Just like her. The thought lodged in her mind as if it were a sudden sliver. Over and over she’d told herself that Stefan was as unlike her as a fussbudget beaver and a wild, uncivilized bear. He was nothing like the nice, safe, repressed intellectual type she’d always enjoyed fantasizing about…but in this, she’d just never expected to find a kindred spirit. Her damn Russian looked just like her when she was working, totally immersed, oblivious to fires or tornadoes or anything else…not even hearing someone yelling his name from the next room. And no one, but no one, could understand that love of work or intense concentration as well as she could.
Paige pivoted around, thinking she’d just tiptoe out of here—he hadn’t noticed her yet—since she now knew for sure that he was okay. Yet she hesitated.
She’d bet a blue-chip stock that he hadn’t eaten. She’d even bet her favorite pair of Uggs that he’d forgotten all about food. And guilt roiled within her conscience. Maybe she hadn’t asked, maybe she hadn’t wanted him to, but Stefan had been doing a dozen favors and chores for her. He’d given and given and given. And although he’d stolen a few kisses—and cracked a fissure on her sanity in the process—he had never asked for, nor even seemed to expect anything in return for all those nice things he’d done.
Slowly she peeled off her jacket, and winged it on a chair. Slowly she came up behind him and put a hand on his shoulder. “Stefan, it’s just me.” She expected him to half jump out of his skin—and probably bark her head off. It was what she’d have done if somebody had suddenly interrupted her concentration.
Yet his left hand immediately reached up and covered hers, as if he weren’t startled by her presence at all. He said, “I’m glad you’re here, lambchop. But I cannot stop what I am doing at exactly this second.”
And he didn’t stop—the fingers on his right hand kept poking keys, making more strange numbers and symbols show up on the monitor. But his left hand seemed to weigh on hers as if it were a lead cuff, holding her hand tightly, warmly to his shoulder.
She managed to twist her hand free, but then she had to roll her eyes. What irony. It was extremely clear that Stefan was going to put work before a woman. Any sane woman was supposed to be smart enough to steer clear of a guy whose priorities were not on her. But damnation, she understood. There were times she got immersed, too, and just never figured any guy would understand that it wasn’t a matter of not caring, but that certain types of work were really sabotaged if you were interrupted in the concentration process.
She said, “I’m going to make you some dinner.”
No response.
“Stefan. I’m going to make you some dinner, and I don’t know what there is in the kitchen, but it’s bound to take me at least a half hour to throw something together. You have some time, but you need to start gearing down. You’re quitting to eat something, and that’s that. If you want to go back to work after dinner, I won’t bug you.”
No response.
“Say yes so I know this is registering at some brain level,” she ordered him firmly.
“Yes, you beautiful, adorable, understanding and irresistible woman.”
A simple yes would have done, but she told herself it was unfair to hold any verbal comments he made against him just then. Hells bells, she tended to babble when she was working hard, too.
In the kitchen, she scouted drawers and cupboards for potential dinner ingredients. Unlike her house, he had a full larder of choices. Stefan was a hedonist in more areas than one. Her cooking skills couldn’t match him, either—he wasn’t getting any Russian Creams or Cream and Sugar Slave concoctions out of her. Regretfully he didn’t have any Lean Cuisine. Microwave button-pressing was really her best cooking specialty.
But she couldn’t mess up pasta too badly. And he had some fancy gourmet spaghetti-sauce stuff, and plenty of fixings for a fresh salad. She saw an unopened bottle of red wine, but guessed he’d rather have coffee in case he wanted to work later. She made the coffee, fussed with a salad dressing and found the ingredients for fresh rolls.
Fifteen minutes before it was done, she called from the doorway, “Stefan, fifteen-minute warning.” And when she got no answer, ordered him, “Say yes so I know there’s a functioning connection.”
“Yes, love.”
No matter how fast he was mastering the language, there was just no curing him of using endearments with her. She’d just accepted that a leopard couldn’t change all its spots. Yet that “love” still made her pause, made her pulse suddenly beat like the flutter of butterfly wings. He was getting no more warnings about dinner, she thought darkly. As it happened, he didn’t need any. Just as she finished setting silverware on the bar countertop, she spun around to find Stefan in the doorway.
He moved right in to help, took a fork to test the bubbling pasta and then tossed the salad. She didn’t know any men who felt comfortable in a kitchen, yet they worked like a natural team together. For a few minutes. By accident their hips bumped when she was moving dishes to the counter, and that comradely team feeling was suddenly all done. There was no smell of sulfur, but there might as well have been a charge of lightning between them. She was suddenly aware of his hip, his body, his hands, his eyes. And he kept sliding glances her way that ignited more lightning charges. What happened to the nice, safe, distracted man who’d been buried in an intellectual physics problem only minutes before?
“You saved my life,” he told her. “I would have forgotten all about dinner.”
“Happens to me all the time. I understand. You probably want to work again this evening—”
“No need. I’m done. I solved the megillah I was dealing with.”
Her eyebrows arched. “Megillah?”
“Did I use the wrong word again?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never heard that one before.”
“So even an American has a tough time keeping up with slang,” he teased her. “Megillah is like… brouhaha. Big deal. A problem to make a man crazy until it is solved.”
She waved her hand in between bites of spaghetti. “I have to warn you not to explain any further. I don’t know zip about physics.”
“I don’t know zip about cameos. But I think we both love our work exactly the same way, yes?” He’d leveled the spaghetti and salad, and now pushed the plates aside. “I knew too many people whose job meant nothing more than making a living. I always felt lucky this way, to find a career and work that was really important to me. I am sorry I ignored you when you first came in, toots.”
“It was okay. Really okay.”
“Well, I do dishes now while you put feet up. No, don’t argue. This division of labor is only fair when you did the cooking. But I would appreciate your watching Dan Rather with me. He requires much translation.”
Paige had planned to leave. She’d never, in fact, planned to stay long enough to share the meal with him. When she’d walked over, the skies had already been darkening, but now it was seriously blacker than pitch outside. Time for good girls to be home, and she’d been a card-carrying good girl for more than ten years now.
“The evening news,” he said helplessly, “really confuses me. Someone comes on, and announces the facts about some big important issue. Then someone else comes on, and contradicts all the facts that the first person swore to. I don’t get it. How you know who is telling the truth. How you know who to believe. This is another cultural gap problem I have been having. It would really help if you would watch with me. Perhaps you could explain so I could understand better.”
Well, spit, she thought glumly. She could well believe he was having trouble understanding American politics—especially as interpreted by the news. But somehow, even the simplest questions with Stefan, had a way of sidetracking into the complex. Some minor items on the news miraculously turned into a discussion on the nature of the American press and its relationship to the constitutional right of free speech.
After that, he wanted to know about race relations, and consumerism, and Americans’ feeli
ngs about religion and the educational system, and the reason for crime and high school dropouts.
The news had been over for two hours before she realized how long she’d been installed on his couch. It wasn’t the first time Stefan had conned her into these discussions. He had an insatiable hunger and love of talking about anything American, and she had long suspicioned that he was a ton better read in American history than she was. He just loved this stuff.
At some point, he’d poured her a glass of wine, fed the fire and switched off the TV. His couch was one of those dangerous ones, where you sat down and the cushions swallowed you and the odds were iffy you could ever get up again. And she’d curled up because, after all, she’d been up and working since five that morning, and curling up in her stocking feet was a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
But curling up next to him was not so reasonable.
“…I think there is no inner city in the world where despair is not a problem,” he was saying. “It was no different in Russia. Alcoholism and suicide rates very high…”
He’d naturally thrown his arm across the couch back. And it seemed that she had naturally leaned against his arm when she’d gotten animated and distracted by the discussion. She just couldn’t remember the exact moment when his hand had dropped, in a way that brushed her shoulder and neck, and his fingers seemed to be sifting a strand of her hair, in a whisper-light, whisper-soft rhythmic caress. The warmth in his eyes was familiar…too familiar.
The fire crackled and hissed, shooting sparks up the chimney. The lemon-orange flames were the only light in the room…and it wasn’t enough light. On a blizzard-raw night, the warmth and shadows created a cocoon, a feeling of intimacy, and so did that look in his eyes. She was used to it, she told herself. He always aroused an instinct of danger, of uncomfortable vulnerability, and nothing had happened before. Nothing was different tonight. There was no specific reason to feel that she was suddenly sitting on a warm, gentle, euphoric time bomb.
“…Drugs like crack are in Russian cities, too. But the reason for despair is so much clearer there. The free time of young people is rigidly controlled. They are ever expected to conform, to obey, choices made for them that they have no say in. Poverty is always a cage, but there are so many more choices here. So much hope to just…Paige?”
“Hmm?”
“Somehow I don’t think your mind is still on the despair of the young people who drop out of your high schools?”
“Oh, it is,” she assured him.
“Yes? And do you also agree with my assessment about elephants flying?”
“I couldn’t agree more,” she assured him.
He smiled at her then. A slow, satisfied, distinctly male smile that seemed to come from nowhere. “It was kind of you to come over tonight. You were worried that I was all right, yes?”
“You missed Star Trek. I thought you might have been hurt or sick—”
“You care,” he announced.
The deep, dark, intimate look in his eyes was sending alarm bells peeling through her pulse. “You’re a friend. Of course I care.”
“I think, lyubeesh, that you like that word ‘friend’ very much. But it’s time to let it go.”
“I don’t know what you mean—”
“It means I hope you left nothing burning at your house, because I doubt that you’re going home tonight. And I don’t believe either of us are going to notice any fires. Except for the ones we start here.”
“Stefan…” As automatically as the sun came up in the morning, her lips framed a denial. She meant to say no. It never occurred to her that she wouldn’t. When he reached for her, she understood what was happening. She understood what she was inviting. There was no possible way to misunderstand the burnclear desire to seduce her that shone in his eyes.
“Beam me up, Paige Stanford,” he murmured, his voice as rough and low as a whisper of wind. Or a dare. And then he kissed her.
He’d kissed her before. Tons of times now. She knew his taste, knew the texture of his mouth, knew the terrorizingly dizzy thing his kisses did to trample her common sense and sanity. She knew how to protect herself from risks that were simply too dangerous. But nothing was the same this night.
His arms swallowed her in a lonely, hungry embrace. She didn’t know that he’d been leashing that hunger, didn’t know all those other kisses had been his version of polite. When his mouth took hers this time, there was no “please” or “may I” implied. This kiss was a demand. Fierce. Hard. Consuming. He wasn’t asking for her response. He was claiming it, and a thrill shot through her like a jagged spear of lightning. So did fear.
She was in love with him. Not a little, but so deeply and painfully that nothing else seemed to matter. She knew he was leaving soon. She believed that loneliness propelled his feelings for her rather than anything that could last. She could list a hundred practical, serious reasons why making love with him was a terrible idea, but Paige had always revered truth, had always been ruthless with herself about facing it. Stefan had long captured a corner of her heart. There wasn’t a man on the planet who ever tempted or exasperated or stirred her the way he did. He was beyond special to her. She could no longer deny it.
Maybe her heart already knew that making love with him was inevitable. But she’d counted on him being polite. She’d counted on those other kinds of kisses—the familiar ones. She expected fire, but she had no possible life experience to prepare her for handling a conflagration…
He scooped her into his arms, lifting her from the couch as if she weighed nothing—when she was a solid, sturdy one hundred thirty pounds and utterly embarrassed by such a hokey romantic gesture. She was no princess to be carried off. She was no pirate’s booty to be swept away. Yet he kissed her and kept kissing her, into the shadows beyond the firelight, down the gloomy dark hall, his tongue diving into her mouth, inviting fierce, frightening feelings that she wasn’t remotely prepared for.
“Stefan, you’re scaring me.”
“Good,” he said.
“We need…I need…to go slower.”
“Nyet. I don’t think so. Slow for me—good idea. Slow for you—worst idea in town. And this first time is definitely for you.”
He was not giving her sane, rational answers. Never mind if her arms were looped around his neck. Never mind if she allowed him to dip down for another kiss. He wasn’t even trying to reassure her. And the way her heart was slamming, her heart already knew that he was everything she was afraid of. “We can’t make love. I don’t have any birth control.”
“Lucky thing that I am grown man. No man of honor would ever risk a woman.” He kissed her throat, right where her tattletale pulse was racing a hundred miles an hour of sheer feminine nerves. “Only irresponsible boy would not be prepared.”
“Stefan-”
“I am right here. Going nowhere. Trust me. You can take that promise for gold.”
She squeezed her eyes closed. He was distracting her, and somehow she needed to get some critical information said. “Stefan…maybe I haven’t done this a million times before.”
“I guessed you haven’t done it at all,” he murmured, his tone as blunt and rough as a burr. “But I am in love with you, lyubeesh. Head over knees in love. Beyond reason in love. And this is the way it should be, that you make love only with someone who loves you. And I hear all your stalling questions. I hear the fears in your voice. But unless I have missed something completely in this conversation—I am not hearing a no.”
A no wasn’t precisely on her mind. An unnamed panic was. Backing out struck her as a superb idea, the best idea she’d had in weeks, maybe the best idea she’d had in her whole life. But then he dropped her on the bed, and followed, coming down on her, with her. Only the palest light glowed from the hall. The double bed had some kind of feather mattress, old-fashioned and swallowing soft. Over that was a spread in some slippery fabric that felt icy, shivery cool beneath her neck.
He wasn’t. His body temperature could melt any
iceberg. He threw the pillows onto the floor and her head went flat, sinking into the mattress, propelled by a kiss that stole her breath. His fingers snapped the band holding her braid. He lifted his head from that kiss, allowing her to haul in a lungful of air, yet in the same moment her sweatshirt was sweeping over her head. On the sweatshirt’s way hurled across the room, her hair came loose. Tumbling loose. Wild loose. Encouraged by his hands tangled in it.
He wasn’t giving her time to think. She frantically needed that time. She’d had a cage of inhibitions padlocked for years. That lock was supposed to be made of steel. But damn him, she hadn’t been this shook up since she was a girl.
“You’re going to be disappointed,” she whispered, warning him fiercely, clearly. Honestly.
“I don’t think there’s a prayer of your doing that, lambchop.” Eyes blacker than the devil’s suddenly danced…as he scooched off her overalls, unraveling her underpants at the same time. “Try, though. In fact, I think is exquisite idea. I think you should try very hard to disappoint me, love. Give it best shot.”
His tongue laved the arch of her foot—an insane place to kiss a woman. His tongue, his mouth, traced the curve of her calf. Then her knee. Then the inside of her thigh. She swallowed, then swallowed again, then gave up trying to breathe. “We talked about chaos. I thought you understood—”
“I do understand. Insane thing, to invite chaos. Very frightening, to lose control, to not know what could happen, to upset whole orange cart.” He smiled. As he unhooked the front catch of her bra. “This kind of chaos is the most delicious thing in universe that I know. This kind of chaos is terrible risk, no guarantees, nothing for sure. And make no mistake, lyubeesh. I am asking you to take this risk with me. I am daring you.”
Dare. Stefan couldn’t know how that word echoed painfully from her teenage years. Back then, she never turned down a dare, never realized there were consequences for taking blind, impulsive risks that could hurt other people. Paige had buried that woman-child who had caused so much harm. Completely buried. There were simply risks she never took. Not anymore.
The Unwilling Bride Page 11
