The Unwilling Bride

“And I bet you never had borscht? Caviar? Solyanka? We will have to fix all those missing experiences in your life very soon.”

Food, he was talking about. Not love. Not sex. It had to be the hundred-proof liquid sloshing in her mind that made her suddenly think of “missed experiences” in a context with Stefan.

Vodka might be medicine for the soul in Russia, but it wasn’t for her. Positively she was never touching the stuff again if it made her feel this…goofy.

Stefan had been nothing but friendly. A lonely man in a strange country, seeking some basic companionship. Even now, as he yanked on his alpaca jacket, the front hall sconce light illuminated his genial smile, the crinkle of laugh lines around his eyes. It was just his powerful stature that made her five-seven seem defenselessly small. Maybe he was hopelessly gregarious, but he hadn’t done or said one thing to make her worry that he was anything but a kind man. A safe man. A good guy.

“Snowing again,” he noted, as he pulled worn leather gloves from his pockets.

“We’ll probably have a couple more inches by morning.” She hugged her arms under her chest. The front hall was drafty cold. He was obviously ready to leave, so she thought he was just turning toward her to say goodbye. And she saw him bend his head, but she also saw his kind, safe almost-familiar-now smile.

It never occurred to her that a kiss was coming.

It never occurred to her that he wanted to kiss her.

Her mind scrabbled to recall if she’d sent him any come-on body language signals. But of course she hadn’t. Paige hadn’t sent any men those willing body language signals since she was sixteen. And lightning storms weren’t supposed to happen in the blizzard month of January.

She wasn’t prepared, never even got her arms unfolded before they were trapped between his body and hers. A big hand cupped her head. His lips touched hers, more gentle than a whisper, his mouth unbearably soft against the tickle of his rough, wiry beard.

The taste of him was foreign. Alien. Drugging sweet and disturbing. Her pulse zoomed like a skater on the ice for the first time, unpredictable and unsteady and flying way too fast.

That first skimming kiss turned deeper. His mouth rubbed against hers, testing, exploring the texture of her lips, savoring the taste of her. You’d think he hadn’t kissed a woman in the last hundred years. You’d think he just discovered a secret treasure, and her senses wrapped around the smell of leather and alpaca wool and the male warmth radiating from his body.

The speed of light was fast, but not half as fast as the speed of darkness. It had been so long since she’d kissed anyone. She’d forgotten. The exhilaration sweeping through her pulse was more frightening than any danger. She’d forgotten what it was like to feel that innocent burst of yearning, to feel that lusty dizzy spring-fever high, to feel that heady excitement of wanting. Or maybe she’d never known. She’d kissed boys, not men. Never a man who knew how to kiss like he did. Never him.

She meant to bolt, not close her eyes. She meant to push him away, not stand stock-still as if she were caught up in a spell of enchantment. She wasn’t wild anymore. She’d slayed and buried every hint of wildness in her heart, years and years ago, yet it was as if she’d frozen those emotions instead of truly killing them off, because they seeped through her now, billowing loose like a parachute in the wind.

It was his fault. If she could just get a lungful of oxygen, she knew she could catch control again. Yet his thumb grazed the line of her jaw, in a caressing gesture as potent as tenderness. And his kiss turned openmouthed, claiming her response as if it already belonged to him, making her li’ps ache and her head feel thrumming dizzy.

She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. And then, she didn’t have to. He lifted his head. There was a fire in his eyes that hadn’t been there before, sharp and black and hot, yet he pushed back a strand of her hair with a gentle touch. His gaze scored her face, studying her eyes, her mouth, the flush burned in her cheeks that he’d put there. And then he smiled.

“Paige…” He dropped his hand and stepped toward the door, as if nothing but leaving had ever been on his mind. The sudden glint of humor in his eyes, in fact, had the devil’s own mischief. “So you know. That was not about oppression or sex object. That was just Russian way of saying thank you, good night.”

That was it. When he opened the door, a harsh sting of snow blasted in, but then he was gone.

She threw the latch and hooked the chain bolt, unsure whether she wanted to shoot him—or laugh. It would seem she’d gotten one language lesson through to him, if he understood the concepts of “oppression” and “sex object” well enough to joke about them.

She couldn’t seem to laugh, though. Her heart was still slamming too hard. Even when he’d completely disappeared out of sight down the driveway, her pulse was still bouncing off the walls.

That Russian didn’t need language to communicate a damn thing.

Abruptly she realized how late it was. She gathered up the dishes from the living room, then started turning off lights through the house. The last room was her workshop, and when she switched off the overhead from the doorway, her eyes instinctively flew to the jade cameo.

The light couldn’t help but draw her. She’d stashed the jade cameo on a shelf, still unsure what she was going to do with it. But even with the whole downstairs dark, the bright snowy night caught the soft iridescent glow of the stone. It was the nature of jade to appear lit from within, and she found herself staring at the carved woman in profile, frowning hard, not really seeing her but simply thinking.

She used to be wild and impulsive, once upon a time. She used to be reckless, giddy on life and her newly developing powers as a woman, teasing every boy she could attract. And it was never far from her conscience, that a sixteen-year-old boy had once paid the cost for her thoughtlessness and insensitivity.

She’d changed. Completely. Her life was selfdiscipline, work, responsibility. Possibly she was a teensy bit absentminded—hey, there was no way to wipe every single flaw from her character—but she felt good about the woman she’d turned into. She hadn’t hurt anyone. She’d been very careful of that. Her sisters said she was too tough on herself, but Paige stood on her own two feet, strong and sturdy.

Alone.

Safe.

Alone and safe had been paired in her mind for a decade, as natural as pairing peanut butter and jelly. Nothing she’d questioned…until tonight and a wild, wayward kiss that had come out of nowhere.

Around that unpredictable Russian, Paige thought darkly, she had better watch her p’s and q’s.

That settled, she pivoted on her heel and went up to bed.

Three

Paige was too busy working to think about Stefan.

Her legs were wrapped around the spokes of the work stool, her hands around a cup of fragrant Darjeeling tea. At five in the morning—when she had just as determinedly not been thinking about Stefan—she ’d remembered the coral.

The chances of her falling back to sleep wouldn’t make bookie’s odds, and the coral was an excellent excuse to bolt out of bed. So she’d charged downstairs in old black sweats and bare feet, and burrowed through all the boxes of raw materials until she found it.

Sipping her tea—from the second pot, now—she studied the crooked, jagged wedge of coral shell with ruthless concentration. She still recalled the sly, sneaky grin on the clerk who sold her the piece—he’d been real sure he was pawning off a worthless piece on a rookie. Maybe the clerk was an ace pro at textbook geology, but he didn’t know cameos and he didn’t know coral.

She did.

In the middle of the night, when she’d been fighting to get that blasted Russian off her mind, she remembered the coral, remembered the break in the outer layer of the shell, the rich cherry red color the Italians called rosso scuro.

Coral was almost always uniform in color. Finding a piece with two shades was crying rare—and a cameo carver’s dream. Further, the coral that mattered was gem material—true precious coral—not the stuff that came off from reefs in shallow seas, but the stuff that came from down deep. This piece came from down deep, off the coast of Sardinia. No holes, no flaws, no cracks. The shadings were rich and true It’d make a pendant, nothing bigger, but the potential for treasure was there—and hopefully a perfect treasure for her sister, Gwen.

Paige gulped another sip of tea. Energy was biting at her harder than hunger. Her fingers itched to pick up a chisel and start working. But she had to know the piece of coral more intimately than her own heartbeat before touching it. Nothing was more fragile than coral. Nothing as easily broken.

Like her sister, she thought.

Her gaze strayed to the jade cameo on the top shelf. She’d really been stupid. It had always been a mistake, trying to make a present for Gwen in jade. Coral was so much more like her. Probably from its first discovery, coral had been symbolic in medicine and magic. A romantic talisman of beauty and the kind of beauty one put in everyday life, which was exactly like Gwen. Hopelessly romantic. Fragile. Easily hurt, easily scarred, but beautiful on the inside—if anyone could ever get her to believe it.

Too restless to sit, Paige popped off the stool and started twisting the gooseneck stem of her work lamp so the light better illuminated every angle of the coral, her mind on Gwen—and Abby.

Paige had been badly worried about both sisters since Christmas. Generations of Stanfords had lived in the old Vermont homestead until the clan scattered—Abby and Gwen had grown up, moved away, and then their parents had retired to Arizona. The whole crew had argued with Paige about living alone in the old-fashioned, heat-eating monster, but this was home, the roots of the whole family, and they all still gathered here for the holidays. They had this past Christmas, too, but with mom and dad there, both her older sisters had kept a protective lid on any serious conversations.

Paige didn’t need the specifics to recognize that both Gwen and Abby were stressed out and unhappy. Growing up, they’d all fought like snakes and mongeese. Still did. Gwen had made one man her whole life; Abby was all ambition and drive; and Paige was the unconventional rebel. Bickering and teasing was probably inevitable when none of them ever had one single thing in common, much less came close to sharing each others’ goals or dreams.

It didn’t matter. It never mattered. They didn’t have to understand each other to love. The bond between sisters had always been unshakable. Paige always knew when one of them was unhappy. The reverse was just as true. And she’d been frustrated and worried ever since Christmas, that her sisters were having some kind of trouble in their personal lives that she couldn’t do a damn thing about.

A cameo wasn’t going to solve Gwen’s problems. The need was in Paige, to create something for her sister, something that had meaning; something that expressed love. Impatiently she propped her hands on her hips, fiercely concentrating. All raw materials looked like nothing in the beginning. The coral, no different than other shells or stones she worked with, had a secret to tell. It was up to her to find the truth.

The frown on her forehead suddenly eased. Blood started waltzing through her veins. She had it. Automatically her fingers fumbled blind, yanking open the drawer on the left, groping for the India ink pen and the leather-lined vise. Oh, man, it was there; she saw exactly what she wanted to do—

From nowhere, a scraping sound interrupted her concentration. A grating scrape, followed by a mysteriously soft whoomph. Her head shot up. Both sounds came from the outside, but definitely close enough to the house to be unignorable. Someone was on her property. In her driveway.

She heard the sharp, grating scrape again—what on earth was it?—followed by…damn…a wild baritone singing some kind of insane aria. A Russian aria.

She thought, no.

Perching up on tiptoe, she scowled out the window, but couldn’t see anything or anyone from that view. The scrape-whoomph sequence repeated itself again, though. She pushed up her sweatshirt sleeves and stomped down the hall to the next bedroom. From that window, if she craned her neck far enough, she could see a bucketful of snow flying in the air, the silver shine of a snow shovel and, yeah, a disheveled head of coal black hair.

She thought, I’m gonna kill him. And headed for the back door to do just that. An occasional visit, fine. Stefan was alone in a new country and lonesome to talk with someone. Fine. He needed help with his language before he was safe to let loose in public—at least around women—and that was fine, too. She personally knew what it felt like to be a misfit, and she really didn’t mind helping him.

Only the kiss last night had changed things.

She’d spent a sleepless night with Mr. Michaelovich barging into her dreams. Those dreams had been embarrassingly, explicitly sexual, brought on—no doubt—by her celibate life-style. Only no guy had bugged her dreams before Stefan. And neither had any other guy’s kisses.

No one could help what they dreamed, but by George, a woman could control who used her snow shovel.

Bristling from every feminine nerve, she yanked open the back door—and almost earned herself a scoop of snow directly in the face. Thankfully the white powder frosted the overgrown yews next to the door—and by then Stefan had spotted her.

He leaned an elbow on the shovel handle and grinned. It had snowed the night before, four fresh inches of sugar-white powder adding to the foot-deep ground cover. Pine branches sagged under the weight; the naked hardwoods looked as if they were coated with a layer of whipped cream. The whole world had turned white except for one slam of color—him.

His cheeks were redder than apples; his eyes a dancing black. Backdropped against all that stark white, his shoulders looked huge and powerful—a wincing jolt of virile, vital masculine energy in a day that had been so serene, so calm, so peaceful.

“Good morning, my cupcake! You take my breath, you are that sexy this fresh in the morning!”

Paige wiped a hand over her face. Heaven knew what she looked like, but for positive it wasn’t sexy, and he was not going to do this to her again. She was not disarmed by the way his Russian accent wrapped around that antiquated sexist endearment; she was not charmed by the totally unpredictable uses of the language that came out of his mouth. She was aggravated with him for this intrusion. Justifiably aggravated. But the damn man was so exuberantly enthusiastic, so happy, that yelling at him was harder than kicking a puppy.

“Good morning,” she said, echoing him, her tone as formal as she could make it, and then forged ahead, “Stefan, there was absolutely no need for you to come over and shovel my walk!”

“Well, big confession to tell. Guilty confession.” Stefan cocked an elbow on the shovel handle. “I not do this for you. I do this for me.”

“I—pardon me?”

“I work on computer for hours. Very quiet, very silent work. Requires total focus. And this is my work, what I love, no question, but I get desperate for exercise. I have to break in—”

“Break out.” She automatically corrected him.

“Yeah, you understand. Need to break out. I get energy buildup like to burst. I see you have no man, that it snowed last night, very easy for me to shovel your walk for you. Big favor to me, because I am so desperate to vent all this physical energy. I thank you for providing this chore.”

She opened her mouth. Closed it. She scalped a hand through her hair, feeling confused. So far she had yet to anticipate anything the confounded man was going to say. Ignoring the comment about “no man” was easy, but how was she going to argue with a guy who regarded snow shoveling as a personal favor to him?

And those dancing dark eyes mirrored utter sincerity. “I found shovel by your back door. Easy to find. No reason to ask you, I know, because we are neighbors, and like you told me, it is natural for neighbors to help each other in America.”

“Well, I know I said that….” Geezle beezle, talk about getting trapped by her own words. “But this is a little different, Stefan. It scared me, when I heard an unfamiliar sound outside. I didn’t know it was you—”

“Da, I can imagine. You live alone, any stranger could bother you. Not good, this danger, but I will watch over you now, Paige, no need to worry. And I tell you next time I’m here, so you know it’s just me.”

Alarm shot through her. It was funny, really, even sweet that he thought she needed protecting—considering that no man, from the day she was born, had ever doubted that Paige could take care of herself. Her dad used to fret that she took self-reliance to a fault and tease that she was stubborn enough to take on a battalion of marines—but she’d never lacked the courage to stand up for herself. Maybe Stefan had grown up with some outmoded chivalrous values about women, though. And she didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but somehow she was failing to communicate the concept of privacy.

“Stefan, it’s okay—I’m okay—and I really don’t need watching over. I can shovel my own walk, fix my own leaky faucets. I’ve been taking care of myself for a long time, and I’ve known everyone who lives in Walnut Woods all my life. The same families have been here for generations, and I…”

Her voice trailed off. Stefan was shaking his head before she halfway finished explaining. Something was on his mind, because he obviously wasn’t listening to her.

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