You Belong to Me (Cardinia’s Royal Family #2)

Ukraine Province, Russia, 1836

Constantin Rubliov stood at the window in his drawing room, his hands clasped behind his back, watching the dust cloud in the distance slowly approaching.

The window, located at the front of his house, looked out on the road that wound past his country estate and led to the Dnieper River in the east. From the second floor of the house, you could just make out the river on a clear day.

From his vantage point in the drawing room, the road to the west was visible as far as the eye could see, and that was where the dust cloud was approaching from.

If he hadn’t known that there was going to be a horse race today, the sight of all the people crowding both sides of the road just beyond his house would have told him.

His Cossacks loved a good race as much as they loved a good fight.

They were a tough, volatile, high-spirited people, always laughing, singing, or fighting—and fiercely loyal.

But they weren’t exactly his, although he had always thought of them that way because they had been so long associated with his family.

And they, too, thought of him and his as theirs.

But Cossack meant “free warrior,” and these Cossacks were certainly that.

Since his great-great-grandfather had given them permission to settle on his land and raise their families in peace, they had worked for the Rubliovs in whatever capacity was required.

They staffed Constantin’s house, they bred his horses, they guarded him and his family in their travels.

The settlement they had started all those years ago was now a thriving town less than a quarter mile to the west of his estate.

The Razins, who had supplied the town with its leaders for all these years as well as populated three-fourths of the town with the many branches of their family, had grown as prosperous as the Rubliovs.

With their help, Constantin now supplied horses to the Czar’s army, and thoroughbreds to aristocrats who could afford them.

His sugar beet crops filled the markets of Kiev and the settlements along the Dnieper, and his wheat brought fine prices along the Black Sea coast. He was growing richer by the year since he had taken an active interest in his horses and fields.

Ever since his wife had died ten years ago, he had stopped being an absentee landlord, as most of the Russian nobles were.

Only his sister still made use of their town house in Moscow and the Rubliov palace in St. Petersburg.

“You aren’t going to like this, darling.”

Constantin didn’t glance at the woman who had spoken.

Anna Veriovka stood only several feet away at the next window, watching the same scene in front of the house.

Anna was one of those rare women who never seemed to age.

To look at her with her dark brown hair always perfectly coiffed and her even darker brown eyes, the fine bone structure that was going to make her an eternal beauty, no one could guess she had seen thirty-five years.

Right now it was her tone, rather than her words, that made Constantin brace his hands on the window ledge and stare more intently at the oncoming horses.

Deep in his gut, he knew what he would see.

It wouldn’t be the first time, or, he feared, the last. But for a moment all he could see was that dust cloud, nearly reaching the house now, and in its midst the vague shape of six thoroughbreds crowding one another on the narrow road.

Fur hats, long coats flapping, sleek legs stretching for the finish line at the nearby village, and the large white wolfhound racing along beside the road, barking, urging the animals to a little more speed. And wherever that dog was…

“Alex will win,” Anna said in a smug voice.

“Of course Alex will win,” Constantin grumbled, watching the lead rider crawl up on the saddle, squat there, slowly rise to standing, then toss off a fur cap, laughing, with the other riders following suit.

His eyes were squeezed shut as he added, “She always wins—and I wish you wouldn’t call her that. It only encourages her to act the hoyden.”

His longtime mistress merely clucked her tongue, but after a few more moments he felt her breasts press against his back and her arms circle his waist. “You can look now, darling. She didn’t break her neck.”

“Thank God,” he whispered, and then the anger came, for the scare he’d just had was no less severe than it always was. “I’m going to beat her this time, I swear I am.”

Anna chuckled. “So you always say, but you never do. Besides, the Razin boys wouldn’t let you.”

“Then I’ll get their father to do it. Ermak will do anything I ask of him.”

“Except hurt a hair on that sweet child’s head. He adores Alex as much as you do.”

Constantin sighed as he turned around to do some hugging of his own.

“Anna, my love, that ‘sweet child’ is twenty-five years old, too old for the foolishness we just witnessed. You know it as well as I do. She should be married and nursing babies. Her two sisters had no difficulty in that respect. Lydia has given me five granddaughters. Elizaveta had three before she was widowed. Why has it been so impossible to get my youngest daughter married?”

Anna thought it prudent not to mention Alexandra’s outrageous frankness that had caused such a stir and had made Czar Nicholas unofficially ban her from St. Petersburg.

If Anna reminded Constantin of that, she was afraid she would laugh, which she did every time she recalled that scene at the Romanovsky dinner, when Princess Olga had lamented to the twenty or so guests sitting near her that, however much she tried, she couldn’t keep from gaining weight that season.

Alexandra, hearing her, had suggested quite helpfully and with complete sincerity, “Why, ma’am, if you would just stop stuffing your mouth with blinis and sour cream, you might lose a pound or two.”

Since the princess had been stuffing her mouth with those very things at that very moment, it wasn’t surprising that a good many of the guests had suddenly begun coughing into their napkins or looking beneath the table for something they had supposedly dropped, just to hide their snickers.

Anna, who had been there as Alexandra’s chaperone, had thought it hilarious herself, but Olga Romanovsky hadn’t; she’d gone straight to the royal ear the next day with her complaint, likely asking for outright execution.

Anna thought it fortunate for Alexandra that the Czar had merely politely suggested that Constantin take his daughter back to the country, where her wayward tongue would do no more than offend the peasants.

Unfortunately, Alexandra hadn’t learned from her mistake.

Her outspokenness had not been curbed the next season in Moscow, or later in Kharkov, and certainly not closer to home, in Kiev.

She had managed, single-handedly, to make herself a social pariah.

And Anna suspected, more than once, that she had not done it all in ignorance or by accident.

After all, Alexandra was a fairly intelligent girl, and she had confessed after that first disastrous season in St. Petersburg that she was in love with the Honorable Christopher Leighton, whom she had met there, and she meant to marry him and no one else.

How better to wait for the lagging Englishman than to ensure that no other young man would be asking for her hand in the meantime.

Which was what had happened, regardless of whether Alexandra had intended it.

As for Constantin’s question, Anna decided to remind him about the man who had stolen his daughter’s heart all those years ago. “You don’t think she could still be waiting for that English diplomat, do you?”

Constantin snorted. “After seven long years? Don’t be absurd.”

“But he left the country only three years ago,” she pointed out.

“And Alexandra hasn’t mentioned his name again, since I refused to let her follow him to England at the time,” he replied.

“Isn’t that when she told you she wasn’t going to marry anyone, ever?”

Constantin flushed, recalling the argument he’d had with his lovely daughter, which had been one of their worst. “She didn’t mean it. She was just angry.”

Anna lifted a brow. “Are you trying to convince me of that, or yourself? Or maybe it’s slipped your notice that Alex ignores every young man you bring home for her to meet, and she hasn’t traveled any farther than Kiev in the past three years, and she made that trip only to shop.

Even then, she managed to come up with one excuse after another to remain cooped up in your hotel suite. ”

It was actually a relief to Constantin to hear Anna voice his own suspicions, a relief and an easing of the guilt he’d been living with this past week.

True, Alexandra’s excuses were always logical and sounded sincere, but they were still excuses.

And when she had come up with one of them last week in order to refuse to travel with him to Vasilkov to visit her sister and nieces, he had come to the same conclusions Anna had just drawn, and got morose, thinking about his youngest daughter wasting her life pining for that damned foreigner.

Unfortunately, he had also got quite drunk and done something he never would have if he had been sober.