Compromised By The Prince’s Touch

‘I keep three, actually.’ He smiled at the mention of his horses and the result changed his face entirely, translating the strong, stoic planes of his warrior’s face into breath-taking handsomeness. Zvezda was cool and they led her out into the aisle towards a stall. ‘We’re passing them now.’ He nodded to the left, a hand going to the pocket of his coat to retrieve a treat as they came up on the first stall. ‘This is Cossack. He’s a Russian Don by breed.’

‘He must be your cavalry horse.’ Klara ran her eyes over the muscled chestnut, taking in the horse’s shiny coat. ‘He’s magnificent,’ she complimented, but she could tell her comment, her knowledge, had surprised him.

‘Yes. I brought him with me when I left Kuban.’ She heard the wistfulness as his voice caressed the words. Perhaps he would rather not have left? The Prince moved on to the stall beside it. ‘This is Balkan, my stallion.’ He ran a hand affectionately down the long neck of a horse so dark, he was nearly black.

‘Let me guess.’ Klara took in the short back, the height of the withers. ‘He’s Kabardin, perhaps Karachay.’

‘Very good!’ He flashed her another handsome smile. ‘You do know something of the Motherland then.’

It was her turn to be uncomfortable with his display of insight. ‘I know something of horses and their breeds,’ Klara replied, leading Zvezda to her stall. She grabbed the blanket hanging beside the stall and stepped inside. ‘How did you know?’

The Prince lounged outside the stall door, arms crossed, eyes studying her as she tossed the blanket over Zvezda’s back. ‘You didn’t know what Zvezda meant when I told you. You don’t speak Russian and I would guess that your mother is English.’ He pushed off the wall and stepped inside to work the chest fastenings of the blanket. ‘I would go so far as to say you’ve never lived in Russia.’

‘You’re almost right.’ Her hands stilled on the blanket straps. What would this prince think of such a woman who had no knowledge of her heritage? ‘I haven’t lived there since I was a little girl. It’s true, I don’t remember much of it. We lived in St Petersburg for three years when I was four. We spent the summers in the countryside at an estate near Peterhof. That’s what I am told. What I remember are the grasses around the estate, how they were as tall as I was and I could hear the wind pass through them.’ She loved those memories. She’d lain for hours in those grasses looking up at the sky, happy and unaware how sadly the sojourn in St Petersburg would end.

No one paid much attention to her in those days—she would only understand why much later. In the moment, she’d been pleased. She could go where she willed, do what she wanted. She’d had grand adventures. Returning to England had been the end of those adventures, except for her horses. She might have gone crazy if it hadn’t been for them. England had been the start of special tutors, then special schools, the very best for a girl who was expected to grow up to marry a duke, to become a complete Englishwoman, her Russian heritage nothing more than a novel characteristic to be put on display the way one displays a parlour trick. Something interesting and entertaining, but not to be taken seriously, not even by her, although this was ground on which she and her father disagreed. She wanted to know about her Russian heritage, hungered for it, even against her father’s promises to her dying mother to raise an English rose.

‘St Petersburg is a long way from the Kuban Steppes,’ the Prince said neutrally and she had the sense that she was the one being vetted, quite the reverse of her intentions for this meeting. It made her nervous. What had she given away? What secrets had she inadvertently revealed?

She tried for a smile and a bit of humour. ‘We can’t all be patriotic cavalry officers.’

The effort failed. Her remark had been meant as a compliment, but it evoked something darker. The openness of his expression shuttered. ‘Who said anything about being patriotic? Come, you haven’t seen my other horse, she’s a Cleveland Bay. I acquired her when I arrived. I have hopes of breeding her with my Kabardin stallion.’ Any chance to follow up on his comment was lost in his rambling talk of a breeding opportunity. Klara was certain it was quite purposely done. The comment about patriotism had made him edgy. She had skated close to something with that remark.

They petted the Cleveland Bay and made conversation about mares and horses in general—safe ground for them both. But she was aware the atmosphere around them remained charged with wariness. They were both on their guard now, protecting themselves, cautious of revealing too much by accident to a stranger. She didn’t want him to see any more of her and her lack of ‘Russianness’. It was embarrassing to her that he should see it so clearly and on such short acquaintance. Would he be as disgusted by it as she if he knew the reason—that she’d been groomed to be an expensive pawn in a dangerous game she couldn’t escape? Would he even care? Disgust implied the pre-existence of caring. He was her riding instructor, nothing more. And as for the Prince—what was it he didn’t want her to see? What was he protecting? Why? More importantly, why did he think a diplomat’s daughter would care about his secrets? In his case, caring assumed his secrets contained something of value he was not willing to share with another. Which was precisely what her father suspected.

A stable hand came to announce the arrival of her father’s carriage and Nikolay gave her a formal incline of his head. ‘It is time to say do svidaniya, Miss Grigorieva.’ He leaned close and she smelled the scents of man and beast on him, not an unpleasing fragrance to a woman who preferred horses over the dandified fops of the ton. ‘That means “until we meet again”.’

‘What makes you sure I’ll come back?’ She let her eyes linger on his face, her voice low. She was flirting with him as he’d flirted with her, with private words and lingering glances.

‘You didn’t quite get what you came for, Miss Grigorieva. You’ll be back. Did you want to wait until next Thursday or perhaps you’d like to try again sooner? I have an opening on Monday.’

‘Monday? That’s three days away,’ she answered the challenge with a bold confidence she didn’t feel. This man had a way of pushing her off balance at the most unlooked for moments. What did he think she was hunting? She hardly knew herself. ‘How about Saturday in the park?’ she countered. ‘We will ride. You can bring Balkan. Call for me at two.’ She paused. ‘Unless you’re worried I might get the rest of what I came for.’

He grinned, a wicked warrior’s smile that sent a most unladylike tremor all the way to her toes, despite her usual dislike of arrogant men. He seemed to be an exception. ‘I’m not the one who should be worried, Miss Grigorieva. Two o’clock Saturday it is.’

* * *

‘You should be worried, Nik. I don’t like the sounds of this at all,’ Stepan counselled at dinner that night. The four of them—Illarion and Ruslan, Stepan and himself, all royal expatriates of Kuban—were pushed back from the table, enjoying vodka and sampling some of Stepan’s latest samogon—the Russian version of an Englishman’s John Barleycorn. Drinking together was their nightly ritual, an attempt to recreate something from their old life in Kuban, to create something of their own, something comfortable in this new world they were learning to navigate.

Nikolay shoved his glass forward for more. Klara Grigorieva had disturbed him on more than a political level. She disturbed him on a sensual level, too, something, he might add, which had not happened in the time since they’d left Kuban. He thought his last, nearly fatal run-in with a woman had resolved his susceptibilities to feminine charm. Apparently not. The man in him wanted to pursue her, but the warrior in him counselled caution, as Stepan did. For now, he was happy to let his friends debate the issue for him.

To his right, Illarion, always the romantic, argued leniency. ‘We might just be paranoid. The girl’s not Russian, for one, not really. She was raised here. Nik says she doesn’t even speak the language. It’s hard to believe she’s invited into her father’s counsels or that she has any interest, like most of these English girls.’

‘Unlike most English girls—’ Stepan tendered his rebuttal ‘—her father is indisputably Russian. He’s an ambassador. It is his job to represent Russian interests in England.’ Stepan had become their unofficial adahop during the months they’d been in London, the one they all turned to for advice. ‘If anyone is supposed to be loyal to one’s country, it’s the ambassador.’

Therein lay the true concern. Perhaps the ambassador would be loyal enough to see a renegade prince, wanted for royal murder, returned home.

This had always been the risk; that Kuban would want him back and that the Kubanian Tsar would not be willing to settle for having his number-one troublemaker out of the country. Nikolay was starting to regret the group’s decision to not learn more about the Russian situation in London. The four of them had decided it would be better to simply go about their lives and let the ambassador come to them if he was interested in London’s four newest Russian citizens. It had been an easy choice. There had been much to do in resettling.

The strategy had worked. To date, the ambassador had been uninterested. Today, that had potentially changed. Unless Klara was only what she seemed: a riding pupil, another English girl looking for ways to fill her long, empty days until she married. But the scenario didn’t suit the woman he’d seen in the riding house. In his gut Nikolay knew that wasn’t a legitimate assumption. She had not ‘seemed’ only a riding pupil today. Whatever she’d wanted from him, she’d wanted it badly enough to swallow her pride. He’d not missed how much it galled her when he’d shouted to keep her heels down, or to check her pacing. She might be there to ride, but she was there for something else as well.

Across the table, Ruslan, always the diplomat, seconded Stepan’s advice. ‘You have to admit it looks strange; the Russian ambassador’s daughter, who is already an exceptional rider, shows up asking for lessons? Why? Especially given your circumstances.’ Ruslan looked around the table at each of them. ‘We are all awkward expatriates.’

They were indeed, especially if a condition of expatriation was ‘voluntary’ relocation. Nikolay wasn’t convinced even a loose definition of voluntary applied to him. His choice to leave hadn’t been much of a choice at all when his other option was facing imprisonment and trial for a murder that could be couched as treason, a trial he might not win. He’d argued against the traditions of the kingdom once too often. Whether the charges against him held was not the issue. The Tsar had reason to make sure that they did. There’d been plenty of occasions when he’d clashed with the traditional-minded Tsar, but this last time, blood had been spilt. When his friend, Prince Dimitri Petrovich, a man who had abdicated his title in Kuban in order to claim a bride forbidden to him under Kubanian law, had written asking him to see to his sister’s safe passage to England, Nikolay had jumped at the chance as much out of the deep bonds of friendship as for his own personal benefit.

Dimitri’s request had come at a time when Kuban was no longer safe for him, as it was no longer safe, in varying degrees, for the other three men who sat at the table with him. Stepan Shevchenko; who had helped him escape the Tsar’s dungeons in a very literal and perhaps unforgivable sense; Illarion Kutejnikov, whose only claim to fame before he’d used his poetry to protest Kubanian marriage practices was that a cousin had been a general during the recent wars; and Ruslan Pisarev, who might or might not have been involved in a questionable underground operation to help people leave the country. Ruslan’s knowledge in escaping Kuban without detection certainly indicated he might be guilty as charged. They could make no claim to Kuban now, except for perhaps Ruslan, who might be the one who found a way to return some day.

For now, all four of them were homeless princes abroad in a strange land, living off Dimitri’s good graces. The first months they’d arrived in England, they’d stayed in the country with Dimitri and his English wife, Evie. But they did not want to overstay their welcome, not with Evie expecting a baby. Their friend had a family of his own. They needed to strike out for themselves. But even that bit of independence was a misnomer. The four of them had come to London, thanks to the generous loan of Dimitri’s London residence, Kuban House, a loan they were all keenly aware couldn’t last no matter how much Dimitri insisted it could. Eventually, they would have to find homes of their own. But for now, it was all they had, a very new concept to Princes who had once owned palaces and summer homes that far exceeded their need.

Former Princes, Nikolay supposed. He had to get used to thinking of himself that way. Or perhaps not? Could one ever be a ‘former’ prince? The term ‘Prince’ was nothing more than an honorific now. They had no palaces, no land, none of the trappings that made them princes. They’d left it all behind in the hopes Kuban would make no claim on them.

The question was whether or not Kuban had let them go. Would Kuban come after them, or was London far enough to outrun the arm of Mother Russia? That was the question he saw mirrored in the eyes of his friends as he looked around the table. Was the lovely, sharp-witted Klara Grigorieva the advance scout for a larger scheme to drag the Princes home? If so, was that net truly after all of them, or just after him? He was the only one with official charges against him. Until he knew for sure, how he chose to handle Miss Grigorieva could affect them all. For the sake of his friends, he needed to know what he was up against.

Nikolay swallowed the samogon and pushed back from the table. ‘I’ll ride with her on Saturday. If she’s truly setting a trap, then cancelling the appointment will alert her to our suspicions. I can’t learn about her intentions if I don’t spend time with her.’ That would not be a hardship. Klara Grigorieva was intriguing in her own right. He’d want to spend time with her without the need to unravel the mysteries she presented, a foreign ambassador’s daughter raised to be English. He had responded to her mentally, physically, from the moment she’d taken off her helmet, shaken down all that glorious hair and chastised him for being late, to the moment she’d invited him for a Saturday ride. Call for me at two. There’d been no doubt in her mind that he would accept. A woman like that would keep a man on his feet. Klara Grigorieva wasn’t for the fainthearted, but no one had ever called him a coward.

Chapter Three

Klara’s finger moved south down the page of the atlas from St Petersburg, past Moscow and Kiev, to a spot between the Black Sea and the Don Steppe. Kuban. The home of Nikolay Baklanov; a land of mountains, steppes, grasslands and rivers.

She ran her finger over the ridges depicting the Caucasus range and along the curve of the river. A land of mild climates and severe mountains if the map was to be believed. A land of contrasts, just like the man himself. One could know much about a man if one knew where he was from. Men were products of their places. Women were, too, for that matter. She did not exclude herself from that generalisation.

The image of Nikolay’s smile was imprinted in her mind. It had transformed his face completely, the smile made him approachable, made it seem possible that a woman had a chance to solve the mysteries behind those dark eyes. What might those mysteries be? What caused a man to leave his country? Not just any man, but a warrior, a man trained to fight for that country, to defend it. What caused a prince to teach riding lessons to spoiled girls?

The answers to those mysteries surely lay behind the granite-dark eyes. There were other mysteries, too, more sensual mysteries that lay behind those eyes, those lips. This was a man of deep passions. She had not been oblivious to the considerations of his gaze yesterday which had not been limited to an assessment of her riding. He had found her interesting in the way a man finds an attractive woman ‘interesting’.

That made him dangerous. She drummed her fingers on the atlas page. A dispossessed Russian prince was hardly the type of man her father was saving her for, had raised her for. But obedience was not enough to stop a trill of excitement from running through her at the thought of their Saturday meeting—a chance to be with him again, a chance to trade wits, to probe beneath surfaces. Would he flirt with her? Would he look at her with those hot, dark eyes? Would he be ready with his wicked innuendos? Would he smile? Would he pursue his ‘interest’? Would she let him even knowing she had to ensure the pursuit was ultimately futile? She was meant for an English peer, and soon. But knowing that couldn’t stop the wondering. What would it be like to be the object of such a man’s attentions? Affections?

Klara sighed, wishing she could see beyond the map. What kind of country produced such a man? Such passions? Such intensity? What did Nikolay’s Kuban look like? Perhaps it was the idea of Kuban that drew her to him more than anything else. That was easier to explain than pure physical attraction. Russia was forbidden fruit. She was to be English in all ways, English like the mother who had died in St Petersburg at the end of that final summer, but that didn’t stop the craving, only made it understandable.

The door to the library opened, admitting her father, and she deftly slid another book on top of the atlas. To give in to the craving would hurt him. Russia had taken his wife; he would not tolerate it taking his daughter. Her father strode towards the table, all smiles. ‘At last, we have time to talk, Klara.’ He was a handsome man, a tall man, in his fifties but still possessed of youthful vigour. Only the streaks of grey in his hair hinted he might not be as young as he appeared. He pulled out a chair beside her and sat. ‘Tell me everything, how was your lesson with Baklanov?’

Her father was a good man, Klara reminded herself. He did care about the lesson. He’d always encouraged her riding and he was proud of her, she knew that unequivocally. But he wasn’t strictly interested in only the lesson today. He wanted her assessment of the Prince. She should feel proud he trusted her input, that he allowed her to help with his work, yet she felt some guilt, as if telling her father made her a spy, a betrayer of trust. No, that was too dramatic. She was making too much out of recounting first impressions. How could she betray a man she’d met only once and knew nothing about?

Perhaps that was where she was wrong. Even after one meeting, she did know him. She knew the caress of his wicked gaze as he flirted with her. She knew the compassion he held for his horses, had seen it in the gentle stroke of his hand on their long noses, heard it in the words of his stories. Now, she was being asked to turn those experiences over to her father. Perhaps that was the real issue. She wanted to treasure the encounter, to have it just to herself instead of giving it over to ‘the game’. She had so little in her life that didn’t belong to her father’s game. The game had become the basis of their relationship as she grew up. Her father was waiting, patient and calm, across the table from her. Certain she’d give up whatever she’d learned for the greater good. His good.

‘The Prince is very talented. We worked on pacing. Even at my level, he found ways to help me improve.’

Her father listened politely before saying, ‘What of the man himself? What is his character?’

‘He is intense. Committed.’ She recalled hearing him shout at the unfortunate Miss Calhoun while she’d waited outside. The Prince gave his best to whatever he did and he expected the best from those around him.

‘Those are useful attributes,’ her father mused. That was how he assessed people and characteristics. There were only two categories as far as he was concerned: usable and unusable. Perhaps she should be grateful she fell into the former classification. Yet there were days when she wondered what her life could have been like if she’d been unusable to him and left to have a life outside the game, like she had before a summer fever and a deathbed promise had committed her to other people’s dreams.

For a moment, she thought her brief insight would be enough, but he wanted more. ‘Do you suppose he feels that intensity, that commitment still for his country, or is he ready to attach those feelings to a new loyalty? A man does not leave his country without provocation.’

‘I couldn’t say on such short acquaintance.’ It was only a partial lie. She thought of the wistfulness she’d heard at the edges of his words as he’d talked of his horses. He hadn’t talked of ‘bringing them’, but of ‘not leaving them’. Such a word choice implied he did at least ‘look back’ occasionally, that he still thought of Kuban as home. That nostalgia might create a loyal bond difficult to break.

‘Perhaps you need a longer acquaintance, then.’ Her father smiled. ‘We could use an intense man of commitment.’ We. A shiver ran down her spine at the mention of that evocative pronoun. We meant the Union of Salvation, the covert group of officers and palace politicos like her father who plotted against Tsar Alexander back in St Petersburg. The Union had already been defeated once before, three years ago. Therein lay the danger. They were forced now to plot abroad or ‘underground’ in order to continue the game. That game of intrigue had become his life and she wanted to be part of his life, wanted to have his love and attention. She wanted to prove herself to him.

That was what dutiful pawns and daughters did, they obeyed and protected those they loved. She never would have played the game if her mother had lived and neither would have he. There would have been no need for it. She studied her father. Up close, one could see the first signs of ageing faint on his face, the lines about his mouth, the tiredness around his eyes; the first tolls taken in a life lived between countries. He blamed Russia’s backwardness for her mother’s death; a summer fever even though they summered in countryside, far from the sewage-laden Neva River of the city. Distance had not been enough and neither had the country doctor’s competence. That had been in 1810. By 1817, flush from victory over Napoleon and a tour of duty beyond Russian borders, others felt as her father did: that Russia was behind the rest of Europe in all ways. Modernising Russia was her father’s passion now, a way to avenge his wife’s death and a way to serve his country.

‘When will you see the Prince again?’ her father asked, his mind already hard at work behind his intelligent eyes. Every day was a chess game and she played because she loved him.

‘We are riding together on Saturday. Perhaps I can learn more.’ She said nothing of the shadow that crossed Nikolay’s face at her reference to patriotism. Her father would find that reference as encouraging as the nostalgia had been discouraging.

‘Excellent. Ask him to stay for our dinner with the Duke of Amesbury. Prince Baklanov would be a perfect addition. General Vasilev and the others will attend. We can all take his measure then.’

She nodded, not allowing her dislike for the guest list to show. Amesbury would be there. She’d rather have the Prince to dinner without the Duke. Amesbury was a formidable man with intimidating opinions. It was no secret in their circles that the Duke was a powerful politico interested in British–Russian relations. Her father had seen to it that the settlement of boundaries in the American north-west stood to benefit the Duke’s fur trade investments. She did not know what the Duke had given him in return. Something, to be sure, her father always got paid for his efforts in favours or connections. The Duke also had some very strong opinions about the backwardness of Russia. Letting the Duke expose those opinions would be the perfect test for Prince Baklanov’s loyalty. Would the Prince be a traditionalist or a modernist? A twinge of guilt pricked at her. It hardly seemed fair to invite the Prince to dinner simply to ambush him. She should warn him, but it would hardly serve her father’s purposes to have the Prince hide his true thoughts. Saturday would be...interesting.