"You must make love to me," she whispered, and pulled him close.
"I must?" There was the minutest pause. They were only inches apart, her golden dark-lashed eyes riveting in their boldness. "And if I won't?" he very softly said, although a white-hot excitement was already rousing him, an impatient fever more pungent than blood lust, more provocative than Hafiz's poetry and gilded interiors.
"I'D give you pleasure," she said very simply, in the rich womanly contralto he'd heard earlier in the evening. Her palms were slipping down over the firmly defined musculature of his chest, and he inhaled sharply as her small hands drifted lower. "I will, you know," she murmured, her voice as sensuous as a Sultan's favorite, trained from the cradle. It was as if she must tantalize him to pique his jaded interest.
He smiled then. Despite her innocence and lack of experience, he knew she would. "I know," he whispered. As a jeweled gift gives pleasure, he thought, as enchantment might be held in one's hands. "It's been three months," he said. "You will give me pleasure.''
"It's been twenty-two years," she softly said, "and I don't want to wait." Her smile was pure unadulterated sunshine.
He laughed, looking down at her as she half reclined against the pillows, her hands under his robe, resting on his chest, her beautiful face lifted to him, her golden eyes so bright they seemed to glisten with life.
"What if I make you wait?" he teased. He knew how to pace himself.
"You can't," she playfully pouted.
"You're only a Countess." He touched her pouty lip. "I outrank you." The amusement in his eyes spilled over into his grin.
"I'm a Princess, too. My mother was Princess Kuzan. You may have heard of the Kuzans." Her voice was coquettish but touched with an aristocratic pride he recognized. "We own a great deal of Russia. I'm your equal," she breathed, reaching for the tie of his robe, "in rank and fortune."
It stopped him momentarily-not only the fact she was a Kuzan, but the manner in which she uttered the words. She meant it. An equal. It was a novel thought.
"I'll order you," she softly said, releasing the loose knot of his robe, sweeping aside the dark brocade to reveal his hard, masculine, roused body, and he was reminded that the Kuzans were known for their audacity.
He reached out to touch the turgid hardness of her peaked nipples, lifted them slightly until he saw her inhale deeply and briefly close her eyes. "Shall we see," he said, very, very softly, "how equal we are?" And with a shrug he dropped the robe from his shoulders and followed her down on the bed, covering her soft willing body with his.
She felt his weight for a moment before he propped himself on his arms, and she experienced an electrifying defenselessness, thrilling in its effect. He could do with her what he liked. He was larger and stronger; he could lift her effortlessly like a child into his arms. But in his own way he was defenseless in his need for her, a power she possessed, a power she realized for the first exciting time in her life. It was like standing on a lighted threshold before a vista of perfect paradise. They were equals whether he knew it or not.
Her large golden eyes, framed with the lace of silken lashes, looked directly up into his and she said very quietly without entreaty or decree, her heated body throbbing with desire through every nerve and cell and racing pulse beat, "I must have you or I'll die."
And he gave her what she wanted because it was what he wanted, too. She was unlike other women he knew, so different he had no comparison. To please himself he had to please her, too. He was poised on the perimeters of unfamiliar emotional territory and perhaps he did it for her after all. It wasn't a time to debate or presciently attempt to see the future. He wanted her desperately and she him.
He gently touched the heated dampness between her thighs, his arousal quivering in his own need for her. Feeling her readiness and the surprising strength of her hands pulling him close, he said, "Hold on tight," a heartbeat before he thrust into her waiting body and buried himself in her honeyed sweetness.
She didn't cry out. She sighed, a great, melting, bewitching sigh, and he thought she must be a nymph sent from heaven or Olympus or Allah to welcome him back from the war. She reached up to kiss him and he smothered her waiting mouth with a restless kiss, feeling as though heaven had opened, as though his heart were beating outside his body. Then he began to move gently within her so she could feel the enchantment, too.
"My toes are curling," she blissfully murmured against his throat.
"I'm glad," he whispered, and bending his head, he nibbled at her mouth, pressing upward into her until she felt him fill her deep and hard and so intensely that she cried out in ecstasy.
"Am I dying?" she breathed a long moment later when the sound of her voice had faded into the night.
"No, darling, it's the very best of living, trust me," he murmured into the curls near her ear, and the rhythm of his lower body, slow and smooth and carefully choreographed to suit her, to please her, brought the entire focus of the world to the flame-hot center of her body. It was living, she thought, breathless, her pulse beating in her ears, her skin so hot she felt as though they were back on the plain of Kars. It was bliss and an open door into paradise. Was this love, too, she wondered, this torrid, melting lust? Did you love a man like this, skilled and perfect and so beautiful?
She hoped not, she thought in the small pocket of logic that remained in her dissolving brain. She hoped not because she'd get lost in the crowd.
It wouldn't be much longer, Stefan decided, short moments later, watching her eyes and the flush on her face and throat, aware of her small hands fiercely pulling him close so she could feel him longer and deeper and more intensely. She was the most flagrantly sensual woman he knew, untouched by convention, more heated in her intemperate response than his Gypsy lover. Maybe it was the Kuzan blood. Sensuality ran unbridled through the family. She was a glowing, extravagant woman and she was about to climax.
He met and joined her passion with his in a driving, insistent wildness that kept her agonized, dying with pleasure for long practised moments until she trembled with small gasping sobs in his arms and he poured, shuddering, into her. Then they lay, sheened with sweat, their heartbeats shaking the bed.
In the course of the summer night they dallied like the lovers in Hafiz, and he taught her what pleasure was. She would say into the moonlit room, breathless with passion, "You know that too?"
"And that!" She lay gilded with moonlight and pampered indulgence.
"And than"
Finally he laughed and said, "I'll have to show you the Renaissance printmakers and the Japanese, sweet child. Hafiz is only one in a galaxy."
Her smile was new when she looked up at him lying above her, and it was touched with a delightful sangfroid in addition to her habitual imperturbability.
"How nice," she said.
Chapter Three
In the morning the Prince decided against an immediate return to Tiflis. Instead he sent his troopers ahead and pursued idyllic leisured activities with the Countess for several additional days. And when they finally chose to travel north, the Countess's wardrobe having been nastily restored by Aleksandropol's only French dressmaker still in residence, the two-day journey stretched into a number of more delightfully lazy days.
Prince Bariatinsky's household, of course, had been on the alert for his appearance since his men had arrived days before, so when the Prince and Countess drew up to the grand marble staircase of his palace overlooking Tiflis, his entire staff was at attention in the drive while two women-one elderly, the other young-stood on the first broad landing waiting their arrival.