden eyes half-lidded in the drowsy aftermath of lovemaking, dressed only in Militza's pearl earrings, her slender voluptuous body close enough to touch, he said uncharacteristically, his voice a deep low growl, "You're mine." There was nothing logical in his declaration; emotion moved him, not reason.
Her lashes lifted that fraction necessary to afford him a direct remonstrance. "Temporarily," she reminded him, her own independence as stubborn as his, their personalities matched in imperiousness.
"We'll see," he replied, emotionally unwilling to relinquish her, impelled in his present need to brand her as his property. He didn't question the unorthodoxy of these sensations; he only acted on them.
"No, we won't see," she retorted, unwilling to submit when he wouldn't. The man was engaged; they'd both agreed on the limit of their holiday. Unless some facet of his life changed, which was highly unlikely, locked in as he was to the necessity of a court marriage, she wouldn't further indulge him.
"You're not in any position to resist my wishes," he quietly said, his smile the kind that might or might not extend into genuine warmth, "on my mountaintop."
"Are we talking more of your archaic notions of captivity?"
"Call them what you will. I'm not concerned with your choice of words."
"I won't be dealt with as an object of your obsessions," she reminded him, gazing boldly up at him as though she weren't lying nude in his bed hours from the nearest hint of civilization.
She saw his struggle to respond congenially to her words and saw, too, the enormous control necessary to bring his wild impulses to heel. "I keep forgetting," he said, moving away from her and striding with a naturalness unconstrained by his nudity to a small liquor cabinet, added no doubt when his boyhood was past, "you want to be equal." He said it benignly, as an overture of peace, unaware of the inherent repudiation in his statement.
His words, however benevolent in spirit, were the same challenge Lisaveta had faced all of her life. They brought her to a sitting position in the middle of his ermine bedcover.
"I don't wish to be argumentative," she said in a voice of suppressed emotion, watching him pour some of the local liquor into a small glass, "but it's not that I wish to be equal, I am."
She'd been raised to be equal, had sufficient wealth to be equal, was educated by a great number of tutors to be more than equal to most men and had consequently never felt inferior as a woman.
"Sorry," Stefan apologized, "of course," and lifting the glass to his mouth, he swallowed the fiery spirits. His apology was the mindless variety one automatically expressed when bumping into someone accidentally or stepping on someone's toes in a crush. "There now," he said, placing the empty glass back on the cabinet, "have I told you lately how I adore your very sweet stiff-backed pride?"
His grin was intimate and effortless and Lisaveta wondered how many times he'd evaded controversy with that grin.
"I'm not seventeen," she quietly retorted, annoyed with his repertoire of avoidance.
"You look seventeen, dushka, word of honor." He had no intention of arguing over who had more power. While he understood her need to challenge the inequalities, from his male point of view, the world offered her little chance of succeeding. He'd been in positions of supreme power too long to have any delusions about the position of women.
"Do women have to be young to please you?" Sweet malice and condemnation colored her soft tone.
He'd reached the bed as she finished speaking and he inhaled softly as if with restraint before he quietly said, "No, darling, they don't, and I don't want to fight. I do that every day in a much more bloody fashion than you could ever imagine. I want only to love you and hold you and make you smile, and if apologizing for all the inequities to women of the past millenium will help, I offer that apology." He looked down at her, enormous in his towering height and breadth of shoulder, his eyes dark and heated and strangely seductive in the harsh masculinity of his features. "There now, is my blanket apology accepted?" His grin broke dazzling white against the swarthiness of his bronzed skin. "Or do I have to beat you into submission?"
She grinned back and sighed herself, realizing the futility of their stalemated issues. "Incorrigible man. Are you beyond reform?"
Sitting down on the bed then, he pushed her backward with the lightest pressure. "Reform me, darling," he murmured, following her down, lying atop her so she felt only the silk of his muscles and none of his weight. His smile was breathtaking and a breath away. "You've twenty days."
"Somehow," Lisaveta murmured, her mouth so close to his that tiny vibrations of sound passed between them, her eyes matching the teasing in his, "I don't think you're serious."
"I'm serious," he demurred, adjusting her hips a scant inch to accommodate him. "I've never been so serious," he unseriously said.
She hit him.
He responded by playfully nipping her earlobe.
At which point she tried to squirm away in sportive frolic.
Her small struggles amused him and aroused him, and the kiss he took from her was lush and endless and sweetly benevolent.
"I will reform you," Lisaveta breathlessly whispered when her mouth was released at last, her declaration only half in jest.
"I look forward to my schooling," Stefan softly replied, sliding her up the mellow ermine so he could settle between her legs. "Tell me, Countess," he murmured a moment later, his chin resting on her thigh, his eyes black and liquid with passion, his hands moving to ready her for his tongue, "when you feel I've made… progress."
All thought of anything beyond insensate pleasure disappeared from her mind as Stefan's tongue slipped into her. He licked and stroked, the taste of her blending with the distinctive flavor of their lovemaking, his own body reacting to the intemperate welcome of hers.
They were a matched pair, he thought, in passion and desire, a combination of personalities so perfectly meshed he could almost feel her urgency in his own body. When she moved to refine the tactile sensations more exquisitely, a flare of excitement raced through him, and when she moaned in luxurious gratification, the muted sound echoed in his own mind.
Then he realized with a start that she was inexplicably moving away from him, a teasing smile of undisguised allure on her face. "I think I'll rest for a while," she purred. She was all feline grace and temptation… and she was lying a full two feet away, her weight resting on both her elbows, her eyes indolent under half-lowered lashes.
"I think you're lying," he said, his voice low and husky. "I think you can't even wait a minute for what you want." He was sprawled opposite her, his bronzed skin dark against the ermine, his heavy brows mildly raised in mocking remonstrance, his smile amused.
"Is this a contest?"
"Not from here it isn't." There was undisputed confidence in his tone.
"Are you always so superior?"
"I prefer… realistic," he answered very softly. "Now don't move and I'll make us both happy." She moved.
She almost managed to escape the bed. Almost.
With lightning speed he lunged across the bed, his fingers closing around her ankle just before her foot hit the floor. Rolling over on his back, he scooped her into his arms in a single diving motion, depositing her on his stomach with effortless finesse.
"So you're physically stronger," Lisaveta begrudgingly said, but she was smiling.
"Do I have to apologize for that?" He was playing her game with lighthearted boyishness.
"Actually, it has its advantages." Her voice was a rich contralto, her golden eyes heated.
He laughed out loud and, reaching out, gathered her into his arms and rolled over her so she was pinned beneath him. "Beg me," he said, his smile angelic.
"With your libido," she whispered, her own smile sunshine bright and assured, "I don't have to."
"Maybe I have willpower."
"Not with me you don't."
She was right, but anyone knowing Stefan in the past would have been fascinated at his lack of control and his lack of concern at his lack of control.
"It must be your intelligence," he teased, "attracting me."
"No doubt," she ironically replied.
"And perhaps a touch of your hot-blooded Kuzan lust," he added, his face very close to hers, his dark hair brushing her cheeks, the feel of his body an invitation to pleasure.
"I thought maybe there was something more than my mind," she lazily murmured, "that interested you…" She moved minutely beneath him, her full breasts silken friction against the crisp hair of his chest, her legs sliding comfortably around his. "It's just a wild guess," she added, reaching up to touch his lips with her tongue, "you understand."
"Good guess," he murmured, gliding into her so gently she could count the exquisite seconds in her mind before she was filled with him, bliss so flooding her senses she felt heaven must be near and if she looked up past the diamond stars she'd see angel toes. And when he was deep inside her, he made it even better. He moved that minute distance more so her breath caught in her throat, white flame racing hotly through her blood. His rhythm was slow when he began moving in her, penetrating and withdrawing with an expertise that he'd learned very young brought women to a pitched and tempestuous climax, to a screaming panting climax. And she answered the deliberate driving motion of his lower body with her own fevered passion.
"I'll beg," she breathed, short of breath and clinging to him sometime later when he'd stopped for the shortest interval to kiss her parted lips. She'd reached the point where she was going to peak without him and she wanted him with her.
"No need, dushka," he softly murmured. "I only wanted to kiss you… There." His smile was indulgent as he slid into her once more. "Is that better?"
She couldn't answer because her mind was exploding with pleasure. She couldn't answer because words were incidental to the awesome rapture singing through her blood and through every quivering shuddering nerve in her body.
He met her passion then with his own, understanding her wishes with an unspoken comprehension that was partly skill and partly intrinsic emotion. They climaxed together, falling over the edge of the world onto soft white ermine.
He opened his eyes first and thought himself the luckiest of men. Twenty days left, he reflected, with the extravagant Countess.
Lisaveta's lashes rose with effort long moments later. She was new to the excessive sensuality of Stefan's companionship, or relatively new, and she didn't have his stamina. "I want to sleep," she murmured.
His smile was unselfish and accommodating. "Sleep, darling, as long as you wish." He had twenty days left in paradise.