catch you after all the trouble I’ve gone through?”
She hugged him. “It’s just that the time drags so. And since the Empress knows where I am, she will never let me leave China.”
“Don’t talk like that. They’ll tire of guarding the road. New skirmishes with those Boxers are breaking out more frequently. One day the old witch will have to send her soldiers off to put down an uprising and we’ll be free as birds.”
“I feel so guilty about your staying to help me now that your tour of duty is finished.”
“My job in Washington will always be there. Father will see to that. I’ve explained that I’ve been delayed. He bought the lie just as easily as he bought all my others.” He’d already had official entry papers issued naming himself, Edward Wells, as Adam’s father.
April felt no guilt at having seduced him when he first arrived at the legation. She would have seduced Satan if it meant settling her score with Peter and Lydia. As he embraced her she felt his need for her. “Stay,” she whispered.
“I shouldn’t,” he answered, glancing toward the door.
She knew he did not want her to send him away—not yet. “Please,” she urged, placing her leg between his thighs. “Adam is sound asleep. You can stay with me for just a little while.”
April knew he didn’t love her any more than she loved him. Eddie Wells was a rake, a wastrel, the only son of a prominent politician who indulged his son anything. The liaison that had developed between herself and Eddie was almost like a game they both got pleasure in playing.
“April,” he murmured, as he moved her toward the bed, at the same time they were struggling out of their clothes.
She enjoyed being in his arms because it reminded her of all those pleasurable hours in David’s arms. It was heavenly to close her eyes and pretend that David’s hands caressed her breasts and stroked her thighs as his mouth ravaged hers.
His flesh was warm and exciting. April pulled him closer, giving herself to her fantasies as he kissed her ears, her throat, her breasts. She let him part her thighs and reveled in the exquisite sensations of penetration. She kept her eyes tightly shut and her ears deaf to all sounds. She gave herself up to the sheer physical pleasure of the act as she moved up to meet his thrusts. The rhythm of their sex act increased as he moved more urgently, yet with a strange tenderness that was so reminiscent of David’s lovemaking.
April gave herself over to the passion that was building higher and higher from deep inside her. She strangled the cries of ecstasy that she’d so freely vented with David; with Eddie such cries had no meaning.
He groaned as he pushed himself completely into the heat of her body and felt the flood of his passion burst out in jolting gushes of molten passion. He moaned, gasping her name, and then fell, spent and content, on top of her.
April cradled him like a child, stroking the smooth, taut muscles, of his back until she felt him relax. The frightening tensions of the last several hours, the disappointment of a foiled escape were forgotten for the moment. There would be other nights. She only hoped that they would not all end like this one, as had so many earlier ones.
Eddie stirred. “Now I surely must leave you. It will be dawn in a couple of minutes.” He got up and started putting on his clothes. “Get some sleep, pet. Just have patience. I made you a promise that I’d get you out of this infernal country and I will.” He leaned over and pecked her mouth. “We made a bargain, you and I. You’ve been keeping your part magnificently and I swear to you that I will keep mine—or die in the attempt.”
He meant it. She could tell by his voice. Scoundrel that he was, he was an honorable scoundrel, she knew, with all the romantic ideals of a teen-aged boy, which Eddie had forgotten to shed.
He paused before the mirror to tie his tie. “One thing I can’t understand, though; never could.” He glanced over at her lovely face with its almond eyes and skin of pink porcelain. “You are a Chinese princess and look every bit the part. It beats me why you want to chuck away all that royalty stuff and go back to San Francisco, where Orientals are not exactly the favorite citizens.”
She knew what he meant because she remembered only too well how badly she’d been treated when she lived there with her mother.
“I told you,” April said. “I have a debt that needs to be paid. Besides, the Dowager Empress would only make me a prisoner, perhaps even kill me if I’m taken back inside the walls of the Forbidden City. She and my father are not particularly close.”
She snuggled deeper into the covers and watched him slick back his hair with her brushes. He was a good-looking man and a very accomplished lover. She felt a stirring below her waist. The lovemaking had been too brief, but that was always the way with Eddie Wells—the one important way in which he differed greatly from David.
“But you’re a princess,” he insisted with his practical American way of thinking. “A member of her family.”
“In China, royal family members are the most susceptible to the High Executioner’s hatchet.”
He stooped and kissed her again, briefly. “The next contingent of Marines leaves in a week,” he said. “If the road is clear we’ll try again to hide you and Adam in one of their caissons.” He blew her a kiss and was gone.
Left alone, April heard Adam move uncomfortably and mutter something in his sleep. She slipped out of bed, pulling a robe about herself, and went to his trundle bed. Again he’d kicked off the covers and again April tucked him in. As her hand brushed his little arm she frowned. It felt warm. She placed her hand on his forehead. She couldn’t decide whether or not he was running a temperature, but to be safe she’d have the doctor look at him in the morning. It might well be just the excitement that was making him flushed and feverish.
She started back to her own bed. A glint of moonlight reflected on the silver box she’d removed earlier from her portmanteau and had left lying atop the bureau. Unconsciously she lifted its lid and sorted through the collection of exquisite jewels and packets of money she’d taken when she fled the palace. She picked up the sapphire ring the old Empress had given her and bit down on her lower lip to stop its quivering.
“You too, you old devil,” April swore, remembering the Empress’s stony face as she sat stolid and unmoved while David was dragged to the block. The woman she’d once revered above all the gods would also feel the sting of her revenge one day, April vowed. If it meant the giving of her own life to accomplish it, the three of them—Peter, Lydia, and the Dragon Empress Tz’u Hsi—would suffer as they had made her suffer.
She took up the long strands of pearls she’d braided into her raven, waist-length hair that night in Paris when she and David planned their flight to China, to what they believed to be the security of her father’s royal house. It all seemed so long, long ago and yet the agonies and terrors she’d undergone had left no scars on her lovely young face. Her dark almond eyes were just as lustrous; her flawless complexion still exquisitely delicate. She’d be twenty-four in the spring. She smiled at her image in the mirror. She still looked like a young girl.
She replaced the jewels, lowered the lid, and returned the box to the top drawer. It would take most of what she had to pay for her protection to the harbor in Shanghai and once there for passage on a ship bound for San Francisco. Once in America she would be a princess no longer. She’d be despised and demeaned as she’d been once before. She hated the city and the people in it, but that was where her enemies
