he?
Nicolai sat straight up, watching her in the tense silence. The sheet fell back, revealing the lean, muscled contours of his body. The light glimmered on the fine blond hairs of his legs and arms, making him seem gilded, like an ancient idol.
She shrugged the cloak away, leaving it in a pool on the floor as she moved slowly toward the bed. She didn’t know what he would do. Kill her? Kiss her? Laugh at her, and send her away? She would rather he plunged his dagger into her heart than do that!
He said nothing, just studied her with his unearthly eyes as she slowly climbed on to the mattress beside him. She reached out and gently pushed him back on to the tangle of sheets and velvet blankets.
“Marguerite…” he said tightly.
“I am not Marguerite tonight,” she whispered. “I am your fairy enchantress.”
She leaned over his taut body, her hair falling around them in a pale curtain, closing off the world. She touched the hollow of his throat with the tip of her tongue, feeling the pulse of his life, tasting the salt of the tiny bead of sweat that pooled there. He was so tense under her, like a drawn bow, but he leaned back, gave her her own way.
As she trailed kisses across his shoulder, she reached her fingers down to lightly trace the circle of his flat, brown nipple, which pebbled under her caress. Her tongue followed, darting out to lick before blowing on it gently. Ever so softly.
“An enchantress indeed,” he groaned.
Marguerite laughed, revelling in the sudden wave of power that rushed through her. The heady, giddy pleasure. Her lips trailed along his chest, over his taut abdomen, soft, quick, teasing kisses.
At last her mouth closed over the throbbing length of his manhood. His fingers clasped in her hair, as if to push her away—or hold her closer. In that one, perfect moment, he was hers. And it was everything she wanted.
Chapter Twelve
Marguerite drowsed in Nicolai’s loose embrace, lying on her side in his bed, curled back against him as she ran her fingertips lightly along his arm. From his wrist to his elbow and back again, until she twined her fingers with his and pressed his hand to her stomach.
There were old scars there from the horse’s kicks, the cuts of the iron shoes, a tracery of rough red lines she had never let anyone see before. But now she let Nicolai touch them, his fingertips playing over them gently.
“What will you do when you leave England?” she asked quietly.
Nicolai chuckled, his warm breath stirring her hair. He drew her even closer into the heat of his body. “Why? So you can chase me when I go? Run after me across the continent until you kill me at last?”
“If I wanted to kill you, you would be dead tonight, Muscovite!” she said, kicking back at him. “Remember, I had your most precious organ balanced right in my hand.”
He laughed, spinning her in his arms until her head rested on his shoulder. “How could I forget?”
Marguerite propped herself on her elbow, gazing down at his face in the sputtering candlelight. He was relaxed, laughing, so young. “I will not kill you in bed. I will face you fairly on a dueling field.”
“Would you indeed, dorogaya?” He took her hand, kissing each fingertip in turn. He sucked her littlest finger into his mouth, laving it lightly until she shivered. “Well, you will not have to search for me very hard for our duel. I intend to stay in one place for a good long while once this errand is done, and Dona Elena safely on her way back to Spain.”
“But you are a travelling player!”
“And so I’ve been nearly all my life, since I was nine years old, and I am twenty-seven now. I grow weary now, too old for this life. Too old to don motley and walk the tightrope.”
Too old to spy? Surely she did know how he felt. She was barely twenty-one years of age herself, and yet there were times she felt so very ancient. “What will you do instead?”
“I fear you would laugh at me, my sophisticated mademoiselle. My worldly fairy queen.”
“I could never laugh at you. Unless you play the Arlecchino. Then you are diverting beyond measure!”
“Ah, so you have seen my Arlecchino, then?”
“Once, in the Piazza San Marco, when you and your pretty young lover outwitted her sour old husband.”
“Then you know what I mean. I would soon be more likely to play the husband.”
“Au contraire, monsieur!” She traced a light, teasing caress along his chest, his taut abdomen. “There can be no player in all Europe who would look finer in those tight silks.”
“Lecherous lady! Now I know why you came to me—your lust for Arlecchino.”
“Can you blame me?” She rested her head on his shoulder, listening to the steady thrum of his heartbeat, the pulse of his very life. “So, if you will be a player no more, what will you do?”
“I will turn farmer.”
“Farmer? You? In Russia?”
“Nay. I have lost my taste for bitter winters. I bought some land from my friend Marc’s wife Julietta, on the mainland near Venice. It is an overgrown tangle right now, and the villa burned. I will build a new house, though, one that is entirely mine. And I will tend my grapevines and fields of barley, will learn to make wine and press olive oil. I’ll grow old in peace there, under the warm sun.”
Marguerite closed her eyes, picturing it all in her mind. The house, glistening white stucco crowned with a rust-red tiled roof, shimmering under that bright light. White curtains fluttering at the open windows; tables spread with bread, cheese, olives, and the vineyard’s own wines on the warm terrace, shaded by cypress trees. The twisting, beautiful vines, spread out as far as the eye could see, plump grapes ripening happily, full of sugar, until they could be gathered and turned carefully, painstakingly, into that magical elixir—wine.
“My father, he had one passion in life besides the memory of my mother, and that was wine,” she said dreamily, looping one satin strand of his hair around her finger.
His finger traced a lazy pattern on her shoulder. “Do you mean to say you had parents, Marguerite?” he teased. “Human beings? That you were not left on their doorstep as a changeling?”
She laughed. “Of course I had real, human parents! I do not remember my mother, but my father used to carry me through his vineyard when I was a child, talking about his hopes for the grapes, his plans to improve the harvests. New methods for producing the wine, which he read about in agricultural treatises from Spain or Italy.”
“Your father’s vineyards did well under his care?”
She shook her head. “Not at all, yet he never ceased to try. We lived in Champagne, you see, in the north of France where the winters are cold and come early. But the soil was good for grapes, or should have been—chalky, so it drains well and doesn’t dry out quickly. Loose, so the vines could penetrate deep and retain the precious
