His smile was as angelic as a young choirboy's. "I detected a slight interest."

"So I can't be assessing blame exclusively."

"If you wish to be perfectly honest, no," he said, "but I dislike the word blame for anything that's passed between us. I prefer happiness… or joy-''

"Or paradise on earth."

He grinned. "A good approximation."

"I should thank you, then, for sending her away."

He moved toward her, his smile intact, his hands open in peace. "If you like," he said.

"And thank you for spending fifty thousand roubles because of me."

"Plus two racers from my stud," he added, close enough now to touch her outstretched hands. "I should feel flattered."

"I certainly hope so," he murmured, taking her small hands in his.

"And how many days do we have?"

"Twenty."

Her smile diminished slightly. "I might have to leave sooner for Papa's ceremony in Saint Petersburg. I've a personal invitation from the Tsar. I should stop at my home in Rostov first. My cousin Nikki's expecting me…" Her voice trailed away because the observance honoring her father's work translating Hafiz had seemed until this moment of great importance.

Stefan wasn't going to touch that… not after reaching harmony once again, not this minute when he held her hands in his and their holiday in the mountains was just beginning. "Fine," he said, his own smile lush with warming passion, knowing he had days ahead to change her mind or adjust her travel timetable. "Whatever you want."

Drawing her close, he stood for a small space of time with her body touching his, savoring the first tentative prelude to pleasure, feeling at peace, at home…alone with the woman who'd come to preoccupy his mind and senses, isolated on his mountaintop with the woman he wanted to spend the next twenty days making love to.

"I'm sorry about the abduction," he said softly, his hand reaching up to take the first hairpin from her hair, "but I didn't want to lose you."

Lisaveta touched the bridge of his nose, tracing down its arrow-straight length as if she marked him for herself, as if that small gesture were possession. How nice it would be, she thought, if it were possible to gain possession so easily, if one could simply say, "I want you too, for always. For the pleasure you give me and for your smiles, for the laughter we share, for the enchantment of being in your arms." But she was sensible enough to say instead, her voice teasing and hushed, "I'll make you do penance for the abduction."

His hand stopped just short of his desk, where he'd been placing the pins from her hair, and arrested in motion, he looked at her from under his dark brows and smiled. "How nice," he said.

"You needn't sound so pleased," Lisaveta murmured, mocking irony in her tone.

"Darling," Stefan whispered, taking her into his arms and drawing the length of her body against his so she felt the extent of his arousal, "your whims are my command."

A flare of excitement raced through Lisaveta. Although she knew as well as he that his amorous words were playful, a rush of gratified power spiked through her. She did indeed command him. "Are they really?" she said, moving her hips enticingly, testing the measure of her advantage.

"Right now, dushka," Stefan whispered, taking her face between the palms of his large hands, "for want of you I'd sell my soul."

And jettison your fiancée? she wondered, the wretched consideration coming from nowhere to spoil the moment. Perhaps if she'd asked right then he would have said yes to please her and please himself. But she didn't ask, because she wanted him too much and was afraid of his answer. A man in Stefan's position didn't marry for passion; Militza had made his intentions plain.

"My price isn't that high," she said, her arms wrapped around his waist, a curious contentment invading her mind. He was here with her; because of enormous effort he was here with her; his fiancée was alone at his palace and there was satisfaction in that. She wouldn't be more greedy. "I don't want your soul, although I think I should be worth at least as much as Choura."

While her tone was teasing, Stefan gazed at Lisaveta with a slightly altered expression. Was she like all the others after all? he wondered. Although he'd never begrudged gifts to his lovers, he'd found Lise's generosity of spirit unique. Was she perhaps only more subtle in her demands? His voice when he spoke was quiet and restrained. "Of course, darling, you're worth much more. What would you like?"

"You'll think me foolish," she prefaced, blushing at what she was about to say.

"Never, sweetheart," he replied, admiring the innocent color on her cheeks, knowing he would give her whatever she wanted regardless of her request. He was not an ungenerous man. Her large tawny eyes were looking directly into his despite her blushing hesitancy, and he thought again how her frankness appealed to him.

"I want you to love only me, to forget all those other women," she blurted out, a desperate and unfathomable urge impelling her, inexplicable and beyond her control. She hurried on when she saw the startled look in his eyes. "I mean now… for these days we have together." When he didn't answer, she added softly, "The fiction will do, Stefan, and don't ask me why, but it's important to me." Had she been asked to define her feelings she would have been at loss to explain. She loved him, she thought with a cymbal-crashing revelation, neither annotated nor detailed but explosive and deafening inside her head. And she wanted her love returned.

For a woman who was not only a scholar but an expert in a man's field, for a woman who'd decided to ride across the battleground of Kurdistan in the midst of war, for a woman who'd traveled up his harrowing mountain trails with a minimum of vapors or complaint, she looked suddenly as vulnerable and artless as a young maid. She didn't want extravagant gifts or large sums of money; she wasn't intent on binding him in a female way he'd learned at a very young age to avoid. She wanted only his love.

And for the only time in his extremely varied experience with women, his heart was touched, not simply by the naïveté of her request but by her utter candor. "Gladly," he replied, his emotions evident in his voice, "with intemperate feeling and pleasure."

When her face lighted up at his response, her joy and happiness immediately apparent, a warmth of unprecedented feeling washed over him. Gently lifting her face to his, he said very, very softly, "I plight you my love on this mountaintop," pledging surety to her and with that pledge, unknown to Lisaveta, offering his love for the first time in his life.

He lifted her in his arms then, as though his patience had a finite limit, and carried her out of his study and up the small curved staircase. The polished wooden railing resembled a sinuous grapevine, curling upward as it would in nature, minutely detailed with beautifully carved tendrils, leaves and fruit; the treads were covered in lush grass-green carpet, silken and luminous. So close to nature were these creations of man she almost expected to gaze up and see stars in the sky.

"Where are the stars?" she playfully murmured.

As if he read her mind, as if they were so completely in harmony he knew what she was thinking, he answered, "In ray room."

Past the top of the vine-draped stairs, at the end of a narrow hallway hung with candlelit icons and illuminated paintings reminiscent of glittering jewels, Stefan pushed open double wooden doors, hinged and ornamented with brass serpentine animal forms, and stepped into a room he'd known since childhood.

Toys were stacked on shelves and tabletops; a wooden rocking horse painted dapple gray in primitive craft style with large staring eyes and an unusual smile gazed at them from a window embrasure; a special glass case held massed armies of miniature soldiers. The polished wood floor was covered with fur rugs, as was the plain four-poster bed, although the elaborately embroidered, lace-trimmed white pillow covers were an incongruous sight in this young boy's room.

The dormer windows were curtained in plain blue linen, made less plain by the entwined Bariatinsky-Orbeliani family crests woven in gold thread and picked out with sapphire jewels. While austere in design, Stefan's room spoke eloquently of his family's enormous wealth, from the sable rugs to the cabochon emeralds in his rocking horse's eyes.

And the stars.

When he pointed up with a smile so she'd look, Lisaveta saw a lapis lazuli arched ceiling set with diamond stars.

"You have a fortune in your ceiling," she couldn't help but say. Even though her mother's family was in the exclusive ranks of the Empire's wealthiest and the Lazaroffs were far from paupers, she'd never seen anything like the lavishness of Stefan's households.

"My mama's Persian background," Stefan explained. "The Orbelianis had a different standard of wealth than the rest of the world." He didn't reply with either apology or pretension but simply made a statement of fact. "I wanted to see the stars at night when I went to sleep, I told Mama when I was very young and this lodge was being built."

"Does Choura like your diamond stars?" She couldn't restrain her remark although she'd valiantly suppressed it twice before it came tumbling out. Her jealousy was stridently real and Choura was wildly beautiful by anyone's standards, an untamed dazzling enchantress.

"I haven't brought her here." He'd never brought any woman to this room. It was exclusively his in a selfish introverted way. He'd never wanted to share his past or his feelings-all openly visible here in his mementos and childhood toys. He'd preserved the shelter of this room intact against the personal disasters that had decimated his family. His happiest memories of childhood were inventoried and catalogued by each particle and belonging in this room, and until today he'd never wanted to expose those intimacies to anyone.

Lisaveta's gaze was skeptical.

"Her room was on the main floor facing the courtyard," he matter-of-factly said, secure in the truth. "I'll show you if you-"

"No," she said. "No, don't show me." The thought of Stefan and… her… in any room made her feel green-eyed with resentment. "So she never saw this?" It wasn't that she didn't believe him, only that she found it hard to believe.

Stefan set her down carefully in an oversize chair upholstered in royal blue damascene, squatted down in front of her so their eyes were level and said, this man who was known to prize his personal privacy, "Ask me everything and then you'll be content."

"Don't patronize me, Stefan."

"I'll answer honestly." And that, too, was a startling admission from Stefan, who by virtue of necessity in the sheer number of his amorous liaisons considered evasion an essential.

Lisaveta sighed, her expression rueful, her golden eyes innocent as a young girl's. "I'm sorry. Do you think me excessively possessive?"

"I think you've brought me unmitigated joy the week past is what I think." He grinned. "And I'm in no position to be passing judgment on character."

She smiled back, charmed by both his admissions. "True," she unabashedly said, happily accepting both his statements. "Why didn't she see this?" she asked then, because she wanted the detail behind his action, because she wanted the pleasure and luxury of hearing he hadn't cared for Choura as much as he did for her.

"I didn't say she didn't see this. She may have when I was gone. None of the doors are locked."

"Why?"

"Why aren't they locked?" A lifetime of evasion wasn't so easily jettisoned.

Lisaveta gazed at him with mock severity.

"It was my room," he said bluntly. "I didn't care to bring her here."

"Why?"

He shrugged. "I don't know." His reasons were not so easily disentangled from the muddle of his past. It had been a matter of survival, perhaps, for a man who'd seen his world destroyed while very young. His dark eyes held hers for a moment. "Introspection is a new concept for me, dushka. I'm sorry," he said, apologizing for the inadequacy of his answer. "It didn't seem right. Is that sufficient?"

"I'm sorry," she said, recognizing the effort he'd made in answering, "for being so insistent. It's as though I've no control over my jealousy."

"We're well matched then, sweetheart, because I must keep you by me… regardless…" He left the sentence unfinished, for each knew the difficulties evaded to bring them here together.

His shoulders seemed very wide only inches below her eye level, the breadth of his chest like a solid wall before her. His black eyes beneath his heavy brows were like a force of nature, so vibrant and intense was his glance. He was dynamic power and energy and a magnetic beauty she could no more relinquish than the earth could stop turning on its axis. With a curious finality she said, "And I want you selfishly for myself alone."