Golden Paradise (31 page)

"What happens when you don't have your way?"

He shrugged rather than answer her, for he wished to avoid further argument. "Why so polemical,
dushka,"
he said instead. "There are pleasanter ways to pass the time."

"Making love, you mean."

"Precisely."

"And if I don't wish to?"

"Come, darling," he murmured, "you always wish to."

"I don't right now."

He surveyed her for a moment as she had so recently him, and then said mildly, "If you take your dress off, I'll marry you." His remark was facetious and blasé and remarkably genuine.

"According to Nikki," she reminded him, "you'll marry me whether I take my dress off or not."

"Hmm," he said.

"Yes, exactly."
Her smugness was genial, not malicious.

Another short silence and then he said, "How emphatic are you about your prerogatives?" He was smiling now with a buoyant cheer that made him even more appealing, and she was suddenly jealous of all the women who'd seen that particular smile. It was an intimate smile of exceptional grace and charm, like a promise of personal fulfillment.

"About as emphatic as you are about yours."

"Hmm," he said again. Her honesty was always demonstrably plain.

"Is this difficult, this style of courtship in which a woman doesn't fall immediately panting into your arms?" Her golden eyes were amused.

" 'Difficult'
wouldn't be my choice of word. I'd say time-consuming," he drawled, his grin boyish. "But then I've still a day and a half before I have to go back."

Fleeting surprise showed on her face.
"Back?"

"To Kars, of course.
You didn't think the war was over?"

"Are you going to win?" she asked in an intemperate rush of words, fearful suddenly she might lose him after all, not to Nadejda or a multitude of other women but to something far worse. It altered her perspective instantaneously and made his presence in Saint Petersburg treasured.

"Of course," he replied with his usual expansive confidence. "I always do."

"The undefeated Prince Bariatinsky," she said softly. He was heralded not only as the youngest commander in the Tsar's army but as the only undefeated general in Russian history.

"At your service,
mademoiselle…"
Out of uniform he looked vulnerable suddenly, not a symbol of the Tsar's Empire or the strength of Russia's army but simply a man, who was smiling at her and teasing her. A man who'd come a great distance and quite plainly wanted her. A man she loved beyond reason or sanity. "You will be careful, won't you?" Lisaveta said gravely, her mood transformed by a stabbing reassertion of fear.

"Darling," Stefan said, his smile intact, untouched by her anxiety, "you survive by
not
being careful. Don't worry about me."

She attempted an answering smile of reassurance but a tiny shiver ran down her spine as if some unseen specter had tapped her on the shoulder.

"Are you finished now?" he asked. She looked at him blankly.

"Talking," he said. "I've only a day and a half." His grin struck away her last vestiges of apprehension.

"Some men subscribe to a touch more gallantry," she mockingly chastised.

"They probably have more time than I," he retorted, un-chastised and smiling still.

"Is that my cue to fall willing into your arms?"
A coy and teasing response.

"I'd like that." And while his dark eyes were amused, his voice was suddenly serious. "You own my heart,
dushka,"
he added very softly, acknowledging at last the feelings he'd fought so long, the feelings that had taken him from Kars. "And I'm helplessly in love."

Tears welled in her eyes and she swallowed once before answering. "Oh, Stepka," Lisaveta whispered, reaching out to touch his hand, "what are we going to do?"

"I'm marrying you," he said simply, as though he'd understood that eventuality always and not only in the last few revealing moments, and then he sighed a little because
he could
ready feel the burden of the past engulf him. All the bitter memories came rushing back, all the whispers ignored and uncertainties felt, the malice and hurt surrounding his parents' grand passion recalled as if it were yesterday. And now he was doing what he'd sworn never to do; he was letting love for a woman compromise his future plans.

Consciously shaking away his reservations, he drew Lisaveta into the curve of his arms, the feel of her warmth next to him mitigating the jarring foreboding. "And you're marrying me," he whispered, her soft braids like silk under his chin. "Do you like the sound of that as much as I?"

"We shouldn't," she murmured, distraught. "I shouldn't. It's asking too much of you." She understood he was relinquishing all his carefully wrought plans, the ones so painstakingly arranged to overcome the shadow of his father's disgrace, the ones he'd considered a logical solution to the pain of his own unorthodox childhood. He was risking, too, his own illustrious career if Prince Taneiev were vengeful. Men had fallen from favor with the Tsar for smaller infractions. And since Alexander was insulated from the world, his information often censored and altered in the political cauldron of court intrigue, there was never any certainty one's case would be presented objectively.

"Nonsense," Stefan said, "everything can be resolved." A striking statement from a man who'd vowed never to love a woman so madly that it affected his life or career.

"You don't have to marry me," Lisaveta quietly declared.

"But I wish to,
dushka,
and besides," he said, drawing away so he could look at her, a faint grin lifting the corners of his mouth, "Nikki will kill me if I don't."

"Vladimir Taneiev might kill you if you do." No levity infused her remark.

"True. However," Stefan briskly went on, "I understand his greed outstrips his ethics. I'll offer him large sums of money."

"Could I help?" she said then. "I could at least do that."

He looked at her in mild astonishment because he'd never had a woman offer to pay his way. "You
were
raised differently," he said in murmured wonder, "but thank you, no. I've plenty."
An understatement from the heir to two family fortunes that individually could have run the Empire for a decade.
"And now that I've offered you my name, my wealth, my future, do you think you could say yes out of consideration for my feelings?" The laughter in his eyes reminded her of a young boy intent on play.

"Oh, yes," she said then, young-girl breathless with suffocating happiness. "Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes…" she whispered, feeling a joy so profound she trembled. She loved him beyond the normal scope of
emotion,
she loved him with an incoherent, jubilant elation that stacked pleasure upon pleasure to the rooftop of the world.

She had made her objection, offered him a chance to reconsider his proposal out of decency and a kindly courtesy. He didn't have to marry her because Nikki was insisting or because of the possibility she carried his child. She knew, too, how much his previous plans for marriage were based on the sadnesses in his past.

But when she'd made those required objections and he'd refused them all in his teasing, smiling way, she'd allowed the full measure of her happiness to invade her heart, so she felt now a rosy warm magic, as though she could touch the whole world and make it smile with her. She couldn't have accepted him had he been coerced or reluctant. She was too prideful herself to take a husband who didn't love her immensely. And he did, it was plain. Beyond his teasing and irony, it was clear he loved her so much he'd come across Russia for her and would marry her even in Vladimir Taneiev's shadow.

"I'll make you happy, Stepka," she whispered, her face alight with love, "always."

And he knew with that certainty reserved for those rare and perfect unions, she would. He'd searched for her, blasé and unknowing, too long to doubt it.

He knew it with that blinding flash of mystic revelation.

With a Zoroastrian belief like burning flame.

With a shaman magic—he knew it.

He smiled, thinking of an additional intuitive reason more: she said "Stepka" with the exact inflection that his father had, and in
all the
world he'd found someone to love again. Or perhaps she had found him, he thought, considering how they'd met.

"And I'll try, little mother," he murmured, "to make you
both
happy."

Her eyes showed a small startled reflex and she said very softly, "It's a very new thought…."

"The way it works, darling," he said, his smile so close she could feel its warmth, "you'll have time to get used to the idea."

He kissed her then, and she him, with a giddy smiling kiss that tasted of love and delight and wonder. They had both found the illusive prize of life, the spilled-over love chalice of everyone's quest, the insupportable marvel of requited, deep and perfect love…and it seeped like blissful sunshine into every corner of their mind.

Their kiss in the normal sequence of events turned in time from sunshine into licking flame, and it was then Stefan gathered Lisaveta into his arms with effortless
strength,
rose from the sofa with a fluid grace and began walking toward the doors leading into the hallway. As if already mated in mind and spirit, he said, "I'm taking you to my palace," before she could ask her intended question.

B
ut Nikki was waiting in the corridor, seated on a bargello-upholstered Venetian chair directly facing the drawing room doors.

"Chaperoning, are you?" Stefan mildly inquired, his tone benign, holding Lisaveta in his arms as though he always casually held her while conversing.

"I thought I'd read for a time," Nikki pleasantly replied, his book unopened beside him on the console table.

"And that was the only chair in this block-long palace?"

"The only convenient one," Nikki answered with a grin. "I see all is reconciled." He could see Lisaveta was happy—it was apparent in her beaming face—and Stefan had the look of a triumphant man.

"And if it hadn't been?" Stefan said in a quiet voice.

"I brought my revolver. One never knows when one might need it—reading." He had not of course, but a measure of coercion existed beneath his amused words.

"Before you two do something adolescent and ruin all this unalloyed bliss," Lisaveta interjected with a smile, "may I point out that all this masculine pride is rather irrelevant since Stefan proposed and I
accepted.
"

"Congratulations." Benevolence and cordiality infused the single word, for beyond the fact that Lisaveta's future was
secure,
Nikki was genuinely fond of them both. "Should I talk to my priest?" he inquired, rising from his chair.

"So subtle,
mon
ami,"
Stefan replied with a grin, "but I'll speak to mine instead." And in afterthought for a man used to command, he looked down at Lisaveta. "If that's all right with you, darling," he added with deference.

Lisaveta was currently feeling an over-the-moon happiness and was capable of complacently viewing the yawning jaws of hell with equanimity. "Whatever you think," she
said,
her voice compliant.

Stefan's eyes widened in mock surprise.
"No argument, no contention, no combative response? Had I realized," he went on with teasing brightness, "how simple it was to curtail your temper, I'd have proposed long ago."

"There, you
see,
the feminine mystique transparent at last," Lisaveta facetiously replied. "I'll teach you everything I know," she promised in a whispered aside.

Her remark immediately refocused Stefan's attention on his original mission. "I'd really like to stay and chat," he said to Nikki, who was beaming visibly at the success of his cousinly pressure, "but I've only a day and half before I have to leave."

"I'll call at your home later, then," Nikki said, "to hear your plans. Do you want me to inform anyone?"

Stefan's answer was staccato swift. "Not just yet," he
said,
his glance over Lisaveta's head significant with meaning. He had first to face Nadejda and her family. "I'll get back to you."

"Say goodbye," Lisaveta murmured into the sweep of black hair near Stefan's ear, and he promptly did, as anxious as she to be alone, the problem of Nadejda's family instantly discarded in lieu of more gratifying thoughts.

"Have a pleasant day," Nikki volunteered, his doting grin that of an extremely pleased man.

"Thank you," Stefan replied
,
his face creasing into a broad smile as his eyes met with Lisaveta's. "We will."

The weeks of their separation past, their ruinous jealousy resolved, neither chose to dwell on the unreliable future; they were feeling only intemperate joy. And when Stefan had Lisaveta at last where he'd so often fantasized of late, in his home and bed, softly warm beneath him, he told her how much he loved her with a rare and garlanded poetry she found captivating. She answered him with her own simple words, words she'd contemplated in the long days of their absence and the bitter nights of their separation, words she'd once considered forever denied her. "I love you," she said, "with all my heart."