The Captive #7
The camp poured out to meet them the same as before—dogs first, then children, then everyone—and the great fire was already roaring by then, a whole sheep on the spit and a cauldron of that dark red stew breathing paprika over half the steppe.
Someone had a fiddle going before the first man dismounted.
The bandura—a string instrument I’d only learned the word for today—joined it, then the voices, and the evening cracked open into celebration as though the camp had merely been holding its breath all day.
Dmitri came through the crowd flushed with wind and grinning, and when he found me by the fire in my red silk, he stopped dead.
Then he laughed—a great free bark of it—closed the distance, caught me by the waist, and swept me off my feet and around in a full circle while the silk flared and the camp whooped.
My hands landed on his shoulders. My head spun with more than the turning.
He set me down and kissed me, brief and thorough, in front of everyone. As though I belonged here. As though I were the thing he’d ridden home to.
“Krasivaya,” he said, by way of explanation, and towed me toward the fire by the hand.
Beautiful, Dmitri called me. He called me that when I was dressed as one of his people, or when I was in my nightrail. Or when I was half-naked.
We ate seated on felts before the fire, close enough that his thigh lay warm along mine.
He fed me without asking—lamb pulled off the bone with his fingers, bread dragged through the stew, a honeyed thing that stuck my fingers together—and kept my cup filled with the clear spirit from the night before.
“Horilka,” he said, when I choked on it, and tapped my cup with his. “Say it.”
“Horilka,” I managed, in flames.
“There. Now you drink like a Cossack.” My wolf was relaxed in a manner I hadn’t yet seen—loose-shouldered, easy, laughing across the fire at his men.
He was rested. Home.
“Where did you ride today?” I asked.
“East. A village called Talniki.” Dmitri tore bread, unhurried. “In the spring, the administrator’s men took their cattle…arrears of taxes.” The word arrears spat out of his soft lips with a contempt that spoke of experience. “Today we brought them sheep, and silver for the winter.”
A white grin, sudden, sidelong. “Some of it yours, duchess. Your silver is feeding widows as we speak. You are very charitable.”
I stared at him in surprise. “You gave it away?” A very strange sort of bandit.
“We keep what we eat and what we ride. The rest goes where the Tsar’s men have already been.” He shrugged, as though this were simple rather than the stuff legends are made of. “It is not so noble as you are about to decide. The villages feed us all winter. A man pays his debts.”
“We have ballads about a man like you,” I said slowly. “In England. He robbed the rich on the king’s roads and gave the takings to the poor, and lived merrily in the greenwood with his men.”
“Did he hang?”
“The ballads disagree.”
“Ballads always do.” My captor drank, his eyes laughing at me over the rim.
The horilka was warm in my chest, and his hand had come to rest against my back—idle, moving, his thumb drawing slow lines through the silk along my spine as though he were thinking with it. I made no move at all to stop him.
“Your French,” I said. “You never told me where.”
“Paris.” His mouth curled. “I helped occupy it.”
“You—” I gasped, counting back the years. “You rode against Napoleon!”
“From eighteen-twelve to ‘fifteen. My father has standing in our stanitsa; his son went to the war looking respectable, with two horses and a new saber.” The firelight moved on Dmitri’s face, doing nothing to hide his bitterness.
He fed me another piece of soft bread. “In the year fourteen I rode into Paris with the army, and stayed most of a year. I learned the wine, the language, and the arguments of a widow on the Rue Jacob who threw a boot at my head whenever I was stupid.” His lips twisted wryly. “A good education, nyet?”
“And then you came back,” I said. “You saw Paris, and you came back here.”
To this barren steppe, where he and his men kept only what they ate.
“Here is mine.” Dmitri shrugged when he said it, as if it were the most natural sentiment in the world.
Then he was quiet for a moment, and the fire cracked, and the singing on the far side of it slid into one of those mournful turns that I couldn’t understand, but I still knew.
Unbidden, my fingertips rose to trace the pale line of his scar, where it left his beard. Only Dmitri’s eyes moved, tracing the lines of my face.
“This came from the war?”
“This came after the war,” he corrected without rancor. “I came home and found a new administrator sent from Petersburg—a man who could not sit a horse, carving up our grazing lands with a pen. Common land, held by Cossack right longer than the Romanovs have held anything.”
Now there was heat and anger and bitterness in Dmitri’s words, and his eyes grew hard. “He gave it to his friends. My father petitioned—the proper way, stamps and clerks. He was ignored. He petitioned again and was fined.”
Finally, he dropped his gaze to the cup in his hands, his voice softening. “The third time he petitioned, my father was threatened.” He turned the cup idly, as if not seeing it. “Then in the autumn they came to seize his horses. Tax in arrears.”
“His horses,” I said. My whole chest hurt at the thought. I’d learned that horses were life here on the steppe, and the way Dmitri’s band cared for Juno and Hector proved that.
His father had his animals confiscated for refusing to give up his land?
My wolf took a deep breath, his expression strangely blank, when I was used to his grins.
“I had watched men die four years for the Tsar,” he said.
“I found I could not watch that atrocity—a good man losing what was his. There were words, and then there was steel, and at the end of it one of the administrator’s lieutenants was dead on my father’s ground, and I had this”—a finger along the scar, jaw to collar—”from his saber.
He was faster than I expected. Once.” Another shrug.
“My father took shelter in a nearby stanitsa, and I found peace here, among other men who have been pushed out.”
The fire popped.
I am sorry. There are laws. You protected your father. But there were no right words to say.
“Three years, now.” He shrugged, and the ease came back into him the way the stream flows past the camp, and his lips curled wryly as he glanced back up at me.
“The Tsar’s men call me bandit. The stanitsas call me other things.
Both feed me—one at saber-point, one at the door.
” That grin again, unhurried and unashamed.
“And now I have an English duchess at my fire, wearing Turkish silk, drinking horilka.” He shrugged. “Bog obespechivayet. God provides.”
I laughed. It came out of me before I could stop to consider it, and his eyes went to my mouth and darkened, and my laughter ran out of air.
You are not falling for a bandit.
But I couldn’t lie to myself; Dmitri’s charm, his command, his grace was undeniable. And now that I knew his history, how he came to be here on the steppe, a kind of outlaw and a kind of hero? How could I not fall for a man who brought me such pleasure and then held me as I slept?
There is no future. You are a duchess with a purpose back home. An estate, a dower house, and one day soon, grandchildren to help raise. Dmitri is nothing.
Dmitri was one of the finest men I’d met in a dozen years of travel.
Still, you cannot hope for a future here on the steppes with him.
No.
No, I could not. But perhaps I didn’t need a long future with him. It would take weeks for Hobbs and the others to return to Moscow, longer still to get word to Edwin, months before the ransom arrived.
I shifted myself closer to Dmitri. I didn’t have long with him…but perhaps what we did have would be enough.
The horilka agreed; Dmitri’s thumb, still moving against the silk over my spine, confirmed my decision.
“Have you eaten enough?” he asked.
The question was so domestic, so mild, that I answered it honestly. “Yes—”
I bit off the rest of my agreement with a gasp when he suddenly stood and lifted me off the felts in one motion, silk and sash and all, and the fire circle erupted—men roaring, cups raised, somebody shouting something and getting a howl of laughter for it.
Heat flooded my face, and I hid it against Dmitri’s neck, which improved nothing, but his scent spiked my heartbeat and my arousal. He carried me toward the whitened tent without hurrying, the singing rolling on behind us.
Last night I had screamed his name so the whole camp heard it, and he had taken nothing for himself at all.
Well.
Tonight I meant to pay the toll.
He set me down in the center of the tent, the warmth of the rugs rising around my bare feet. The air smelled of wool and smoke and the faint, lingering scent of sandalwood—him. My pulse pounded in my throat as he reached for the sash at my waist, his fingers brushing against the silk.
“I should have stopped at the stream to bathe,” he murmured, his voice rough with something that wasn’t quite regret. “I rode all day.”
I met his gaze, boldness rising in me like the horilka’s fire. “Do you have water?” My fingers found the first silver button of my stolen gown. “I will wash you. I am your captive, after all.”
His dark eyes flared with heat as I began to undo the buttons, slow and deliberate. The silk parted, revealing the thin chemise beneath, the swell of my breasts, the curve of my waist. He exhaled sharply, his hands coming to rest on my hips, his thumbs tracing the edge of the fabric.
“Augusta,” he growled, low and approving.
I pushed the gown from my shoulders, letting it pool at my feet.
The chemise and the lightweight trousers followed, and then I stood before him in nothing but the cool air of the tent, my skin prickling with awareness.
His gaze traveled over me, lingering on my breasts, my hips, the dark curls between my thighs.