‘Regretting your decision to stay already?’ It was the first direct comment Stepan had made to her all day. It seemed he was intent on ignoring not only the kiss, but her, too.
She shook her head. ‘No, I’m just thinking of other times I watched Dimitri drive away,’ Of the time he didn’t come back. He’d sent a letter instead informing her of his decision to give up his title, his life, and stay in England to marry the daughter of a baronet. Stepan had been with her then. Dimitri had entrusted Stepan and Ruslan with the details of their quiet departure from Kuban. Only that departure had not been so quiet. Nikolay had been arrested and Illarion would have been next. Stepan had suddenly found himself not only with one young girl and an old man to whisk off to safety, but also a gravely wounded cavalry officer and a poet wanted for libel. Stepan had never faltered no matter how difficult the duty.
Stepan sighed. ‘They all drive away one way or another.’ He must be thinking of the others: of Illarion, Ruslan and Nikolay. He missed them, she realised. He was always so strong, so stoic, it was hard to imagine he had softer feelings, as well. But she knew better now, didn’t she? Now that he’d kissed her. That kiss had exposed him to her as much as it had exposed her. He did feel, he did yearn, he did hurt. Beneath his hard shell, Stepan Shevchenko was human after all. Such a realisation should have made him less heroic to her, but in fact it did not. It only increased the mystery of him, a stark reminder of how much she didn’t know and how much there was yet to know.
Stepan gestured towards the open door. Somewhere deep inside, a servant was lighting the lamps. A warm glow beckoned through the dusk. ‘Come, Anna-Maria. Dinner will be on the table soon and we can discuss exactly what you’ve got yourself into.’
* * *
Did she understand that by extension whatever she’d got herself into she’d got him into, as well? Stepan poured himself another glass of wine, studying Anna-Maria in the candlelight of the dining table: the glossy dark waves of her hair, the fine line of her nose, the soft curve of her jaw, the stubborn point of her chin. She was a beautiful woman, empirically, a quality heightened when she smiled, putting the sensuality of her mouth on full display. She was smiling now as she motioned to his nearly untouched plate.
‘Do you not care for the venison pie?’
He’d only taken a few bites. ‘No, on the contrary, it’s quite delicious.’ It was the best meal he’d had since he’d left Dimitri’s and he knew it was thanks to Evie and Anna-Maria, who’d given Cook instructions and direction. He’d been too busy with the ships to pay attention to the house. As a result, he’d eaten cold meat and bread since he’d left Dimitri’s, or eaten at the tavern. But he wasn’t going to admit that to Anna-Maria. It would only give her justification for staying. He took a bite to pacify her. ‘Why are you really here, Anna-Maria?’
‘Because you need someone to look after you.’ Anna-Maria took a sip of wine, looking over the rim with a coy glance. ‘Cook told us you haven’t eaten a decent meal all week or left any instructions.’
So much for not admitting that, then—but she’d made a tactical error. Stepan chuckled. ‘You didn’t know that until you arrived, though.’ He leaned close over the table. ‘Somehow I suspect this little jaunt was all your idea. What prompted you to leave Little Westbury?’
She looked him squarely in the eye. ‘I’m bored. Why should you get to have all the fun? You need help and I can help with the house and the books, and in return you can squire me to the assemblies. I can practise for the Season on the officers in town.’
Heaven help the British military. Heaven help him. There wasn’t a part of Anna-Maria’s speech that didn’t drive a spike of fear into him. The last things he wanted were for her to get her hands on his books and for her to be waltzing around Shoreham with the very people sworn to bring him down. A deadly game was about to get underway in earnest. He couldn’t afford to be distracted or to have his crew distracted. He’d already spoken to Abernathy about his earlier breach. He had a lot to oversee as it was, without worrying about what she might accidentally uncover: the hidden staircase leading down to the caves, ledgers left out on an office desk. He’d have to live very carefully in both action and association. That would be a whole other layer of distraction to consider. At Dimitri’s home there’d only been the distraction of her. Now, the distraction was double.
‘Well, say something?’ Anna-Maria prompted expectantly. ‘You don’t seem pleased about it. I thought it was a rather good trade for your services.’
‘I don’t,’ Stepan answered bluntly. Perhaps if he could scare her off, she would reconsider. ‘I didn’t ask for your help. I am managing in my own way and I don’t have time to escort you to military assemblies.’ He gave her a strong look. ‘Dimitri told me the real reason you wanted to come. You want to dance.’
Her brother made her sound like a silly-headed flirt. Anna-Maria set down her glass with enough force to make the wine slosh over the rim, and sat back in her chair, arms crossed over her chest. ‘You don’t have time or you simply don’t want to? While we’re being honest, why don’t you like me? You used to, at least I thought you did.’
Stepan groaned. What he didn’t have time for was this—doing maintenance on a relationship that wasn’t supposed to exist. ‘I do like you, Anna-Maria; you know I care for your family very much,’ he placated, trying to sound brotherly and uncle-like when he didn’t feel either in the least.
‘This is not about my family, it’s about me,’ Anna-Maria challenged. ‘You’ve been ignoring me all winter. At first, I believed you went out for business or for an affair. I let myself believe that for months, but now I think it’s something else. Either you don’t like me or—’ she pierced him with a hard stare ‘—you’re afraid of me.’
Now, his blood was starting to boil. ‘Afraid of you? Whatever gave you that idea?’ It was preposterous. He was a smuggler. He risked the noose or transportation with every shipment. He’d smuggled his best friends out of Kuban with warrants from the Tsar on their heads, for which the penalty was treason. He was not afraid of a nineteen-year-old girl.
‘You kissed me and you ran. You couldn’t get out of my brother’s house fast enough.’ Anna-Maria laid out her evidence.
‘I kissed you to teach you a lesson. Nothing more. Don’t go attaching girlish fantasies to it.’ He did not want to talk about the kiss. It had been a piece of ill-advised foolishness on his part. He’d drawn too near the fire with it.
‘Fine. The kiss and your leaving are mere coincidence.’ Anna-Maria studied him with her whisky eyes. ‘If the kiss was not the reason for your hasty departure, then Shoreham was. What’s so important about being here?’ This was precisely the type of enquiry he wanted to avoid. He didn’t want her poking around his business interests any more than he wanted her poking around inside his head.
Stepan rose. ‘I must claim a gentleman’s prerogative for discretion in order to ensure the privacy of all parties involved. It’s been a long day. I need to retire.’ He needed to be down in the caves helping Joseph get out the last of the half ankers of vodka and other goods before Denning had his troops organised.
‘Prerogative? Discretion? Those are very English words, Stepan. I don’t recall you ever being so enamoured of the British. Weren’t you always the one that said the British had the same oppressions Kuban did, they only dressed them up differently?’ Anna-Maria had risen, too. ‘You’ve changed. You’re becoming one of them.’ She nearly spat the word and her vehemence caught at his attention.
Stepan stiffened at the cut. ‘Them’ didn’t mean British gentlemen, but a far larger grouping of men in general: men who used their power to keep others down. ‘I am still the same as I’ve ever been, Anna-Maria.’
Constant and true to those he loved even when they demanded too much from him.
He wanted to say more. He wanted to defend himself against her misguided slander, to explain he was fighting
for justice and power for the downtrodden, that right now a crew of boys depended on him for their livelihood, for their slice of justice, but there was no time. Joseph was expecting him and there was work to be done. Arguing philosophies with Anna-Maria would have to wait. ‘Perhaps the change you see is in yourself.’ He gave her a bow and departed, already regretting his words long before he heard the shattering of crystal against the dining-room wall.
Chapter Six
How dare he insinuate the fault was hers! Anna knelt on the floor, a napkin in hand as she carefully picked up the crystal shards of her shattered goblet before a servant came in and witnessed her folly. She should not have thrown the glass any more than Stepan should have spoken so harshly to her. Perhaps she should not have come. Her motives hadn’t been entirely pure. She’d come for herself and in doing so, she’d made Stepan miserable, although why it should matter so much to him that she was here she didn’t fully understand.
She wrapped the glass pieces in the napkin and set it on the table. Shock over the violence of what she’d done began to sink in. She’d never thrown something, never wantonly destroyed anything. The force of her response was illuminating. She cared about Stepan’s words far more deeply than she would have guessed. Not because he’d accused her of changing—that much was true. She had changed. How could she not have after the journey she’d been through? The life she’d been through and the reality that she was coming of age? For her, it was a natural time of change. To assume otherwise was to be naïve or in denial.
No, what had been illuminating was what those words revealed about him and her together. After all this time, after all the years and adventures they shared, they didn’t know each other at all. He didn’t know the woman she was becoming any more than she knew the man he’d become—the man who preferred to be alone, who preferred to keep his own secrets. That was assuming they’d ever known each other at all. What had she known of the boy her brother had brought home beyond his quiet reserve? And what did he know of her? Did he know her dreams? Her hopes? Her fears? She didn’t know his. But she could. Anna blew out a breath. They had to learn one another again, learn one another perhaps for the first time.
She would apologise to Stepan, but not just yet. Despite her realisation, her anger was still too hot to seek him out. She would see to it that the goblet was replaced, too, even though it would mean asking Dimitri for money. He wouldn’t deny her, but that didn’t make the prospect of asking any more palatable. Some of her anger flared again at the thought, taking the form of hot tears at her own impotence. Some things were changing, but not everything. There was some change that was apparently beyond her. She would not cry inside this house, not where anyone could see, not the servants and not Stepan should he return from wherever he’d gone. Outside. She needed to get outside.
Anna-Maria found her way to the veranda. It ran the length of the back of the house and commanded an unadulterated view of the ocean beyond. It also paid for that view by taking the brunt of the weather. The wind was strong out here. Tonight, she welcomed its power as she gripped the stone balustrade, letting the wind dry her tears before they could fall.
It wasn’t fair. She didn’t want to ask Dimitri for money even if she knew he’d give it to her. She wanted her own money just as she wanted her own life and the power to make her own decisions. These were the things England had promised her and had so far not delivered.
Two years! Two years of waiting and nothing had changed. She would be twenty next month, older than the debutantes she would meet in London. The difference seemed like a lifetime. She’d escaped Kuban so that her life could start, but nothing had started. Worse, nothing had changed. She’d been tucked away in the country living in a manner far too reminiscent of how she’d lived in Kuban. If this was all there was, why had she bothered to leave? Why had Dimitri bothered to rescue her at all?
In her more rational moments she understood she could not have remained in Kuban. She would have been married to the Pasha’s son and spirited away to a foreign land. She’d no more be in Kuban right now if she had stayed than she was right now. She understood, too, Dimitri’s hesitation in launching her into London society; she’d needed time to practise her English, to learn English ways, to polish her manners, to learn forms of address. They had also needed time to ensure they were safe.
Flaunting an escaped princess among the ballrooms of London after twice breaking a royally arranged betrothal agreement was hardly discreet, even if her cousin Yulian had been glad enough to step into the breach and offer himself to the Pasha’s daughter instead. If Kuban wanted her back, it wouldn’t be hard to retrieve her. But she was safe now. Time and Ruslan’s efforts with the recent Summer Revolution ensured no one would be looking for her ever again. In that regard, she had her freedom.
In all fairness, she understood her brother’s protective reasoning. But tonight, she didn’t want to be fair. She wanted to be entirely free. During all those long nights in the mountains, sleeping on the ground, eating cold food for fear a fire would give them away, fearing discovery, fearing she would wake up and be told Nikolay had died of his wounds, she’d never imagined England would be like this.
England had been the Promised Land, a place where she could be free to discover herself. England would be a place where she could live out from under Dimitri’s sheltering thumb and her father’s unforgiving censure. Not that she’d had any idea what she’d do with that freedom. But she’d wanted to explore the possibilities. Might she paint or draw? Might she ride like Nikolay? Might she write like Illarion? Might she discover some heretofore unknown passion that was entirely her own?
The night she’d fled, anything and everything had seemed possible. Hope of the impossible had buoyed her throughout that journey. She didn’t feel that way now. She felt more sheltered than ever. Anna-Maria looked up at the stars. Not for the first time, she envied Stepan and the others their maleness and the freedom that went with it. When they’d arrived, they all had spent a few months in Little Westbury with Dimitri. By that first winter, the men had gone to London to look around. Only Stepan had come back to Little Westbury and tonight he’d borne the brunt of her dissatisfaction for all of them. It was hardly an endorsement for Stepan to return to the house while she was still up. She couldn’t blame him if he avoided her like the plague.
* * *
‘You’ll have to avoid the main roads like the plague,’ Stepan instructed Joseph as they distilled the last of the raw vodka. The work was hard, lifting heavy kegs, but he welcomed it as a much-needed distraction from his emotions. Dinner with Anna-Maria had not gone well. He would leave it at that for now. He’d have to apologise. No matter his frustration, there was no excuse for speaking to her like that.
‘Denning will have his men in place, watching the obvious routes. He won’t have discovered the secondary roads yet.’ With luck the captain never would, but that luck would depend on how loyal the population of Shoreham was to their smugglers. It only took one informant to break the chain.
‘Aye.’ Joseph nodded thoughtfully, looking older than his seventeen years. ‘We’ll manage. We could take on some more bat men. I know some fellows we can trust.’ Bat men had the job of protecting the tub men if anyone dared to interfere with the transport.
‘I prefer stealth over force.’ Stepan cautioned, ‘Force is obvious and can be tracked. Bat men can be recognised.’ He wouldn’t risk anyone facing hanging on his account.
‘Force may become a necessity if this Captain Denning can’t be reasoned with.’
‘You mean bribed?’ Stepan chuckled and cracked open another cask. ‘He didn’t seem the bribable sort, I’ll say that much for him. He’s a very determined fellow.’ More than determined. He would exact cruel retribution from anyone he caught.
Stepan stood, stretching his back, and surveyed the cavern. The half ankers that would be worn by the tub men were nearly full and only a few casks remained for d
istilling. Soon, he wouldn’t have an excuse for staying out of the house and avoiding Anna-Maria. But it was late and he could hope she’d gone to bed. ‘Can we move the ankers tomorrow night? I think the sooner the better, given the circumstances.’ He would have preferred to have used a wagon, but the winter mud combined with the weight of heavy casks would have left a wagon mired on boggy roads before it had gone a mile, a sitting duck for the excise men.
‘We can go tomorrow night.’ Joseph rubbed at his chin. ‘The hardest part will be getting out of town. The place is crawling with soldiers, even if they are disorganised at the moment.’
Stepan thought for a minute. ‘You need a distraction.’ A slow smile spread across his face. ‘I think I know just how to kill two birds with one stone. We’ll wait one more night, Joseph, and move the vodka and spices while the barracks dance. A welcoming assembly is planned for them this Friday. I’ve been invited, of course, as have the troops. I’ll keep Denning busy while you and the boys move the cargo.’
Joseph grinned in agreement. ‘It’s the perfect distraction. I’ll keep guards posted tonight and tomorrow to make sure no one comes sniffing around in the next thirty-six hours.’ Then his brow furrowed. ‘That’s only one bird, though, milord. You said two birds with one stone. What’s the other?’
Stepan gave a wry smile. ‘I owe a lady a dance.’
A lady. Anna-Maria. One and the same. Stepan climbed the steps to the house, the wind howling around the stone tunnel encasing the stairs—all one hundred and sixty of them. He could not gloss over the reality. Anna-Maria was no longer a little girl in braids, or the wide-eyed adolescent who’d ridden in the saddle before him without complaint on the gruelling trek out of Kuban. That girl was gone and in her place was a stunning, passionate young woman too headstrong for her own good and too tempting for his.
Seduced By The Prince's Kiss (Russian Royals 0f Kuban Book 4) Page 6
