Читать книгу Compromised By The Prince’s Touch - Bronwyn Scott - Страница 11

Chapter Two

Heels down? Was he joking? No one had told her that for years. She was no amateur and yet she begrudgingly discovered there was a bit of room in the stirrups still for the slightest of adjustments. She turned Zvezda around and pointed her towards the jump. Five even strides. She’d show that arrogant Russian prince perfection in motion. Heels down. Hah. That would be the last time she gave him reason to find any fault with her.

They worked on counting strides for the better part of the hour until the mare was tired, but not too tired, not too sweaty. Sweaty horses chilled easily in the winter. Nikolay Baklanov had a good eye, not just for the horse, but for the rider, too. His arrogance was well earned. His reputation did not disappoint. Even with her experience, she’d picked up a tip or two during their session which was something of a surprise in part because she’d not expected to and in part because learning something had only been a portion of the reason she was here. The other part was that she’d been sent on a mission of sorts to vet the young Kubanian royal. The Prince had been in London for two months; long enough to have called on the ambassador himself. Since he hadn’t, her father had decided to send her to call on him. She was to meet Prince Baklanov and establish his ‘quality’.

Klara dismounted to walk her horse while the mare cooled. The Prince fell into step beside her, debriefing the lesson with instructions on what to practise throughout the week. She could easily imagine him giving the same terse litany of instructions to his troops. He would be a commanding leader. Up close, he was tall, a novelty for her. She could look most men in the eye, but she reached only his shoulder, a very broad shoulder. There was no doubting he was a rider of superb calibre. He was built for it with long legs, muscled thighs evident even through the fabric of his trousers and lean through the hips. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on him, only muscle: well-trained, well-hewn muscle.

This was no dandified cavalry officer whose position had been purchased by his parents and good fortune of birth. This man was a warrior, a point accentuated by the dark hair worn long at his shoulders; the firm cut of his jaw and severe, chiselled lines of his face. A woman could look at that face for hours, could lose herself in the dark depths of his eyes—eyes full of secrets. He was a man who knew how to be dangerous to both men and women—a warrior to one, a lover to the other. He did not strike her as a man who’d appreciate being manipulated.

‘Do you keep a horse here?’ she asked when his debrief finished. Men loved to talk about themselves, it was always safe—and useful—conversation and that’s what she was here for: useful conversation with Prince Baklanov. Men gave hints away all the time, in their words if she was lucky, but in other subtle ways, too: the tone of their voices, the gestures they made, the way they held their bodies.

‘I keep three, actually.’ He smiled at the mention of his horses and the result changed his face entirely, translating the strong, stoic planes of his warrior’s face into breath-taking handsomeness. Zvezda was cool and they led her out into the aisle towards a stall. ‘We’re passing them now.’ He nodded to the left, a hand going to the pocket of his coat to retrieve a treat as they came up on the first stall. ‘This is Cossack. He’s a Russian Don by breed.’

‘He must be your cavalry horse.’ Klara ran her eyes over the muscled chestnut, taking in the horse’s shiny coat. ‘He’s magnificent,’ she complimented, but she could tell her comment, her knowledge, had surprised him.

‘Yes. I brought him with me when I left Kuban.’ She heard the wistfulness as his voice caressed the words. Perhaps he would rather not have left? The Prince moved on to the stall beside it. ‘This is Balkan, my stallion.’ He ran a hand affectionately down the long neck of a horse so dark, he was nearly black.

‘Let me guess.’ Klara took in the short back, the height of the withers. ‘He’s Kabardin, perhaps Karachay.’

‘Very good!’ He flashed her another handsome smile. ‘You do know something of the Motherland then.’

It was her turn to be uncomfortable with his display of insight. ‘I know something of horses and their breeds,’ Klara replied, leading Zvezda to her stall. She grabbed the blanket hanging beside the stall and stepped inside. ‘How did you know?’

The Prince lounged outside the stall door, arms crossed, eyes studying her as she tossed the blanket over Zvezda’s back. ‘You didn’t know what Zvezda meant when I told you. You don’t speak Russian and I would guess that your mother is English.’ He pushed off the wall and stepped inside to work the chest fastenings of the blanket. ‘I would go so far as to say you’ve never lived in Russia.’

‘You’re almost right.’ Her hands stilled on the blanket straps. What would this prince think of such a woman who had no knowledge of her heritage? ‘I haven’t lived there since I was a little girl. It’s true, I don’t remember much of it. We lived in St Petersburg for three years when I was four. We spent the summers in the countryside at an estate near Peterhof. That’s what I am told. What I remember are the grasses around the estate, how they were as tall as I was and I could hear the wind pass through them.’ She loved those memories. She’d lain for hours in those grasses looking up at the sky, happy and unaware how sadly the sojourn in St Petersburg would end.

No one paid much attention to her in those days—she would only understand why much later. In the moment, she’d been pleased. She could go where she willed, do what she wanted. She’d had grand adventures. Returning to England had been the end of those adventures, except for her horses. She might have gone crazy if it hadn’t been for them. England had been the start of special tutors, then special schools, the very best for a girl who was expected to grow up to marry a duke, to become a complete Englishwoman, her Russian heritage nothing more than a novel characteristic to be put on display the way one displays a parlour trick. Something interesting and entertaining, but not to be taken seriously, not even by her, although this was ground on which she and her father disagreed. She wanted to know about her Russian heritage, hungered for it, even against her father’s promises to her dying mother to raise an English rose.

‘St Petersburg is a long way from the Kuban Steppes,’ the Prince said neutrally and she had the sense that she was the one being vetted, quite the reverse of her intentions for this meeting. It made her nervous. What had she given away? What secrets had she inadvertently revealed?

She tried for a smile and a bit of humour. ‘We can’t all be patriotic cavalry officers.’

The effort failed. Her remark had been meant as a compliment, but it evoked something darker. The openness of his expression shuttered. ‘Who said anything about being patriotic? Come, you haven’t seen my other horse, she’s a Cleveland Bay. I acquired her when I arrived. I have hopes of breeding her with my Kabardin stallion.’ Any chance to follow up on his comment was lost in his rambling talk of a breeding opportunity. Klara was certain it was quite purposely done. The comment about patriotism had made him edgy. She had skated close to something with that remark.

They petted the Cleveland Bay and made conversation about mares and horses in general—safe ground for them both. But she was aware the atmosphere around them remained charged with wariness. They were both on their guard now, protecting themselves, cautious of revealing too much by accident to a stranger. She didn’t want him to see any more of her and her lack of ‘Russianness’. It was embarrassing to her that he should see it so clearly and on such short acquaintance. Would he be as disgusted by it as she if he knew the reason—that she’d been groomed to be an expensive pawn in a dangerous game she couldn’t escape? Would he even care? Disgust implied the pre-existence of caring. He was her riding instructor, nothing more. And as for the Prince—what was it he didn’t want her to see? What was he protecting? Why? More importantly, why did he think a diplomat’s daughter would care about his secrets? In his case, caring assumed his secrets contained something of value he was not willing to share with another. Which was precisely what her father suspected.

A stable hand came to announce the arrival of her father’s carriage and Nikolay gave her a formal incline of his head. ‘It is time to say do svidaniya, Miss Grigorieva.’ He leaned close and she smelled the scents of man and beast on him, not an unpleasing fragrance to a woman who preferred horses over the dandified fops of the ton. ‘That means “until we meet again”.’

‘What makes you sure I’ll come back?’ She let her eyes linger on his face, her voice low. She was flirting with him as he’d flirted with her, with private words and lingering glances.

‘You didn’t quite get what you came for, Miss Grigorieva. You’ll be back. Did you want to wait until next Thursday or perhaps you’d like to try again sooner? I have an opening on Monday.’

‘Monday? That’s three days away,’ she answered the challenge with a bold confidence she didn’t feel. This man had a way of pushing her off balance at the most unlooked for moments. What did he think she was hunting? She hardly knew herself. ‘How about Saturday in the park?’ she countered. ‘We will ride. You can bring Balkan. Call for me at two.’ She paused. ‘Unless you’re worried I might get the rest of what I came for.’

He grinned, a wicked warrior’s smile that sent a most unladylike tremor all the way to her toes, despite her usual dislike of arrogant men. He seemed to be an exception. ‘I’m not the one who should be worried, Miss Grigorieva. Two o’clock Saturday it is.’

* * *

‘You should be worried, Nik. I don’t like the sounds of this at all,’ Stepan counselled at dinner that night. The four of them—Illarion and Ruslan, Stepan and himself, all royal expatriates of Kuban—were pushed back from the table, enjoying vodka and sampling some of Stepan’s latest samogon—the Russian version of an Englishman’s John Barleycorn. Drinking together was their nightly ritual, an attempt to recreate something from their old life in Kuban, to create something of their own, something comfortable in this new world they were learning to navigate.

Nikolay shoved his glass forward for more. Klara Grigorieva had disturbed him on more than a political level. She disturbed him on a sensual level, too, something, he might add, which had not happened in the time since they’d left Kuban. He thought his last, nearly fatal run-in with a woman had resolved his susceptibilities to feminine charm. Apparently not. The man in him wanted to pursue her, but the warrior in him counselled caution, as Stepan did. For now, he was happy to let his friends debate the issue for him.

To his right, Illarion, always the romantic, argued leniency. ‘We might just be paranoid. The girl’s not Russian, for one, not really. She was raised here. Nik says she doesn’t even speak the language. It’s hard to believe she’s invited into her father’s counsels or that she has any interest, like most of these English girls.’

‘Unlike most English girls—’ Stepan tendered his rebuttal ‘—her father is indisputably Russian. He’s an ambassador. It is his job to represent Russian interests in England.’ Stepan had become their unofficial adahop during the months they’d been in London, the one they all turned to for advice. ‘If anyone is supposed to be loyal to one’s country, it’s the ambassador.’

Therein lay the true concern. Perhaps the ambassador would be loyal enough to see a renegade prince, wanted for royal murder, returned home.

This had always been the risk; that Kuban would want him back and that the Kubanian Tsar would not be willing to settle for having his number-one troublemaker out of the country. Nikolay was starting to regret the group’s decision to not learn more about the Russian situation in London. The four of them had decided it would be better to simply go about their lives and let the ambassador come to them if he was interested in London’s four newest Russian citizens. It had been an easy choice. There had been much to do in resettling.

The strategy had worked. To date, the ambassador had been uninterested. Today, that had potentially changed. Unless Klara was only what she seemed: a riding pupil, another English girl looking for ways to fill her long, empty days until she married. But the scenario didn’t suit the woman he’d seen in the riding house. In his gut Nikolay knew that wasn’t a legitimate assumption. She had not ‘seemed’ only a riding pupil today. Whatever she’d wanted from him, she’d wanted it badly enough to swallow her pride. He’d not missed how much it galled her when he’d shouted to keep her heels down, or to check her pacing. She might be there to ride, but she was there for something else as well.

Across the table, Ruslan, always the diplomat, seconded Stepan’s advice. ‘You have to admit it looks strange; the Russian ambassador’s daughter, who is already an exceptional rider, shows up asking for lessons? Why? Especially given your circumstances.’ Ruslan looked around the table at each of them. ‘We are all awkward expatriates.’

They were indeed, especially if a condition of expatriation was ‘voluntary’ relocation. Nikolay wasn’t convinced even a loose definition of voluntary applied to him. His choice to leave hadn’t been much of a choice at all when his other option was facing imprisonment and trial for a murder that could be couched as treason, a trial he might not win. He’d argued against the traditions of the kingdom once too often. Whether the charges against him held was not the issue. The Tsar had reason to make sure that they did. There’d been plenty of occasions when he’d clashed with the traditional-minded Tsar, but this last time, blood had been spilt. When his friend, Prince Dimitri Petrovich, a man who had abdicated his title in Kuban in order to claim a bride forbidden to him under Kubanian law, had written asking him to see to his sister’s safe passage to England, Nikolay had jumped at the chance as much out of the deep bonds of friendship as for his own personal benefit.

Dimitri’s request had come at a time when Kuban was no longer safe for him, as it was no longer safe, in varying degrees, for the other three men who sat at the table with him. Stepan Shevchenko; who had helped him escape the Tsar’s dungeons in a very literal and perhaps unforgivable sense; Illarion Kutejnikov, whose only claim to fame before he’d used his poetry to protest Kubanian marriage practices was that a cousin had been a general during the recent wars; and Ruslan Pisarev, who might or might not have been involved in a questionable underground operation to help people leave the country. Ruslan’s knowledge in escaping Kuban without detection certainly indicated he might be guilty as charged. They could make no claim to Kuban now, except for perhaps Ruslan, who might be the one who found a way to return some day.

For now, all four of them were homeless princes abroad in a strange land, living off Dimitri’s good graces. The first months they’d arrived in England, they’d stayed in the country with Dimitri and his English wife, Evie. But they did not want to overstay their welcome, not with Evie expecting a baby. Their friend had a family of his own. They needed to strike out for themselves. But even that bit of independence was a misnomer. The four of them had come to London, thanks to the generous loan of Dimitri’s London residence, Kuban House, a loan they were all keenly aware couldn’t last no matter how much Dimitri insisted it could. Eventually, they would have to find homes of their own. But for now, it was all they had, a very new concept to Princes who had once owned palaces and summer homes that far exceeded their need.

Former Princes, Nikolay supposed. He had to get used to thinking of himself that way. Or perhaps not? Could one ever be a ‘former’ prince? The term ‘Prince’ was nothing more than an honorific now. They had no palaces, no land, none of the trappings that made them princes. They’d left it all behind in the hopes Kuban would make no claim on them.

The question was whether or not Kuban had let them go. Would Kuban come after them, or was London far enough to outrun the arm of Mother Russia? That was the question he saw mirrored in the eyes of his friends as he looked around the table. Was the lovely, sharp-witted Klara Grigorieva the advance scout for a larger scheme to drag the Princes home? If so, was that net truly after all of them, or just after him? He was the only one with official charges against him. Until he knew for sure, how he chose to handle Miss Grigorieva could affect them all. For the sake of his friends, he needed to know what he was up against.

Nikolay swallowed the samogon and pushed back from the table. ‘I’ll ride with her on Saturday. If she’s truly setting a trap, then cancelling the appointment will alert her to our suspicions. I can’t learn about her intentions if I don’t spend time with her.’ That would not be a hardship. Klara Grigorieva was intriguing in her own right. He’d want to spend time with her without the need to unravel the mysteries she presented, a foreign ambassador’s daughter raised to be English. He had responded to her mentally, physically, from the moment she’d taken off her helmet, shaken down all that glorious hair and chastised him for being late, to the moment she’d invited him for a Saturday ride. Call for me at two. There’d been no doubt in her mind that he would accept. A woman like that would keep a man on his feet. Klara Grigorieva wasn’t for the fainthearted, but no one had ever called him a coward.