'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,
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.
Chapter Eight
After Haci and the troop were dismissed the next morning, the days of their holiday continued in delight and…innovation. It was also a time of unalloyed happiness. In some small ways the Prince came to understand the nature of Lisaveta's independence. At least he tried, she indulgently thought. But steeped as he was in the culture of the Caucasus, Oriental in its social and political traditions, he had deep-seated traditions to reconcile.
His mother's family, while Georgian for centuries and thus Christian, were Persian in heritage and suzerains over large Kurdish tribes-nominally Muslim in religion, although their shaman past was still an integral part of life. These native tribes of Central Asian extraction were warrior cultures in which males were supreme, training for war a way of life and women's concerns incidental to their existence. Stefan had grown up in their midst.
His father had been born in Saint Petersburg, but he'd spent his adult life subduing the Caucasus and then ruling it for the Tsar. Field Marshal Bariatinsky had loved the mountain region and its exotic, exuberant, often violent life. The warrior culture spoke to his own soldier's soul.
Conditioned as Stefan was by a society in which harems were the norm, where warfare was the only occupation for a man, where the larger concerns of imperial expansion overrode personal interests, he was making conscious adjustments in his sentiments to accommodate Lisaveta's different perception of the world. He was trying to accommodate her notions of equality, her inexperience outside of the sphere of literary scholarship, and what he considered an idealistic vision.
She noticed his tolerance for her beliefs and his constraint when he couldn't agree. He tried not to argue, although their philosophies were at times starkly opposed. She, too, trod tightly when discussing controversial topics.
For the first time in her life, Lisaveta was experiencing a time spent purely for pleasure. For many years, she'd dealt with solitary scholarship and dusty tomes, with linguistic detail, not with this dizzying, intoxicating delirium of feeling. She was, as it were, on holiday from the circumstances of her life.
For his part, Stefan experienced not so much a break from the amusements of his past as a heightened awareness of what pleasure could be. A pleasure amplified beyond the physical, a pleasure so intense and joyous he woke at night and gently hugged Lisaveta to assure himself his sensations were real. In the days of their mountain retreat he felt again the unconditional happiness of his early childhood before he grew old enough to realize his family wasn't like others: His mother wasn't married to his father but to another man; his grandparents were his legal guardians to protect his legacy from the unknown man his mother had once married; his parents' profound love was mysteriously measured by a society as quick to punish as adore. And his long-held and dearly bought cynicism diminished in direct proportion to his happiness.
They bathed in the flower-bordered pool dammed up above the courtyard, warmed by their love to withstand the brisk temperatures of mountain streams, and rubbed each other dry amid moss-covered stones and verdant ferns, only to fall prey to the sensations provoked. The pool was their garden of Eden, their own green paradise, and they swam in the sunlight and moonlight and made love in the cool slipperiness of the water and on the scented banks of the stream.
'Will I last twenty days?' Stefan gasped one afternoon as he collapsed beside Lisaveta, his passion momentarily spent but his desire for her insatiable.
'At least I know why your reputation is so formidable,' she sweetly replied, her own breathing ragged.
Her tone brought his head around and he looked at her from under his hand thrown across his forehead. 'Are we being catty?' he replied, his mouth lifted in a grin.
'How do you ever find time to fight the Tsar's battles?' she said in a tone that was definitely feline.
'It's your fault,' he bluntly said, although the kiss he gave her mitigated his words.
'Don't blame
'Much exaggerated,
'Oh, really… this is an aberration, then.'
'Yes, darling, Lise,' Stefan said, exhaling deeply, 'you definitely are.'
'I don't know,' she playfully said, pleased he wasn't so enamored with all his other women, pleased her wanted her more, pleased with a female vanity she hadn't realized she possessed that he couldn't satisfy his desire for her, 'if I like being called an aberration.'
'Would you prefer seductive witch?' He was up on one elbow now, gazing at her as she lay beside him on the green mossy bank, his dark eyes amused.
She pursed her lips in mock disapproval. 'It smacks of evil.'
'Well, this pleasure is certainly not that. Do you like-' he traced a light finger down the column of her neck '- delightful nymph?'
She considered for a moment, as if this discussion were one of substance, then with reservation said, 'Too poetical, Stefan, darling. I'm an archrealist.'
He could have argued with her assessment. The unreality of their holiday together was so far removed from the mundane that he questioned at times whether he'd died and gone to heaven. 'Delectable charmer,' he pleasantly offered, 'or captivating enchantress?'
Her eyes narrowed transiently at the ease with which his descriptions flowed. 'Do you have many of these?' she softly inquired.
