Free Seized by Love by Susan Johnson

served him
well in the past. Together they returned to the lodge to satisfy the desires
that Alisa's lush body had stirred within them. Nikki listened to their hasty
retreat through the underbrush, then turned to the dismayed woman.
    "Forgive me, Alisa,
for the crude stupidity of my friends," he apologized softly.
    As Nikki watched her silent
face, he saw a tear well out of one corner of her eye and trace a course down
her rosy cheek.
    Damn them, damn them to
hell, he thought. Of all the abominable luck!
    "I'm sorry,"
Nikki said aloud, and moved toward Alisa as if to offer what comfort he could.
    He'd had vague misgivings
and qualifications about this seduction from the beginning, and even more so
after their second encounter, but he'd brushed them aside. For Nikki had always
lived unhampered by restrictions, ungoverned by rationale, totally unconcerned
with consequences. Now he found himself uncomfortably conscious of being the
cause of Alisa's pain and humiliation. He felt guilty, and this guilt upset him
because it was foreign to his nature.
    In addition to the guilt,
he was smolderingly furious at his wretched friends. If he'd been honest with
himself, he could have understood their puzzled reaction to his rage. For years
the men had participated in many "shared" experiences with women. How
were Cernov and Illyich to know that in this rare instance they were not
supposed to join the fun?
    Alisa cringed from Nikki's
sympathetic gesture. He hastily stayed his hand in midair.
    "Please go," she
whispered.
    "Alisa, let me
explain," Nikki began, forcibly struck by the misery in her tear-filled
eyes.
    "Please," she
remonstrated in a barely audible voice. "Just go, you've had your
amusement." Her body involuntarily shuddered. "Just go!" she
cried hysterically.
    "Very well,"
Nikki said stiffly. He dressed swiftly, apologizing formally when he withdrew
his shirt from her naked form and replaced it with one of her petticoats.
    "Please accept my
deepest apologies, Madame," he said in a clipped, cool voice as he bowed
briefly to her recum-bent form, her eyes staring, unseeing, averted from his.
Then he walked quickly away, flushed with frustration and anger.
    Quite suddenly, all the
light went out of Alisa's day. She wept and wept, hugging her petticoat to her
as though to keep herself from breaking apart from the great racking sobs of
humiliation. She wasn't ashamed of the men seeing her unclothed, she could survive
that; she was ashamed for wanting Nikki so, for willingly giving her body to
him; he hadn't had to force her, she had wanted him. And she wept for that
capitulation, for her loss of will. Strong and resolute enough to withstand an
intolerable man and marriage for six years, determined enough to patiently plan
and wait for escape from a husband she despised, she'd been brought low by an
unfathomable desire for a man with a reputation for treating women casually.
Who at this very moment, no doubt, considered her simply another pleasant
diversion.
    Alisa's life hadn't been
happy since the death of her parents; everything she'd loved and cherished had
been swept away in a few days when influenza had claimed both her parents
within hours of each other. The raging fever that had held them in its
tenacious, deadly grip had never broken. Her lovely, gay mother and quiet,
scholarly father had eased into a coma from which they'd never wakened. Alisa
had often wished in the years following that she, too, could have died, but her
young, strong body had defeated the disease.
    Then so shortly after,
indeed quite improperly so, the incredulous demand of her hand in marriage by
old Mr. Forseus, arranged, he'd said, by her father. Unthinkable, but
apparently true, since her father's signature was on the document.
    If she'd not had Katelina
to love after that first year, a child to bring joy to her, she wouldn't have
had the strength or courage to continue her existence. Katelina, her darling
Katelina, her only solace, had given her reason