Hatshepsut's Collar (The Artifact Hunters #2) (23 page)

Such strange parallels of cruelty in their stories. Nate married Cara much later, but he protested he did it to protect her. “What makes one marriage any better than the other?” she pondered; a noose was a noose whether made of rope or silk.

Natalie took up Cara’s hand and squeezed her fingers. “Women like you and me, we yearn to be treated as equals, not chattels. But all marriages are not alike. Some husbands trap their women in gilded stables like expensive broodmares. Others treat them like spirited Arabian fillies, and let us gallop free. Look to your heart, you know which you have.”

Cara didn’t want to look to her heart, she knew Nate lingered there, his presence a soft reassuring pulse along their bond.

Natalie, as though sensing her unease, continued talking of her marriage. “I knew Nikolai was the one for me the moment I laid eyes on him. He is my angel, but, being fifteen years older than me, he treated me like a treasured daughter. I did not want that!” A smile broke which animated her entire face. “The day I turned eighteen I got him drunk, tied him to his bed until he sobered up, and then seduced him.”

Cara burst out laughing at the courage, determination, and planning Natalie’s scheme must have taken. “So you got your way?”

Natalie winked. “I have been his wife and his partner in every sense since that day.”

Other women swirled in and out of the private saloon, a rainbow of colours brushing past in a cloud of laughter. Cara turned her mind to other matters. “Have Nate and Nikolai known each other long?”

“They are old friends and sometimes opponents. Nate was eighteen when Nikolai first encountered him on a privateer airship. I believe Nikolai kept him imprisoned in the hold until his temper cooled.”

Cara’s lips quirked.
Ah ha! Always knew he started as a pirate.

“It is only fitting that you and I become friends also. We will show them. Come.”

She rose and Cara stood with her. They were of a similar height making it easier to bend their heads together to exchange secrets. Natalie tucked Cara’s arm through hers and they left the salon in search of their two spies. They circled the ballroom, arm in arm, exchanging small details of their lives as though they had known each other for years, not hours.

“You do not sound happy to be married to Nate, do you not love him?”

Cara shook her head. She never doubted the depth of her feelings for Nate. “I love him so much it hurts,” she whispered as she struggled to articulate the words causing her so much pain. “But he bought me. I was never given a choice.”

Natalie cocked her head, and made a clicking sound of tongue against teeth as she thought. “So, did he force himself on you?”

Cara wondered where this conversation was headed. She couldn’t imagine Nate ever forcing himself on a woman, he didn’t need to. “No. Never.”

Natalie frowned. “Did he demand you obey him?”

Good luck to him if he ever pulled that line.
A smile tickled Cara’s lips. “No.”

Natalie drew to a halt and faced Cara, a puzzled look on her face. “Then I do not understand. He married you, but did nothing. How do you come to be by his side?”

Cara shrugged. “I made my own way to him.”

“Ah,” Natalie exclaimed as though Cara had neatly demonstrated her point. “He left you free to determine you own course.”

Cara frowned, she missed something in the exchange, and it nagged and itched just below her conscience. “I only found out what he did just over a week ago. I’m so angry at him.”

“You have every reason to be angry. Only you know if this betrayal is so deep it splits you apart or if you can build a bridge and move on.” The women continued their slow circuit of the room. A waiter stopped before them, the silver tray holding crystal glasses of champagne. They took one each and continued on. “There is no time limit on your decision, one week, one month, or one year. Look inside, your instincts and heart know the answer, your mind just needs to recognise it.”

Cara mulled over the advice. She desperately wanted to talk to Nan and Nessy, but she found Natalie’s words made a certain sense to her churning mind. By the time they skirted the edge of the enormous room and found their husbands, Cara felt she had found a lifelong friend and had much to think over.

The men exchanged raised eyebrows, watching the two heads bent together before they reclaimed their wives.

“We are in trouble now, my friend.” Nikolai observed as Natalie gave Cara a wink.

In the early hours of the morning, they returned to their suite. Cara possessed a restless energy. She seemed reluctant to join him in the large bed, instead she stalked their rooms. He watched her prowl, back and forth, until she stopped by the window. She leaned against the side of the frame, her cheek pressed to the cool pane, lost in her thoughts as she stared out into the darkness. Moonlight cut through the glass and danced over her body, setting fire to the deep auburn in her hair. The cream silk robe fell down her arm, revealing a slender neck, the line of her shoulder, the gentle rise of one breast. Her skin glowed like alabaster, but he knew she was warm velvet beneath his hands, beneath him.

He bit back the groan rising in his throat. He tossed the blankets from his body, the soft cotton rough comfort when he wanted to feel the glide of silk over his skin. His balls ached, and a throbbing pulse from his cock heated his entire body.

She was his life, his breath. He had fought to keep her free, untethered, for more years than she would ever know. The idea of her slipping from beside him was a knife in his gut. It fought with the pain lower down in his groin. Seeing her, without touching her, was a torture far worse than he ever imagined. Fire burned through his limbs; he needed to quench himself in her before it consumed him and drove him insane.

St. Petersburg slept, or at least the parts around the hotel. Loki and Miguel plied the dockside taverns searching for Sergei. The city contained more contrasts than Cara ever saw in London. The glittering excess of the nobles took her breath away while elsewhere on their vast estates, they maintained peasants like feudal lords. Alexander had emancipated the serfs, but freedom didn’t put bread in the stomach of a starving child. The situation reminded her of Louis XVI’s France and she wondered if Russia would face a similar uprising in her future.

Shaking thoughts of revolution from her head, she pondered the new friend she discovered in the ballroom of the Winter Palace. She recognised something in Natalie, a similar thread twined through both their lives, pulling them together at this particular moment in time. When Cara most needed someone to talk to and had no opportunity to reach her grandmother, Natalie appeared. Now her words swirled in her head.

Did he force himself on you?
No.

Did he demand you obey him?
No.

How did you come to be by his side?
I made my own way to him.

What if Natalie was right? What if Nate’s actions in marrying her, made her free, not chained? Perhaps she needed to look at the issue from another angle. She turned her gaze from the window, back inside the luxurious suite, and toward the bed large enough to contain a hungry man and his harem of companions.

Her breath hitched in her throat.

There’s another angle to things.

Nate lay naked, the blankets tossed aside. One hand wrapped around the thick length of his cock as he gave lazy strokes up and down the shaft. On the upstroke his thumb worked over the tip, spreading the glistening pre-cum on the down-stroke.

She tipped her head back against the window frame. Her gaze roamed up the hard abdominal muscles over his chest to a sharp, chiselled face. Blue eyes held molten heat when she met his gaze.

“Really, Nate?” she murmured.

His hand never ceased moving. “What is a man to do,
cara mia
? You won’t play, and I am no celibate monk.” Stroke up, stroke down. Her gaze held hostage by his. “You are the most beautiful, spirited, and fierce creature I have ever laid eyes on.”

She parted her lips in a sigh as a wave of desire and love washed over her. Lust and longing heated the room and enveloped her, the air heavy and sultry like before the rains hit in India. What was she to do? He dared marry her, and not tell her, but left her free to find her own way to him. She loved him to the depths of her core and desired him with a heat as consuming as the sun.

Call me Icarus, for it’s time to embrace the flames.

Her fingers went to the tie of her robe, loosening the knot so the two sides fell free. She allowed the fabric to drop from her shoulders. Leaving the pool of silk by the window, she walked naked to the bed as a primal growl ripped from Nate’s throat.

ara stretched her body alongside Nate’s larger one. Her muscles ached and lassitude flowed from every pore. He had loved her hard and furious. He took all she offered and demanded more, stroking her hotter than ever before she fractured under him. In the early hours of the morning he brought tears to her eyes when he took her with a gentle reverence. He worshipped her body with his lips and tongue until she thought she would rupture from the longing. A shiver of pleasured remembrance ran through her body.

“I want to stay here all day,” she murmured, relishing the feel of pressing bare skin against him.