Read Online You Belong to Me by Johanna Lindsey - Free Book Online

to catch up to her. But it was Stenka Razin who drew up beside her and glared at her because of the mad ride he’d had trying to keep up with her.
    “You were trying to kill us both, right? Or just the horses?”
    “I was trying to outrun a few demons, if you must know,” she replied.
    “Any I know?”
    “My father, for one.”
    “Ah, another fight with your papa,” he said with a knowing grin.
    Of the three Razin brothers, Stenka was the one who didn’t have a serious bone in his body. He loved life and found pleasure, and more often than not humor, in just about every aspect of it. Whenever Alexandra was angry, or hurt, or just plain moody, he always managed to make her laugh. She was afraid he wasn’t going to manage it this time if he tried.
    His brother Timofee was only slightly less carefree. The twins were so alike it was uncanny, and not just in their identical features. They were twenty-seven, had the black hair and blue eyes that ran in their family, and wanted the exact same things, including women, which was why they constantly competed with each other—and fought. It didn’t take much to set those two off, and it wasn’t unusual for one or the other to sport a black eye or a split lip from their tussles.
    “I don’t know why you let these arguments with your papa upset you, since you always win,” Stenka remarked.
    “I didn’t win,” she mumbled.
    “You didn’t win?”
    His deliberately incredulous look didn’t bring the grin he was looking for. “I didn’t win!”
    “I suppose there is a first time for everything.” He sighed. “So what didn’t you win?”
    “He has betrothed me to a Cardinian.”
    There was nothing feigned about his new incredulous look. “He wouldn’t do that to you.”
    “He did it fifteen years ago.”
    “Ah, when you were still a baby,” he said, as if that explained it.
    “A ten-year-old baby?”
    He waved his hand dismissively. “So what are you going to do?”
    “Honesty would be the best strategy, I think,” she said matter-of-factly. “I’ll simply tell this Cardinian count that I don’t want to marry him.”
    Stenka gave her an assessing look that ran from her fur-topped head to her booted feet and, in his opinion, passed over a great many assets in between. “He could be as homely as hell, take one look at you, and think he’s died and gone to heaven. Your honesty won’t matter in that case.”
    Alexandra groaned over that possibility. “You aren’t helping, Stenka.”
    “Was I supposed to?”
    “It would be appreciated.”
    “Well, then,” he said cheerfully, “Timofee and I could ambush him, beat him up, and warn him off.”
    “Except he’s probably arriving even as we speak,” she predicted, then added, just in casehe’d mistaken her response to his suggestion as permission, “and we’re not going to beat up a king’s cousin—except as a last resort.”
    He whistled softly. “A king ’s cousin? So why don’t you marry him?”
    Her midnight-blue eyes took on a deep purple hue when she glared, which she was doing now. “Because I happen to love Christopher.”
    “ Him! ” Stenka said with such derision that she nearly winced. They all knew about her Englishman and they’d been happy for her—until the years had started to pass with no ring forthcoming for her finger. “That no-good laggard!”
    “I don’t want to hear it.”
    “You’re sure?”
    “Yes.”
    “But it would do me a world of good to get it off my chest.”
    His expression was so earnest, she couldn’t help chuckling. He grinned, having finally gotten the result he was after.
    “So let’s go and meet your betrothed,” he suggested. “You never know, you might like him.” When she just snorted, he added, “It’s not impossible.”
    “But it wouldn’t matter.”
    He didn’t have to ask why, and that was the hell of it, Stenka thought, feeling disgust now. Their Alex was too damn loyal, even when her loyalty was misplaced. And her papa had