CHAPTER SIXTEEN
AT TEN-THIRTY that night the front doorbell rang. Laddy, stretched out in the sitting room with a book, stiffened and sat up, her heart beginning to pound. It couldn't be! He couldn't have meant it!
She moved into the hall and quietly opened the door that led from her apartment into the communal front hall. Then she stood a moment without breathing while the doorbell pealed again.
"Who is it?" she called.
"It's Margaret, dear. I've forgotten my keys," she heard, and exhaling with sudden relief, Laddy pulled open the heavy front door. Margaret smiled apologetically. "I'm sorry, Laddy, I took the wrong set of keys. I've been standing here for ten minutes ringing our bell, but you know what Ben's like - he must be sound asleep. Brr! I'm nearly frozen. Did I wake you?"
"Oh, no," Laddy smiled. "I was just reading."
They chatted in the hall for a moment and then Margaret said good-night and opened the door that led upstairs into the Smileys' flat. Moving back into the sitting room lighted by a soft lamp and fire glow, Laddy flung herself onto the sofa and picked up To Make Kafka Live again. Her heart was still beating with the fright she had had-----She must be a bundle of nerves, she thought.
The book was absorbing, whatever she thought of the man. Laddy had no idea how long she had been reading when she heard Margaret's footsteps coming down the stairs again. She glanced up and realized that the friendly fire she had built had nearly died.
There was no immediate tap on the door, and Laddy read another half page, gently torn between looking forward to a late-night cocoa and chat with Margaret and wishing to be left alone to read this remarkable treatise on totalitarian methods.
"Come on in!" she called when the knock sounded, and let the open book drop to rest on her stomach.
"Can't sleep?",she called as her hall door opened and shut. "I hope you're looking for cocoa and a nice long chat."
In the moment when she became aware of the extraordinary fact that she could hear footsteps going back up the stairs, a deep masculine voice said, "I am sorry to disappoint you, but it is not cocoa or a chat that I want." And in the shadowy doorway beyond the end of the sofa she saw the dark figure of Mischa Busnetsky.
Laddy jackknifed to a sitting position and onto her feet in one panic-stricken movement. She stood facing him with her back to the fire, her eyes wide, her breath rasping in her throat.
"What are you doing here?" she demanded.
"But you know this already. You invited me to come," Mischa answered, and in the shadows his mouth was unsmiling and his eyes never left her face.
"What?" she screeched. "Of course I didn't!"
"I had a printed invitation," he said silkily. "It was printed on the front page of the paper this afternoon."
"Did you seriously expect me to take any notice of your threats this morning?" she demanded contemptuously. "Did you think that a word from you would throw over the freedom of the press?"
He looked at her through eyes that were heavy lidded with anger. "This has nothing to do with the freedom of the press," he said in a dangerous tone. "This is between you and me."
The note in his voice sent a whisper of fear up her spine. "It is, like hell!" she shouted. "Get out of my house!"
There was a moment of tense silence between them, and suddenly, with a thrill of fear, she became aware of his size, and his power seemed to flow out and touch her. With an abrupt wild motion Laddy threw the book she was holding at his head.
Mischa caught it with one hand and, glancing at the title, laughed shortly.
"Were you waiting for me?" he asked, dropping the book nonchalantly onto the low sideboard inside the doorway as he moved into the room toward her.
Laddy could not stop herself from backing up a step, the fine silk of her long burgundy caftan brushing her legs and the carpet with a quiet whisper.
"Keep away from me!" she shouted, but somehow her voice, too, was a whisper.
"There is a way to keep me away from you," Mischa said roughly, advancing on her slowly, step by threatening step. "Tomorrow you will wish that you had followed it."
She stepped to one side of the fireplace and turned to run, intending to go around the sofa to the door, but she was brought up short by a pull on the hem of her robe. It was caught on one of the rough logs stacked by the fireplace.
The beautiful fabric snagged and came away as she jerked it, but it was too late: he had understood her intent and was now so close in the soft circle of lampglow that he could stop her escape with one slow hand.
"No," she begged him, her eyes wide with trepidation, her voice catching hoarsely in her throat.
Mischa smiled sensuously, unkindly. "How can it be 'no,' " he asked lazily, "when you are wearing the robe of the sacrificial virgin?"
She swallowed, and involuntarily her eyes followed his hands as he pulled open his coat. His trench coat was lined with a luxurious black fur, and he wore it over a black turtleneck sweater and casual but well-fitting black corduroy trousers. His eyes not leaving her, he shrugged out of the coat and threw it negligently onto the thick pile of cushions on the floor behind her. It landed on a large high cushion and splayed out over half the pile with a silken rustling that revealed the sensuous black fur of the lining.
It made the cushions suddenly seem like some barbaric warlord's bed, and Laddy found herself staring over her shoulder at the shiny silken blackness, her lips parted on a gasp of surprise.
"It is even more beautiful to the touch," Mischa suggested softly. "Like your hair."
She felt his hand on the ribbon that tied her long hair back on her neck, and she jerked her head around to evade it. But he simply tightened his grasp and brought his other hand up so that his arms encircled her head, and slowly he pulled the ribbon from her hair.
She was shaking like a leaf, hating him, hating the burning, erotic touch of his hands upon her as he brushed her-hair's black cloudiness around her shoulders.
Laddy dropped her eyes shut and gritted her teeth. "Take your hands off me!" she said violently, then opened her eyes to blaze at him. "I hate you. The touch of your hand on me makes me sick!"
He smiled a cold smile, showing his teeth. "You hate me," he agreed lazily, "but before this hour is out you will ask for more than the touch of my hand on you."
"No!" she cried as panic filled her, twisting to get away from him. But she was backed up now with her feet and ankles against the pile of cushions, and losing her balance, she fell sideways onto them.
For a brief moment she felt the silken black fur against her cheek and under her outflung palm, before a strong dark hand gripped her wrist and pulled her onto her back - and in that instant the broad heavy body of Mischa Busnetsky flung itself against hers and pressed her into the cushions. Without warning his mouth clamped passionately down on her own, forcing her head back and her lips apart in a deep, thrusting kiss that scorched through her. And suddenly, terrifyingly, a flickering flame caught in her blood and threatened to lick through all her veins.
"No," she whimpered, when his mouth released her. "Oh, please, no!"
He sought out the sensitive spots that six months ago he had discovered and taught her, and she closed her eyes and desperately clenched her hands against the response her body made to the heat of his mouth against her ears, her neck, her throat and the soft hollows of her shoulders.
"Oh, how I hate you!" she ground out, after his touch had made her gasp aloud. "Let me go!"
His hand slid through the low neckline of her robe and found her breast so suddenly that she gave a hoarse cry of need, and Mischa laughed deep in his throat.
"No," he whispered, his mouth tantalizing against her ear. "You do not hate me, my Lady - not my mouth, or my hands or my body. Someone else you hate, but don't think of that now. Think only of this - " he ran his hand along the length of her shuddering body " - and this - " he tilted her head back over his arm and kissed the hollow of her throat " - and this - " His lips began to taste hers slowly, deliberately, his tongue flicking between her parted lips with tormenting lightness till she was nearly mad for the violence of his mouth on hers.
She was breathing through her mouth in little half moans of despair and desire. Then, involuntarily the cry was on her lips, and not until she heard it did she realize what he had achieved, "Yes," she begged huskily. And suddenly, realizing, she cried in horror, "No! Oh, God!" But she had remembered herself too late. In the moment when she had made that first begging cry, Mischa's rough-clad body had come down on top of her again, his legs between her own, his hands firm around her wrists.
She was tormentingly conscious of the black fur against her hands and her wrists, of the pillows giving under her back, of his thighs warm against hers - and of how deeply he was aware of her.
"No?" he asked huskily, meaningfully. "Still no?" His legs and hips slid down against her until his mouth was against her breast, caressing the swelling tip through the wine-dark silk that both covered and revealed her passionate response to him.
With agonizing slowness his hand encircled her other breast, and his mouth found that one, too, with its heat and caress.
He touched the silk impatiently and leaned over her on one elbow. "Take this off," he commanded with a deep growl. "I want to touch you."
"No," she said, her jaw clenching against the knowledge that she wanted his mouth on her bare skin as much as he did.
"Take it off or I will tear it off," Mischa said without raising his voice, and the threat was -all the more real for the quiet certainty with which he made it.
"It is the last gift my father ever brought me," she said coldly. "You took him from me, why not my memories, too? Go ahead and tear."
He breathed deeply, then gathered her up against his chest with one strong arm, her body frail against his, and his other hand, with gentle impatience, slid the dark silk up between them till her breasts were bared to him.
With rough possessiveness he ran his hand from her knee over the curve of thigh, hip and waist, till it closed firmly on her breast, and he bent with open mouth to kiss the firm roundness.
She wanted him. God forgive her, in every nerve and cell, in every pore of her skin, she wanted him. She wanted to feel his skin against hers, she wanted his body to find hers as it had done long ago.
She gritted her teeth, willing him to admit a need as great as her own, but he only watched her in {he' shadowy light with half-lidded eyes and flickered a smile each time her breath caught in her throat.
She grasped at a tiny corner of reason through the swirling sea that she drowned in and understood dimly what torment would be hers if she gave in to the icy passion that burned in him.
She understood it, and still she wanted him. She could not have moved a muscle to fight off the searching fire of his mouth, the hot caress of his rough, passionate hands, the disturbing pressure of his hard body. She could not push him away when every second was increasing her wild need of him. She must make him push her away instead - before the cry in her throat told him the truth.
"Pavel Snegov," Laddy whispered gropingly, hardly knowing what she said. "I...."
Mischa's mouth was between her breasts, and she whimpered and her hand pressed against his thick dark hair as though to hold him there forever.
"Yes?" Mischa breathed, and then he stiffened as though the name had suddenly reached him, and with the tearing pain of desolate need she knew she had won. "Pavel Snegov will want to know what valuable information you gave me tonight," she said, amazed that the noises her lips were making could produce any kind of sense. "You must tell me something that will make him happy."
Mischa rolled away from her onto his back and lay cursing softly in Russian. The agony of being left alone tore through Laddy's body like a shriek, and she bit her lip against it. The pain restored her to reason, and she sat up to pull her robe down over her aching body and dropped her head forward on her knees.
The sound of Mischa's throaty laughter behind her made her stiffen. Before she could move, his hand was in her hair and she was pulled down onto the cushions beside him as he bent over her. He smiled down into her eyes, a strange dark smile that she could nol read.
"Tell the good comrade this," he said, his finger brushing her lips with an odd fierceness. "There is one thing in this world with which he could destroy me. But it is mine - and he will never touch it."
He reached over her to grasp the soft folds of his coat, and she could sense a deep silent laughter in him. He flung the coat over his arm and sat looking down at her with an expression in his eyes that again she could not understand.
"Have you learned that it will be wise to stop writing lies about me?" he asked.
"I don't write lies!" Laddy blazed, the passion he had raised in her finding an outlet at last. "I write what I see! And neither you nor anyone else is going to stop me!"
His eyes smiled with a glittering sensuality that made her breath stop.
"Good," he said huskily. "That is very good."
"What?" she whispered, confused.
"Oh, yes," he said with slow deliberation. "We have unfinished business, have we not? I will read the paper to learn when you will wish to finish it."
With an easy movement he was on his feet looking down at her.
"What a pity you cannot review my books," he said. "That would give your hatred great scope - and think how I would make you pay for it afterward."
He crossed to the hall and went out, but Laddy closed her eyes and did not watch him go. She heard the noise of the door to her flat and then of the front door while she lay shaking, clenching her hands - lay trying not to let her wild brain imagine how Mischa would make her pay for a scathing attack on one of his books.
THE SATURDAY-MORNING PAPERS went to town on what had happened at the publication party the previous evening. The circumstances of her father's death had been quickly researched and rehashed, as had his long career as a fighter in the area of human rights and as founder of the International Council on Freedom. The statements that Laddy had made after Mischa had so abruptly thrown her to the wolves were also given prominence.
She was a little startled to see how much she had said:
Miss Penreith, a staff reporter on the London Evening Herald, who was attending the reception on the media side, was obviously surprised when Mr. Busnetsky made his statement. But she confirmed that her father had been to Russia shortly before his death four years ago, and that she had reason to believe it was on that trip that he obtained both of the Busnetsky manuscripts being published this week. She said her father had hidden the manuscripts in a special place she was not aware of until the discovery of the manuscripts early this year. Miss Penreith said that the manuscripts, which she found in their original condition, would almost certainly have been moved to her father's publishing offices in Covent Garden within two or three days of her father's acquisition of them. But the manuscripts, To Make Kafka Live and Love of a Lady, were not found in his office. Miss Penreith would not say where the hiding place had been. Earlier this year the London Evening Herald published a series of articles by Miss Penreith that were the result of extensive interviews with Mr. Busnetsky. The articles, acclaimed for their in-depth study of the personality of the well-known dissident, were syndicated in newspapers and magazines around the world.
Laddy let the paper fall back onto the table and wished she had not got out of bed this morning. She leaned wearily back in her chair, pressing her eyes with thumb and forefinger, then stood up.
Outside the kitchen window a gray November day was just beginning to throw chilling rain against the glass. Laddy sighed, pulling the belt of her terry-cloth robe more securely around her, and picked up her cup and moved to the stove to refill it from the coffeepot.
She leaned against the counter, cradling the warm cup in her hands, and watched the drops of rain on the window multiply.
"You're a great one to talk about honor, Comrade Busnetsky," she muttered aloud. "That's another thing I won't forgive you for as long as I live."
The rain didn't let up all morning and by early afternoon it was getting steadily worse. With her house having been cleaned, her groceries got in and her laundry done on Friday night, there was no reason for Laddy to brave the elements, so after lunch she settled down with Love of a Lady. It was n6t a large book and she knew it was fiction; she told herself that she did not have the mental energies on such a bleak afternoon to continue To Make Kafka Live.
By the end of the first chapter her eyes were swimming so that she could hardly read, and when, hours later, she had finished the book, she flung it violently aside and a storm of weeping overtook her.
She was filled with a sense of desolate loss. After months of hating Mischa, she was painfully reminded of the fact that once she had loved him, that once her heart had overflowed with warmth and love. Now it was a cold black lump in her breast that for some reason kept on pumping blood to keep her alive, and she understood that Ben Smiley was right - she had survived by becoming less than human.
Love of a Lady was a prose poem, a paean of love for a woman she recognized as herself. Mischa had told her the simple truth when he said that her memory had kept him alive over the years of their separation. The book had been written over a period of nearly four years, beginning at the time of his first arrest after they had met in a roomful of paintings. It was a diary of love letters, of yearning, of promises - yet at the same time it was a novel, with a unifying core that she felt but did not quite recognize.
This was what she had lost. This was what suspicion and fear and lack of trust had destroyed. A love that had once been consuming and fearless, a love that had triumphed over every agony of body and mind....
That a man who had loved her so much could have hurt her so brutally was a contradiction almost impossible to believe. Laddy remembered the look she had seen in his eyes six months ago when he opened the manuscript she had brought him and translated the title. He had loved her then as much as the man of the book loved his lady, and instinctively she had known it. But the man in the book would have accepted far, far more from his woman than any small mistake Laddy had committed against Mischa....
What had happened to change his love? What had occurred between the day she had given him the manuscripts and the day he had accused her of being a spy?
He had come to know her. The dreams had become a reality. That was all, nothing else.
So although the dream woman who had kept him alive had been herself, Mischa had not been able to love the real Laddy Penreith the way he had loved her image for eight years.
That was hardly surprising. The only surprising thing about it, in fact, was that this thought had never occurred to her before. All the accusations of espionage and betrayal had been a cover for the real fact - Mischa had learned that he simply did not love her.
Laddy was no longer crying. Her eyes were as dry as her heart was cold. He had not been hurt by her, he had not felt betrayed - he had been too much of a coward to tell her the truth, that was all.
She could not stop herself picking up the book again, staring down at the wine-red dust jacket spattered with infinitesimal dots of a red so dark it was almost black and at the golden lettering of words that had once been meant for her.
"Love is strong as Death." The quotation, unat-tributed, had a page to itself immediately before the text. Laddy sat with the page open in front of her, wondering what the source was. She had heard the quote before, but she could not now remember the context. And suddenly it seemed important to know where the line came from.
She knelt on the sofa, gazing over the back to the bookshelves that ran from floor to ceiling along the wall by the door, and let her eyes run along the lettering on the spines of the books.
She felt sure the line was taken from a love poem, but that was as far as her memory would take her - if even that much were correct. John Donne? Yes, perhaps -
Half an hour later, when the doorbell rang, she was sitting on the floor by the bookcase with a stack of poetry books beside her, still hunting down the elusive quotation but no nearer to it. As the warm tones of the bell sounded, she leaped to her feet, surprised to see that the rain had stopped and it was quite dark outside. How long had she been reading, then?
She pulled open the front door with a book of poetry closed in one hand, her finger marking the place.
"John!" she exclaimed blankly.
John Bentinck had been smiling, but now his face darkened angrily.
"When you look at me as though you've forgotten my existence it means you've been thinking of Busnetsky," he said bitterly. "Is he after you again now he's back in England?"
Laddy sucked in a startled breath.
"Don't be ridiculous!" she laughed. "If I'm absentminded it's because I'm trying to track down a quotation." She held up a volume of John Donne's poetry and stepped back from the door.
"Come on in. Where does 'Love is strong as death' come from?"
"I don't know," John said, moving inside as she closed the door. He eyed her briefly up and down, noting her worn blue jeans and scruffy sweater. "You must want to know pretty badly if it made you forget to get dressed. How long have you been looking for it?"
"Not very long. Anyway, what's the matter with the way I'm dressed?" Laddy smiled quizzically.
"Nothing, I suppose," John said after a moment. "I did get seats in the stalls, though."
Laddy made a moue of contrition.
"Good heavens, is it that late? I thought you were early!" she exclaimed. "I must have been flipping through those books longer than I thought!"
She was lying: she had totally forgotten the date she had made with John yesterday to see a show tonight.
"It's just on seven," John said.
Laddy scooped up Love of a Lady as she passed behind the sofa to the bookshelves and slid it onto a shelf along with the volumes of poetry she had pulled out in her search for the quotation. She indicated the bottles on the sideboard.
"Help yourself to a drink, and I'll be ready in ten minutes, no more. What are we going to see?" she said, pausing at the door.
"A friend of mine had tickets he couldn't use for Much Ado About Nothing," John said. "At the Aldwych. It's supposed to be a very good production."
"Super!" she said, and disappeared into her bedroom.
It was very good, with a rather stronger actress than usual playing Hero, reminding Laddy of her own pain at being falsely accused, and making her take a dislike to the weak but handsome Claudio that was almost cathartic.
"He didn't love her at all, he just wanted to make a good marriage," she said to John afterward. They were sitting over a late supper, which Laddy was attacking ravenously, having eaten nothing at all since lunch. "Would you throw off a woman you loved like that?" she asked, and her eyes gave away more than she knew.
John smiled softly, and reached out a hand to cover hers.
"Never, love," he said, allowing a deeper shade of meaning to color his voice. "No man who loved a woman could do that to her."
She knew it was true; yet later at her front door when John bent to kiss her good-night, she allowed his kiss but could not respond.
She hated Mischa Busnetsky, but his face still stood between her and any other man.
THE REVIEWS of Busnetsky's books in the large Sunday papers the next morning were unanimous raves. Mikhail Busnetsky was a powerful, compelling writer, and To Make Kafka Live was a uniquely disturbing indictment of the Soviet system of repression.
But it was obvious to everyone that Busnetsky's great talent lay in fiction. "Mr. Busnetsky has said that his political writings were made necessary by the society he lived in, but that fiction was made necessary by his soul," Laddy read. The reviewer was quoting from her published interviews with Mischa, and she could not help remembering the sunny spring day on the cliffs when he had said it to her. "If Love of a Lady was necessary to the author, it will become equally necessary to many readers...."
Another reviewer compared Love of a Lady, surprisingly, to the Song of Solomon: "... tremendous passion that, like the Song of Songs, also cloaks an inner meaning. The Song of Songs, a quote from which prefaces the book, is, of course, held by some to be an allegory of God's love of Israel. Future students of this work will be more than usually justified in considering the Lady of the title a metaphor for freedom...."
Thoughtfully Laddy let the paper fall. A metaphor for freedom! Was it possible? Was the deeply passionate love she had discovered last night in Love of a Lady directed toward freedom and not herself at all?
Well, what did she care, anyway? It was all an academic exercise. She hated Mischa Busnetsky, and whether he had once loved her or had never loved her made no difference at all - except to her pride. If she could think that Mischa had believed he loved her for a while, she would feel less of a fool for having believed him. But it made no real difference to her at all.
Well, at least she now knew the source of the quotation he had used. Laddy got up and walked into the living room to pull down a Bible from the bookshelves. She sat down and, captured by the power of the words, stopped skimming for the quotation and read the Song of Songs right through. She found the quotation toward the end:
For love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire which hath a most vehement flame.
Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.
Laddy finished the Song, breathing shakily. If Solomon had indeed written this, he deserved to be famous for more than his wisdom! But whoever the writer was, she had the feeling he might have laughed in delight to hear the scholastics label this poetry an allegory of anything at all, that he would have felt that this passionate love poem was an end in itself.
With a sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach, she realized that she was hoping that Mischa Busnetsky was laughing, too, this morning - and for the same reason.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
FOR THE NEXT TEN DAYS Mischa Busnetsky stayed out of the pages of the Herald and, for the most part, out of the public eye, while Laddy and the world wrestled with some ominous developments in the Middle East. But by the end of November things had almost settled back into their normal insanity, and Laddy, who had told herself more than once during those busy days that she was glad she had heard nothing of Busnetsky and hoped she never saw so much as a press release about him again as long as she lived, gave in at last and began to phone her contacts to find out what the man was up to.
Richard Digby was out of town and his office was not familiar with Busnetsky's movements, so she rang the ICF. Nobody seemed to know where Mischa was. Finally she got in touch with an old friend of her father's who was involved in the ICF, a woman named Mary Regent.
"I don't think he's doing much of anything except settling down in England," Mrs. Regent said. "And I think he's writing another book. He's not taking any kind of lecture engagement till January at the earliest, I know that."
"Where has he gone to do his writing?" Laddy asked.
"I really don't know." The woman's voice was warm. After a few more pointless remarks, Laddy was about to hang up when Mary Regent said abruptly, as though she had just come to a decision, "You know, Miss Penreith, no one who read your interviews could seriously believe you're hostile to Mikhail Busnetsky. But a week or two ago, when he came back from America, you did make him seem rather... selfish and self-seeking. And I, for one, think you should know that all future earnings from To Make Kafka Live have been signed over jointly to the ICF and the Campaign Against Psychiatric Abuse."
Laddy sat up and reached for a pencil. "Really?" she queried, her voice surprised. "When did that happen?"
"Quite some time ago," Mary Regent said. "I wanted you to know for your own information."
Laddy's pencil paused in its scribbling. "For my own information? But may I publish this?"
"Oh!" The rather kindly voice sounded taken aback. "Well, I don't really know, Miss Penreith. Nothing was said about keeping it secret, but...."
"Well, if nothing was said..." Laddy suggested.
"Yes, I really don't see why it shouldn't be published," Mary Regent said, with quiet decision, and Laddy thanked her. But when she hung up the phone she was laughing. Mary Regent was either very naive or very canny, and Laddy did not think she was naive.
Laddy herself knew perfectly well that Mischa would not want this information made public. Since the publication of his interviews with her, he had given no personal information whatsoever to the media. He talked about torture, he talked about psychiatric abuse, he talked about the Russian state - but he did not talk about Mikhail Busnetsky. Laddy knew as though he had told her that this piece of information was not for publication.
She felt her blood singing with challenge as she called three other people listed in her contact book to get confirmation of the facts from them. None of them seemed concerned that she had got the information, but it only meant they did not know Mischa Busnetsky as well as she did.
And if Mischa did not like her hostile stories, he was going to like her favorable publicity even less, she told herself grimly. With an excited, nervous laugh she rolled paper into her machine and wrote up the story for the late-afternoon edition.
"Mischa Busnetsky, well-known Soviet dissident and exile who arrived in the West ill and penniless just six months ago, has donated all future earnings of his critically acclaimed book To Make Kafka Live to international civil rights groups...."
He was waiting for her in the street when she left work that evening just before five o'clock. Laddy's heart skipped a beat as she saw him, and then it rushed into wild thumping, as though this were a meeting with a deadly enemy. As Mischa approached her across the pavement, a black London cab slid out from between two navy-and-white Herald delivery trucks and pulled up beside them.
Mischa took her wrist in a deceptively light grasp and opened the taxi door.
"Get in."
His voice was a low growl, and his posture was threatening, like a predatory animal. She felt that if she moved, a lightning velvet paw would crush her before she had even decided on a direction.
"What the hell do you want?" Laddy demanded in a low angry tone that she hoped disguised her nervous confusion.
"You," he said. "Get in or I'll pick you up and throw you in."
"You will not!" she declared, backing away a step - into the taxi door that stood open at her back. She was trapped.
Mischa smiled glitteringly at her, silently underlining her predicament.
"If you don't let me go right now, I'll scream," she said, as calmly as she could. "Try keeping your name out, of the papers with a charge of assault on your head, Mr. Busnetsky!"
His black eyes caught her gaze; she couldn't look away.
"If you start to scream I will kiss you," he said flatly. "Here in the street in front of your colleagues. Who do you think will win then?"
"You can't kiss me forever," she said, smiling angrily. "As soon as you stop, I'll start screaming again."
"Have you learned so little?" he asked, his voice grating tinglingly on her nerve ends. "If we start to kiss here on the street we shall be lucky if we do not end up making love in the back of the taxi. And you would not cry out until I made you do so. Get in the car."
Her knees shaking almost uncontrollably, Laddy climbed into the taxi and sat in the far corner of the seat. Mischa said something to the driver through the window and climbed in after her, and suddenly the roomy interior of the cab was too small for comfort.
Laddy shifted nervously as the cab pulled out into the rush-hour traffic and crossed her legs away from him.
Mischa smiled at her, but his smile only increased her nervousness. His anger filled the cab - she could taste it when she breathed.
"Where are you taking me?" she demanded, so hoarsely she could hardly be heard.
"To a place where we can talk," Mischa said shortly. "And we will talk when we get there."
In the rush-hour traffic the drive was tortuously slow, and the panic and anticipation his silent presence caused in her was just becoming unbearable when the cab stopped in front of a large white terraced house in Queen's Gate, not far south of Kensington Gardens. Laddy stepped out of the cab and blinked at the expensive house in the near darkness.
"Where are we?" she asked coldly when Mischa had paid the driver. He took her arm firmly to lead her up the wide white steps to a black-and-brass door.
He unlocked the front door without speaking, then the vestibule door and ushered her into a well-lighted black-and-white-tiled hallway where a marble staircase curved up to another floor. There was only one door on the main floor, and he unlocked that and waited for her to enter.
"We are in my home," he said finally, as he closed the door behind them.
The apartment covered the whole of the main floor; it was huge. She stood in the center of the enormous, well-furnished front room and simply stared.
"Yours?" she repeated, gazing up at the high ceiling, which actually had a mural painted on it, like some baroque cathedral. "What do you do for money?"
"You are mercenary minded," he said dryly. "Paperback rights for Love of a Lady have now been negotiated. You may publish that piece of information, if you must. But I do not care to see any mention of this place in the pages of your newspaper."
He took off her coat and his own and threw them onto the sofa, the casual action belied by a nervous tension, in his body and in the air, that she could almost touch. Involuntarily she shivered, as though his hand had brushed her back.
He moved over to a well-stocked drinks table and lifted a crystal decanter.
"Cold?" he asked. "Would you like sherry, or do you prefer, perhaps, whiskey?"
"Sherry," Laddy whispered. She did not want a drink, but there was wisdom in saving her energy to fight more important battles. She watched him pour her drink, her tension increasing in direct proportion to his studied calm. Crossing the few feet of space between them, Mischa handed her a glass and raised his own to her. Laddy took the heavy glass but did not drink.
"Would you mind telling me what I'm doing here?" she demanded finally, moving away from him as though to look at the furnishings.
Mischa lowered his glass and gazed at her, his dark eyes unreadable.
"Do^you not know?" he asked, his deep, rough voice dragging out the last vowel on a sensuous note that brushed alarmingly up her spine and made her shiver again.
"No, I don't know!" she said hotly. "But if it's because of the article this afternoon about your book royalties, let me remind you of the way you threw me to the wolves awhile ago, and of the fact - "
He interrupted her with smooth anger.
"But this was a very friendly article you wrote today. Why should this cause me to be angry?"
"Because you think you're above everything, that's why, because I made you - " She broke off in surprise as a most extraordinary expression entered his eyes, as if a light had just come on in his brain. His gaze, suddenly very black and intent, riveted her own.
"In fact," he said slowly, "this article, like all the others, was written to make me angry."
"No, it wasn't!" she protested sharply. "Whatever I write is news, without regard to - and stop pretending it didn't make you angry, because it did! You think you ought to be untouchable. That's why I'm here right now!"
She stopped speaking because he was laughing, a delighted, husky, caressing laugh.
"But this is not why I have brought you here," he said, smiling deeply at her. "You are here because I want you."
"What are you talking about?" she demanded shrilly. "You want me for what?"
The look in his eyes froze her into immobility, and she stared at him in angry fear.
"No!" she cried, flinging up her hand instinctively, without conscious intent. He understood, however, and moved aside, and the beautiful crystal glass she had been holding shattered into bits against the marble fireplace. In the next second Mischa's own glass was on the table, and his powerful dark body was moving across the room to her. Laddy tore her startled eyes away from the shards of glass and turned to run to the door.
He let her battle frantically with the impossible lock for several seconds, standing watching her from a two-foot distance as she jerked uselessly on the door.
"There is a bolt above your head," he said at last, and as her hand snapped up and turned it, the length of his body was against her back and his broad fingers closed ruthlessly over the slim white hand on the bolt and forced it down.
"Do not fight me, my Lady," he whispered dangerously, his lips moving erotically against her ear as he spoke, his voice sending waves of melting heat through her body.
"I hate you," she moaned into the door panels, her teeth clenched against the passion his nearness was arousing. "I hate you, damn you! Why can't you leave me alone?"
For an answer he pulled her around to face him, pressed her body tightly against his and with one hand on her throat forced her head back to look into her eyes.
"I do not leave you alone for the same reason you do not stop trying to anger me with what you write. This reason - " His mouth closed on hers with a gentle urgency that made her head swim. She had no balance and she clutched at him, knowing she would fall if he let her go.
When his searching mouth abandoned her lips to rain light kisses over her cheeks and eyes, her face lifted to his mouth involuntarily, like a flower to spring rain. His large arms wrapped tightly around her then as though he would never let her go, and she felt an unbearable ache that she had not known for months stab her heart.
"There is another reason," Mischa whispered, suddenly no longer kissing but only holding her, and Laddy opened her eyes.
He was looking down at her, his face grave and unsmiling.
"I love you, Lady," he said.
Laddy recoiled as though he had struck her.
"What?" she demanded, her voice rising to an incredulous squeak. Her hands pushed frantically against him, and her body strained back against the pressure of his masculine arms.
"I love you."
"Don't say that! I can't bear - Let me go!" she cried wildly, twisting and turning as she fought to be free, so that her long hair flung out, blinding both of them.
Mischa's arms shook her impatiently.
"Lady, stop this! What - "
"Let me go!" she cried again, and the unmistakable note of panic was in her voice.
When suddenly his arms no longer enclosed her, she was off balance, and she staggered. His broad right hand caught her arm above the elbow in a tight steadying grip, and Laddy drew herself up straight, then looked from his hand on her arm to his face with cold disgust. She stepped back, and Mischa's hand dropped from her. She breathed shakily, trying to control the dry painful shudders that shook her slim frame.
"You love me?" she said in contemptuous horror, when she could speak. "You love me? And when did that happen? When did you discover that!" Her voice was shrill in the large room, as though it echoed back from the ceiling and windows.
"I have always loved you," Mischa said, and she sucked in her breath with an involuntary hiss.
"You never loved me. You don't know what the word means."
"I taught you what it means," Mischa said, in a calm measured voice that betrayed no emotion.
"You taught me sexl" she blazed. "Sex - not love! I taught myself love - more the fool me. I taught myself to love a man who.... But it was a myth. The man I loved never existed. And I didn't have to teach myself to hate the man you really are! That came naturally. I hate you and I'll always hate you, and when you use the word love to me it makes my flesh creep!"
He stood watching her for a long moment of silence.' 'Why?" he asked at last.
Laddy snorted in angry derision.
"Why?" she repeated. "You - all right, I'll tell you why: when you were in the States, in that clinic, I wrote you a letter. Did you know about that letter?"
"Lady, I - "
"Just answer my question!" she said, flinging up a hand to stop his protest. "Did you know?"
"Yes. I knew," Mischa said, and his voice, strangely, was gentle, and his eyes looked at her as though he understood much more than her words.
"I knew you knew. I never doubted that you knew," Laddy said in a brittle voice. "There's your first why. Second - John Bentinck wrote you a letter explaining how those interviews got in the Herald, explaining that I had nothing to do with it. Did you get that letter?"
"Yes, I got it," Mischa said.
She faced him across a three-foot space, her back rigid, her head flung up with proud strength to meet his eyes.
"And you believed what he said, didn't you?" she demanded.
Mischa looked at her a moment before replying, "I believed him."
"So you knew. Long before I wrote you, you knew the truth. But still you let a total stranger answer my letter. You let me suffer that. And now you tell me you've always loved me. Tell me, did you love me while Marsha Miller was answering my letter for you?"
She was cold - exultantly cold, like a distant star, with a shell of ice around her brain. She looked at Mischa Busnetsky and knew that he could never hurt her again if she lived for a thousand years.
"Yes," he said. "I loved you then."
Her laugh pealed out like icy chimes. "Well, if that's your idea of love, I suppose Imust be grateful that you've never hated me!" Laddy said brightly.
"Lady - " he began, still in that same oddly gentle voice, but she interrupted him.
"No, wait! We haven't had the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question yet! Did you actually ever believe at any time either that I was giving information to Pavel Snegov or that I had anything to do with betraying your whereabouts to the media?"
Mischa's eyes still watched her steadily, his face tight and unmoving.
"Not for any significant length of time, no," he said impassively.
"Thank you," Laddy said huskily. "You've confirmed what I've always known. If you don't understand why I hate you, you should. As for your having always loved me - well, once you told me that you did not and never had loved me. And either you were lying then, or you're lying now. You'll forgive me if I tend to think that today you are a liar."
She moved over to the sofa and picked up her black leather coat and put it on. With unhurried motions she tied the belt tightly around her waist and pulled the wide collar and lapels up around her neck and cheeks. Then she faced Mischa, a cold half smile on her lips, nothing in her eyes.
"You destroyed me, Mischa," she said flatly. "I'm only half human, thanks to you. You have no right now to pretend it never happened, no right to try to get me back into the bed you once threw me out of." She paused. "And no right to tell me that what you feel for me is love."
"No," he said quietly. "I am sorry. I will not tell you so again."
She did not move so much as an eyelash as she stared at him. Then she crossed to the door and opened it.
"1 hope to God I never see you again as long as I live," she whispered, her voice evincing emotion for the first time.
Mischa's jaw tightened. "This I cannot promise," he said.
She went out without a word.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
IT WAS THE COLDEST WINTER Laddy could remember. The heating bills for the house were enormous, and everyone was edgy with the cold and the possibility of oil shortages. The Herald began to remember the frightful winter of 1963 and wonder if another one was on its way. With a large segment of the population now dependent on central heating in their homes, the prospects were not comforting.
On a Saturday just before Christmas the fourth anniversary of her father's death passed, and Laddy sat over her breakfast coffee with two sweaters on and gazed out at the swirling snowflakes that blew coldly over the stiff, naked twigs and branches in the blackened garden. She had lost more weight, and she felt too thin for such a cold winter.
She would spend Christmas as she had each year for three years: in Richmond, with the large bustling family of a friend from college days who now worked in a publishing house. Today was the last day she would have any time for Christmas shopping, and her list was long. She had always enjoyed Christmas shopping, but today she knew that it would be a task. The thought of the crowds on Oxford Street - or even in Highgate Village - made her weary before she began. But to go to Richmond without gifts was unthinkable.
HER CHRISTMAS passed pleasantly, with her friend Miranda bringing home yet another new boyfriend for her family's approval and the young man turning out to be an instant success with all members of the Christmas party.
"Should I marry him, do you think?" Miranda's reflection in the dressing-table mirror laughed and made a wry face at her and Laddy smiled back. It was late on Christmas night, and tomorrow Laddy would go back to London. The house was silent around the bedroom that had been Miranda's since childhood and that now the two girls were sharing.
"Do you love him?" asked Laddy.
"Darling, of course I love him!" Miranda laughed, and stroked the brush through her red gold hair. "I love all my men - you know I do."
Laddy closed her eyes for a moment of painful envy of the lighthearted, nearly callous ease of Miranda's affections.
"You're not very well, are you, darling?" Miranda's voice broke in on her thoughts, and Laddy opened her eyes to see that her friend had swung around on the seat and was regarding her with an air of concern.
"Of course I'm well," Laddy returned easily.
"You don't look at all well, my Lad," Miranda shook her brush admonishingly at her. "It's all this cold weather. You need to get away somewhere warm before you collapse."
"I can't afford to get away somewhere warm." Laddy forced a laugh. "Do you know how much that house is going to cost me to run this winter?"
"Couldn't you afford to get away to Corfu even if the parents let you have the flat?" Miranda asked. Laddy smiled, shaking her head. It was typical of Miranda to make a show of concern, but Laddy knew better than to count on the offer. She had learned long ago that Miranda was a friend for the good times. She was charming and good fun - but far too self-absorbed to wish to understand anything outside her own immediate, rather shallow emotional ken.
"Not even then, I'm afraid," Laddy said, suddenly wishing that Miranda were the sort of friend she could tell about Mischa Busnetsky with some hope of being understood. Miranda's heart had been broken a score of times. Surely she knew a way to cope? "Anyway, it wouldn't help," she said. "Wherever I go, I'm taking myself along. You can't escape yourself."
"Well, you should try to get away somewhere, darling, even if you have to borrow to do it," Miranda said, returning to her reflection with the happy satisfaction of someone who has settled a troublesome problem with selfless concern. "Because you look awful."
She was right, Laddy thought a few days later as she looked out again over the Highgate garden that seemed more dreary and infertile with every day that passed. She ought to get out of London, where the dirt and the traffic made the winter even more desolate. She had a week's holiday still to come, and though she would not go into debt for a holiday abroad this year, she could at least get into the country - the Lake District or Cornwall. At least there would be no tourists at this time of year. Or Wales.
"I THINK you arrived just in time," Brigit said, standing at the window of Mairi Davies's bright kitchen and eyeing the lowering sky with concern. "The air's felt odd all day. We're in for something, but I don't know what."
"Snow," Alun Davies said succinctly, just that moment coming in the door. He moved over to the ancient black cook stove to warm his hands. "Georgy is predicting a very bad storm." Georgy was an old man who had been a sailor and whose weather forecasts were reputedly more accurate than the BBC'S.
Brigit looked worried. "Would you like to stay here, Laddy?" she asked. "We can get one of the guest rooms ready in no time, you know."
Laddy shook her head and smiled as Rhodri burst smiling into the warm room with a rush of words, complaining strenuously about the cold. He divested himself of coat and boots in record time and rushed over to Laddy's side.
"We put coal out back in the old animal shelter for you," he informed her. "Enough for half the winter, I think. And wood, too - Alun and I, and.... We did not want you to freeze, you know."
Laddy hugged him. "Thank you very much. It's nice of you to look after me like that. I wasn't expecting - "
"Well, if it snows the way Georgy says, you will need it, you know."
Brigit interrupted. "Surely you would rather stay with us, Laddy - at least till we see how bad this is going to be?"
It was the wise thing to do, and yet she wanted to be alone in that little cottage, away from everyone - even from the warmth of this family.
"What?" demanded Rhodri indignantly. "After all-the work Alun and I have done? No, no, you want to go, don't you, Laddy? Besides, there is a surprise there for you - but I am not to tell you what it is."
"Yes, I do want to go," she said. "And I ought to go now and get settled in before it gets dark." She stood up, thanking them for taking the trouble to make the cottage ready for her, and took the key Brigit had had waiting for her on Helen Digby's instructions.
Everyone trooped out to the car to see her off.
"Have you got enough supplies?" Brigit asked, stooping to the car window.
"Yes, I stocked up in Fishguard," Laddy said. "I won't need to come in for anything except the papers."
"If we don't hear from you, we'll send Rhodri over to check on you," Brigit said. "I hope you've brought something to read."
Laddy laughed and waved and drove off into a wind that was already stronger than it had been half an hour ago. She glanced up at the black sky and wondered at the wisdom of what she was doing.
Helen had been enthusiastic when she had asked about the possibility of a week in the cottage. Wales was beautiful in the winter, she had said. Of course Laddy must go. Helen had only been sorry that she and Richard would both be in town till February.
Laddy pulled her red car up to the white gate and looked at the sky again, feeling the unfamiliar nip in the air. Was that the snow that Georgy smelled? She almost hoped it would be snow. If those clouds carried rain, she could almost believe that Trefelin would be washed off the hillsides and into the valley.
She made three trips across the wintry meadow, her arms full of suitcases and provisions that she left at the door. There was smoke from her chimney, which the wind immediately dispersed: Rhodri and Alun had made her a fire. That must be Rhodri's surprise, the reason he had wanted her to come: the house would already be warm and welcoming.
She didn't need the key; they had left the door unlocked. Laddy quickly set the bags inside the kitchen and with a shivery "Brr!" closed the door on the cold weather and tried to warm her nose with an equally cold hand.
Leaving the shopping bags to sink down against one another on the floor, she picked up her cases and headed for the bedroom to take off her coat and change her clothes.
She got no farther than the door of the sitting room. There, with a startled yelp, she dropped her cases and stared, her face a mask of incredulous dismay.
Sitting on the sofa in front of a roaring fire, large and dark and looking very much in charge of the situation, was Mikhail Alexandrovich Busnetsky.
He had the sofa drawn up before the fire, his long broad arms stretched over the back on either side of him, one ankle resting on a knee. A posture of possession, and Laddy noted it and gritted her teeth. He was wearing a thick navy turtleneck that molded his muscular body and worn blue jeans, and with his thick dark hair curling down over his collar and across his forehead he looked like a sailor or a gypsy.
A lock of hair fell from his high forehead as their eyes met, and for a split second Laddy saw his face as though for the first time. She saw a face of enormous intelligence, upon which were etched the knowledge of pain and suffering, and indomitable courage. She saw the face of a man who had fought against enormous odds. She saw....
She saw Mischa Busnetsky, whom she hated, in a place that was filled with memories of him, in the last place in the world that she wanted or expected to see him.
"What are you doing here?" Laddy demanded, when she could speak.
"I am here to write a book," he said. "What are you doing here?"
Laddy began to take off her coat. It seemed ludicrous to stand in the doorway staring at him as though he represented some kind of physical danger.
"I'm here to think, and I doubt if I'll do very much with you sitting there. I presume you are not planning to write your book in this cottage?" she said sarcastically, as she busied herself with her coat and scarf.
"The idea is not without appeal, but I am established in my own," he said regretfully, as though she had invited him to stay with her.
"Good," she said, ignoring that. "Would you mind returning there?"
"And not even thanks for this warm fire?"
Laddy looked at him. It was a long time since Mischa had joked with her. "Do I owe the thanks to you or to Rhodri?" she asked.
"We laid it together. But I lighted it," Mischa said, with a gravely confiding air.
"And you told him not to tell me you were here," she said, suddenly understanding that Mischa was the surprise the boy had spoken of.
Mischa shrugged a very Russian shrug. "I didn't want you to break an ankle in your haste to see me," he said, wresting an unwilling laugh from her.
"Of course not," she agreed dryly. "Would yon - " She hesitated. She had almost said, "Would you go now?", but the sight of the first few snowflakes swirling against the window stopped her. Suddenly the idea of being alone on a snowy evening on a lonely cliff was not nearly so attractive as the thought of company - even if that company was Mischa Busnetsky.
So she changed it to, "Would you excuse me? I want to change," and tried not to flinch when he stood and crossed to pick up her cases.
He set the suitcases on the bed while Laddy hovered nervously by the wardrobe. Somehow he seemed to dwarf the room as he stood for a moment looking down at her.
"Am I invited to tea?" he asked, his eyes smiling at her as though nothing terrible had ever passed between them. As though the last eight months hadn't happened.
"Uh, I...uh, yes, why not? I had a cup of tea with Brigit, but I'm certainly hungry enough to eat something. I'll just get out of these - " She was babbling; she could hear the flustered panic in her voice and broke off.
"You have been driving all day," he said. "Relax - take a hot shower. I am capable of making a meal."
"All right," she said. "But, Mischa...."
In the doorway he halted and turned to look at her inquiringly. "Yes?"
"Don't..." she lowered her eyelids "...don't think because I want company that I...I've changed my mind about...."
"I shall not forget your feelings for me," Mischa said. "You need not be afraid of me, Lady."
There was a short pause.
"Thank you," she said.
She came out of the shower feeling warm and clean, but not relaxed, to find Mischa in the very efficient process of creating a meal. In her warm red toweling robe, she paused for a moment, the tiles cool beneath her bare feet.
"What are we eating?" she asked.
"Omelet," said Mischa. "Call me when you are two minutes from being ready."
"All right," she agreed, feeling somehow nervous.
"Lady."
She was on her way out of the kitchen when his quiet voice halted her. Her heart beat loudly for a second and then quieted. Wordlessly she turned and looked at him.
Mischa moved over to stand in front of her, lifting his large comforting hands to hold her shoulders. His eyes smiled down at her with a friendly warmth.
"Just for. these few days of being neighbors, shall we try to forget everything - all the passion, the violent emotions - and try to be friendly with one another? I don't like to see you flinching from me as though I might strike you at any moment without warning. You have nothing to fear from me - not love, not hate. 1 will not hurt you again. Can you believe this, try to believe this, while we are here?"
She closed her eyes, suddenly wanting to believe it more than anything in the world. For no matter how much she hated Mischa Busnetsky, she knew in a moment of blinding clarity that he would always have the power to hurt her. If only she could believe that he would never use that power....
For the first time in months Laddy felt the hard shell ease around her heart. She looked at him and swallowed. "If I believed you and you...you hurt me again... it would kill me this time," she said, not understanding how much she was confessing to him.
"Yes," he said softly. "So I will be very careful with you."
She wanted to trust him more than she wanted breath. They could never be lovers, as she had once believed they would, going through time together - but Mischa had been more than a lover. He had been a friend who understood everything she thought and was.... "We could try to be friends," Laddy said, and her heart began to beat as though she had leaped a dangerous chasm.
Mischa bent down with a gentle smile on his lips. "Hello, friend," he said, so softly it was almost a whisper, and kissed her lightly on each cheek. Involuntarily she kissed him back, her mouth brushing the firm flesh of his cheek with a satisfied sigh. She might be a fool, but it would be worse than foolish to continue to freeze her emotions because a man who had believed he loved her had not known how to tell her that he had made a mistake. She had to forgive him, to try to become human again, so that one day she could love someone else....
When they had eaten the delipious meal he had prepared, Mischa banked the fire and they sat down together on the sofa and talked and listened to the fire and the silence and the snow....
When he reached out to pull her gently onto his shoulder, she rested her face against the hard muscles of his chest and breathed in the scent of wool and of the man with undisguised pleasure.
"I feel as though nothing could ever hurt me again," she murmured drowsily, hardly knowing she said it.
"Never, when I am by," the deep voice said over her head, and she knew he was a friend and she could say anything to him.
"Will we still be friends when Marsha Miller is around?" she asked, her voice muffled against him.
She counted one beat of time, and then he said, "She is not going to be around. Why did you think she would be?"
"Aren't you going to marry her?" she asked, because she couldn't quite answer that.
"No," said Mischa. But he did not order her off the subject, so she pressed.
"She's very beautiful, isn't she?"
"Very," Mischa said.
"How did you meet her?"
"Her mother organized the sponsoring of one of my lectures. Marsha attached herself to me."
"Did she?" For some reason Laddy found that funny. "And didn't you have any say in the matter?
Or couldn't you turn away anyone as beautiful as her?"
"I couldn't turn away anyone who reminded me so strongly of you," Mischa said quietly.
"Oh!" Laddy stiffened and tried to sit up, but he held her where she was.
"Don't panic," he said. "You asked and I told you. Is the information so dangerous?"
If it wasn't, why was her heart beating so erratically, as though she had barely escaped a fall into a bottomless chasm?
"No," she said hesitantly, and then more strongly, "No." She could ask him for explanations here where they were locked away from the world, where nothing mattered.
"You couldn't turn away someone who looked like me, and yet---"
"Yes?" he asked gently, and she heard in his voice that he wanted her to ask, he wanted to tell her and again she drew back in fear. Again his warm arm held her. "I have finished with hurting you," Mischa said. "What I say now can have no power to hurt you, Lady." But she was not so sure.
"In America I tried to do what was impossible: I tried to forget you. I thought about health and good food and the rules of squash games, and I trie'd to forget you. I believed I could succeed, I believed I was succeeding - sometimes half a day would pass without my thinking of you, although in prison you had been with me constantly.
"Marsha Miller had hair like yours," he said, "and your long legs, but I told myself that meant nothing. Then your letter came, sent on by the clinic. I saw your writing on the envelope and I knew that I had not forgotten you at all and that if I read the letter, I would never be free of you.
"I was already receiving fan letters because of your newspaper interview. I put your letter with them, and when Marsha offered to answer such letters for me I thanked her."
As he spoke she felt a painful twist deep inside and bit her lip at this proof that a man she hated could still hurt her with words.
"Free of me?" she repeated steadily. "Is that what you wanted?"
Mischa looked at her long and steadily. "My love, I loved you so much. So much more than I thought possible, so much that the book I wrote for you was only a shadow. You could have led me to hell and I would have followed with a smile on my face.
"On the night your friend kissed you and on the morning the reporters came I realized that though I had survived the betrayal of so many friends and strangers and fellow fighters, I would not survive if you betrayed me."
"But I would never - " She had begun to protest as though the last eight months had not been, and hearing her own words, she broke off suddenly.
"No," he agreed. "No matter how much I accused you, how much I tried to make myself believe, I knew you would not. But I was afraid to believe it, afraid to believe in your love, knowing how much power you would have over me."
"You had the same power over me," she whispered.
"Do you understand what it is like to be in prison?" he asked her gently. "To be completely powerless, entirely at the mercy of every whim of every guard and civil servant and bureaucrat who crosses your path? Can you understand this? For ten years, since I began my battle with the Soviet state, I had had only one weapon against them - my will. My refusal to accept their falsehoods."
"God," she whispered.
"And then there you were, without any power of wire fences or walls or dogs, with only love, and my love for you, to use against me. And I saw that I had no weapon at all against you, that there was nothing I would not do for you."
"But you were wrong, weren't you?" she said in quiet bitterness. "Your love was not as strong as you thought." Mischa looked down into her face for a long moment as though reading what lay behind her eyes. Then he breathed deeply in decision and leaned forward to knock his pipe against the grate.
"I think it's time I went home," he said. "It is late and my fire must have gone out hours ago."
Laddy stood up and shivered as the colder air of the room beyond the fire reached her.
"It's cold in here," she exclaimed. "The temperature must have dropped since this afternoon."
"Not only the temperature," said Mischa, at the window looking out. "Look at this."
There was nothing to see except a blinding white swirl and, whenever it momentarily ceased, white as far as the eye could reach.
"But this is Pembrokeshire," Laddy protested, as though the snow had better disappear, and Mischa laughed at her.
"Obviously the weather should be taught a lesson," he said, pulling on the boots he had left by the fire. "But I am not sure how this should be done." They walked to the kitchen door, and he lifted a hand to her cheek.
"No coat?" she asked.
"In my own cottage," he said. "I did not need it this afternoon."
"Your cottage will be freezing if the fire's out," she said, not understanding why suddenly she could not bear to be left alone. "Do you want to light a fire and come back here to wait until the place is warmer?"
He smiled, his dark eyes warm. "Do you not understand that I do not want to leave at all?" he asked. "That is why it is time to go, my Lady."
She swallowed convulsively. "Oh. Well, then I.... Good night, Mischa."
"Good night, Lady. Don't let your fire go out. Perhaps you had better make your bed on the sofa."
"Yes," she said.
Snow and freezing air boiled into the room for a moment, and the wind shook the cottage like a giant hand. She heard Mischa laugh into the wind, and then the door slammed and she was alone in the cottage, safely shut away from the wind and the storm... and Mischa Busnetksy.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
THE SNOW HAD FALLEN steadily all night and was still falling when she got up in the morning, though the wind had died. The thick blanket of snow transformed the countryside so that the view from the cottage windows was new and unfamiliar.
She had made up her bed on the sofa, because if she did not keep the fire going she would freeze, and in any case the bedroom was too cold. But she had not fallen asleep without effort. Round and round in her head she had kept hearing Mischa's voice saying, "I would not survive if you betrayed me...."
Mischa arrived just as she was filling the kettle, carrying two large bundles and covered with snow from head to foot. He stood inside her door looking like the abominable snowman, and Laddy began to laugh. Suddenly her heart leaped, as though it was not snow but sunlight that he had brought into the little cottage with him.
"Now I know what they mean by 'large as life,' " she said, trying to brush him down with a tea towel and laughing so hard she drove snow into his eyes and down his collar. "You can't imagine what you look like!" she gurgled, as with a laughing muttered oath Mischa wrested the towel from her helpless grip"If you get any more snow down my neck," he growled threateningly, "I will see what you look like when you have climbed out of a snowdrift."
"Did you fall in a snowdrift?" she asked delightedly. "Is that what happened? And you the great expert from Siberia!"
Mischa looked at her with a threatening smile. "How would you like to be hugged by the expert from Siberia?" he asked, making a sudden advance.
Laddy leaped back with a shriek, and Mischa laughed.
"All right," Laddy said, mustering her dignity. "Do it yourself. I'll make the coffee. What's this?" she demanded, stooping over one of the bundles. It was a bed sheet full of various objects, which rolled out in all directions as she opened it.
"Food," Mischa said, stamping the last of the snow from his legs and boots. "All my supplies, in fact. The other bundle is my clothing. I am moving in."
Laddy looked down at the pile of brightly colored packages.
"Why?" she asked.
He said, "Because the snow is not going to stop. Because the temperature is still dropping. It will be effort enough to keep one house warm. And because we might need each other."
"I might need you, you mean," Laddy said. "I'm sure you can handle anything. I can't imagine a situation in which you would need me."
"Don't be too sure," Mischa said.
The snow fell steadily all day, creating utter silence and a brightness that seemed to cut the little cottage off from the world. Mischa and Laddy filled cardboard boxes with coal and stacked them in the kitchen and brought in as much of the wood as they could find space for. They turned on the oven of the electric stove and opened it to warm the kitchen when they needed it, and they kept the fire well fueled all day.
They sat on the sofa in front of the fire most of the day, playing chess on a set Mischa had unearthed from the back of a kitchen cupboard, or cards, or simply talking.
More than once Laddy sighed with *******ment. If only the outside world could never intrude on this, she thought. If only we never had to let them in, I could be happy like this. I would never remember.... If the outside world had not intruded eight months ago, Mischa might never have learned that he didn't love me, and I would never have had to learn to hate him.
She tried to curb these thoughts when they occurred, but she knew that somehow, when the snow melted and the world came back, she was going to discover that she had let herself in for even more hurting-----
"Would you like some Ovaltine?" she asked that night when they had listened to the eleven o'clock news on her little radio and learned that all of southwestern Britain lay under the same incredible blanket of snow. Ovaltine seemed so unbelievably domestic that she laughed aloud.
"That sounds as though we've been married twenty-eight years," she explained at Mischa's questioning look. "But what could warm you better on a night like this?"
Mischa underlined the question with a smile. "I can think of things," he said. "But I will take the Ovaltine, thank you."
She hummed along with the radio as she watched for the milk to heat without scalding, and filled two large thick mugs with the creamy beverage. She laid them on a tray with a plate of ******s and the radio and boogied in time to the music as she carried the offering back into the sitting room.
Then she stopped dead and gaped.
The sofa, which had been comfortably near the fire, had been pushed back, and in its place on the floor was the double mattress from her bed, piled with blankets and comforters - and two pillows.
Mischa was adding coai to the fire, and she advanced to the edge of the mattress.
"What is this?" she asked, but her voice was not as calm as she tried to make it.
Mischa glanced around casually, as though he had not detected any trace of panic in her tone. "It is where we are going to sleep tonight," he said. "We will need each other's heat and all the blankets if we are not going to freeze."
"I'm not sleeping in the same bed with you," Laddy said bluntly.
"Why not?" Mischa asked in surprise, as though there could be no reason. This had the effect of flustering her. She dropped her eyes from his inquiring gaze.
"Because...1 won't, that's all."
"Yes, you will," Mischa said flatly. "I'm not going to spend a cold night for an unintelligent whim. I've had enough years of cold nights to last me a lifetime."
"I'm not - "
"You will sleep with me on the same mattress and under the same blankets," Mischa said harshly. "If one of us were to get a chill and become ill - even only with a bad cold - what then?" He sat down on the mattress, reached for a mug and smiled up at her. "Now, let's drink our domestic Ovaltine and go to bed. If we have been married twenty-eight years, no doubt we can pass a night now and then without making love, if that is what worries you."
It was exactly what worried her, and when he smiled at her like that she could almost forget....
"No," he said quietly, seeing remembrance come into her eyes. "No, you have promised to forget that for now. We are friends, Lady. That is all."
She changed in the bathroom into warm flannelette pajamas, which had long stripes emphasizing her tall thinness. Mischa looked up. at her from where he crouched at the fire, stoking it.
"Do you always wear these unfeminine night things?" he asked curiously.
"Yes, I do," she said woodenly. Mischa smiled at her again.
"If you were my woman, you would not wish to wear such a garment to bed, even when alone," he said smilingly, as though this were an academic subject of dispassionate curiosity. "Who is your man that he inspires in you no joy in your beautiful body?"
"Guess," she said sarcastically.
"The man who taught you that love was pain," Mischa said quietly.
"That's right," Laddy said brightly. "So let's get into the bed that is going to be colder than you think, in spite of the blankets and the human warmth - shall we?"
While Mischa showered and changed, she turned out the lights, with the exception of one lamp, which she brought down to the floor beside the mattress. Then she crawled between the icy sheets and lay propped on an elbow, looking into the fire that was only a glow under the heap of new coals Mischa had piled on.
He came into the living room with his hair damp, wearing a pair of soft white trousers with elastic at the waist and legs that looked like part of a jogging or warm-up outfit. Above them his chest and arms, unbelievably brown against the white, were naked.
Laddy sucked in her breath.
"Can't you wear pajamas like everybody else?" she asked testily. "Do you have to come to bed half-naked?"
His feet were brown, bony and muscled, with fine dark hairs curling on his ankles under the white elasticized cuffs, and they gripped the floor as if they owned it.
"I do not own pajamas," he said mildly. "I do not wear them. This - " he indicated the woolly trousers " - is a concession to your modesty."
"Why on earth don't you own pajamas?" she asked in irritated discomfort, and his face crinkled into laughter as, fists on hips, he^gazed down at her. He looked like a Persian prince or a genie out of a golden lamp.
"Because they are an unnecessary restriction of freedom," he said, kneeling down to throw back the blankets. "And I want to be free."
He crawled in beside her, smelling damp and masculine, and eased his long body between the sheets with that sensuous enjoyment of a soft bed that she had noticed once before, on a bed of grass.
"Ann!" he breathed, his broad biceps flexing as he folded his arms under his head. "I expect whoever invented the spring mattress died a millionaire. Did he?"
She couldn't help laughing at this.
"How on earth would I know?"
"Is he not a famous hero?" Mischa asked. "The Americans have made heroes of so many - surely they have not let this one pass unsung?"
"Next time I talk to an American contact I'll ask him for you, shall I?" she laughed.
"Thank you," he said, and she realized with a sinking heart that that had sounded as though she would be seeing him again.
"Lady," he said gently, reaching an arm toward her, "come here. Don't be afraid of me - I want to talk to you."
She could not resist the tone in his voice. Wordlessly she slid to his side under the blankets and, under the pressure of his hand and arm, rested her head against his shoulder in his gentle embrace.
"How warm you are against me," he breathed. "Lady, my Lady - don't be afraid of me tonight," he whispered as she tensed. "I will not try to make love to you, my love, much as I want to."
"Why not?" she whispered, her stomach suddenly filled with a wild fluttering.
"Because you hate me, and because I love you," Mischa said. "And because I want you to love me when we make love again."
Her jaw clenched against his chest at his first mention of love, and he felt it.
"Mischa, I will never love you," she said quietly. "Don't think it."
He absorbed that in silence. "You loved me once," he said at last.
"More fool me."
He leaned up over her, his hand stroking her arm from shoulder to elbow, and she shivered.
"You tremble when I touch you, Lady. You tremble with desire," he said. "Do you think this means nothing?"
"It means you're very attractive and I'm attracted to you," Laddy said flatly.
"That is all?" She looked wordlessly at him, letting him read the answer in her eyes. "And how many other attractive men create this response in you? How many men have loved you since I left you in the spring?" he grated harshly.
Her eyes widened in fear, and she twisted her face away. Mischa caught her chin and turned her head back, looking deep into her eyes.
"Say it!" he commanded. "One?. Two?" He paused. She made no sign. "Three?"
"No, of course not!" she exploded.
He breathed, "Of course not? A woman like you - passionate as I know you are, beautiful, intelligent, loving - do you tell me that no man has touched you since I went away?"
"That's right," she said, angrily, unable to lie.
He took a deep breath. "Yet you tell yourself that you want me only because I am physically attractive?"
"Well, I meant it's a purely physical attraction," she muttered.
"What foolish things are taught about love," he said after a moment. "1 cannot believe that you yourself believe this."
"I don't see why not!" she flared. "You feel a physical attraction for me, too, Mischa, I know that much!"
He laughed gently, laying his broad hand against her cheek and temple, "Of course I do, my dearest love. But this is because 1 love you."
She felt shakily near tears for a moment and bit her lip.
"You've got a funny way of showing it," she said dully. "I'll never believe again that you love me, Mischa. You can't convince me you know what love is."
"I will show you, and I will convince you," he said quietly. "I will give you all the time you need, Lady. Because I know that you love me. Under the pain and hatred I made for you, there is still love. I know it!" he whispered, holding her to him and brushing her brow with his lips.
"No," she said stonily, closing her eyes against the look in his - a look of love that was never going to fool her again.
"Don't think about it now," he said. "Go to sleep against me as though we have been married twenty-eight years - as, one day, if we live, we will be. Go to sleep, my love. Sleep on this: that I have loved you since before the dawn of time, and I always will."
LADDY WAS STRUGGLING through snow up to her thighs, blinded by driving flakes, her whole body frozen. The brightly white sun reflected glaringly from the endless white around her, and she knew she was utterly alone. The loneliness was an ache inside her, and in her dream she thought, I have felt this way before.
There was a small house ahead of her suddenly, and she recognized it as her childhood home in Vancouver, somehow different, and here in the middle of nowhere. There was smoke coming from the chimney, and the door was open. Her struggle ceased, and she was inside the door, where a fire burned in a stone fireplace, and someone was sitting in a chair in front of it. Warmth seeped through her, and the lonely feeling stopped. "I'm home!" she said aloud, and the sound of her voice woke her.
She was curled up against Mischa and his arms surrounded her. He was watching her as she woke, his face lighted by the glow of the fire. Lifting his head from the pillow a little, he smiled.
"You had kicked off the blankets," he whispered. "When I warmed you, you said, 'I'm home.' " And his arms tightened around her.
In her sleep-and-dream-fuddled state, it seemed the most natural thing in the world, and as his mouth came down on hers she delighted in the unique, familiar fire that burned slowly through her being.
He lifted his mouth from hers and looked at her. "You are so beautiful," he said. This time his slow kiss deepened, probed, and his tongue sought out the soft recesses of her mouth with an intensity that made her tremble. As he raised his chest to draw her under him, the blankets fell away from his naked back, and drowsy with sleep and love, Laddy lifted her arms to stroke the warm taut skin. But the contact of those firm rippling muscles touched something deep within her, and she tightened her arms around his back as though she would never let him go - as though she would break him, but knowing he could never be broken.
"Mischa," she breathed, when he lifted his mouth again, and it was a passionate whisper that told him everything.
His large powerful hands held her head, and she felt his mouth trace the line of her neck down to her shoulder, and shuddered at the response of the thousand nerves that suddenly seemed to be clustered there.
She could hear the stars, she could touch the silence of the snow, she could see infinity. Every sense was attuned, and her heart was molten gold in her breast.
Mischa's hand trembled as he unbuttoned her pa-jama top, and the knowledge of how she was affecting him tore at her and she wanted to be in his arms forever, to go through time in this one moment.
When at last he pulled her pajama jacket open, she saw his eyes close for a moment, and he said hoarsely, "Lady, Lady, I have waited so long for you!" Looking into her eyes then, he placed one large strong hand, rough with passion, on her breast, and he smiled at her when she gasped in response. "You see," he said, and she saw what she had always known, that his touch moved her to passion.
She replied, "Yes."
It was a whisper, and his hand moved over her body with a strength that was almost painful. "Tell me!" he demanded, knowing she could hardly speak.
"Yes," she said, and this time the whisper was a moan of desire, and again he closed his eyes.
"Yes," he said.
He moved under the blankets, and then he was lying full-length on her body, their legs touching and she could feel the heat and strength of his powerful thighs along the inside of her own.
This touch immobilized her like a sudden blow, and her arms fell away from him, curving over the pillow above her head; his hands grasped her wrists and held them there. His broad chest seemed terri-fyingly large; he towered over her, from a distance of six inches. She yearned now to touch him, to run her hands and mouth over his skin, but when she tried to move, she could not.
Never in her life had she felt so completely in anyone's power. Physically and mentally she was his. If the cottage had burned down around them she could not have moved until he gave the word.
He would not let her move to touch him: he held her wrists and bent his head to kiss her neck, her shoulders, her breasts until she cried out. She gazed at him, willing him to kiss her mouth, waiting the agonizing time it took him to lower his mouth to her own, waiting for the deep thrusting kiss that, when it finally came, made her want to weep in ecstasy.
Unable to respond with her hands, she moved her long legs against his longer ones, frantic by now to touch him, to move him, to possess him completely. With a sudden movement, he jerked his legs against hers, pushing them farther apart and raised his head to see in her eyes the power he had over her.
But she had power over him, too. His eyes blazed with it, and his hands trembled so that she felt it in her wrists where he still held her.
Mischa released one wrist to reach down and slide his hand over her pajamaed leg. "Nightclothes," he said softly. "Did I not tell you that nightclothes are a restriction of freedom?" His hand moved up to the elastic at her waist, and she felt his rough touch on the skin of her hip.
"Mischa," she begged, and raised her free hand to the mat of black hair on his chest.
"No, not yet," he said, and his voice was suddenly hoarse. He grasped her wrist and held it again immobile, looking into her eyes. "First I am waiting to hear you tell me that you love me." And in the moment he spoke Laddy knew that it was true. The cold pain that had enveloped her heart was gone; she knew that this passion was love, and it swamped her.
It was as it had be^n eight long months ago: her heart threatening to burst within her, filling her with warmth and life. She had never hated him, her hatred had been pain and betrayal -
The eight months of pain and betrayal and memory came flooding back into her brain in a rush, and she felt as though she were awakening from a drugged state. And she knew again, as though she had forgotten, that this was the man who had left her, who had coldly rejected her when she had wept and pleaded for his love; that this was the man who had more power to hurt her than any other human being.
And whatever he said, he did not love her.
"I don't love you, I hate you," she said, in a cold little voice. "Let me go."
Mischa's eyes darkened with pain, and his hold on her wrists tightened convulsively.
"You love me," he said hoarsely.
"No!" she cried.
"This is only physical attraction?" he demanded. "This is only lust?"
"I hate that word," she ground out. "And I hate you. And that's all this is - a hateful feeling for a man I hate."
"All right," he said with dangerous calm. "1 am a fool not to take this half loaf when it is offered me. I want you and you want me. So be it."
She felt the keening "No!" rising in her throat, but she had no time to utter it. His mouth was urgent upon hers, forcing the word back into her throat with such passion that her own answering passion made her unable to speak it.
He tore off her clothing and kicked off his own, and they lay naked on the sheet in the flickering firelight. She lay under the touch of his hands and his body, unable to protest against the bitter pleasure he was giving her, unable to stop her body rising to meet the first sweet, painful thrust of his.
He knew it, and his jaw clenched at her hoarse cry, not knowing how nearly it was a cry of love.
"If this is what you love," he said, his voice anguished, "let me see how much I can give you."
He set out then to drown her in pleasure. His hands, alive with passion, made her cry out, and his mouth made her weep. The crescendo built and built till she lived on the edge of rapture, but he kept her from release. She could not hide her responses from his intimate knowledge of her... and he would smile, and wait, and begin again.
"I love you," he rasped at last. "Do you hear me, my Lady, my love? I love you. If you take this from me now you take a gift of love."
And then what began in her would not be stopped, and when her hands gripped him and her head arched back on a high pleading cry, he answered her cry, and the golden heat coursed through her blood, her nerves, her brain... and her heart.
"I love you," Laddy cried, knowing it for truth, her heart at last renouncing fear and pain. She loved him, no matter what the price. She could not hide from love anymore. "Mischa, I love you," she said again, feeling tears in her eyes and on her cheeks.
His body surged against her, and in one motion he gathered her up against him, shuddering and trembling and whispering over and over: "Love me, oh my Lady, love me...."
CHAPTER TWENTY
TREFELIN WAS a collection of oddly-shaped bumps under a thick white blanket that stretched from the cliff top to the horizon of low encircling hills. Smoke was rising from fluffy white chimneys as if from strange subterranean dwellings. The sun, bright in a blue sky, sparkled blindingly from the dark icy sea and the diamond crystals of white snow.
"Good morning!" chirruped the little mound of snow at the door that seemed to have Rhodri's eyes and voice. "Have you seen the snow, both of you?"
"How could we not?" Mischa asked him, chuckling, his strong white teeth clenched on his pipe, while Laddy burst into laughter.
"Have you been in an avalanche?" she demanded. "Rhodri, you look like an igloo!"
"Yes, they have igloos in Canada, don't they?" Rhodri said with interest, futilely trying to brush off the worst of the snow before coming in. "Did you live in one when you were little, Lady?" Although he called her Laddy in any other company, when the three of them were alone he had taken to pronouncing her name as Mischa did. His thin smiling face was pink with exertion, and his dark eyes were glowing with his joy at seeing both of them; Laddy loved him.
She had to laugh. "An igloo?" she repeated. "Rhodri, where I lived we never even got snow at Christmas. Speak to Mischa, here. He's the one who knows his snow."
"Be careful," Mischa said menacingly, "or you will soon know it as well as Rhodri."
Giving up on the task of trying to stamp off his burden of snow while standing almost thigh deep in the stuff, Rhodri entered the kitchen like a confident puppy, sure of his welcome whatever his condition. Laughing, they stepped back and watched him close the door. Then he jumped up and down in one place, and it was slowly revealed that he wore a white jacket.
"I thought that was all snow," Laddy said.
"Well, there was quite a bit, wasn't there?" Rhodri said, looking with interested pride at the circle of snow on the floor around his feet. "I like it, you know. I have never seen real snow before. It is very white, isn't it, when it is thick? Perhaps when I am older I shall live in Canada. Brigit sent you a loaf of freshly baked bread, but I do not think it is as warm as it was," he chattered, holding out a white plastic-wrapped object. "And I am to be sure you are both all right."
Laughing helplessly, Laddy took the bread from him. "Take off your coat," she said. "Have breakfast with us."
"I am not allowed to, no matter how much you ask," Rhodri said sadly. "I am to go home for breakfast, Brigit says. Mairi, too." He looked from one to the other. "Brigit wants to know if you are finally going to get married," he said matter-of-factly. "She said I was not to ask, but I wish to know, too, and I knew you would not mind if I said so."
The bread was still faintly warm, and its fresh smell filled her nostrils as Laddy carefully unwrapped the thick brown loaf.
"We are certainly getting married," Mischa's voice said behind her.
With a satisfied, "Good," Rhodri turned to the door. "There is a cathedral in St. David's," he said. "You had better get married there." And with this settled to his satisfaction, he pulled open the door and set out back along the shadowed path of his footprints that was the only mark on the dazzling whiteness.
Laddy and Mischa stood in the doorway, looking down toward the village and breathing deeply in the cold, crackling winter air.
"All that snow," breathed Laddy. "Just like my dream."
Mischa's arm tightened around her. "You are home safe now, my Lady. I won't let you go again."
She nuzzled the thick white wool of his sweater under her cheek. "Please don't ever let me go," she said.
As Rhodri's thin figure receded in the distance they drew back inside and closed the door, shivering as the icy air that had crept through their clothes finally attacked the warmth of their skin. The kettle was just coming to a boil on the stove: a cozy, homey sound, and Laddy sighed with deep *******ment.
"We're going to be stuck here for a while, I think," she said.
"Good," said Mischa, with masculine satisfaction.
"You can write your novel, as you planned," she protested. "It's all right for you. What will 1 do?"
"I did not plan on writing a novel," said Mischa. "I planned on teaching you to love me. And I have not finished yet. You will have enough to occupy you, my Lady. And when the snow clears we will go into St. David's and get married."
She drew a finger down his cheek, and his mouth turned in to her palm. "Liar," she accused, laughing. Mischa caught her hand and held it to his lips, and she closed her eyes. "How could you plan to...be with me when you didn't know I'd be here?"
He chuckled deep in his throat. "Do you not know that Helen telephoned me in Crete a week ago when you asked her for the use of this cottage?"
"What?" ' "I had been waiting since that night at my apartment to get you alone for long enough to make you listen to me. Helen and Richard kept me informed of your movements so that - "
"And what were you doing in Crete?" she demanded skeptically.
"Looking at a boat I thought I might kidnap you on if I bought it," he said, "and staying away from the constant temptation to make late visits to your flat."
He was stroking her hair tenderly, and she could feel his touch as though her hair were alive with nerves. She closed her eyes as he bent his head to her lips, and for a long moment in the bright kitchen there was silence, except for the high whistling of the kettle.
"Were you awfully angry about those articles I was writing? They weren't really so bad, were they?" Laddy asked later as they ate a leisurely breakfast.
"I don't know," Mischa smiled. "They gave me a good excuse to think that my violent feelings toward you were only righteous anger."
"Aha!" she said. "And when did you know they were not?"
"The night I came to your flat. You talked about being in league with Pavel Snegov - and suddenly everything fell into place in my mind."
"What everything is that?" Laddy inquired after a moment, concentrating on her futile struggles with the lid of a new jar of marmalade. He took the jar from her, and under his broad palm she heard the snap of air invading the vacuum.
"I saw what a fool I was to worry about the future when I could have love in the present. I knew that there was no connection between you and Pavel Snegov and never would be, that you would never betray me. But even if you did, I knew that I would always love you more than life - and if you led me to hell, what reason was there not to go?"
Her face went white, and she gazed at him with wide, vulnerable eyes.
"Do you really love me like that?" she whispered, feeling as though her breath had ceased to function.
"Do you not know it?" Mischa asked.
"No...I...I...no."
He set down his coffee cup and came round to pull her from her chair. "What did you think?" he asked, almost angrily, his eyes searching her face. She stared up at him, not able to answer, and with a muttered exclamation he pulled her to his chest. "But what else could you think, after I had hurt you so much?"
He breathed shakily, "My love, did you not understand that when I told you to tell Snegov that there was one thing in the world with which I could be destroyed, I was speaking of you?"
There was a deep and utter silence as she absorbed it, and then he sought her lips in a kiss.
"You laughed that night as though - " She broke off.
"I laughed because I felt the way Newton did when the apple hit him on the head. I laughed because I understood. I did not know then how deep your pain was. I thought you were only angry.
I thought you would write another article about me and I would teach you that your anger came from love and not hate." He kissed her again and let her go, and she sat down and shakily drank her coffee.
"And the next article was a friendly story about the royalties." Sitting, Mischa laughed and shook his head. "Until you told me that you thought it, too, would anger me, I was afraid you had given up. That you really did not want to see me again. I thought I would show you the apartment and tell you not to write about it and see what you did then. But this was unnecessary - the friendly article, too, was meant to anger me. I believed then that I could make you remember you loved me. But when you showed me how much I had hurt you, I knew that if by some miracle I could teach you to love me again, it would not be that night. Such a thing would take a long time, and patience. And I knew I must wait for the right time...."
"What sort of right time?"
"When I could get you alone for a few days."
"So when I asked Helen for the cottage, I gave you the perfect opportunity."
"Not perfect - I was not sure whether our memories here would make you remember love or pain. But I could not wait any longer." And he smiled slowly at her.
"But when I saw you, I might have run away," Laddy said. "How could you know there would be a snowstorm to keep me here? Or did you get friendly with the snow god while you were in Siberia?" Her voice lifted in horrified mock accusation. "Is this storm some kind of personal favor to you?"
He laughed with her, pulling her to her feet. "Snow or no snow, you would not have got away from me easily," he said.
"How would you have stopped me?" she asked indignantly, and Mischa laughed, his teeth white against his face.
"I would have incapacitated your car, for one," he said.
"I could still have gone to stay at Mairi Davies's," she pointed out.
He said softly, "I would have gone to bring you back, Lady. And you would have come with me if I had to carry you kicking through the streets. I did not want to wait any longer."
"Mrara," Laddy murmured lovingly into his throat, and he led her into the sitting room to the sofa that had been restored to its position in front of the fire.
"Why did we put the bed away, I wonder?" Mischa asked teasingly. "That was shortsighted."
She laughed and put her arms around his neck. "I love you," she said urgently. "Oh, I love you so much!"
"Thank God," he said huskily, his mouth hovering over hers. "I love you, Lady. I was afraid I would never hear you say that again. When I discovered that my real freedom was your love, only to learn that I had lost you - "
He held her tightly to him, and she had never been safer than she was in this moment. She raised her lips to him like a hungry supplicant.
"Mischa," she moaned, as he kissed her.
He drew back his head a little to say, "I like to taste my name on your lips. Say it again."
"Mischa. I love you, Mischa, Mischa..." she chanted, until his possessive mouth made her mute.
14-11-07, 11:18 PM
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