Her eyes were still wide with recollection. "I'm truly grateful for your rescue," she whispered, her eyes glistening with emotion. "And I'm sorry about today," she softly added. "I know I irritated you."

"I should apologize for my rudeness," Stefan said, his own glance tender, his hand lifting to brush aside a tendril of curl that had fallen over her forehead. "If it's any excuse, I'd just come off three months of campaigning and was damn tired. I'm sorry."

"I should apologize to you for all the extra work my rescue entailed."

Stefan grinned with a sudden boyish charm he rarely exposed. "I think we've covered all the social courtesies. You're sorry. I'm sorry. We've both apologized. I'd prefer," he said, his voice taking on a low husky quality, "to consider our meeting a delightful bit of luck. And I intend to reward my Kurd shaman for his mystical intervention." He was only halfteasing. She had been literally thrown into his path and he was enough of a mystic not to disclaim the metaphysical possibilities. "Are you badly bruised?" he asked suddenly, remembering the violence of her fall. No marks were obvious in the moonlight as his dark glance took in the purity of her form.

"My head… is a bit tender… near my right ear."

I'll be careful, he thought.

"And…well-" she shyly smiled "-my bottom is…slightly bruised."

That, too, he mused, I'll treat with care.

"I…should put my clothes on," Lisaveta said into the small silence, unabashed by her nudity but an innocent in seduction. She didn't realize Stefan had other plans. She didn't realize the game was just beginning.

"Did the servants bring you new clothes?" he asked.

"No."

"Wait till morning then, and we'll find a dressmaker. I'll have Haci dredge one up."

"I'm not as unorthodox as you," she said, understanding then the simple chronology of his sentence.

"I think, dear heart," he murmured, touching the soft fullness of her bottom lip with the lightest brush of fingertips, "you're more unorthodox than I."

"Your reputation-"

"Kiss me," he whispered.

She swayed toward him as though his words were the earth's magnetic poles, her mouth and eyes and soft silken body like an offering. "I shouldn't," she breathed, as if the words could stop the melting suggestion of her body.

"I know."

And the two words he spoke were like a promise she must keep. He could tell immediately, so tentative was the touch of her lips on his, that she'd never kissed a man before. But after three months of war Stefan felt as though some benevolent spirit had taken pity on him, giving him a pale unspoiled woman to make love to, as though she were a gift of innocence and purity after the endless weeks of bloody war. He felt no guilt that she was there for him. She was, after all, curiously self-reliant and surely not entirely chaste as a scholar of Hafiz. But at base he simply did what he did best.

And he began by kissing her back.

Lisaveta's first thought, melodramatic and alien to any preconceived notions she had of herself, was, He's attracted to me.

As a woman. A sense of wonder, magnificent in both its novelty and splendor, flared through her body, and she felt the warming flush like a personal sunrise of the soul. There was no denying the reason Prince Bariatinsky's engravings were collected by sighing women throughout the Empire. His head lifted briefly from their kiss and he smiled at her, his face starkly handsome, his dark eyes tender somehow despite their savage blackness. He was, she decided, wicked, sweet unreason, like a fallen angel dressed in sensuous beauty.

"I like your kisses," she murmured. "They warm me everywhere and make me tingle…"

He touched the small straight perfection of her nose with the briefest of kisses, raised his head and, his smile crinkling the corners of his eyes, said, "Thank you." Her ingenuous directness was enchanting now rather than offensive, the sweetly naive empiricism with which she viewed new experiences tantalizing. He would look forward to each artless reaction as the night progressed.

"Kiss me some more." She said it like a child in a candy store-with unreserved demand and delight. Unguiltily, too, as though she deserved it.

"Your servant, mademoiselle " Stefan murmured agreeably. Numerous women in his past would have been shocked at his placid acquiescence. Prince Bariatinsky, one of the most decorated, celebrated men in the Empire, had never been any woman's servant. Skilled and generous at providing pleasure, certainly, but submissive-never.

"You must tell me, sweet Lise," he whispered with teasing huskiness, bending his dark ruffled head, his breath warm on the aching crest of her nipple, "do you like this more?" And he touched the very tip with a tender suckling kiss that abruptly deepened, then bit with tiny caresses so that she felt a searing flame race downward like molten fire to sanctify each pleasure center in her body.

Her sighing breathy moan was an affirmative response.

He moved later to slowly caress her other breast and then trailed lingering kisses up her throat and across the velvet smoothness of her cheek. He nibbled at her earlobes and whispered the amorous love words that he knew roused women more swiftly than torrid kisses. He knew all the play words, the scented, heated, facile words, and she responded as he knew she would, her small hands reaching out to slide up the cinnamon silk of his robe. They glided with her own inherent coquettish languor under the open neckline and over the solid muscled strength of his shoulders.

"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.