‘I have things to see to. Pack your things, Anna-Maria. You will leave in the morning.’ God willing. Who knew what the storm would do to the roads? He’d cross that bridge when he came to it and hope it wasn’t washed out.
* * *
Anna-Maria crept down the servants’ stairs, careful not to be seen, although it was a good time of day for sneaking. The servants were all in the kitchen preparing the evening meal and the relentless Mrs Batten was spending the night in town with her sister, thank goodness, or she’d already have the trunks out. But Anna was determined to go nowhere until she had answers. If Stepan would not give answers to her, she would find them for herself.
At the very least, she wanted to know where he went and what this business of his was. At the most, she wanted him to admit their kisses meant something, even if they left him confused. That would make two of them. None the less, she’d chosen him over the captain the moment Denning had mentioned the Russian spices. With every smile, with every flirtatious overture she’d given the captain, she’d reiterated that choice. She would do whatever she could to protect Stepan, just in case he needed protecting. He’d not thanked her for it. Perhaps this was what unrequited love felt like—the continual practice of unacknowledged selfless deeds.
Anna stepped out of the servants’ stair and into the main hallway, quietly shutting the door behind her. She was certain Stepan had come this way. His office was down this hall. She tiptoed towards the sliver of light peeking beneath the office door. Someone was inside. She pressed an ear to the door, catching the murmur of low, male voices, one of them Stepan’s.
‘I need you to move the distillation equipment and the rest of the goods. Get them out to the alternate location further down the coast, or, if you can’t travel tonight, get them deeper into the caves where no one is likely to look. I expect when Denning realises smugglers don’t keep open accounts of activity in their offices, he will start searching properties.’
Dear Lord. Anna was reeling with the implications. She nearly missed the rest.
‘Joseph, he knows about the spices. If he starts to search properties, he will come here first. The only thing that might stay him is the grand irony of coming to a prevention officer’s home to find smuggled goods.’
Joseph. The new groom who was apparently not a groom.
No wonder he’d been so keen to accompany her on the picnic. ‘And Miss Petrova’s smile,’ came a cheeky response that was cut short. She could imagine the sharp look that remark must have earned him.
‘I will not send her to beg, is that understood?’
‘Yes, milord. If that will be all, I’ll get the boys right on it.’ Joseph sounded chastised and penitent. She felt a moment’s sympathy with him. She knew what it was like to be on the receiving end of Stepan’s scolding tongue. But a moment was all she had to spare. Her mind was overwhelmed and she had to hide. She was in no state to face Stepan now. Anna darted to the curtains framing the long hall window. It was hardly original, but it had to do.
She stayed behind the bulky folds for a while, long after Stepan’s footsteps had passed. She let her mind catch up with the information. This was a horrible turn of fate. Stepan was a smuggler. Not only that, he was the smuggler she’d tried to protect him from.
Stepan, a smuggler. A criminal. A lawbreaker.
She clutched at the heavy fabric of the curtains, sitting down hard on the ledge of the window. It couldn’t be true. Not her noble Stepan, her moral compass, the man she counted on to know right and to do right. Wasn’t this the very argument she’d just made with herself? And in one revelation, that image, that belief was destroyed. Emptiness swamped her at the loss.
She could not comprehend it. Why had a prince of Kuban lowered himself to the status of a common criminal, a man who could be hung? Why would he risk himself so recklessly and without cause? He didn’t need the money. Didn’t he know they all counted on him, that they couldn’t do without him? She couldn’t do without him.
What would her life be like without her north star? Fearful tears threatened as she imagined a life stretching before her without Stepan’s strength always on the periphery, waiting to come to her aid, his presence constant and steady when all else was at sea—what would life be like even without his chiding and his grimness? They were as much a part of him as the other. And his touch, that touch that made her burn. What would her life be like without ever knowing that heat again? Knowing that she had jeopardised Stepan with her choices?
The rest of it hit her hard. She put a hand to her stomach, trying to calm the twin tides of panic. In her attempt to protect Stepan, she’d invited his worst enemy to look at his ledgers, a man who could see him hanged or transported. Based on Denning’s actions to date, he’d not hesitate to hang Stepan as a show of force. She had unwittingly put him at risk. Her brother would never forgive her if something happened to Stepan.
Her brother. What would her brother do if he knew Stepan was smuggling? Dimitri would confront him. Dimitri would ask why, he would seek explanation. She would do the same, then; she would plead with him to stop before it was too late. There was still time. It was the one thought that calmed her. Denning would have to catch him first. Whatever Stepan had done, it wasn’t in the ledgers. There was no paper trail. Second, he had a few weapons in his arsenal: irony and a smile, if he’d let her use it. First, she’d have to convince him to let her stay and she’d have to get him to confess. She needed a plan and there was little time to lose.
Anna stepped out from behind the curtains and hurried to the kitchens to inform the cook, ‘Please have dinner brought to the library tonight.’ Tonight, she would beard this Kubanian lion in his den and force him to see her as a woman who was equal to him—and whatever burdens he might carry—by any method possible. Tonight, there could be no holds barred. Too much was at stake.
Chapter Fourteen
‘What is all this, Anna?’ Stepan’s question brought her out of the chair by the fire with a start. Lost in thought, she hadn’t heard him come in. She’d planned to challenge him immediately upon his arrival in the library, but hearing the suspicion in his voice as he took in the food laid out on a low table between the chairs and the firelit intimacy of the room, she decided on a different tack.
Anna rose and gave a soft shrug of her shoulders. ‘Dining rooms aren’t for stormy nights.’ There’d been enough challenges between them and those challenges usually ended in fights that resulted in Stepan creating distance between them. That was not the conclusion she was looking for tonight. She wanted to draw him close, not drive him away. They teetered on a knife-edge of no return. If she drove him away now, she would never get him back.
Anna gestured to the food. ‘Come, sit with me and eat. You must be tired and hungry after travelling today.’ And after so much more which she couldn’t say out loud.
After coming home to see checkpoints set up along the roads, after brawling in the streets of Shoreham to save a merchant, after coming home to confront Captain Denning, after quarrelling with me, after meeting secretly with a fellow smuggler who might at this very moment be moving your stolen goods to a new location.
Stepan’s day had been busy indeed, full of shocks and instant decisions. Hardly the kind of day one expected from the staid man who was set on being oh-so-proper that he bordered on boring. But she knew better now. That man was a façade, an incomplete image of who he really was.
Anna studied the strong, austere profile across from her, a dichotomy of its own, she realised, the long, sharp nose, the high Slavic cheekbones she’d seen so many times. It was a face saved from harshness by the hint of softness at its mouth. At first look, Stepan’s mouth matched the rest of him—hard-set and given to grimness. If he’d been a military man, he would have been a demanding officer. But if one looked closely enough, the softness, and the kindness, were there, too. That same humanity was in his quicksilver eyes when they weren�
�t storming. It was his mouth and his eyes that gave him his handsomeness, just as his nose and his cheekbones gave him his strength, his stoicism.
But he was not boring. Anna filled a plate with cheese and cold meat. Stepan had fooled them all with the act. Anyone in London who thought him a bore didn’t know the half of it. Anyone who thought him too proper hadn’t kissed him, or eavesdropped behind closed doors. She had, though. A frisson of awareness uncoiled down her spine, spreading warmth in its wake. She’d turned over the rock and seen what was underneath: a secret life full of danger and stormy passion. This was a man young girls should run from, but despite it all, she wanted to run to him. She wanted to be part of this other world he lived in.
Stepan opened the wine and poured each of them a glass. ‘Are you packed?’
‘No.’ Anna gave a soft smile, watching his face. ‘I’ve decided to stay, after all.’ She said it as if the decision was hers to make.
Stepan’s hand tightened about his wine glass. ‘I think it is best if you go. We’ve already discussed this.’
‘I couldn’t possibly leave a friend in need.’ Anna held his eyes over the rim of her glass as she sipped her wine. ‘It’s one of the lessons I learned from you and Dimitri and the others.’ She had him there. Loyalty and devotion were paramount to Stepan.
His eyes glittered dangerously. ‘You’ve already handled Captain Denning. What makes you think I am “in need”?’
Since I learned you were committing a hanging offence against the Crown. Anna wanted to rage like the storm outside. But a fight would give him what he wanted—something to wedge between them, something to send her away with. Anna set down her wine. It was time to move in for the kill, calmly, of course. ‘Since I learned you are a smuggler.’ She picked up her glass again, watching Stepan’s face go blank. ‘I heard you talking in your office today. I know all about your double life and now I want to know why.’
* * *
‘You were eavesdropping.’
She knew.
She knew the one secret he wanted to keep from her. The significance of that hit him like a blow to the stomach. How could he keep her safe if she knew? Thank goodness she hadn’t known before Denning had commandeered his books.
‘Eavesdropping? Really, Stepan? I don’t think that’s the bigger crime here.’ She was cool tonight. Gone was the raging princess who would have scolded and yelled. In her place was a temptation of a woman who sat before the fire, with her hair down and wine on her lips. She licked those lips now before speaking. ‘When were you going to tell me? Does Dimitri know?’
‘Never and no. Dimitri is not to know. You cannot tell him, Anna-Maria. You must promise me,’ Stepan answered, trying to turn the point to his advantage. ‘You understand why I need you to go now. If Denning thinks you know something, you become a liability to me and leverage to him. He could use you against me.’ Surely that argument would hold sway with her. One’s own personal safety was usually a powerful motivator.
But Anna-Maria crossed her legs confidently. She had an answer for that, too. ‘Denning is another reason I need to stay. I can manage him with a smile, a little flirting.’
‘No!’ Stepan’s fist came down on the arm of his chair. ‘You will not toy with him. It is far too risky. He is a dangerous man, Anna. Do you have any idea what he could do to you and no one could stop him?’ He did not want to imagine Anna subjected to any kind of torture designed to break him.
Her eyes flared, the cool mien she’d worn starting to slip. This was the Anna-Maria he knew. ‘I am from Kuban, Stepan. I know exactly what absolute power can do. Do you think I haven’t thought of it with the roadblocks and the sea barricades? It’s like the past has come to the present. What about you? Do you know what he can do to you?’
That was when he saw it—the caring, the concern that surpassed a young girl’s infatuation and superseded the physical tenets of desire. Physical desire he might have dealt with. Infatuation he could have overcome with time and eventual disillusionment. But love? That thing he knew nothing about. But the Petrovichs did. Dimitri and Anna-Maria were capable of it. He’d seen it a thousand times. Love was the Petrovichs’ most powerful weapon. It was what made them dangerous to a man who’d sworn to be alone.
A litany formed in his mind, a silent warning to Anna-Maria. He could never be enough for her. Do not fall in love with me. I am not worth it. Even if I could protect you, I will still disappoint you. He would carry the mantra with him like a mental shield.
‘I know very well the price for smuggling if one is caught.’
‘Why do you risk it, then?’ The quiet question took the conversation in an entirely different direction. This was no longer about her involvement, but his. ‘You don’t need the money, Stepan.’ She would not be pawned off with a simple answer.
‘Because it is a fight against injustice.’ Would she understand? He searched her gaze, wanting to find validation, suddenly realising how much he was counting on that. Would she see him as nothing but a criminal or would she see the nobility in this choice; how could he not choose this path while others suffered? ‘It gives meaning to my life and purpose to my days. I am needed.’
She held his eyes for a long time in thoughtful silence. Then she reached for his hand. ‘I know what it is to want to be needed.’ She was quiet before she spoke again. ‘But we need you, too, Stepan. I need you. Alive—not a martyr to a cause.’
‘Do you think I can’t make a difference?’ Stepan challenged. ‘That one man’s sacrifice cannot change the outcome? You didn’t think so in Marseilles when you emptied your purse for the urchins.’
‘That was different. I couldn’t hang for it. I sacrificed nothing, not even money. Those coins meant little to me. I had more.’
‘I don’t mean to be caught.’ Certainly not by the likes of Captain Denning—a man who saw this as a mission that served his personal gain without thinking what his success would cost the coastal economy. If Denning succeeded, people would suffer. More children like Joseph and the others would go hungry.
‘What of you, Stepan? Do you think the prospect of what Denning could do to you does not fill me with a certain amount of dread? I’d rather take my chances flirting with him than see you at the gallows,’ Anna-Maria pressed.
‘And I’d rather take my chances outsmarting him than see you imprisoned and raped in the name of one man’s justice.’ Or one man’s revenge, if he tweaked the man’s nose too much.
He rose from his chair and knelt before her, clasping her hands where they lay in her lap. He looked into her face, letting his eyes plead with hers. Her hair fell over her shoulders. She’d worn it down tonight and it gave her the look of both Madonna and Magdalene at once, a temptation come to life.
‘Why can I not worry for you? Why can I not fight for you as you fight for others?’ she challenged softly. Did she understand how provocative she looked? Good Lord, she was burning him alive with those eyes, with those words and those wine-stained lips, the touch of her hands in his.
His hands clenched over hers. ‘Because you’re mine, damn it, you’re mine,’ he growled fiercely, knowing the fight was lost, not because he couldn’t resist her—he’d been resisting for a while now—but because he didn’t want to any more. He did not want to resist while lightning flashed on the waves and rain pelted the long glass windows. He wanted to give in, to take comfort and pleasure before the roar of the fire, in her arms.
‘Show me, then, Stepan. Make me yours.’ Fire lit her eyes with desire’s flame. There was nothing of the Madonna about her now as he breathed in the lavender scent of her, his body tightening in want, his mind temporarily overriding all the objections that formed his resistance, replacing them with maybes and what ifs. What if in this room they could be Anna-Maria the woman and Stepan the man? What if they could suspend their common history and ties? Suspend the choices he’d made that put him beyond her reach? Maybe then
it would be possible to discover who they might be together.
Stepan rose up, his mouth inches from hers. ‘I want you, Anna-Maria, but there can be no future in it.’ He heard the hoarseness in his own voice. Did she hear it, too? Did she understand what it meant? What wanting entailed when it moved from the emotional realm to the physical?
‘But there can be tonight, Stepan.’
His mouth sealed hers in a kiss, full-bodied and open-mouthed, as he took the invitation. His hands gripped her thighs through the fabric of her skirts. He gave a moan of appreciation, the sound a connoisseur might make upon tasting some perfectly prepared delicacy. His senses were on high alert as he tasted her anew: the wine on her tongue, the clench of her hands in his hair signalling the intensity of her own hunger, the smell of her—lavender and the faintest hint of female arousal—the sound of her need a breathy panting at his ear.
‘Stepan.’ His name was a gasp on her lips and it spoke a thousand messages: that they had passed the stage of experimenting mouths, that kissing was no longer enough, no longer able to satisfy the craving they raised in one another. His hands slipped beneath her skirts, sliding up silk-stockinged legs. ‘Take them off.’ She breathed her command against his neck and he complied, his fingers skimming the high, tender skin of her thigh, working the garter and then rolling down the silk on first one leg and then the other. Stockings discarded, his hands pushed back her skirts, his mouth following in their wake with a trail of kisses over the curve of one calf, over the inner skin of one thigh until he reached the secret place between her legs. He was aware of her as he knelt between her thighs, the scent of her in his nostrils, the wetness of her teasing his fingers.
‘Part for me,’ he whispered the invitation at her core, letting his breath play over her damp curls. She did and he kissed the tender crease of her thighs in reward, feeling her body tense, hearing her breath catch. He licked at her seam then, tasting her, teasing her as he sought the hidden nub within her folds.
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