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11:22 AM<br />
The realization that she was pregnant had come upon Tatiana Orlov all at once, in a single wave<br />
of nausea.<br />
She had tried, with a fair amount of success, to ignore the possibility for weeks, a selfdeception<br />
made easier by the fact that she had never fully stopped bleeding. For the last two cycles,<br />
her courses had been far lighter than usual, but she had passed it off to the grief she felt about the<br />
impending summer and her enforced separation from Konstantin.<br />
Speaking of Konstantin, he must not know. They had used precautions. Ineffective ones, as it<br />
turned out, but who was to say how he would react to this news? He might be driven to do something<br />
drastic, to assert some sort of claim on her, especially if he knew the child she carried was definitely<br />
his and not Filip’s.<br />
And speaking of Filip, he absolutely without question must not know. Two years ago, as they<br />
had traveled from their small village of Sugry to St. Petersburg, grains of rice from their hasty<br />
marriage still sticking to her hair, he had looked at her and said, “If there are no children from our<br />
union, you will understand this?”<br />
“I will celebrate it,” she had told him. “I don’t like children.”<br />
And he had thrown his head back and roared with laughter, saying “We shall suit each other<br />
well, little bird.”<br />
Precisely what he had meant with the remark about the children, at the time she did not know.<br />
Perhaps his manhood had been compromised by the injuries he had suffered in his service to the tsar.<br />
This too she might have welcomed - Filip and Tatiana were scarcely a love match - but their<br />
overnight stop at an inn on the outskirts of town had repeatedly and emphatically proven that such was<br />
not the case. Filip still had his virility, but evidently not his potency, for, just has he had predicted,<br />
two years of marriage had produced no pregnancy.<br />
Until now.<br />
Tatiana leaned against the wall of her bathroom, pressing a towel to her mouth and staring at her<br />
splotched face in the mirror as if it were the image of a stranger. This could not be. There were ways
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