The Silver Fox and the Red-Hot Dove (7 page)

He nudged the horse and it walked toward her, switching its tail lazily, the English gear making the soft, taunting sighs of fine leather. “Good evening, Elena,” Audubon said pleasantly. “Nice night for a walk, wouldn’t you say? I had the same idea, myself.”

The
volks
must spy for him, because no one else could have reported her route before she knew it herself. In bitter silence she turned and walked back to the path. His horse caught up with her without increasing its insultingly lazy gait. Its head bobbed along beside her, and the rhythmical whoosh of its breath was so patient that she wanted to scream.

“There’s room for two up here.” Audubon’s deep, rich voice was also patient.

Twenty-five years of dreaming, hoping, and frustration, and defeat made her finally lose control. She stopped, threw her head back, and filled the night with a long wail of fury and grief. She saw a fallen limb to one side of the trail and snatched it up, then went to a tree and beat the branch against it with all her strength. She heard herself make keening sounds, and her head buzzed with desperation, closing out the rest of the world.

Then Audubon was behind her, enfolding her in his arms and pulling her against his torso while he gently grasped her wrists. She struggled against the restraint and the crooning sound he made into her ear, and doggedly held onto the limb, now splintered and bent.

“I won’t be used any longer! I won’t live without choices and dreams of my own, just my own, without having to ask for permission!”

“Tell me the truth,” Audubon urged, holding her tightly, his mouth brushing her ear. “Were you part of Kriloff’s research?”

“Yes! Yes! Are you satisfied, now? Does that confirm my value?”

“Did you volunteer to take part?”

She laughed with an edge of hysteria. “Volunteer? At five years old, would I
volunteer
to spend the rest of my life in captivity?”

“Elena, do you mean—”

“Stop! What difference does it make to you? You’ve always had everything you wanted. You’ve always lived in a country where people can do as they please!”

“Why are you so important to his work?” Audubon’s hands slid over hers. She dropped the broken stick as his fingers pried into her palms. He cupped her hands inside his much bigger ones. “It’s here, isn’t it? What happened today on the beach came from something special inside you.
Tell
me.”

“Pay me.” Her voice was cold. “Money, lots of it. And help me find a place to live. Then I’ll tell you everything.”

“I like
my
plan better. As soon as you get it through your head that I’m only going to help you, you’ll talk. You can’t go off alone and expect to be safe. My plan is for your own good.”

“I’ll never trust you, because you’ll never admit your motive.”

“You want a motive? Here.” He took her by the shoulders, swung her to face him, then wrapped one arm around her shoulders and the other around her waist. With a suddenness that took her breath away she was on her tiptoes, her body conforming to his from chest to thigh. She could feel his leg muscles flex through her housedress and the tight riding trousers he wore. Winding her hands into his soft cotton shirt, she cursed years of training that magnified every nuance of his body to her senses.

“When we danced the other night, I wanted you in a pure male-wanting-female way,” he whispered, his voice angry and challenging. “And you wanted me. I
know you believe that, at least. Don’t try to tell me otherwise.”

“It’s not enough.”

“I don’t have many purely personal pleasures in life, believe it or not, and I want to feel the way you make me feel. And that, my dear Elena, has nothing to do with your gift, or talent, or hocus-pocus—whatever you want to call the reason you’re so valuable to Kriloff.”

“You want sex, then? Okay, maybe I can trade sex for what I want.” Crying silently, she caught his face between her hands and kissed him, hoping her limited experience wouldn’t show. His mouth conveyed his surprise for a second, then his hands gripped her harder and he twisted his lips on hers, moving swiftly and taking the advantage in her small gasp.

There were dozens of emotions and sensations in the contact—the warm pull and push of his mouth, the defensive way she met his tongue with her own, then shivered with pleasure when his explored it tenderly. Fear shattered as the intimacy brought them so close, it seemed impossible to think of ever distrusting him again. Her knees were weak; she melted inward, aching. Elena rose farther on her toes, and the downward slide of his hand on her hips brought them closer. He nestled himself against her stomach, and she swayed. How could he give her this sublime combination of desire and emotion if he had other, less admirable, plans for her future? Surely he couldn’t be that good at deception.

Remember Pavel?

It was easy to be blind when a man had you in his arms and you were dazed with instinctive responses to his touch. Such flights of fancy meant nothing, she knew. They were to be enjoyed, then forgotten. But Pavel had not been T. S. Audubon, and she’d never forget what Audubon’s slow, uninhibited kisses were doing to her, even while she worried.

“You want to play games?” she asked. “Then we’ll play.” She reached between them with both hands and jerked the tail of his shirt loose, then quickly
slid her hands underneath. This time, he was the one who drew a sharp breath. “I have power too,” she warned. “A different kind.” Molding her hands to his sides, she drew them upward. One found his half-healed scar; she poured her heat and energy into the place and heard him sigh in response.

“Part of your life belongs to me,” Elena whispered, making it sound like a threat. “And I know you in a way that no other woman will ever know you.” Her hands slid around him, the fingertips meeting over his spine. She tilted her head back and looked at him. The darkness hid his expression, but not the swift rise and fall of his chest. “I find an old back injury, here. The muscles stiffen sometimes.”

She rubbed the pads of her fingers over the bone and sinew. “There, that’s better.” She brought her intimate hands down his back as if she’d stroked him a thousand times. Unerring, her right hand slipped under the waistband of his riding trousers. She never hesitated as her hand flattened just above his hip, her fingertips tantalizing the cluster of scar tissue there. “This nearly crippled you, and even though it didn’t, I feel the arthritis that makes your leg ache sometimes.”

“Your fingers are melting into my skin,” he said hoarsely. “I can’t tell where you stop and I begin. How do you do it?”

She pulled her hands away, raised them to his face, and stroked the backs of her fingers up his cheeks. “My secret. Don’t think you have all the control.”

“My God, no wonder Kriloff will do anything to get you back.”

“And you will do anything to keep me—at least, until it suits you to do otherwise.”

He grasped her hands and held them still, tucked against his chest. “I could turn you over to my own government. You could take your chances with the diplomats, hoping they won’t give you back to Kriloff or let our scientists put you under a microscope. Or you can stay hidden here, as my guest. And I’ll make
sure that when my government does find out about you, you’ll be given everything you want.”

Poignant confusion tightened her throat. “I want to trust you, but you have too many mysteries.”

“So do you.” He stepped back, still holding her hands, and studied her in the moonlight. “But we have plenty of time to figure each other out.”

“Do we, really? How long before someone learns I’m here?”

“I could hide you forever. I have the people, the know-how, and the money to take care of it. Don’t worry.”

“You’ve learned unusual skills from the import export business.”

“No more unusual than your
massage
technique.” He led her to the horse, climbed up while she stood in wary silence, then held out his hand. “You don’t want to walk all the way home, do you?”

Where will I ever have a home?
She wished he wouldn’t be so casual with his sharing. When she left his estate, she didn’t want to take homesickness for him and this place with her.

She exhaled in resignation and mounted the horse with his help, settling awkwardly behind him on the animal’s wide back. “I’m no cossack. I can’t ride. I don’t even know what to hold on to.”

“Me. That’s the beauty of riding double. I get to have fun.”

She grasped his bare sides where the shirt hadn’t quite drifted back into place. This time she concentrated and kept her touch cool. But it was impossible not to savor the warmth and strength contained in the hard masculine body between her hands.

“You’ve turned the generator off,” he noted slyly. “But the circuits are still humming.”

During the ride back he tried to draw her into conversation, but she resisted until he finally gave up. She was more vulnerable to him than she’d suspected, and it frightened her. Years ago she’d stopped expecting the silver fox to come to her reseue;
now she was too cynical to let herself imagine differently.

He escorted her to her suite a second time that night but didn’t tease her with a kiss, as before. He didn’t have to. He only had to stand there in the low, provocative hallway light and bid her good night, while his gaze lingered on her mouth. After she shut the door of the suite she leaned against it, listening to him walk away. His private quarters were on the other side of the house. He’d told her he kept the entire upper wing to himself. Lonely, mysterious Audubon. Did she dare believe he was a friend?

Dragging with fatigue and nervous exhaustion, she soaked her feet in a claw-footed bathtub in a bathroom larger than most Moscow apartments, with pale blue carpet as plush as the fur of a Russian sable. Tossing the housedress aside, she looked at herself in a gilt-edged mirror, seeing a raggedy blond woman in very plain, utilitarian white panties and a pointed bra.

American women didn’t wear pointed bras. She hoped new underwear was part of the clothes Audubon had mentioned. It occurred to her that she was becoming very uncomfortable with the way she looked to him.

Frowning, she stripped off her underwear and sank into a canopied bed with sheets trimmed in white lace, and pillows almost as large as herself. The room’s delicate white antiques stood out in the moonlight coming through an enormous bay window. The feel of the sheets and white satin coverlet made her naked skin flush with excitement.

Even after this terrible, exhausting day, which had left her trapped, alone, and fearing she’d revealed too much about herself, she felt a glimmer of hope. She thought of Audubon, analyzed him, mulled over his every word, every touch, the essence of him, and came to no conclusions. But she lay in the darkness, with the sheets making love to her skin, and watched a houseplant in one corner of the room begin to bloom.

His Majesty, also known as Mr. Rex, was inarguably the most renowned expert in beauty and fashion among the wealthy women of Virginia. His Richmond salon even drew the elite from Washington. On many occasions he’d been brought to Audubon’s estate to tend a guest’s coiffure. As far as Audubon was concerned, the only worthwhile reason to hire Mr. Rex was his fierce code of silence. He never talked about his clients to
anyone
, and neither did his well-trained staff.

“His Majesty’s here,” Clarice announced to Audubon when the housekeeper, Bernard, called downstairs with the news. “Bernie’s cleared a place for him in the garden room because he insists on lots of natural light. Guess he’d get moldy in normal light. Ms. Petrovic has been brought to the throne room and is now being studied by His Majesty’s court. Bernie says His Majesty shrieked when he saw her. I don’t know if that’s good or bad.”

As Audubon stepped onto the main floor, eager to see Elena after spending a long morning in his underground office, he heard Rex shouting at an assistant. The perpetually exasperated voice echoed down the marble-tiled center hall from beyond the whitewashed arch that led to the glass-enclosed piazza across the back of the house.

“Use the
cream
facial, you twit! I said her skin was dry, not oily!”

Lost in his dark mood, Audubon couldn’t manage even a disgusted smile as he strode toward the beauty battlefield. Winning Elena’s trust and pampering her—if Mr. Rex’s attention could be called pampering—would have been pure pleasure except for his ultimate goal.

He had
never
let personal feelings interfere with his decisions before, but now two separate dilemmas had become tangled into one large, distracting worry. There was Elena, a woman like no other, and the first in years who made him want to rediscover life beyond his work. And there was Kash Santelli, his adopted son, who might be in trouble on an assignment. Their futures depended on Audubon … and possibly on each other.

Audubon forced a smile as he entered the sprawling room filled with plants and white wicker furniture. In the center of a cleared circle, where antique wicker and lush greenery had been pushed aside as if to form an arena, Elena’s tall, slender body was sunk into a special beautician’s chair that Mr. Rex carted along on private appointments.

In Clarice’s huge pink housedress she resembled an oversized bell with two slender clappers. Her bare legs stuck out from the knees down. They were propped on pillows atop the chair’s padded footrest, and her toes, decorated with red polish on the nails, were separated by chunks of cotton. Her willowy arms lounged on pillows along the chair’s armrests, and her fingers were also pried apart with cotton. Their nails bore no color—yet.

“I’ve seen cats do that with their claws.” Audubon commented, halting nearby with his hands clasped behind him and his chin up. “You look as if you’ve just been startled by a puppy.”

“A wolf,” she said deadpan. “Good morning.”

“Good morning.” He was struggling not to chuckle. Then her line of vision, which had been blocked by Mr. Rex and a female assistant’s fussy maneuvers
around her head, swiveled toward him and locked. Audubon felt a surge of excitement through his nerves, his blood, his thoughts. She was studying him with less wariness and more hope this morning, and in the hope there was also the pure, elemental trading of unsatisfied questions, fears, and desires.