by Jane Toombs
“‘Ochi Chorni.’ It’s a Russian folk song.”
The words had a familiar sound. After a moment she realized why. “You whispered that in my ear when we were, well, in Aino’s barn,” she said.
“It translates as ‘Dark Eyes’.” He half smiled. “Which you once had.”
Unsure how to take that—was he actually teasing her?—Rachel didn’t reply.
“So, Tawny Eyes, care to climb into Zed’s loft with me?” he asked.
She gazed at him, making up her mind. He wanted to make love with her, she knew. Despite everything, if she were honest, that’s what she wanted, too, wasn’t it?
Without giving him an answer, she sauntered toward the barn. A light over the door made it easy to see how to slide it open, but she deliberately waited for him to catch up and do the honors. Somehow it seemed appropriate.
Once he’d opened the door, he flicked on an interior light. In the connected stable, she heard a horse snuffle and shift its feet. The familiar barn smell gave her a sense of homecoming. The ladder to the loft was directly ahead. He gestured toward it.
Glancing at him, she said, “You first. I have a skirt on.”
He grinned at her, as well he might, but she couldn’t help—or explain—her attack of shyness.
As he climbed the ladder ahead of her, she stared at his blue-jeans-covered butt and asked, “What happened to the man in black?”
He reached the top and turned to look down at her. “Ever hear about the tiger who changed his stripes? That’s me.”
She raised her eyebrows.
He led her directly to the kittens and their mother, making her say, “Danny must have told you exactly where they were.”
“He said mama cat kept hiding them in different places, but we special agents have our secret ways. Reconnaissance uncovered her latest nest in the hay.”
“You mean you’ve already been up here?”
He shrugged.
Shaking her head, Rachel knelt and stretched a cautious hand toward the cat, who sniffed her fingers, showing no hostility, even when Rachel picked up an orange-and-white kitten with a tiny stub of a tail, snuggling it up against her cheek.
“Aren’t they darling?” she cooed.
“If you say so.”
“Oh, come on, there’s nothing cuter than a kitten.”
She held it out to him and he ran a cautious forefinger over its head. The kitten wailed, causing the mother cat to mew in protest. “Obviously I don’t have the right touch where kittens are concerned,” he said.
Rachel returned the kitten to its mother and rose from her knees. He took her hand and led her to where a blanket stretched across the hay. “Reconnaissance?” she asked, nodding toward the blanket.
“Okay, so I planned ahead,” he muttered. “You can’t deny hay prickles when you sit on it. We had to talk somewhere in private. Beside, I seem to recall telling you I’d bring a blanket next time. Which this is.”
“Yes, but for all you know, Danny and the other kids will be swarming up the ladder any moment.”
“No,” he said. “They won’t. I guarantee it. Please sit down.”
When she did as he asked, he breathed a sigh of relief. The barn light was attached to a wall lower than the loft, so that shadows concealed her expression, but he knew she must have doubts.
“You think I brought you up here just to make love to you,” he said.
She fingered the blanket. “Something like that, yes.”
He put an arm around her shoulders, pulling her closer to him, but controlled his urge to kiss her. “I’m not saying that isn’t in the back of my mind, but I meant what I said—we need to talk.”
“Why are you so sure the kids won’t come into the barn?”
“Nathan.”
“Dr. Walker? What does he have to do with anything?”
Mikel decided this was no time to reveal what Nathan had said to him in private, though the words still reverberated in his mind. “You want to find the entire gang circling you and Rachel?” Nathan had asked him. “Because that’s what’ll happen if you don’t settle whatever you two have going for you. I know, because that’s what they did to Jade and me, and I sure wouldn’t want to repeat that confrontation. Believe me, it’s embarrassing.”
Then Nathan had gone into specifics. “If you love her, tell her so. If you want to be with her in whatever arrangement, get her to agree before you’re forced to do it in public.”
Mikel had stared at Nathan, hardly believing his ears. “But I’m not family, I’m a stranger.”
Nathan chuckled. “You’re family enough because you’re Steve’s buddy, so you’ve been accepted. And Rachel is his wife’s sister. Think about it, man.”
Mikel then button-holed Steve and got the same story. “The only reason Victoria and I escaped was because I beat them to it,” Steve told him. “If I were you I’d take Doc’s advice. And, by the way, Victoria reports that Rachel is in love with you, if that makes any difference.”
To say he was rocked back on his heels was an understatement. Yet his surprise was as much from how he realized he felt about Rachel as from what Nathan and Steve had told him. He knew he and Rachel had to talk, and the sooner the better, so he got Nathan to keep the kids away from the barn. For some reason he’d known in his heart that she’d be drawn there.
In his heart. Where truth lay, according to Grandma Sonia.
“You haven’t answered my question,” Rachel said, bringing him back to the moment.
“About Nathan? I asked him to keep the kids away because we had some decisions to make.”
“We do?”
He nodded. “And we’re in this hayloft because it was in that U.P. hayloft where I first realized you were the one. The only one. It took me a while to accept this since I’m not too swift at looking into my heart. I love you, Rachel.” He found the words to say far easier than he’d expected. Maybe because they were the truth.
“You—you do?”
“I’ve succumbed to a superior force.”
Snuggling closer, she laid her head on his shoulder and breathed his name, murmuring, “I love you, too.”
He smiled to himself. “So I figure marriage is the only solution.”
She jerked her head away. “Marriage!”
“Yeah—you must have heard of it since it’s a venerable institution.” His words were cooler than his emotions. Would she agree?
“I—you took me by surprise.” Turning toward him, she folded herself into his arms.
“Before I kiss you, I need an answer.”
“You mean you won’t make love with me if I don’t give you one?”
Damned if she wasn’t teasing him. He gave a whoop of laughter. “Just try me.”
“After due consideration,” she said, “the answer is yes. Can we live in Virginia, where Victoria and Steve are?”
“Talk about planning ahead! But, hell, why not? End of conversation.” He lowered his head and kissed her, and as always, the world faded into the distance. With all his heart he believed it would always be this way with the two of them. His last coherent thought was that his grandmother was right, as usual. Rachel was the only woman for him. She always would be.
Epilogue
“There’s Mommy’s car,” Rachel told Heidi, who was sitting on the floor. Victoria sometimes dropped the little girl off at Rachel’s when she wanted to run an errand, since the house she and Mikel had bought was conveniently near Steve and Victoria’s. “We’d better get your jacket.”
Heidi looked up from putting together the large plastic Lego pieces Rachel kept here for her to play with. “No,” she said.
“Yes. Mommy will stay until you finish your creation, and then she’ll take you home.”
“Not crashun. Kitty.”
“Okay, your kitty.”
“You don’t got kitty.”
“No, we don’t have any pets,” Rachel told her.
Heidi gazed at her with her big blue eyes, enough to melt t
he hardest heart. “Poor Aunty.”
Rachel felt anything but poor. Marriage to Mikel was even better than her dreams and it was wonderful living so close to her sister. Plus she’d been able to do some substitute teaching on occasion.
“Finish the kitty and we’ll save him,” she told Heidi, “but we have to put all the other pieces back in the box for next time.”
The door opened enough for Victoria’s head to poke through. “Okay to come in?”
“Mommy, look.” Heidi brandished her creation.
Victoria entered. “That’s a wonderful—” she paused, obviously searching for a resemblance to something.
“—kitty,” Rachel finished.
“Oh, yes, it does look like Bevins,” Victoria said.
“Not Bevins,” Heidi insisted. “Aunty’s kitty.”
A few minutes later, with Rachel holding “her” kitty, Victoria persuaded Heidi into her jacket. As she bore her daughter off, Victoria grinned at Rachel and said, “So now you that you have a taste of what’s in your not-so-far-away future, what do you think?”
“I can’t wait,” Rachel said.
Victoria rolled her eyes.
After they left, Rachel finished picking up the unused plastic pieces and set the box into the play cupboard that held toys for Heidi. Her niece could be a handful, but she was such a darling. She glanced at her watch, murmured “Oh-oh,” and headed for the kitchen to check the stew in the Crock-Pot. Mikel would be home any time now and she wanted to make sure all the dinner fixings were close to ready.
When she heard his car pull into the garage, it was nearly an hour later than he’d told her, making her glad she’d planned on stew, a dish that only tasted better the longer it sat.
He came in through the back door and she started to reach up for a kiss, pausing when she realized he was carrying a grocery bag in one hand and, with his other, cradling something wrapped in his jacket.
“What’ve you got there?” she asked.
As she spoke, a tiny head poked out of the jacket and she stared into a kitten’s golden eyes.
“Good heavens! That’s a cat.”
“I thought you liked them,” he said, unwrapping it and exposing the scrawniest, dirtiest kitten she’d ever seen.
She reached for it. “Oh, Mikel, the poor little thing.” The calico kitten clung to her, purring.
“Stopped to get gas. The guy running the place had just found the kitten in his Dumpster. Since it’s too little to have crawled in, he figured someone had tossed it in there. He didn’t want the cat, was going to call the animal shelter, so, well, I took Koshka.”
“Koshka?”
“Russian for cat. The guy said it was a female and the name seemed to fit her.”
If he’d named her, he really did mean to keep her. “I thought you weren’t any too enthusiastic about cats.”
He shrugged. “No one wanted this one. Besides, she’s got eyes the color of yours.”
Rachel reached up and gave him a quick kiss. “I knew there was a reason I married you,” she said.
Later, after supper and after she’d given Koshka a bath and the kitten had eaten some of the cat food Mikel had brought home, she looked much more appealing. Holding her, Rachel sat on the couch with Mikel, then Koshka promptly crawled off her lap and onto his, where she curled up and closed her eyes.
“Hey,” he protested, “who invited you?”
“She knows a rescuer when she sees one,” Rachel told him, laughing, remembering how, at Aino’s, he’d tried to discourage Metsa from following him around.
No strings, he told the dog.
He’d really surprised her by bringing home this kitten—two strings now, his wife and his kitten. Maybe it was time to tell him she had her own little surprise coming up in about seven months.
“Mikel,” she said, snuggling closer, “how about it? Do you think you can adjust to a third string?”
He blinked, then his eyes widened. “Are you telling me I get to be a father?” Before she could answer he smiled at her, a happy grin that warmed her heart.
“Wife, cat, baby,” he murmured as he reached for her. “Love those entangling strings.”
ISBN: 978-1-4592-4383-5
HER MYSTERIOUS HOUSEGUEST
Copyright © 2001 by Jane Toombs
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