She grinned back and sighed herself, realizing the futility of their stalemated issues. "Incorrigible man. Are you beyond reform?"

Sitting down on the bed then, he pushed her backward with the lightest pressure. "Reform me, darling," he murmured, following her down, lying atop her so she felt only the silk of his muscles and none of his weight. His smile was breathtaking and a breath away. "You've twenty days."

"Somehow," Lisaveta murmured, her mouth so close to his that tiny vibrations of sound passed between them, her eyes matching the teasing in his, "I don't think you're serious."

"I'm serious," he demurred, adjusting her hips a scant inch to accommodate him. "I've never been so serious," he unseriously said.

She hit him.

He responded by playfully nipping her earlobe.

At which point she tried to squirm away in sportive frolic.

Her small struggles amused him and aroused him, and the kiss he took from her was lush and endless and sweetly benevolent.

"I will reform you," Lisaveta breathlessly whispered when her mouth was released at last, her declaration only half in jest.

"I look forward to my schooling," Stefan softly replied, sliding her up the mellow ermine so he could settle between her legs. "Tell me, Countess," he murmured a moment later, his chin resting on her thigh, his eyes black and liquid with passion, his hands moving to ready her for his tongue, "when you feel I've made… progress."

All thought of anything beyond insensate pleasure disappeared from her mind as Stefan's tongue slipped into her. He licked and stroked, the taste of her blending with the distinctive flavor of their lovemaking, his own body reacting to the intemperate welcome of hers.

They were a matched pair, he thought, in passion and desire, a combination of personalities so perfectly meshed he could almost feel her urgency in his own body. When she moved to refine the tactile sensations more exquisitely, a flare of excitement raced through him, and when she moaned in luxurious gratification, the muted sound echoed in his own mind.

Then he realized with a start that she was inexplicably moving away from him, a teasing smile of undisguised allure on her face. "I think I'll rest for a while," she purred. She was all feline grace and temptation… and she was lying a full two feet away, her weight resting on both her elbows, her eyes indolent under half-lowered lashes.

"I think you're lying," he said, his voice low and husky. "I think you can't even wait a minute for what you want." He was sprawled opposite her, his bronzed skin dark against the ermine, his heavy brows mildly raised in mocking remonstrance, his smile amused.

"Is this a contest?"

"Not from here it isn't." There was undisputed confidence in his tone.

"Are you always so superior?"

"I prefer… realistic," he answered very softly. "Now don't move and I'll make us both happy." She moved.

She almost managed to escape the bed. Almost.

With lightning speed he lunged across the bed, his fingers closing around her ankle just before her foot hit the floor. Rolling over on his back, he scooped her into his arms in a single diving motion, depositing her on his stomach with effortless finesse.

"So you're physically stronger," Lisaveta begrudgingly said, but she was smiling.

"Do I have to apologize for that?" He was playing her game with lighthearted boyishness.

"Actually, it has its advantages." Her voice was a rich contralto, her golden eyes heated.

He laughed out loud and, reaching out, gathered her into his arms and rolled over her so she was pinned beneath him. "Beg me," he said, his smile angelic.

"With your libido," she whispered, her own smile sunshine bright and assured, "I don't have to."

"Maybe I have willpower."

"Not with me you don't."

She was right, but anyone knowing Stefan in the past would have been fascinated at his lack of control and his lack of concern at his lack of control.

"It must be your intelligence," he teased, "attracting me."

"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, dushka," he softly murmured. "I only wanted to kiss you… There." His smile was indulgent as he slid into her once more. "Is that better?"

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.