Czytaj książkę: «The Unwilling Bride»

One

Someone was violently knocking on her front door, which Paige Stanford ignored. The phone had been ringing incessantly for the past hour, which she’d blithely ignored, too.

Growing up, her sisters used to tease her that she was so absentminded that she’d probably forget her own wedding. Paige had always vociferously resented that accusation. She wasn’t in the least absentminded. She simply had a gift for intense concentration.

Like now.

Heaven knew what time it was. Paige wasn’t sure when she had last eaten, either—and didn’t care.

Watery winter sunlight poured through the south windows on the bench counter and cement floor. Her whole workshop was strewn with veiners, gravers, chisels and pumice stones, grindstones and Eskimo stylers, drills and sanders and files. None of it would make a lick of sense to anyone but her. A stranger had no way to understand that sometimes it took chaos and a dusty mess to create a treasure of incomparable beauty.

Her eyes were riveted on the exquisite piece of jade. Weeks ago, the jade had been nothing more than a jagged lump of stone.

Now it was a finished cameo.

Paige couldn’t take her eyes off it. She’d made the cameo for her older sister, Gwen, whose birthday was six months away. Starting the project so far ahead was necessary, because it could so easily go wrong. There was no way of knowing, ever, what an innocuous lump of stone or shell would turn into until she started carving. Every stone held a mystery. Years ago she’d picked up an old saying in the sculpting world: “The truth is always there. You don’t have to find it. All you have to do is carve away what isn’t the truth.”

Discovering that truth was what she loved—and what challenged her—but Paige knew better than to claim credit for the result. Maybe it took talent and skill to reveal the stone’s secrets, but either there was beauty and truth intrinsic to the raw material or there wasn’t. As it happened, this particular piece of jade had hidden a damn near breathtaking treasure.

But holy kamoly. When she’d stepped back to study the finished cameo, it was as if a ghost had walked on her shadow. Her arms still had goose bumps, and her pulse had picked up an uneasy, disturbing beat. Her whole work studio seemed flooded with an eerie silence. She felt edgy and unsettled, almost…frightened.

Normally it took an avalanche to shake Paige—and she’d have been real annoyed at the avalanche. She couldn’t even remember being scared since she was sixteen, and that was an incident that had totally changed her life around. She was a practical, no-nonsense, unbudgeably tough cookie these days, and for Pete’s sake, she’d made hundreds of cameos. To have some strange emotional reaction to this one was not only stupid but downright confounding.

Someone thunderously knocked on her front door again. The sound registered like the vaguely annoying buzz of a gnat. She heard it. She just paid no attention.

With an impatient scowl, she examined and reexamined the piece from every angle. There had to be a reason the cameo was giving her the willies. Paige being Paige, wasn’t about to drop the problem until she figured it out.

The slab was a rough oval, perhaps ten inches across, and the image that had gradually emerged from the stone was simply a scene with a woman. Nothing frightening about her. Nothing weird. Like some primitive woods maiden, the woman was bent over a pond of water, gazing at her reflection with an expression as if she were discovering what she looked lite for the first time. She was bare, sitting with her legs tucked under her, the carving revealing full breasts and the slender slope of her spine. A mane of long, flowing hair streamed down her back. Her profile revealed a sensual classic beauty—high cheekbones, a slim nose, mysterious deep-set eyes. Something in those eyes spoke of innocence, a woman untouched by man, yet that innocence was a striking contrast to the inherent sexuality and sensuality in everything else about her.

Paige reached up and scratched her chin. The piece was good. Beyond good. It was totally wrong for her sister—Gwen was unshakably traditional and would have a conniption fit at the nudity. Paige never set out to carve the woman with bare boobs; it was just how the stone came out. Thankfully she had enough time to make an entirely different gift for her sister, but that problem shouldn’t take away from her own artistic sense of satisfaction. Without question, the cameo was one of the best things she’d ever done. She’d lucked out. The jade had magic. And it was always a thrill when she found a stone’s secrets were this wondrous, this precious.

Except for this time. For some absolutely ridiculous reason, her hands were trembling.

From her denim overalls to the calfskin Uggs on her feet to the long, practical braid hanging over her shoulder, Paige wasn’t the trembling type. All her life she’d been a rebel. As a teenager, she’d taken that too far, but as an adult she’d been grateful for those sturdy New England individualist genes. If she hadn’t had the guts to beat to her own drummer, she’d never have had the courage to take up cameo carving as a profession. Being a little weird didn’t bother her, but at the vast age of twenty-seven, she’d never been so ditzy as to believe in the fanciful or impossible.

The woman in the cameo appeared painfully familiar, when she couldn’t be. Paige could not possibly know that woman, that face, that scene. The stone revealed its own secrets, and those secrets had nothing to do with the artist—no sculptor could impose or force an idea that wasn’t inherent in the raw material. The woman had no special meaning for her. Couldn’t. Period. Pfft. End of subject.

So why couldn’t she shake this stupid, silly, and damnably eerie déjà vu feeling?

For a few moments, she was vaguely aware that the repetitive pounding on her front door had finally ceased. But then a new sound intruded-in the background. Apparently her unwanted visitor had entered the house, because she heard a voice calling out. A deep, booming, male voice—positively one she didn’t recognize—coming from the muffled distance of the front hall.

On a scale of one to ten, her interest in chitchatting with a stranger was a negative five. Paige figured it was an even-Steven chance the guy would take off if he found no one home, and she was hidden pretty good. The workshop had once been a porch off a spare bedroom, tacked on to the old Vermont farmhouse as if it were a surprise and handily buried at the end of a wing. She didn’t imagine a thief would choose to announce his presence with a big booming yell, so it was mighty unlikely the stranger represented any threat worth worrying about, and she was loath to break her concentration on the cameo if she had a choice.

It seemed she didn’t.

Faster than gossip could spread bad news, the intruder barreled through her workshop doorway. Paige only had a few seconds to form an impression before all hell broke loose.

A slim memory slapped in her mind of someone—maybe Joanne, the clerk at the grocery store?—mentioning that she had a new neighbor who’d rented the old Jasper place down the road. In a tiny Vermont town like Walnut Woods, Paige knew every face and kissing cousin in the whole burg, so this had to be the newcomer.

Positively, though, Joanne had neglected to mention that the man was genetic kin to a bear. Wild, shaggy black hair framed a ruddy face with high Slavic cheekbones. A thick, wiry beard hid his chin. His eyes were piercing black with the shine of wet onyx. She really only had time for one quick glance—she guessed his age in the early thirties, definitely a man and not a boy—and one fast eyeful took in the cossack boots, the tree-trunk solid torso that stretched well past six feet, and the red-and-black flannel jacket that was dusted with snow and flapping open.

The devil spotted her and started yelling. Roaring, more like. She couldn’t understand a word—she guessed the foreign language was Russian, because he seemed to be bellowing at her in all consonants—and offhand, she suspicioned he was communicating primarily in swear words. His voice volume was accompanied by wild pantomiming gestures indicating he wanted her to come with him. Now.

Paige never obeyed anyone—which he couldn’t know—but the man had to have a rich fantasy life to assume any woman with a brain would obediently take off with a madman of a stranger. Still, he was a strikingly sexy hunk. His breathtaking looks had no relevance to anything. It was just a point of interest; she didn’t run into a lot of men who could make a nun’s hormones sizzle. If she had to be interrupted, he was uncontestably the most fascinating intrusion she’d had in a blue moon.

She waved a hand in a soothing gesture, hoping to calm him down. It was more than obvious that the stranger was overheated, uncontrolled, and beside himself about something. Whatever upset him clearly had to be addressed before she had a prayer of getting rid of him.

“Do you speak English?” she asked.

That stopped him short. “Da…yes.” As if he just then recognized that he was speaking to her in the wrong language, he threw up his hands. The gesture was as exuberantly extravagant as everything else about him. Lowering his voice two volumes, he said clearly and succinctly, “My beautiful lambchop, your kitchen is on fire.”

She blinked.

No one—but no one—had ever called Paige “lambchop.” She’d never even heard such a sexist term in a decade. Whoever had taught the stranger English must either have been ancient or had a mischievous sense of humor—who knew if he realized what he was saying?—but then the meaning of his words registered.

She sniffed. Fast. Sometimes, when she worked with power tools, her workshop picked up a leftover, dusty smoke smell. But this scrabbling hint of smoke wasn’t at all the same odor. And it definitely wasn’t emanating from her workroom.

“Aw, shoot,” she muttered, and took off. Guilt pumped extra adrenaline through her veins. She hit the turn in the hall at a near gallop. No question she’d put a loaf of bread in the oven to bake earlier. She didn’t make her own bread often, but something about all the kneading and pounding and mess invariably inspired the creative juices when she was in a work slump. And it worked that morning, too. She clearly remembered flying back to her shop and diving back into her cameo project with renewed and furiously intense concentration.

She’d just sort of accidentally forgotten about the bread.

The bear tagged her heels as she tore down the white-stucco hall and rounded the corner toward the kitchen. Smoke belched through the room, thicker than cumulus clouds, and at a glance she could see flames shooting from the old wood stove.

A woman who lost track of time as often as she did learned to be an ace pro with emergencies. Her judgment call was quick and came from experience—this wasn’t a 911 problem requiring outside help. It was just a run-of-the-mill ordinary disaster. Coughing—and calling herself a number of colorful names—she raced toward the old-fashioned broom closet and yanked out the giant fire extinguisher.

For an instant there, she’d forgotten she had a side kick. The stranger suddenly leaped into action, as if his first concern had been rescuing any humans in the house, and his second was an automatic assumption that he was needed to take charge. The bear grabbed the extinguisher from her hands and then pushed her—right in the chest!—out of harm’s way through the door.

He shouted something at her, but it was in consonants again. He tried a second time. “I need…cloth! You got cloth thingie?”

She interpreted that he wanted hot pads before opening the oven, but he found the pads on his own. They were in plain sight on the counter, just like about everything else in the old fashioned blue-and-white kitchen. Paige firmly believed in a clean, neat, everything-put-away cooking space. She just never got around to doing it. Good thing, this time, because he found the hot pads and hurled the flaming bread pan in the snow in a matter of seconds. Then he pulled the pin on the extinguisher and let it rip inside the oven.

The fire was out and the hoopla over almost faster than she could spit. The kitchen was still choking from the stench of the burned bread and acrid extinguisher spray, but even that was dissipating quickly. Her stranger hadn’t slowed down yet. One window was already cracked open—her wood stove could toast a small country if there was an outlet for the heat—but now he threw up the sashes on all the rest of the windows. Nice, freezing, seventeen-degree Vermont winter air poured into the room like a blessing.

Her heart was still slamming, so it took a few seconds to get her breath back and assess the damages. The ancient wood stove had a fresh, new coat of blacking, but the old baby had survived fires before. A few more soot stains only added to its character. For the hundredth time she consoled herself that her gift for intense concentration was a wonderful thing, not a dismally disgusting character flaw. Her life would just run smoother if she paid an eensy bit more attention to real life. Thank God, though, it really didn’t appear that there was any serious harm done.

The bear seemed to reach the same conclusion. He whipped around and pinned her with a studying stare. “You okay, fruitcake?”

She blinked. Again.

“Ah. Fruitcake is wrong word, I know.” He thought fast. “Cupcake. You okay, my cupcake?”

She dry-washed her face with a hand. It didn’t seem the time to suggest some changes in his vocabulary to adjust for twentieth century feminist American values. Not before they’d even been introduced. And not while he was beaming at her with a big, brawny, unnervingly sexy grin that somehow made her…rattled.

“I saw smoke from my house. Just little bit, coming from you one open window. Good thing I saw that, huh, lambchop? All gone now. No hurt done. You okay, you house okay, happy to be of rescue.” He held out his hand. “I am Stefan Michaelovich. Your neighbor.”

“Paige Stanford. And I’m grateful that you spotted the smoke so quickly. Thank you for, um, rescuing me.” Returning his handshake was just basic manners. Paige had no idea how such an innocuous, automatic courtesy turned into something else.

His palm clapped against hers and then just laid there—he didn’t pump or shake; he just held her hand in a capturing squeeze. Perhaps people shook hands differently in Russia? She had no problem with that. It was just that the connection was tighter than a plug in a socket, and she wasn’t prepared for the electric shock.

His hand was swallowing bigger than hers, and warm. His grip had all the muscular power of a physically active man, yet his skin was smooth and unscarred, his nails pared short and clean. By contrast, her hands were a disgrace. Nothing new. Unavoidably she picked up calluses and cuts from working so many hours with chisels and carving tools. She never thought about her hands—who cared?—but she was suddenly, strangely conscious of every knuckle and nail, every surface of texture that touched his.

Seconds spun out. She kept expecting him to release her hand. Instead his eyes charged over her face as the warmth of his palm seeped into hers. A clock ticked somewhere. Radiators clanked on. Cold, sharp air gushed from the windows, rapidly obliterating the last of the smoke, and still his gaze honed on her face, stalking every feature as if fascinated by her eyes and nose and mouth.

She had an ordinary nose. Plain old brown eyes. An average mouth with no lipstick or gloss. Her bulky denim overalls entirely concealed her figure, and by this time in the day the single braid dangling down her back was undoubtedly sloppy and askew.

Years and years ago, Paige couldn’t find a skirt tight enough, a sweater skimpy enough, but that was back when she’d been a wild, reckless girl who was determined to test and tease her new feminine powers on every passing boy. She’d wiped every trace of that teenage girl off the map. Fiercely. Completely. Eons ago. There was nothing suggestive about her appearance now—absolutely nothing.

Yet the stranger seemed to find something in her looks that captivated him. He wouldn’t stop looking at her, his attention absorbed, as if he were learning things about her from the nest of their palms and the look of her face. Things she didn’t know. Things she didn’t see when she looked in a mirror.

“Mr. Michaelovich—” she began uneasily.

He swiftly corrected her. “Stefan.”

“Stefan, then. I—” But abruptly she forgot whatever she’d planned to say, because that simply, he released her hand and she was free again. Those few seconds of unnerving silence might never have been. The way he looked at her, the brush of those midnight black eyes on her face and body, the electric plug of awareness between his palm and hers…she must have, simply must have, imagined it.

She drew herself up to her full five foot seven inches, and mentally scrambled for something intelligent and neighborly to say. There wasn’t a man in Walnut Woods that she didn’t get along with; she never had a problem relating with a guy one-on-one—and he certainly wasn’t going to be the exception. “So…you’re living in the old Jasper place?”

“Yes. Just down your road.”

Since that seemed to awkwardly end the conversation, she scrambled for something more. “Are you here with your wife and family?”

A slow waltz of a smile. He was pleased she’d asked. “No wife. No small ones. But the Borges in town—they are family, third cousins, maybe four. They are how I came here, to your Vermont, instead of L.A. or Georgia or Texas. This was only place I had a family from Russia, so good to start from.”

“You plan to stay?”

“To stay in America—oh, yes. I am already studying to become citizen. But am only living in Walnut Woods for couple months, temporary until I figure out jobs and where best to settle. My work is physics. For now I have computer hooked up, real cool, real groovy, can do much work this way. In the long time, though, I will need to find my own kind.”

Although his accent was thick, he wasn’t that hard to understand. She mentally translated “in the long time” to mean “in the long run” and almost chuckled at his use of the ancient “groovy” slang. It was just his last comment that she couldn’t comprehend. “By your own kind, do you mean other Russian people?”

“No, no. Being Russian, not important. French, German, Japanese, would make no difference, either. I mean finding other people in physics, like me, a lab or university where we talk the same work. This is why I come here. Important, this freedom and right to talk with each other. We have many, many problems affecting whole planet. Cannot fix these nature of problems unless we all have freedom to talk together. So I come to America to melt in your pot.” He hesitated. “Have I said it right, about melt in the pot?”

“Right enough. The phrase is ‘melting pot’. People say that America is a melting pot of different cultures.” He sounded like a hard-core idealist, she mused, which somehow didn’t surprise her any more than his physicist background. Never mind the over-whelming shoulders and that wild beard. He only appeared to be an uncivilized bear at first glance. He hadn’t missed anything yet. Those black eyes were shrewd, swift, sharp with intelligence—and maybe saw too much for a woman’s own good.

“I struggle. Reading the language, no problem, and the words in my work, I know. But talking everyday words…” He shook his head with an exuberant grin. “Your language can make me tired quick.”

“You’re doing fine,” she assured him.

“Nyet. Will take time. But I get there. Will be happy when I get past all this struggling part.” He shifted on his feet and looked around again. “Well…you want help cleaning up this mess?”

“No, no. I can handle it myself.”

“Could have had big fire. You work hard concentrating, you forget things like fire, huh? No one else here? Like husband?”

“No, I live alone.” Everyone in town knew she lived by herself, so there was no point in being less than honest.

“Hmm.” She wasn’t sure what he was assessing with that long, lingering hmm, but his gaze was suddenly all over her face again. Then, with one swift move, he pushed away from the counter and loped for the door. “Well, I go home. But you know now I live close if you need help, yes?”

“Yes. And that’s very kind.” She followed him to the door and had just grabbed for the knob when he suddenly pivoted around.

“If it’s an okeydoke, I would sure like to get it on with you, babe.”

Her jaw had to drop a full inch.

“Uh-oh. I say something to offend? I mean to say…hope to see you again. Hope you might put up with my learning new English sometimes? Be like neighbors, friends?”

“I…sure.”

A flash of another high-voltage grin, and then—finally—he was gone. Paige closed the door behind him with a massive sigh of relief. She shook her head. Of course he hadn’t meant that “get it on with you, babe” in a sexual context.

Stefan was obviously having some problems coping with a new language. That someone had taught him a ton of colloquial expressions wasn’t helping. He undoubtedly didn’t realize what he was saying.

The room was freezing—no surprise, with all the open windows—and Paige abruptly hustled to shag them all down and latch them again. When she reached the far south pane, though, she yanked down the window and then hesitated. From that view she could still see him, his shaggy head thrown back as he chugged down her snowy driveway, past the old stone fence until he crossed the road out of sight.

Vermont was Robert Frost country, and her stone fence was typical of a New England neighborhood that strongly believed Frost’s philosophy about good fences making good neighbors. Her friends and neighbors all knew she was a hopeless hermit—a happy hermit—and respected her workaholic habits. Everyone knew better than to interrupt her workday.

Somehow she didn’t think the gregarious Russian had ever read Frost.

As she ambled back toward her workshop, she told herself it didn’t matter. They weren’t likely to run into each other that often. Positively, though, it would be cruel to be unfriendly when they did. If he blithely ran around calling women “babe” and “cupcake” and boisterously suggesting “they get it on,” some woman was going to lynch him.

It wouldn’t kill her to give him a little language coaching. He had to be lonely, trying to adjust to a new country, a new place, new ways.

Paige knew about loneliness. She knew all about having trouble fitting in. Old memories suddenly pushed through her mind like bubbles rising to the surface of a pond. She pushed them back down.

At twenty-seven, she was secure and content with her life-style. Maybe she’d once been as flighty as a fickle wind, but that unfortunate period in her life was long over. These days, nothing budged her from her steady course—except, of course, for that dadblasted strange cameo waiting for her attention in the workshop. Her mind turned to her sisters and to the work waiting for her.

Her new neighbor was about as restful as a tornado. But he was basically just a stranger passing through. No one she needed to worry about. No one who was going to affect her life.

Paige had survived tornadoes before.