Her favorite village had been Sitka, once the capital of Russian America. At twelve, she’d looked across the gray, frozen Bering Sea and dreamed of the distant, ancient, mysterious land of the tsars. When wooden Orthodox churches were being hacked out of the wilderness in Alaska, St. Petersburg was already a century old, built on the orders of a tsar. She’d dreamed of someday seeing the palatial Russian city, the onion domes of its cathedrals shining with silver and gold. But Bree never dreamed she’d come here as the cosseted mistress of a prince. For two days now, she’d been living in his three-story palace outside the city, built like a fortress on a hill, overlooking the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea. She’d spent her days shopping in the most exclusive boutiques of the city, accompanied by his bodyguards and his chauffeur. She spent her nights in Vladimir’s bed. He came to her in the middle of the night, waking her, making love to her in darkness, setting her body ablaze from the inside out.
