This Fierce Splendor by Iris Johansen Page B

blue-gray eyes were so strange. Blazing fiercely, yet ice cold. Her throat tightened and her breath seemed to stop. It was a moment before she could force herself to speak. “No,” she whispered.
    Then, incredibly, he smiled. It was a smile filled with joyous savagery, lighting his dark face with a wild, wicked beauty. “Good.”
    He turned and in another moment had disappeared through the swinging doors of the saloon.

5

    “Y ou should not have come here.”
    Elspeth looked away from the swinging doors to see Andre Marzonoff standing before her table. His plump face was sober and his hazel eyes concerned. “You made him very angry. For a moment, when he first saw you, he reminded me of my cousin, Nicholas. It is not safe to make such men angry.”
    Elspeth tried to smile and found her lips were trembling. Her heart pounded jerkily with a queer sort of panic. Dominic’s eyes had been so … strange.
    “Well, it’s done now.” She rose to her feet. “I can’t turn back the clock. We’ll just have to see what comes of it.” She glanced around the room and suddenly shivered with uneasiness. She couldn’t locate the reassuring face of Ben Travis in the crowd, but the other men in the room were looking at her with curiosity, insolence, even anticipation. There was none of the amusement she had recently encountered on any of the faces surrounding her, and she had a sudden memory of Dominic Delaney’s remark regarding the line no lady could venture to cross. She turned toward the swinging door. “I believe I’ll go back to the hotel. Good night, Andre.”
    “I will accompany you. I have no further interest in this place at present, and you should not be on the streets alone.”
    She would feel safer outside on those streets than inhere, she thought nervously. The atmosphere as well as the attitude of the men gazing at her held a vague element of menace. “Thank you, that would be kind of you.” She knew it was no real sacrifice for Andre to leave the saloon now that the object of his almost boyish hero worship had left the premises, but she appreciated the courtesy. She had no desire to be unescorted at this moment.
    The hot stillness of the night hit her with renewed force as she went through the swinging doors. She heard a sudden release of conversation and laughter in the saloon behind her.
    “He has been most patient with you,” Andre Marzonoff continued as he helped her from the wooden sidewalk to the dirt of the street. “You must realize a lady has certain limitations she must observe. In St. Petersburg a woman who acted as you have would be ostracized, not only by society but by her own family.”
    “Then it’s fortunate that I am not in St. Petersburg, isn’t it?” Elspeth was beginning to be a trifle annoyed by Andre. The incident in the Nugget had been upsetting enough without having to contend with his sermonizing. Over the past few days she had developed a half-impatient fondness for the young Russian. He displayed an almost pathetic eagerness for acceptance from these rough westerners which touched even as it bewildered her. Why didn’t he go home to Russia where he belonged, instead of attempting to be accepted in a society that was so foreign to him? If he stayed a dozen years, he would never be a man of Dominic Delaney’s ilk, no matter how much he strove to emulate him. And it was more than obvious he was trying to emulate him in every possible way. He had discarded his elegant city apparel, and was dressed in the close-fitting trousers, white shirt, and black string tie that Dominic favored. Even his gray waist-length suede jacket was similar to the one she had seen Dominic wear when she first had been introduced to him.
    “Why do you not go home?” she asked gently.“You’re a man who is accustomed to a different way of life from the one they live here. Wouldn’t you be more comfortable with people and places and customs that are familiar?”
    He shook his head. “I was