Chapter 6
Betrayals
Sahar led Lasair to the large, grassy paddock
where she discovered that Aleksandr had already let Zolotoy loose
to graze and laze the afternoon away. It was the day after the
second race, a day of rest for horses and riders alike, the day
after her talk with her mother and the sleepless night that had
followed.
The stallion pricked his ears forward at
sight of Lasair, and Aleksandr waved them in. Sahar untied the lead
rope from Lasair’s bridle and smiled as the mare kicked up her
heels and trotted over to Zolotoy. Sahar followed at a slower, more
deliberate pace, stopping altogether as she realized that Aleksandr
was bare-chested.
She swallowed hard, and resumed her pace, her
cheeks flaming.
“Good afternoon,” he said, grinning that
cursed cocksure grin of his.
She’d seen plenty of bare-chested men. She’d
grown up in a palace full of family and servants, and every summer
the city and the outlying fields were full of men working without
their tunics under the heat of the sun. But this was autumn and she
had never seen a man like Aleksandr before. His tawny chest seemed
twice as broad and his arms even more thickly corded without the
thin veneer of clothing. Then there were the ridges of muscle
spanning across his abdomen and narrowing down to his waist belt,
which held up a pair of leather riding breeches that hugged the
solid length of his thighs. But it was the patch of curly,
gold-brown hair in the middle of his chest she couldn’t stop
staring at.
She watched, mesmerized, as a slight breeze
ruffled the hairs, and his nipples, a darker shade of brown, grew
tight and taut.
Aleksandr chuckled and lightly scratched the
golden patch. “Grass does not grow so well on rock,” he said.
Sahar snapped her gaze up from his chest to
his laughing eyes, which she had the sudden urge to scratch, and
not lightly.
“Is there something in particular you came to
say to me?”
“No,” she answered, and then recanted. “Well,
yes.” How did he do that? How did he manage to read her so well?
Most people seemed to find her mysterious and incomprehensible. “I,
ah, I wanted to thank you for defending me against your
half-sister’s accusations last night, and for acknowledging me and
making a place for me in the line of riders the night of Autumn’s
Eve.”
He said nothing at first, and looked at her
with a quizzical half smile. “That was hard for you, wasn’t
it?”
“You have no idea.”
Aleksandr laughed, his laugh deep and rich.
“Is it thanking me that’s so hard,” he asked, “or is it thanking
anybody?”
She laughed a little despite herself. “Both,”
she admitted. “I don’t like asking for help, or so I have been
told.”
“Why is that?”
She tilted her head and met his earnest gaze.
No man, other than family, had ever asked her that before,
certainly none of the many who had professed their admiration and
proceeded to propose marriage. She considered giving him some
vague, commonly held belief about her as an answer, but he had
asked, and so she was going to tell him.
“Perhaps a lifetime of big, strong men
thinking me too frail to hold my head up with my girlish, princess
neck, rubs me the wrong way,” she said. “Or perhaps it is because I
detest those who think me too stupid to complete some inane task
without their manly knowledge and guidance.”
“I see,” Aleksandr said, and he looked
neither amused nor insulted.
“Why did you defend me against Anastasia last
night?”
“I hate her,” he said. “And I like you.” He
closed the short distance between them, his expression open and
warm. “I liked kissing you.” He reached out and cupped her face in
his big, warm hands. “I think you liked kissing me.”
“So, what if I did?”
“So, I’m going to kiss you again.”
“It won’t change anything,” she declared,
even as she grasped onto his arms to keep the earth from shifting
beneath her. “I still won’t marry you.”
“I know,” he said, his low, rough voice
turning her bones to liquid. “I’m not asking you to marry me, and I
won’t ask again.” He held his lips no more than a breath from hers.
“Next time it’ll be you asking me.” He brushed his lips over hers,
feather-light and teasing. “Better hurry though, before I find
another bride.”
She smiled against his lips. “Why would I
ever ask you?”
“Because,” he whispered as he nipped her
lower lip, “this. This heat between us.” He nibbled his way along
her jawline and suckled her earlobe. “Even you, my hard-headed,
hot-blooded tigress,” he whispered in her ear. “Even you can’t deny
this.”
She actually growled, low and guttural, and
Aleksandr wove his hand through her hair and pulled her head back,
exposing her throat, tasting the skin where her pulse pounded. His
lips seared a path up her neck, and she gasped as those lips found
hers. His mouth covered hers, devouring as she opened to his
probing tongue and tasted the salty heat of him. His hands roamed
down her back, one settling between her shoulders and the other
cupping her backside and pressing her body to his, branding her
everywhere they touched. She slid her hand between them and felt
his breath catch and his heart hammer beneath her palm. She grinned
into his kiss and nipped at his lower lip, her entire body
reverberating with his groan as she curled her fingers into the
light matting of hair on his chest.
Aleksandr deepened his kiss, holding her so
close that her hand was pinned between them. An ache began to grow
between her legs, as did something hard that was pressing against
her belly.
Her eyes flew open.
“See what you do to me,” Aleksandr chuckled
hoarsely as she pushed away.
She dipped her head to see the bulge in his
breeches, and she swiped at the burning heat sweeping across her
cheeks. She pulled her gaze from Aleksandr’s arousal to his
grinning face, and swung.
Aleksandr caught her hand mid-strike.
“Easy there, tigress,” he said, holding her
wrist in his vise-like grip. He shook his head and blew his breath
out in a strangled laugh. “Surely you cannot blame a man for
responding to you. For wanting you.”
She wrested her wrist from his loosened grip
with an unladylike huff. “I thought you wanted an easy-tempered
broodmare for a wife,” she said.
“So did I,” he responded with a shrug. “I’m
beginning to rethink my requirements. What about you?”
“Me?”
“Still think you have no need of a husband,
or a man?”
“Need?” She shook her head. “No.” But
wanting, she was beginning to learn, was something else
entirely.
“Beer or wine, my lord?”
Aleksi glanced up into the broad face of a
buxom blonde serving girl holding a tray with two pitchers on
it.
“I will have beer tonight,” he said, holding
his cup out as she sat the tray down. “Thank you...?”
“Ursula, my lord.”
“Thank you, Ursula,” he said as she poured
the beer into his cup. “But I am no lord. I am only Aleksandr.”
“I do not think you are only anything,
Aleksandr,” she said with a blush and a giggle.
“Why thank you again, Ursula,” Aleksi said,
glancing over at Sahar, who studiously ignored him. “There are
those who would disagree with you.”
“Oh, but certainly not Mistress Anya,
Aleksandr. She near dotes on you as much as she does her own
son.”
“Anya is happy to have someone from her
homeland to talk to.”
“I have worked under cook for five years now,
and I never heard her speak of anyone but her own or the king’s and
queen’s family with such praise.”
“That is kind of you,” he said, outwardly
passing off the servant’s words of Anya’s praise as
inconsequential, when in truth they filled a tiny corner of the
hole his own father’s abandonment had ruptured in his soul with a
healing warmth. He eyed the friendly Ursula until her cheeks were
as round and pink as grapefruits. “I detect a bit of my homeland in
your accent and fair looks as well,” he said. “Where are you
from?”
“From a village even farther north along the
Mother River than your city. My dedushka i babushka, my
grandparents, moved here with me after my parents were killed.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It was many years ago,” she said. “I was no
more than three or four years of age. This is the only home I
remember.”
“And your grandparents?”
“They are both gone now, but they passed
contented with our life here, and were pleased that I have such
good work here in the palace kitchens.”
“I am sure they were proud of you,” Aleksi
said.
She dipped a knee, and Aleksi watched the
sway of her wide hips as she moved on to another table. Strong of
body and easy tempered, she would make a man a fine wife and bear
him many sons. So why did he glance over at Sahar, who sat glaring
back at him, rather than go after Ursula and ask her to walk with
him when she was done with her work for the evening?
Supper over and his appetite sated, Aleksi
left the salon through the kitchens, where Anya gave him a small
sack of choice bits of meat and cheese for Kiska, and escaped out
the door with no more than a quick nod at Ursula, whose open
expression and flirty smile told him she would have packed up and
followed him back to their home country to tend his house and bear
his sons without complaint. All he had to do was ask. He told
himself he would keep her in mind, and that he need not be hasty.
There were more women in this city to choose from than those in the
palace. Besides, his one hasty proposal had gotten him nothing but
green eyes blazing fire and a blade in his groin.
Since, there were the constant arguments and
a few rare smiles, which had warmed Aleksi with the heat of the
sun. And those two kisses. Three, if he counted the quick kiss at
the river crossing, which he did.
Aleksi rubbed his chest where Sahar’s fingers
had played, her touch shooting a bolt of desire directly to his
cock. She had been soft and passionate in his arms, until his
body’s response had scared her, and then his words had angered her,
something Aleksi seemed unusually adept at when it came to her.
She had practically run away from him, and
she had stayed away the past four days, barely acknowledging him as
they passed in the stables or out in the training kraal. He felt