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the violence of her fall. No marks were obvious in the moonlight as his dark glance took in the purity of her form.
    "My head… is a bit tender… near my right ear."
    I'll be careful, he thought.
    "And…well—" she shyly smiled "—my bottom is…slightly bruised."
    That, too, he mused, I'll treat with care.
    "I…should put my clothes on," Lisaveta said into the small silence, unabashed by her nudity but an innocent in seduction. She didn't realize Stefan had other plans. She didn't realize the game was just beginning.
    "Did the servants bring you new clothes?" he asked.
    "No."
    "Wait till morning then, and we'll find a dressmaker. I'll have Haci dredge one up."
    "I'm not as unorthodox as you," she said, understanding then the simple chronology of his sentence.
    "I think, dear heart," he murmured, touching the soft fullness of her bottom lip with the lightest brush of fingertips, "you're more unorthodox than I."
    "Your reputation—"
    "Kiss me," he whispered.
    She swayed toward him as though his words were the earth's magnetic poles, her mouth and eyes and soft silken body like an offering. "I shouldn't," she breathed, as if the words could stop the melting suggestion of her body.
    "I know."
    And the two words he spoke were like a promise she must keep. He could tell immediately, so tentative was the touch of her lips on his, that she'd never kissed a man before. But after three months of war Stefan felt as though some benevolent spirit had taken pity on him, giving him a pale unspoiled woman to make love to, as though she were a gift of innocence and purity after the endless weeks of bloody war. He felt no guilt that she was there for him. She was, after all, curiously self-reliant and surely not entirely chaste as a scholar of Hafiz. But at base he simply did what he did best.
    And he began by kissing her back.
    Lisaveta's first thought, melodramatic and alien to any preconceived notions she had of herself, was , He's attracted to me.
    As a woman. A sense of wonder, magnificent in both its novelty and splendor, flared through her body, and she felt the warming flush like a personal sunrise of the soul. There was no denying the reason Prince Bariatinsky's engravings were collected by sighing women throughout the Empire. His head lifted briefly from their kiss and he smiled at her, his face starkly handsome, his dark eyes tender somehow despite their savage blackness. He was, she decided, wicked, sweet unreason, like a fallen angel dressed in sensuous beauty.
    "I like your kisses," she murmured. "They warm me everywhere and make me tingle…."
    He touched the small straight perfection of her nose with the briefest of kisses, raised his head and, his smile crinkling the corners of his eyes, said, "Thank you." Her ingenuous directness was enchanting now rather than offensive, the sweetly naive empiricism with which she viewed new experiences tantalizing. He would look forward to each artless reaction as the night progressed.
    "Kiss me some more." She said it like a child in a candy store—with unreserved demand and delight. Unguiltily, too, as though she deserved it.
    "Your servant, mademoiselle " Stefan murmured agreeably. Numerous women in his past would have been shocked at his placid acquiescence. Prince Bariatinsky, one of the most decorated, celebrated men in the Empire, had never been any woman's servant. Skilled and generous at providing pleasure, certainly, but submissive—never.
    "You must tell me, sweet Lise," he whispered with teasing huskiness, bending his dark ruffled head, his breath warm on the aching crest of her nipple, "do you like this more?" And he touched the very tip with a tender suckling kiss that abruptly deepened, then bit with tiny caresses so that she felt a searing flame race downward like molten fire to sanctify each pleasure center in her body.
    Her sighing breathy moan was an affirmative response.
    He moved later to slowly caress her other breast and then trailed lingering kisses up her