Royal Renegade (35 page)

"Don't look at me." She dropped her gaze to their clasped hands, seeing in their entwined fingers the impossible tangle that was their love. "Don't, Michael, don't study me as if I were a map. I don't want you to know me so well."

"But I do. I can't help it. I love you and I feel everything you feel." He was so close now, his hard thighs pressed against her legs, his head bent to touch the hands he clasped. "I feel your love and your longing and your fear that it will vanish as soon as you believe in it. I know because I've felt it too."

"Michael, please, if you love me, you won't—" In her anguish she loosed one hand to enmesh in his dark hair and lift his head so she could see his eyes. "I have steeled my heart against you. Only you have broken it nonetheless—I am so frightened."

"I know," he whispered, rising to sit beside her again. "I can see the fear in your eyes. Tell me what frightens you."

She lowered her head, wishing he weren't so stalwart, that he would give into his natural anger and leave her. But when she looked up again, he was still there, still patient, waiting to answer the objections that she had never consciously identified. He was so rational, even in love. "Napoleon will invade Russia."

"Nothing will prevent that. But the Prince Regent has promised me, at least, that no repercussions will come of this. Punishing Russia would only draw attention to the failure of his diplomatic foray."

"Alexander—" Tatiana shivered as she spoke her cousin's name. The tsar's guilt made him ruthless; he would never forgive this.

"He cannot touch you here. And he will be made to understand how lucky he is to get off lightly. For he dug his own grave with his nasty little scheme to get rid of you. If he cared for peace between the nations, he would have thought twice before sending a princess all tied up with a regicide." Michael cut his explanation off, but he had already revealed too much.

"You told the regent about my father?" Tatiana was beyond anger, well into shock. She rose, hacking away from him toward the glittering pavilion. "You betrayed my confidence?"

He shot out his hand to capture her wrist and pull her back to her seat. "Don't you ever accuse me of that. I would never betray you, not by word, not by deed." Tatiana shrank back against the bench, for his rage was as intense as it was unfamiliar to her. He had to struggle to control his voice, but finally he was able to add more quietly, "That shameful episode has been suppressed for a decade, and what good has it done you? You were orphaned and virtually imprisoned and finally sold off into bondage to a murderer. I did what I had to in order to free you. If I kept silent, I'd be as guilty as the tsar of destroying your life. For marrying Cumberland—marrying anyone else—"

He couldn't finish the sentence, but his hands tightened into fists at his sides. In a searching glance, he read her anxiety that the Romanov shame would haunt her even here in her new homeland. "No one else would need know, Tatiana. So it won't harm you or anyone else. You must know I care naught for your family history, except as it has hurt you." His anger was subsiding, but he was still restless, his booted foot drawing interlocking circles in the snow. "Alexander knows to hold his tongue. Prinny will look blank whenever anyone asks about a royal wedding and vow that this whole romantic operetta was his own idea. And so the alliance will go on without you."

The weight of the world had never rested comfortable on Tatiana's slim shoulders, and Michael's sensible words were liberating. She wasn't responsible, not for the protection of Russia, nor for the defeat of Napoleon. She. said with the ghost of a smile, "It is a relief to be unimportant again."

"You are important to me. Essential, even." For a moment she lost herself in the grave depths of his eyes, then he shook his head briskly. "So the international situation is dismissed. Tell me what else worries you."

She turned to gaze into the brilliant pavilion. A maid was on her knees mopping up a spill, while the caterer stood over her shaking his fist. "There are so many problems. We are nothing alike—"

"We are kindred spirits."

Tatiana glanced back quickly, searching for irony in his expression, but found none. "We aren't really—"

"Yes, we are. You knew it from the start, didn't you?" He made no move to touch her, but she could feel the stirring of his passion in her soul. "I was consumed with detail, as you always tell me, and only noticed our differences. But we are both orphans trying to make it alone and now we realize we cannot. And even our differences are complementary, aren't they? You try to make me laugh, and I do my best to make you serious—you are more successful than I, thank God."

She had never actually forgotten Michael's reluctant smile, but she had blocked the image of it for days now. It hurt too much to know that only she could inspire his slow capitulation to laughter. But now she let that smile tease her into a dangerous hope. They really did fit each other; she had known it from the first.

Softly, as if he sensed her weakening, Michael added, "Tatiana, what I love about you most is all that I lack, your gift for creating happiness wherever you are. And I am selfish enough to want you to create it wherever I am.”

She couldn't draw her breath, remembering how so long ago—years ago, was it, or only weeks—she had told Buntin that someday she would find a man who loved her for all those qualities others lamented, her impetuosity and excitability and humor. And that man was Michael, for he had the strength to let Tatiana be herself and still keep her safe.

But even as she ached to hold him, she couldn't surrender to the joy she would find only with him. A decade of despair could not be lifted in a moment, however poignant. Almost unknowingly, she whispered the source of her dread. "Michael, I'd rather have nothing than have it all and lose it."

"Now see how much we are alike," he said, and she looked up, startled that he understood the fear she could hardly name. "For that's the orphan's credo, isn't it? Don't hope, for your hopes will be dashed. Don't trust, for you'll be betrayed. Don't love, for you'll only be left in the end. Don't you think I know that by heart?"

He took her unresisting into his arms, resting his cold cheek against her hair. "Do you know what a friend said about me last night? 'Michael gambles only on a sure thing.' A fitting epitaph for an orphan's life, isn't it? I'd still feel that way if I hadn't met you. In fact, that's why I waited so long to act—I wanted to make sure you loved me and that I wouldn't be risking what little life I had made for myself if you didn't. But you just wouldn't say the words I needed to hear, that you wanted me to save you. And so I had to gamble, and for once not on a sure thing. Damn, I hate that." He kissed her on the temple, and her pulse quickened against his lips. "I tried to control every contingency. But I couldn't. For you're still afraid to love me."

Tatiana felt his chest move in a sigh and his arms tighten momentarily as if to imprison her by his love. Then he released her and the chill evening surrounded her again. He drew her mantle tighter around her shoulders, but it was no substitute for his warmth. "You have been so brave for so long, my love. Now tell me why you are afraid."

She bent her head, for her fear shamed her. "If I let myself love you, I will lose you."

Michael replied with a vow so loving he didn't himself know it to be a lie. "Tatiana, I think the sun rises in your eyes. I will love you all your life. I could never leave you."

"You will leave me next week."

He drew in his' breath at her accusation, then released it slowly. "Is that the real issue, my going back to Portugal? But I've told you all along that I made a commitment and I must keep it. Just as I will keep the commitment I make to you when we marry. And I promise I will return to you."

He spoke with such quiet certainty that she almost wavered. But she recalled her parents' conviction that they would all be together again, and the awful despair that followed her realization that it was a lie. "I can't, Michael. I know we would be happy as long as we were together. But we won't be together. And I couldn't bear it if you died, I couldn't. Once we had been together, I couldn't bear being left alone again."

He rose and paced in front of her, angry again, though a stranger would never know it, for his face was carefully blank and his voice level. Tatiana, however, watched him pull off one glove, finger by finger, as the Count d'Annaud had done when he challenged Fallenwood to a duel. And when he finally replied, it was with another challenge. "Do you want to lose me truly? For that's what you're doing, taking away all my hope for the future. I have given you my heart, and I wouldn't take it back again if I could, for battered and abused as it is it would be no use to anyone. Well, I won't step in front of a rifle if you refuse me, at least not deliberately. But it would serve you straight if I got my head shot off, wouldn't it?"

At her gasp, he stopped short, gripping his glove in his bare hand. "Tatiana, I'm sorry," he murmured, dropping to the seat beside her and pulling her into his arms. "I'm sorry. I'm not being fair, am I? I'm talking like a scoundrel, trying to force you to love me. I'm just so desperate because I'm afraid I'm losing you. But that's no excuse for frightening you."

She closed her fist around his lapel, wanting to strike him both for threatening her and for apologizing so beautifully. She couldn't ever let him go, she realized, for her fingers wouldn't obey her command to open. So she rested against him, letting the anguish subside as she felt the uneven pace of his heart against her cheek.

"It's just that I had it all and now I'm losing it just as I always feared. And I can't bear it."

She looked up, startled, hearing Michael echo her own words, and in his eyes she saw her own worst fear.

He went on, "That moment when I turned and saw you here, with the snow in your curls and the love in your eyes, I was entirely happy. I never knew such joy existed in the world. And now—I can't regret that moment, but I'll never recover from it either."

He drew a ragged breath and carefully untangled her fingers from his coat. Then, resignedly, he pulled his other glove off and dropped it into her lap. "I surrender. I suppose I'm no more essential to Napoleon's defeat than you are. I'm not going to lose you because I want to play soldier, or because I'm afraid Wellington won't respect me. You are more important to me than anything in the world. So I'll give up my commission."

Tatiana picked up the glove, fingering the fine leather, rubbing the roughness at the palm abraded by his horse's reins. "Michael, don't."

His capitulation was too wrenching for him to recognize hers. Before she could explain, he cried impassionedly, desperately, "What do you want, Tatiana? I told you I will give up the most important thing in my life so that I can be with you. I haven't anything else to offer but my heart and my life, and they've been yours since the moment I first saw your smile."

She couldn't bear it any longer, the anguish that blazed from his eyes like moonlight off the snow. "It hurts to love so much. I don't know if I can bear it—oh, Michael, you say the most beautiful things," she sighed, touching his mouth with a reverent finger. "How romantic you have become. For that was the loveliest proposal I've ever received."

"Just how many have you received?"

"Well, there was my cousin Peter's, of course. And this is my third proposal in three days, four if you count Cumberland, and I don't really, as it was actually Wellesley—"

"Tatiana," he groaned, pressing his palms to his temples as if his head would burst, "you are killing me."

"Oh, Michael, I am digressing again, aren't I?"

"Yes," he said with commendable restraint. "Just tell me that you love me and that you will marry me as soon as can be."

She tugged his hands away from his head and kissed him gently on the forehead. "I love you and will marry you as soon as can be."

"That is, I trust," he said, gathering her closer, "the last time you will ever be so obedient."

But then he drew a deep breath, resting his forehead against her hair, and she understood that her cowardice had caused him enormous pain. He had, as he said, given up the most important part of his life for her. And he deserved better from their love than her display of selfishness.

She nestled close to him, feeling the brush of a gold epaulet against her ear, gathering her strength to make another sacrifice. This one came easier than the last, for this time she would make him happy. "Michael, do you truly want to leave the army?"

"Not yet. I have another demand." She listened with interest as he cursed under his breath. "I've never heard that before. Is that Portuguese? Oh, I promise, no more digressions. I shall get straight to the point now." But she had to pause to remember what the point was. "If you sell out your commission, will you still wear your uniform?"

Michael courteously did not comment that this sounded like another digression. "At regimental reunions and the like. But I'll have retired. I shan't be parading about in full dress."

"Such a shame," Tatiana murmured, tracing the elaborate braiding on his jacket. "You are so dazzling in full dress. Think how disappointed the regent will be."

Michael flinched, and she knew he was thinking of his commander, her rival, the great General Wellington. "Prinny's reaction is not the one I dread. But it doesn't matter, truly. I understand your concern and I have agreed."

"I've changed my mind."

With his hands on her waist, Michael set her on her feet and stood up, regarding her warily. "Explain."

Tatiana rose on tiptoe to straighten the epaulet she had dislodged. She smiled brilliantly through a haze of tears. "You see, I had decided yesterday to surrender my love for you so that your life could go on as you'd planned. You would never become a general if you ruined yourself with me."