This time he did pull against his bonds, his arms aching to hold her. She’d come so close to dying. It had been almost two years since he’d found her, broken and bleeding on the forest floor in the midst of a revolution-torn Russia.
She’d been barely conscious, blood soaking her dress from a dozen wounds. On the cusp of womanhood, her wealth and nobility of great fame in the area, he’d recognized her immediately and known that those who’d attacked her would seek her out to finish their evil work. If for no other reason than to claim the czar’s ransom of jewels with which she’d escaped, and that had glimmered from the torn lining of her clothes. Shushing her frightened whimpers, he’d gathered her into his arms and taken her back to his people.
Remembering that time, Rajko nuzzled the top of her head, smiling into her hair. Living and caring for his wounded angel, his feelings had grown beyond what he’d ever thought himself capable. But after her attack she’d become almost fearful, her demeanor quiet and shy. Trying to get more than the most timid of smiles from her had been a daily battle. Though his little mouse had furtively been every bit as fascinated by him, her eyes constantly following him around their camp.
Night after night he’d watch the beautiful young woman, who called herself Stasi, across the campfire as she wrote out her thoughts and secrets in a small diary. And, Rajko had believed, she wrote of her love and desire for him, knowing in his soul that she was a woman of deep hidden passions.
Hoping to win her heart, and release the pain that had crippled her with fear, he’d carved for her a lover’s box and placed it under one of the Gypsies’ most rare and potent charms. About the size of a cigar case, a lover’s box had become a popular trinket among the young gadje women who kept love letters or a journal filled with amorous yearnings for their beaux locked inside. The key was worn as a charm on a bracelet or necklace, a seductive symbol to any male by whom it was seen.
He’d designed the powerful spell so that whenever Stasi wrote her sexual longings and fantasies in her diary, she had only to lock the slim book inside the lover’s box and they would come true for her with the man she desired…none other, of course, than Rajko himself.
At the thought of just how well his gift had worked, his mouth slowly curved into what he had no doubt was an unholy grin and he chuckled wickedly.
Stasi lifted her head, and studied his amusement. She nipped his chin with her pearly little teeth. “Hmm, in my fantasy you were begging, not laughing,” she said. “I’ll have to do something about that.”
Rajko grunted. “I think you’ve done more than enough, Krasili.”
Stasi ran the curves of her nails down the inside of his raised arms, over his chest and down to the muscles that ran on each side of his lower stomach in a diagonal arrow to his groin. The air in his lungs hissed out in a rush.
Clearly fighting a smile, she assured, “You’re just upset at how you arrived. Next time I decide to write out my bondage dreams, I’ll be quite specific in the details,” she said, referring to the idiosyncrasies of the lover’s box.
Yes, the spell he’d created did indeed make her fantasies come true. This, however, left far too many options for fate to play with while getting all the key players into place. And fate seemed to enjoy riling up as much mischief and mayhem as possible along the way. There were times that, in spite of the spine-wringing benefits, Rajko wished she’d grow tired of his wildly successful gift and be happy to hide it away until some other poor woman needed its secrets.
“Next time you should try doing it the old-fashioned way. In a bed. Me on top. No frills. Just the basics. You don’t know. You might like it.”
Now it was her laugh that sounded wicked, and she slid to her knees before him. She laid her cheek against his thigh and her breath washed across him, stirring the dense hair at the base of his length.
“Oh, I don’t think so, my beautiful Gypsy king,” she said, pausing to give the skin between his groin and thigh a slow lick. He actually growled before cutting off the harsh noise escaping his throat. Her palms fit perfectly along the flat planes at the sides of his buttocks, rubbing and pressing, while her lips slipped beneath his heavy stones. She opened her warm, wet mouth impossibly wide then gently sucked as much of him in as she could take. He could hear her lips and tongue erotically working him, and he squeezed his eyes shut and dropped back his head.
His heart banged against his ribs. He had to swallow twice before he finally found his voice and asked, “Why not?”
As her small fist worked its way between his thighs and she pressed two fingertips to the smooth skin behind his sack, her lips loosened their hold on his flesh, though they still touched and brushed against him as she said, “Because we have the kind of passion that legends are made of.”
And with his gift of second sight, Rajko knew she was right and could only hope that the next poor man who found himself at the mercy of the lover’s box understood its true value and discovered the ultimate secret within…that the magic of fulfilling a woman’s desires was the only treasure worth having….
1
St. Petersburg, Russia, Present Day
MINERVA PARKER had done many things in her eighty years of life, but flat-out stealing a rather mediocre, inexpensive antiquity had not been one of them—until today. And damn if her theft of a few minutes ago hadn’t been pure, glorious fun. The last time she could remember enjoying herself as much had been decades ago during an excavation in Cairo when she’d fought off a group of bandits who’d tried to rob a grave she’d uncovered, with nothing more to defend herself than her twenty-two caliber and a whip.
Minerva was a treasure hunter, and had been for the past fifty years. In other words, long before Lara Croft had ever dreamed of raiding her first tomb, Minerva had been on the scene, chasing relics and getting herself into the sort of hair-raising adventures that would make the fictitious video game character’s exploits seem downright subdued.
Smiling to herself, though she made sure to make the expression suitably vacant and dotty, Minerva casually entered the lobby of one of the finest hotels in St. Petersburg, then crossed to the elevator and stepped inside. She didn’t bother to check behind her to see if she was being followed. No one paid attention to old people and she’d just left the legitimate owner of her ill-gotten gains, Max Stone, none the wiser to the robbery and enjoying a drink at the Czar’s Club, a seedy bar in downtown St. Petersburg.
Really, it was far too easy. Slip on a pair of reading glasses and hunch her shoulders a bit to give the appearance of being stooped with age, and people either completely ignored her or looked at her as if she’d just had her ticket punched for a one-way ride on the Alzheimer’s express. However, she was quite disappointed in Max. They might not exactly travel in the same circles, but, as the saying went, it was a small world out there and the antiquities community was no different. After running in to her since he was a rascally teen accompanying his father—a professor in archeology—from dig to dig, the ridiculously handsome scoundrel should have known better.
She was a force to be reckoned with at any age and those who forgot did so at their own peril. Of course he’d been understandably distracted by a seemingly unimportant curio, one of the many second-rate artifacts that a small-time Russian fence had been trying to hawk to him and the other hunters thronging the Czar’s Club. A quite normal occurrence for this time of year.
Every summer the International Antiquities League, or IAL, held a conference here in St. Petersburg. Though the weeklong convention brought together the leading experts from various universities and museums around the world, they weren’t the only ones to take over the picturesque city.
The symposium also attracted every student with enough euros to nab a rail pass, every private collector, treasure hunter—or, as some preferred, antiquities hunter—black market merchant, and hobbyist who wanted to play Indiana Jones.