Golden Paradise

arrogance to losing her. Perhaps he could have abducted her again, but he would not have been able to make her stay, for she was too complex or independent or simply not willing to adapt to his wishes. Even if she had stayed he would never have felt completely secure. And he needed her, he realized, the way he needed air to live.

'How am I?' he repeated gently. With exultation and joy he answered his own question in the utter silence of her apprehension. 'I'm free,' he said.

She didn't move. He'd expected her to laugh or smile at least, jump with excitement or throw herself into his arms, but she was fearful still, as was her tone of voice. 'You can't be. They wouldn't make it that easy. Don't tease me, Stefan, or equivocate if it's not true. It can't be true.'

'Have you no faith?' he teased, lounging back in his chair.

'Not in Vladimir Taneiev and his ice-cold daughter.' In the course of her stay in Saint Petersburg, the Taneiev family had taken every opportunity to show their malevolence. She was well aware of the full extent of their viciousness.

'Does your faithlessness extend to the Tsar?'

She smiled then, tentatively. 'He supports you?'

Stefan drew the special license from his pocket, lifted it so the bold printing was visible and grinned.

She launched herself into his arms like a gamboling puppy and covered his face with wet warm kisses. 'I was terrified… I'd never see you… after tomorrow,' she whispered between the rhythm of her kisses. 'I thought Nadejda would spirit you away-or make you stay away-or somehow barricade you from me.' Her murmured voice was an agitated rush of words. 'But you're here, you're really here!' Leaning away from him, she gazed at Stefan as if to certify her words. As a blind person might, she ran her hands over his face and down his throat, over the breadth of his shoulders and down his chest, resting them finally, her palms on the embroidered black China silk directly over his heart.

He hadn't touched her except to steady her when she landed in his lap, basking in the glory of her jubilant kisses and joyful hysteria, letting his own sense of unutterable joy inundate his mind.

'I love you,' Lisaveta whispered, 'so much I thought I'd die if I lost you.'

'I love you, dushka,' he softly said, his dark eyes beneath his heavy brows intense with emotion, 'enough to give up my command.'

'You didn't!' Her exclamation was an explosive whisper, vibrating with shock. 'I would have.'

'No!' Her single word was as firmly declarative as his admission. She'd listened to the sadness in his voice those weeks in the mountains when he'd spoken of his father. She couldn't face him if he'd made that same sacrifice for her.

'If it came to a choice, I would.' His statement was without subterfuge or arrogance. No longer the commander of the Tsar's cavalry or his father's son, Stefan was only a man in love, a man who'd discovered happiness after years of dismissing the concept as poetic license. 'So…' He covered her small hands with his. 'Will you mind a very precipitous wedding tonight?'

'Tonight?' Her squeal was spontaneous feminine surprise, the kind reflecting wholly practical considerations like dresses, flowers, family and guests, all the ritual every young girl dreams of as fairy-tale magic.

'We leave in the morning.' Stefan's voice was tolerant male but wholly practical, too. He had a war to fight, and dresses and flowers and family hadn't even remotely crossed his mind.

'In the morning?'

'Am I speaking in some unintelligible language?' he amusedly asked.

'Maybe we shouldn't,' Lisaveta abruptly replied.

'Don't even start,' Stefan said. 'I sold my soul.'

'That's what I mean,' she protested. 'I don't want you to sell your soul.' She pulled her hands free. 'Maybe you'll be sorry in a week or a year… maybe Vladimir will change the Tsar's mind and then you'll hate me for ruining your life. Maybe-'

'God, Lise, stop being noble.'

'I'm not being noble, I just don't want to hurt you. I don't want you to decide later our marriage was too hasty.' The petulant moue she made signified her uncertainty and disquietude.

'I could always divorce you-' Stefan's grin was playful '-if that happened. Boris divorced his wife one weekend when he was out shooting with the Tsar. Alexander signed the special decree and Helene discovered her new status on Monday.'

'Well, I could divorce you, too,' Lisaveta immediately retorted, her sense of outrage aggravated by his teasing male arrogance and the ease with which he could expedite a divorce if he wished.

'So there. We're perfectly matched. Why not take a chance?' His casual words were disconcerting and reminiscent of the transience of his affairs and, after his last remark about divorce, not precisely the tone conducive to a romantic concept of marriage. She could feel her heart pounding at the nonchalance of his remarks, alarmed he might in truth view this marriage as an indulgent whim. She wanted her deep love returned in kind, and resentment prompted her reply. 'I don't wish to marry someone as a speculative venture.'

She looked very young in white eyelet and tumbled curls and a petulant scowl, and Stefan thought that although in many ways she was learned beyond her years, she was also ingenuous and unsophisticated in feminine wiles. There wasn't a woman of his acquaintance who would have risked refusing his proposal.

'Look, darling,' he said with a winning smile, conscious of her pursed lips and high color as well as the temper in her remark, treading lightly because he was never absolutely sure of her response, 'I'm leaving in the morning. I don't want to but I must, and while I prefer not pulling rank on you and I love and adore you in all your moods, you needn't be fearful or noble or testy about our marriage. I'll never divorce you, I swear. I was teasing. So just humor me and say, 'Tonight would be perfect for our wedding,' and I'll have the palace staff do their damnedest to follow every little order you wish to give and we'll live happily ever after till the end of time, my word on it, dushka.' And his smile not only touched her heart with its boyish winsomeness but made her feel guilty for her temper.

'I don't have a wedding dress,' she said in a very small voice.

'Oh, Lord,' he said softly, 'is that what this is all about?'

'No, it isn't,' she hotly retorted. Instantly she chastised herself for another overheated response, and with a faint sigh that encompassed the impossibility of putting all the normal wedding preparations into the minutes allotted her, she added, 'It's about… everything.'

'Everything?' Reaching up to ruffle the curls at her temple, he cordially inquired, 'Do I have time for a definition of 'everything'?'

'You're not very romantic.' Her expression was that of a pouty small girl and utterly delightful.

He smiled, apologizing, promising to be romantic, this man who had always scoffed at the notion, then pulling her into his arms, he held her tight, thinking himself the luckiest man alive. Not only did he love beyond the mountains of the moon but he'd never be bored.

Her plaintive 'ouch' brought him out of his cheerful reverie.

'Your embroidery,' she softly reproved, the sheer eyelet of her nightgown no barrier to bristly metallic thread.

Pulling his shirt out of his trousers, Stefan undid the buttons at his neck and tugged his shirt over his head in one swift movement. The dark China silk fell in fluttering folds to the floor. 'So fill me in,' he said, drawing her back against his chest, 'on 'everything,' and we'll have the staff take care of it.'

'How much time do I have?' Lisaveta asked, looking up at him. 'Does that sound impossibly pragmatic?' she went on in a tentative voice, then answered her own question in the next breath. 'Well, maybe it does, but I've always dreamed girlish dreams of frothy gowns and flowers and priestly choirs and candles and music… and true love.'

Stefan touched the fullness of her bottom lip lightly with one finger and said with a quiet intensity, 'You have true love, dushka, and you can also have all your girlish dreams. And there's nothing wrong with being pragmatic… it's your wedding.' His smile was indulgent. 'Is two hours enough?' It was a man's question and he thought a reasonable one.

'Two hours!' she wailed.

He could see their concepts of reasonable differed. 'Four hours then, how about that?' he generously offered. 'But anything after eleven o'clock, I draw the line.' He shrugged and gently reminded her, 'The Turks won't wait.'