Free Seized by Love by Susan Johnson Page A

considerably more polite choice of words, Nikki convinced his young cousin Aleksei to repair to the town house in Petersburg for a few days until Nikki joined him. The Gypsy girls were promptly ousted as well, piled into a carriage in which they contentedly counted their money all the way back to the city.
    Nikki immediately shut himself into the music roomwith two bottles of brandy and a brooding anger that turned into a brooding melancholy by the bottom of the second bottle.
    He roared for his musicians and commanded they play sorrowful, quiet Finnish love songs, the old familiar songs of Nikki’s childhood. His mother’s Tzigane ancestors had settled north of Lake Ladoga over a hundred years ago, when a grateful noble had deeded them a large tract of land and citizenship in return for having preserved an only son’s life from a runaway horse. Nikki’s paternal grandfather had begun construction of Le Repose, northeast of Viipuri, in 1810; the country estate was to become the favorite seat of the Kuzan family. Nikki had been reared there and grew up in an atmosphere of Karelian tradition.
    Play “Kalliolle Kukulalle,” he would sullenly mutter every second song, and the musicians would lapse again into the sad minor key and play the single melody Nikki wanted to hear.
    Kalliolle kukulalle

Rakenan minā majani

Sine hajan oman ystávān

Asuman minuu ransani
.
    The poignant lyrics spoke of a lover bringing his sweetheart to a secluded forest cabin and plunged Nikki still deeper into an agonizing, gloomy depression. He couldn’t dislodge visions of Alisa from his mind. They had shared a sexual response that had struck even the surfeited, world-weary Prince as rare and unique. She was a beauty, unutterably so, artless, dazzling, sensual. He
must
see her again!
    At one o’clock in the morning Nikki’s glazed, drunken eyes lit with a brilliant flash of an idea. He impatiently waved the musicians away and called for his steward. After sending four riders out with a message for his father’s gardener,Nikki, eminently satisfied with his resourcefulness, fell into a drunken sleep, having left adamant orders to be wakened when the messengers returned.
    Fifty versts (33 miles) away, in the sunny breakfast room of Le Repose, Prince Mikhail Petrovich Kuzan’s principal seat and model estate of 172,000 dessiatins (484,400 acres), Nikki’s parents were enjoying the early morning companionship of a breakfast à deux.
    “What in the world is Nikki up to?” his mother curiously inquired. She was a petite, dark-haired Tzigane woman, still lovely and slim at fifty.
    “Need you ask?” his father replied dryly. “When Nikki strips our greenhouses of ten dozen orchids and twenty baskets of strawberries, I would hazard a guess your dear boy has found some woman who adores orchids and has a passion for strawberries. Let us at least hope this sudden passion for strawberries does not signify yet another
enceinte
mistress. He has populated the world quite adequately already with his bastards.”
    “Now, dear, don’t be too harsh on Nikki,” Princess Kuzan remonstrated gently. “He’s supporting them all quite satisfactorily, even lavishly, and need I remind you that you quite put him in the shade by your reckless escapades until I tamed you into the joys of domesticity. The rumor mills put his streak of wildness at your door, Misha my dear, for as you well know, the Kuzan bloodlines have long possessed a reputation for vice,” she finished sweetly.
    Nikki could do no wrong in the eyes of his loving mother. He could be wild and a hellion, but her love was unconditional and she served as a conciliatory influence on the occasions when father and son’s obdurate temperaments clashed.
    “I could perhaps argue about who tamed whom, andfrom whence the taint of wickedness came, but I politely defer to you as a gentleman should,” old Prince Kuzan graciously replied, smiling at his wife. Even after thirty-four years, she continued to