You Belong to Me
Authors: Johanna Lindsey
| You Belong to Me |
| Cardinia's Royal Family [2] |
| Johanna Lindsey |
| Avon (1994) |
In all the world, no man exists who can tame Alexandra Rubilov. A fiery and beautiful free-thinker, Alex's steadfast refusal to marry has frustrated her hapless father. And so he creates a "long-forgotten" agreement and sends his rebellious daughter away, ly maintaining that Alexandra has been promised since childhood to the handsome, insufferable libertine whom she must now accompany to his homeland to wed.
Dismayed to find himself suddenly engaged, Count Vasili Petroff plans to repulse his unwanted fiancee by acting the perfect cad, unaware that wily Alexandra plans to follow a similar path. But the road to deception is a rocky one and its many unexpected turns can lead two reluctant companions to a most unanticipated destination: that place called passionate love.
You Belong to Me
For Jamie,
the daughter I wasn’t fortunate enough to have—
until now.
Constantin Rubliov stood at the window in his drawing room,…
Stefan Barony, the reigning King of Cardinia, had to laugh.
Vasili’s mother wasn’t wearing the correct expression when she joined…
Tanya lifted her veil slightly, just enough so that her…
Two months later, the girl Tanya had pitied was still…
Alexandra rode past the village, past the town, beyond the…
Alexandra had taken a leisurely ride home, so by the…
“Come, sit down, Vasili—you will permit me to call you…
Constantin sat back behind his desk and waited, almost positive…
Alexandra managed to close Vasili’s door quietly, just as she…
Vasili was up at dawn the next morning, not because…
It was a long first day on the road, exceedingly…
The food had been served, but it sat untouched in…
It wasn’t easy to abandon twenty-five years of refined breeding.
If Vasili accomplished anything during his visit to Alexandra’s room,…
A full week passed without any further incidents, possibly because…
Snow greeted them the next morning. The flurries didn’t last…
Alexandra’s embarrassment lasted for two days. She should have taken…
“The hell of it is,” Vasili was telling Lazar as…
Vasili couldn’t quite manage to catch up to Alexandra. He…
“A wise choice, Count Petroff. Now tell me, will my…
The food was hearty, but Vasili was only interested in…
They were shown to a ramshackle, vacant hut that belonged…
Vasili felt her eyes on him as he stood near…
It didn’t take long for them to feel the chill…
As it turned out, they might have been rescued if…
Early the next morning, they left one man behind with…
The royal city of Cardinia was a jewel in a…
Bojik had been waiting on Vasili’s doorstep for Alexandra to…
Vasili had not intended to go to the stable. Alexandra…
The next morning, Vasili found himself in his mother’s stable…
Alexandra compromised. She was ready to leave at the appointed…
Alexandra decided she wasn’t going to wait for Vasili to…
“She left her horses with me, even the two stallions,”…
Alexandra found another month of traveling a daunting prospect. That…
Nina was waiting for her when she returned to her…
“We can discuss this for everyone’s delectation, or you can…
The return to Cardinia seemed to take no time at…
Vasili was waiting in the antechamber of the palace chapel…
Soft candlelight, silk sheets, an extremely thick fur rug before…
Ukraine Province, Russia, 1836
C
onstantin Rubliov stood at the window in his drawing room, his hands clasped behind his back, watching the dust cloud in the distance slowly approaching. The window, located at the front of his house, looked out on the road that wound past his country estate and led to the Dnieper River in the east. From the second floor of the house, you could just make out the river on a clear day. From his vantage point in the drawing room, the road to the west was visible as far as the eye could see, and that was where the dust cloud was approaching from.
If he hadn’t known that there was going to be a horse race today, the sight of all the people crowding both sides of the road just beyond his house would have told him. His Cossacks loved a good race as much as they loved a good fight. They were a tough, volatile, high-spirited people, always laughing, singing, or fighting—and fiercely loyal.
But they weren’t exactly his, although he had always thought of them that way because
they had been so long associated with his family. And they, too, thought of him and his as theirs. But Cossack meant “free warrior,” and these Cossacks were certainly that. Since his great-great-grandfather had given them permission to settle on his land and raise their families in peace, they had worked for the Rubliovs in whatever capacity was required. They staffed Constantin’s house, they bred his horses, they guarded him and his family in their travels.
The settlement they had started all those years ago was now a thriving town less than a quarter mile to the west of his estate. The Razins, who had supplied the town with its leaders for all these years as well as populated three-fourths of the town with the many branches of their family, had grown as prosperous as the Rubliovs.
With their help, Constantin now supplied horses to the Czar’s army, and thoroughbreds to aristocrats who could afford them. His sugar beet crops filled the markets of Kiev and the settlements along the Dnieper, and his wheat brought fine prices along the Black Sea coast. He was growing richer by the year since he had taken an active interest in his horses and fields. Ever since his wife had died ten years ago, he had stopped being an absentee landlord, as most of the Russian nobles were. Only his sister still made use of their town house in Moscow and the Rubliov palace in St. Petersburg.
“You aren’t going to like this, darling.”
Constantin didn’t glance at the woman who had spoken. Anna Veriovka stood only several feet away at the next window, watching the same scene in front of the house. Anna was one of those rare women who never seemed to age. To look at her with her dark brown hair always perfectly coiffed and her even darker brown eyes, the fine bone structure that was going to make her an eternal beauty, no one could guess she had seen thirty-five years.
Right now it was her tone, rather than her words, that made Constantin brace his hands on the window ledge and stare more intently at the oncoming horses.
Deep in his gut, he knew what he would see. It wouldn’t be the first time, or, he feared, the last. But for a moment all he could see was that dust cloud, nearly reaching the house now, and in its midst the vague shape of six thoroughbreds crowding one another on the narrow road. Fur hats, long coats flapping, sleek legs stretching for the finish line at the nearby village, and the large white wolfhound racing along beside the road, barking, urging the animals to a little more speed. And wherever that dog was…
“Alex will win,” Anna said in a smug voice.
“Of course Alex will win,” Constantin grumbled, watching the lead rider crawl up on the saddle, squat there, slowly rise to standing, then toss off a fur cap, laughing, with the other riders following suit.
His eyes were squeezed shut as he added,
“She always wins—and I wish you wouldn’t call her that. It only encourages her to act the hoyden.”
His longtime mistress merely clucked her tongue, but after a few more moments he felt her breasts press against his back and her arms circle his waist. “You can look now, darling. She didn’t break her neck.”
“Thank God,” he whispered, and then the anger came, for the scare he’d just had was no less severe than it always was. “I’m going to beat her this time, I swear I am.”
Anna chuckled. “So you always say, but you never do. Besides, the Razin boys wouldn’t let you.”
“Then I’ll get their father to do it. Ermak will do anything I ask of him.”
“Except hurt a hair on that sweet child’s head. He adores Alex as much as you do.”
Constantin sighed as he turned around to do some hugging of his own. “Anna, my love, that ‘sweet child’ is twenty-five years old, too old for the foolishness we just witnessed. You know it as well as I do. She should be married and nursing babies. Her two sisters had no difficulty in that respect. Lydia has given me five granddaughters. Elizaveta had three before she was widowed. Why has it been so impossible to get my youngest daughter married?”
Anna thought it prudent not to mention Alexandra’s outrageous frankness that had caused such a stir and had made Czar Nicholas unofficially ban her from St. Petersburg. If
Anna reminded Constantin of that, she was afraid she would laugh, which she did every time she recalled that scene at the Romanovsky dinner, when Princess Olga had lamented to the twenty or so guests sitting near her that, however much she tried, she couldn’t keep from gaining weight that season.
Alexandra, hearing her, had suggested quite helpfully and with complete sincerity, “Why, ma’am, if you would just stop stuffing your mouth with blinis and sour cream, you might lose a pound or two.”
Since the princess had been stuffing her mouth with those very things at that very moment, it wasn’t surprising that a good many of the guests had suddenly begun coughing into their napkins or looking beneath the table for something they had supposedly dropped, just to hide their snickers. Anna, who had been there as Alexandra’s chaperone, had thought it hilarious herself, but Olga Romanovsky hadn’t; she’d gone straight to the royal ear the next day with her complaint, likely asking for outright execution. Anna thought it fortunate for Alexandra that the Czar had merely politely suggested that Constantin take his daughter back to the country, where her wayward tongue would do no more than offend the peasants.
Unfortunately, Alexandra hadn’t learned from her mistake. Her outspokenness had not been curbed the next season in Moscow, or later in Kharkov, and certainly not closer to home, in Kiev. She had managed, single-handedly, to
make herself a social pariah. And Anna suspected, more than once, that she had not done it all in ignorance or by accident. After all, Alexandra was a fairly intelligent girl, and she
had
confessed after that first disastrous season in St. Petersburg that she was in love with the Honorable Christopher Leighton, whom she had met there, and she meant to marry him and no one else. How better to wait for the lagging Englishman than to ensure that no other young man would be asking for her hand in the meantime. Which was what had happened, regardless of whether Alexandra had intended it.
As for Constantin’s question, Anna decided to remind him about the man who had stolen his daughter’s heart all those years ago. “You don’t think she could
still
be waiting for that English diplomat, do you?”
Constantin snorted. “After seven long years? Don’t be absurd.”
“But he left the country only three years ago,” she pointed out.
“And Alexandra hasn’t mentioned his name again, since I refused to let her follow him to England at the time,” he replied.
“Isn’t that when she told you she wasn’t going to marry anyone, ever?”
Constantin flushed, recalling the argument he’d had with his lovely daughter, which had been one of their worst. “She didn’t mean it. She was just angry.”
Anna lifted a brow. “Are you trying to convince me of that, or yourself? Or maybe it’s slipped your notice that Alex ignores every
young man you bring home for her to meet, and she hasn’t traveled any farther than Kiev in the past three years, and she made that trip only to shop. Even then, she managed to come up with one excuse after another to remain cooped up in your hotel suite.”
It was actually a relief to Constantin to hear Anna voice his own suspicions, a relief and an easing of the guilt he’d been living with this past week. True, Alexandra’s excuses were always logical and sounded sincere, but they were still excuses. And when she had come up with one of them last week in order to refuse to travel with him to Vasilkov to visit her sister and nieces, he had come to the same conclusions Anna had just drawn, and got morose, thinking about his youngest daughter wasting her life pining for that damned foreigner. Unfortunately, he had also got quite drunk and done something he never would have if he had been sober.
Anna felt the change in his big body, which was no longer relaxed against hers, saw the flush climbing his cheeks, and noted how his deep midnight-blue eyes refused to meet hers. Anna knew him extremely well. Their spouses had died within a year of each other. The four of them had been close friends before that. She and Constantin had continued that friendship, and eight years ago, they had become even closer. She loved him dearly, though she refused to give up her widowed independence to marry him. Nor was it necessary to wed him when she lived in his home as his housekeeper and
hostess, and as companion-chaperone to his youngest daughter whenever that duty was required, which was rarely these days.
Right now shame was fairly oozing from him, and she demanded as baldly as Alexandra would have, “Constantin Rubliov, what have you done?”
He moved out of her embrace without answering, walking straight to the mahogany cabinet where numerous crystal decanters were always kept full of his favorite spirits. Anna came up beside him while he filled one of the larger glasses to the brim with vodka. Immediately he lifted it to his lips.
“It’s that bad?” she asked gently. At his barely perceptible nod, she said, “Maybe you should pour me one of those.”
“No,” he replied, setting the glass down, but keeping his hand around it. Half the contents was gone. “You’ll likely throw it in my face, then the glass at my head, then come after me with the decanter.”
His family might be prone to that sort of tempestuous reaction, but she wasn’t. But she was definitely getting worried now. “Tell me.”
He still wouldn’t look at her. “I have found Alexandra a husband.”
That gave her pause, because it was nothing she hadn’t heard before. He had been trying to do just that for the past seven years. So wherein lay the shame he was presently exhibiting?
“A husband?” she said carefully. “But Alex will only refuse him, as she has all your other
suggestions.” He was slowly shaking his head. “She can’t refuse him? How is that—?” She didn’t finish, and laughed instead. “Don’t tell me you think you can insist at this late date. Come now, darling, you know that does no good with this particular daughter of yours. She’s more stubborn than you are, if you haven’t noticed. You would end up raising the roof with your shouts, then give in to her as you always do.”
Again he was shaking his head, and looking even more unhappy about it. And he still wouldn’t meet her eyes. His color was also still high. He was a man genuinely wallowing in guilt.
Fearful new, she repeated her question. “What
have
you done?”
His head dropped so low on his chest, she could barely hear the words: “Given my daughter no choice.”
She waved her hand dismissively at that answer. “There are always choices—”
“Not when I have involved family honor, which is the one thing she won’t ignore—at least she’s going to think it is involved.”
“What does that mean?”
“That I sacrificed my own honor, my integrity, my principles, ethics, honesty—”
“
What have you done?
”
Anna never raised her voice. She was the epitome of all that was gracious and demure. Even when she was angry she would make her point quietly, and cause her antagonist to feel like an ogre in the process. That she was
shouting now brought Constantin’s eyes to her, not in surprise but in dread. He could well lose her when she learned how low he had sunk in his desire to give his youngest daughter the same happiness and fulfillment her sisters had found.
He looked so miserable, so utterly guilt-ridden and despondent, that Anna gave a little cry and threw her arms around his neck. “It can’t be as terrible as you’re letting on,” she whispered by his ear, which was no easy feat since he towered over her by a foot. “Tell me.”
“I have arranged for a betrothal.”
“A betrothal?”
His response was anticlimactic, to say the least. She relaxed against him, leaning back just enough so she could see his face.
“Thank God,” she said with feeling, “I was beginning to think you had killed someone.”
His expression didn’t change; he looked just as miserable, although he was finally looking at her. “I believe I would feel the same if I had killed someone,” he admitted.
Anna’s eyes flared. She could have hit him at that moment, something she would never in her life have considered doing—until now. “Dammit, Constantin, get to the heart of it before you drive me mad!”
He flinched because she was yelling again. Yelling from Alexandra he could take; he even expected it, and could give it back with equal fervor every time, but he couldn’t bear it from
his little Anna. Yet he deserved it, and her scorn as well.
He finally said, “I sent a letter to Countess Maria Petroff.”
The name brought a thoughtful frown to Anna’s face. “Why does that name sound familiar to me?”
“Because you have heard me speak so often of Simeon Petroff.”
“Ah, your good friend who died—what was it, thirteen or fourteen years ago?”
“Fourteen.”
When he said no more, she frowned again, this time in annoyance. Obviously she was going to have to drag the facts out of him bit by bit.
“Maria would be Simeon’s wife, or rather, his widow. What has she to do with Alex’s betrothal? And when did you arrange this?”