She’d had grand adventures. Returning to England had been the end of those adventures, except for her horses. She might have gone crazy if it hadn’t been for them. England had been the start of special tutors, then special schools, the very best for a girl who was expected to grow up to marry a duke, to become a complete Englishwoman, her Russian heritage nothing more than a novel characteristic to be put on display the way one displays a parlour trick. Something interesting and entertaining, but not to be taken seriously, not even by her, although this was ground on which she and her father disagreed. She wanted to know about her Russian heritage, hungered for it, even against her father’s promises to her dying mother to raise an English rose.
‘St Petersburg is a long way from the Kuban Steppes,’ the Prince said neutrally and she had the sense that she was the one being vetted, quite the reverse of her intentions for this meeting. It made her nervous. What had she given away? What secrets had she inadvertently revealed?
She tried for a smile and a bit of humour. ‘We can’t all be patriotic cavalry officers.’
The effort failed. Her remark had been meant as a compliment, but it evoked something darker. The openness of his expression shuttered. ‘Who said anything about being patriotic? Come, you haven’t seen my other horse, she’s a Cleveland Bay. I acquired her when I arrived. I have hopes of breeding her with my Kabardin stallion.’ Any chance to follow up on his comment was lost in his rambling talk of a breeding opportunity. Klara was certain it was quite purposely done. The comment about patriotism had made him edgy. She had skated close to something with that remark.
They petted the Cleveland Bay and made conversation about mares and horses in general—safe ground for them both. But she was aware the atmosphere around them remained charged with wariness. They were both on their guard now, protecting themselves, cautious of revealing too much by accident to a stranger. She didn’t want him to see any more of her and her lack of ‘Russianness’. It was embarrassing to her that he should see it so clearly and on such short acquaintance. Would he be as disgusted by it as she if he knew the reason—that she’d been groomed to be an expensive pawn in a dangerous game she couldn’t escape? Would he even care? Disgust implied the pre-existence of caring. He was her riding instructor, nothing more. And as for the Prince—what was it he didn’t want her to see? What was he protecting? Why? More importantly, why did he think a diplomat’s daughter would care about his secrets? In his case, caring assumed his secrets contained something of value he was not willing to share with another. Which was precisely what her father suspected.
A stable hand came to announce the arrival of her father’s carriage and Nikolay gave her a formal incline of his head. ‘It is time to say do svidaniya, Miss Grigorieva.’ He leaned close and she smelled the scents of man and beast on him, not an unpleasing fragrance to a woman who preferred horses over the dandified fops of the ton. ‘That means “until we meet again”.’
‘What makes you sure I’ll come back?’ She let her eyes linger on his face, her voice low. She was flirting with him as he’d flirted with her, with private words and lingering glances.
‘You didn’t quite get what you came for, Miss Grigorieva. You’ll be back. Did you want to wait until next Thursday or perhaps you’d like to try again sooner? I have an opening on Monday.’
‘Monday? That’s three days away,’ she answered the challenge with a bold confidence she didn’t feel. This man had a way of pushing her off balance at the most unlooked for moments. What did he think she was hunting? She hardly knew herself. ‘How about Saturday in the park?’ she countered. ‘We will ride. You can bring Balkan. Call for me at two.’ She paused. ‘Unless you’re worried I might get the rest of what I came for.’
He grinned, a wicked warrior’s smile that sent a most unladylike tremor all the way to her toes, despite her usual dislike of arrogant men. He seemed to be an exception. ‘I’m not the one who should be worried, Miss Grigorieva. Two o’clock Saturday it is.’
* * *
‘You should be worried, Nik. I don’t like the sounds of this at all,’ Stepan counselled at dinner that night. The four of them—Illarion and Ruslan, Stepan and himself, all royal expatriates of Kuban—were pushed back from the table, enjoying vodka and sampling some of Stepan’s latest samogon—the Russian version of an Englishman’s John Barleycorn. Drinking together was their nightly ritual, an attempt to recreate something from their old life in Kuban, to create something of their own, something comfortable in this new world they were learning to navigate.
Nikolay shoved his glass forward for more. Klara Grigorieva had disturbed him on more than a political level. She disturbed him on a sensual level, too, something, he might add, which had not happened in the time since they’d left Kuban. He thought his last, nearly fatal run-in with a woman had resolved his susceptibilities to feminine charm. Apparently not. The man in him wanted to pursue her, but the warrior in him counselled caution, as Stepan did. For now, he was happy to let his friends debate the issue for him.
To his right, Illarion, always the romantic, argued leniency. ‘We might just be paranoid. The girl’s not Russian, for one, not really. She was raised here. Nik says she doesn’t even speak the language. It’s hard to believe she’s invited into her father’s counsels or that she has any interest, like most of these English girls.’
‘Unlike most English girls—’ Stepan tendered his rebuttal ‘—her father is indisputably Russian. He’s an ambassador. It is his job to represent Russian interests in England.’ Stepan had become their unofficial adahop during the months they’d been in London, the one they all turned to for advice. ‘If anyone is supposed to be loyal to one’s country, it’s the ambassador.’
Therein lay the true concern. Perhaps the ambassador would be loyal enough to see a renegade prince, wanted for royal murder, returned home.
This had always been the risk; that Kuban would want him back and that the Kubanian Tsar would not be willing to settle for having his number-one troublemaker out of the country. Nikolay was starting to regret the group’s decision to not learn more about the Russian situation in London. The four of them had decided it would be better to simply go about their lives and let the ambassador come to them if he was interested in London’s four newest Russian citizens. It had been an easy choice. There had been much to do in resettling.
The strategy had worked. To date, the ambassador had been uninterested. Today, that had potentially changed. Unless Klara was only what she seemed: a riding pupil, another English girl looking for ways to fill her long, empty days until she married. But the scenario didn’t suit the woman he’d seen in the riding house. In his gut Nikolay knew that wasn’t a legitimate assumption. She had not ‘seemed’ only a riding pupil today. Whatever she’d wanted from him, she’d wanted it badly enough to swallow her pride. He’d not missed how much it galled her when he’d shouted to keep her heels down, or to check her pacing. She might be there to ride, but she was there for something else as well.
Across the table, Ruslan, always the diplomat, seconded Stepan’s advice. ‘You have to admit it looks strange; the Russian ambassador’s daughter, who is already an exceptional rider, shows up asking for lessons? Why? Especially given your circumstances.’ Ruslan looked around the table at each of them. ‘We are all awkward expatriates.’
They were indeed, especially if a condition of expatriation was ‘voluntary’ relocation. Nikolay wasn’t convinced even a loose definition of voluntary applied to him. His choice to leave hadn’t been much of a choice at all when his other option was facing imprisonment and trial for a murder that could be couched as treason, a trial he might not win. He’d argued against the traditions of the kingdom once too often. Whether the charges against him held was not the issue. The Tsar had reason to make sure that they did. There’d been plenty of occasions when he’d clashed with the traditional-minded Tsar, but this last time, blood had been spilt. When his friend, Prince Dimitri Petrovich, a man who had abdicated his title in Kuban in order to claim a bride forbidden to him under Kubanian law, had written asking him to see to his sister’s safe passage to England, Nikolay had jumped at the chance as much out of the deep bonds of friendship as for his own personal benefit.
Dimitri’s