She was no longer whimpering but her breathing was still agitated, like that of a child who has cried too long. As he approached her, her eyes lifted to his, muted golden and sultry, he thought, like the heated night. Too practiced to miscue, he read the lady's acquiescence before she was aware of it herself. Too skilled to rush a lady, he slowly walked toward her, quietly sat beside her on the bed and softly said, "It was a dream."
She nodded, unable to speak with his powerful body so close, and she watched motionless as he put out a hand and touched her throat, slid his fingers in a soft caress across the small distance to where her hand clutched the sheet and, gently loosening her grip, watched the sheet fall away.
"The Bazhis can't hurt you now," he murmured, still holding her hand. Raising it slowly to his lips, he touched each of her fingers in sequence to his mouth before lowering her hand to the bed.
His eyes were like black fire, intense and beautiful with none of the heedless inattention she'd seen in them before. And she understood in a flashing moment his extraordinary appeal to women. He was promising her something she inexplicably wanted, and she felt strange quivering, warm tremors from the tips of her fingers through her arms and body into the very center of her being. They were not strange and fearful sensations, but strangely comforting ones-like a cozy fire on a cool mountain night that relaxes and warms at the same time. But she felt something more too, a dizzy, feverish wanting, an elusive wanting that brought a blush to her cheeks. It was the first time a man had kissed her fingers… had kissed her… and in her own, self-absorbed way she thought it quite pleasant. More than pleasant-magical.
"Was your dream terrible?" Stefan softly asked, the way a trusted friend would say, "Tell me your troubles." He put his large hand over hers.
"There were dozens of them," she whispered, shuddering abruptly at the memory. "I wouldn't have survived, would I?"
You wouldn't have wanted to, he thought, but said instead very low, his hand stroking hers gently, his voice soothing, "Hush, it's over… it was only a dream." The Bazhis' reputation regarding atrocities toward women was common knowledge. As unpaid irregulars in the Turkish army they depended on plunder in lieu of pay and were, accordingly, almost impossible to control. They traveled rapidly and they traveled light. Once a female captive had been used to satisfy their needs, she was always killed in a particularly brutal manner. It was understandable the Countess should be shaken by nightmares.
Her eyes were still wide with recollection. "I'm truly grateful for your rescue," she whispered, her eyes glistening with emotion. "And I'm sorry about today," she softly added. "I know I irritated you."
"I should apologize for my rudeness," Stefan said, his own glance tender, his hand lifting to brush aside a tendril of curl that had fallen over her forehead. "If it's any excuse, I'd just come off three months of campaigning and was damn tired. I'm sorry."
"I should apologize to you for all the extra work my rescue entailed."
Stefan grinned with a sudden boyish charm he rarely exposed. "I think we've covered all the social courtesies. You're sorry. I'm sorry. We've both apologized. I'd prefer," he said, his voice taking on a low husky quality, "to consider our meeting a delightful bit of luck. And I intend to reward my Kurd shaman for his mystical intervention." He was only halfteasing. She had been literally thrown into his path and he was enough of a mystic not to disclaim the metaphysical possibilities. "Are you badly bruised?" he asked suddenly, remembering the violence of her fall. No marks were obvious in the moonlight as his dark glance took in the purity of her form.
"My head… is a bit tender… near my right ear."
I'll be careful, he thought.
"And…well-" she shyly smiled "-my bottom is…slightly bruised."
That, too, he mused, I'll treat with care.
"I…should put my clothes on," Lisaveta said into the small silence, unabashed by her nudity but an innocent in seduction. She didn't realize Stefan had other plans. She didn't realize the game was just beginning.
"Did the servants bring you new clothes?" he asked.
"No."
"Wait till morning then, and we'll find a dressmaker. I'll have Haci dredge one up."
"I'm not as unorthodox as you," she said, understanding then the simple chronology of his sentence.
"I think, dear heart," he murmured, touching the soft fullness of her bottom lip with the lightest brush of fingertips, "you're more unorthodox than I."
"Your reputation-"
"Kiss me," he whispered.
She swayed toward him as though his words were the earth's magnetic poles, her mouth and eyes and soft silken body like an offering. "I shouldn't," she breathed, as if the words could stop the melting suggestion of her body.
"I know."
And the two words he spoke were like a promise she must keep. He could tell immediately, so tentative was the touch of her lips on his, that she'd never kissed a man before. But after three months of war Stefan felt as though some benevolent spirit had taken pity on him, giving him a pale unspoiled woman to make love to, as though she were a gift of innocence and purity after the endless weeks of bloody war. He felt no guilt that she was there for him. She was, after all, curiously self-reliant and surely not entirely chaste as a scholar of Hafiz. But at base he simply did what he did best.
And he began by kissing her back.
Lisaveta's first thought, melodramatic and alien to any preconceived notions she had of herself, was, He's attracted to me.
As a woman. A sense of wonder, magnificent in both its novelty and splendor, flared through her body, and she felt the warming flush like a personal sunrise of the soul. There was no denying the reason Prince Bariatinsky's engravings were collected by sighing women throughout the Empire. His head lifted briefly from their kiss and he smiled at her, his face starkly handsome, his dark eyes tender somehow despite their savage blackness. He was, she decided, wicked, sweet unreason, like a fallen angel dressed in sensuous beauty.
"I like your kisses," she murmured. "They warm me everywhere and make me tingle…"
He touched the small straight perfection of her nose with the briefest of kisses, raised his head and, his smile crinkling the corners of his eyes, said, "Thank you." Her ingenuous directness was enchanting now rather than offensive, the sweetly naive empiricism with which she viewed new experiences tantalizing. He would look forward to each artless reaction as the night progressed.
"Kiss me some more." She said it like a child in a candy store-with unreserved demand and delight. Unguiltily, too, as though she deserved it.
"Your servant, mademoiselle " Stefan murmured agreeably. Numerous women in his past would have been shocked at his placid acquiescence. Prince Bariatinsky, one of the most decorated, celebrated men in the Empire, had never been any woman's servant. Skilled and generous at providing pleasure, certainly, but submissive-never.
"You must tell me, sweet Lise," he whispered with teasing huskiness, bending his dark ruffled head, his breath warm on the aching crest of her nipple, "do you like this more?" And he touched the very tip with a tender suckling kiss that abruptly deepened, then bit with tiny caresses so that she felt a searing flame race downward like molten fire to sanctify each pleasure center in her body.
Her sighing breathy moan was an affirmative response.
He moved later to slowly caress her other breast and then trailed lingering kisses up her throat and across the velvet smoothness of her cheek. He nibbled at her earlobes and whispered the amorous love words that he knew roused women more swiftly than torrid kisses. He knew all the play words, the scented, heated, facile words, and she responded as he knew she would, her small hands reaching out to slide up the cinnamon silk of his robe. They glided with her own inherent coquettish languor under the open neckline and over the solid muscled strength of his shoulders.