The Unwilling Bride

by Jennifer Greene

  She kept a suspicious eye on him while she finished lunch. He hadn’t been in her workshop since that first morning with the fire, and he was investigating every nook and cranny and shelf more thoroughly than an FBI agent. His hands were slugged in the pockets of a brand-new pair of acid-washed jeans, his shoulders hunched in a No Fear sweatshirt. With the wild beard and unruly hair, he looked like an all-American motorcycle gang thug, like the bad-boy every mother warned her daughter about.

  Like a man Paige should have the good sense to be scared of.

  It was the first time her absentmindedness had struck her as a dangerous character flaw. She meant to remember that there were things about him that should logically scare her, but Stefan was so darned fascinating that worry kept slipping her mind. As he loped around the room, he fired a continual round of questions at her. She gave him the names for everything he asked—dop sticks, diamond wax, riffler, scorpers, gravers. Heaven knew why he asked. Her cameo-carving stuff had to bore any outsider witless. Yet typically, nothing escaped his curiosity and he took in every new vocabulary word as if he were a sieve.

  “Stefan…” Finally she pushed aside her empty plate. “You haven’t brought up your cousins since the first week you were here. How’re they doing?” He’d mentioned his relatives in town, and she even vaguely knew the family; the couple ran a catering business. Yet as far as she could tell, he hadn’t spent any time with them—much less in proportion to the time he was spending with her.

  “They’re fine. Good people, my kin. But right now they are gone to spend a month in Florida.”

  “Florida, huh?” She tried to sound interested rather than startled, but it never occurred to her that his only relatives had deserted ship, not when he was brand-new to a whole different country and way of life. He really was alone.

  Except for her.

  He flashed her a grin as he continued to roam around her shop. “My cousins told me ahead they had these travel plans. I figured out that this Florida trip is a major American must—rush south in the winter, hit the beach. The city I lived in, Petersburg, had reputation for the worst climate on planet. Torrential rains, endless fog, harsh and bitter winds. Beach is nice, but this cold climate is more what I am used to.” He turned his head. “Is this the cameo you’re making for your sister?”

  “Yes. I hope. It’s too soon to know if it’s going to work out.” She watched him bend over the leather-lined vise, where she had clamped the piece of coral. It couldn’t look like anything to him. It wasn’t anything yet. She’d determined the size, marked the outline with India ink, removed the back of the shell with a high-speed blade and lubricated the cut with water. Now it was back in the vise, waiting.

  “There is frustration in your voice. You’re having trouble with this?”

  “Not…trouble. But I was lucky to find this piece—two -shaded coral is really rare.” She didn’t really know how to explain. “Every stone or shell is different. It has its own beauty, its own truth, nothing the artist can put in there, but something I have to find. That probably sounds weird—”

  “Not weird,” he said firmly.

  “Well…anyway, coral is an especially fragile material to work with. Very easy to ruin with one wrong cut. And sometimes I have to study the raw material for a long time before I’m sure what to do with it.” She motioned around the shop, where there were various cameos in different stages. “Each part in the process takes some studying and thought, so that’s partly why I work on several pieces at the same time.”

  “I see. I also see many pieces that you have finished.” He paused at the top shelf where she had a dozen finished cameos, ranging from pendants and jewelry to freestanding sculptures. “Paige?”

  “What?”

  “They steal my breath. And I am not making joke.” His head swiveled toward her, eyes dark and piercing. “You create beauty like I have never seen.”

  She’d just taken a sip of hot Japanese green tea, tangy, almost bitter, and for a second she couldn’t seem to swallow. Others had praised her work. Obviously she couldn’t make a living at it if she were pitawful rotten. Talent was an ingredient that enabled her to do something she loved, but otherwise she couldn’t care less what anyone thought of it.

  Yet his praise meant something. It was embarrassing, to feel the nest of warm fuzzies in the pit of her stomach, the sudden flush climb her cheeks. He wasn’t even smiling, but he’d delivered that comment bare, in a quiet, rough-wrapped baritone that struck her as intimate and honest, meant to touch her. And it did.

  “I’m not due that credit,” she said quietly. “I don’t really create, Stefan. All I can ever do is have the skill to bring out the best from the raw material.”

  “You take no credit for being creator? Whoever told you that was dimwit numskull, not appreciate you, sold you bucket of malarky.” Numskull and malarky had been two slang expressions he’d picked up this week, and he’d been testing them in some mighty funny applications. Just then, though, there was no humor in his eyes or his voice. The frown on his brow was a scolding. “You have a gift for beauty, a gift for truth. It is everywhere in this room. Perfect example, this one—”

  He strode over to the jade, the cameo of the woman staring at her reflection in the pond, the unsettling cameo that she’d made for her sister and had yet to figure out what to do with. Paige was surprised he’d even noticed it. It wasn’t with the other finished pieces, but stashed in limbo by itself on another shelf. There was no specific reason she should have minded his seeing it, yet her pulse was suddenly beating uneasily, her nerves on some strange edge.

  “This is you,” he said.

  “Pardon?”

  “This is you, in the cameo.” He glanced at her face, and his shaggy eyebrows suddenly arched in question. “Surely you knew this? That you captured yourself?”

  That strange, sudden uneasiness instantly passed, as she let out a peal of laughter. “You have a wonderful imagination. That’s nothing remotely like me, not in a million years. And that isn’t how cameo carving works, Stefan. You can’t do a portrait of yourself—or anyone else—nothing that deliberate. The carver works with the grain and layer of the stone, finds a face or profile in the raw material, but you can’t ever ‘order’ that raw material to make a face you want.”

  “I understand this explaining. And not to get your liver in an uproar, my lambchop. I believe you.” He motioned again to the jade. “But that’s still you.”

  Four

  “Do you need some money? You wouldn’t be a doofus and lie if you needed some financial help, would you…? Yeah, I know you can take care of yourself, Gwen, but I’ve been making so much money I’m ashamed, downright sinfully ashamed—you’d be doing me a big favor if you took some of this guilty loot off my hands…okay, okay, don’t get your pride all bent out of shape. I hear you, you’re okay financially…”

  Paige had grabbed the telephone just as she was climbing upstairs to get ready for bed. In one swift move, she lifted the receiver, tugged the mens’ extra large Harvard nightshirt over her head and plastered the traveling phone to her ear again. She flicked off the bathroom light, then the hall light, still talking to her sister as she walked barefoot in the dark toward her bedroom.

  “Well listen, Gwen, how about if I just send a plane ticket for you and my favorite monsters? You could just stay here for a couple of weeks, a month, rest up, give me a chance to spoil my nephews to death and get your mind off that son of a mangy cow…all right, all right, I won’t call him a bastard or a sad excuse for a dust bag. You want to still think your ex as a nice guy, I’ll pretend along with you. Hey, I’m on your team. But just so you know, if I meet up with him in person again, I’m gonna stomp his handsome face from here to Poughkeepsie—”

  Her hand groped blind for the light switch in her bedroom. The overlight suddenly glared, illuminating the cherry four poster bed with the patchwork quilt, the Federal rocker, the marble-topped dresser with messily, gaping open drawers—which, she noted, no
housekeeping fairy had come up and closed since morning. Her eyes honed faster than lightning, though, on the jade cameo on the dresser top, and suddenly her heart was skating faster than a toboggan down a steep hill.

  She’d brought the cameo up here after lunch with Stefan. She didn’t know why, didn’t care why. It was her work, her art, and if she wanted to keep something private and out of sight, it was certainly her business.

  Just for an instant, her gaze glued on the sensual profile of the woman in jade—and then faster than a slammed door, she flicked off the overhead light. It didn’t matter if the room was pitch-black. All she was going to do was unbraid her hair and get ready for bed while she talked to her sister, chores she could do in a cave.

  “…so tell me how the boys are doing. Raising hell, I hope…hmm…listen, kiddo, you know that if anything were wrong, all you’d have to do is tell either Abby and me, and we’d be there in thirty seconds flat? I know, you keep telling me you’re doing fine, but I can’t remember ever hearing this much stress in your voice…”

  Paige tripped on something on the floor—probably a shoe—fumbled on the nightside table for her brush, and negotiated the perilous condition of her room in the dark. Curling up in the window seat, she loosened the rubber band—which pinged somewhere in space—then used her fingers to unplait the long braid.

  “I do not work too hard. Geesh, how did this conversation get turned on me? Of course, I’m remembering to eat. And of course, I opened the bills and remembered to pay every single one of them this month.” She had to quit unplaiting long enough to cross her fingers. “Sex? What’s that? Oh. Yeah. Nope, haven’t done anything like that…although, hoboy, you remember when we were kids, the three of us poring over that book by flashlight, terrified Dad was gonna catch us? Remember our deciding we all must be adopted? Because we knew for sure Mom and Dad would never do anything that disgusting…”

  There. She’d made her sister laugh, and before they severed the phone connection, Paige felt relieved that she’d left Gwen in an upbeat frame of mind. They’d talk again in a couple of days—a week never passed before she talked with both her sisters. Gwen refused to admit that anything serious was bothering her, a frustration to Paige—she knew damn well something was. Eventually she’d worm the problem out of her sister, and in the meantime, Ma Bell kept them close.

  Swiftly she finished unplaiting her hair, then shook it loose and free as she gazed out the window. It was magical outside, serene and still, the snow like a blanket of diamonds by starlight. It was a night for girlish dreams of princes and white knights…if Paige had been one to believe in fairy tales.

  As she rhythmically brushed through the tangled strands, her hair shimmered and fell, tickling her nape, drifting down her shoulders and back. Somehow the texture of her hair invoked sensual, feminine feelings…yearnings…that never seemed to trouble her by day. It was only at night, that her four poster bed looked big and lonely. Only at night, that she would sometimes wake up from dreams, always alone, conscious that she had no one to wrap her arms around after a nightmare.

  She still had nightmares, from that time in her life when she’d been spring-green young and wild—and a keg of dynamite hormones. She wasn’t afraid of sex, she’d reassured herself a million times. In this small town, there were simply very few single men her age running around. Before that, she’d been busy learning her trade—and since the nature of her work was isolating, and she loved her work, a celibate life-style had just sort of…happened. Possibly she’d turned down a few opportunities, maybe even more than a few. But anyone who accused her of being afraid of intimacy or sex would be dead wrong.

  An image of Stefan flashed through her mind. The brawny tilt to his shoulders, the wicked spark of sexual awareness in his eyes, the twist of a man’s smile…a man’s way of looking at her.

  For two weeks now, she’d convinced herself she was imagining that look in his eyes. Clearly Stefan wanted and needed a friend. He was lonely in a strange country, and that one kiss had simply been accidental—his whole nature was physical and affectionate and exuberantly effusive. He didn’t want her. She had no reason on earth to think he sought her company because he desired her, and she’d never done one thing with her appearance or actions to lead him in that direction.

  Suddenly, though, she realized she was shivering.

  Sitting on a window seat next to frostbite-cold panes of glass, it was hardly a wonder the chill was getting to her. She dropped the brush, bounced down and dived straight for the cave of comforters and quilts.

  Even in the dark, though, she could see the soft glow of the jade cameo from the moonlight’s reflection. Until she punched the pillow, turned the other way and firmly closed her eyes.

  As soon as Paige opened the door, Stefan thrust the bowl in her hands. “I just want to bring you small present, for being so kind about letting me use your television. It’s a sweet, called Russian Cream. We call it ‘food for the gods,’ made of cream and sugar and sour cream—nothing good for you, make arteries cringe in horror—but believe you will find it one of those to-die-for things.”

  “Stefan, you didn’t have to do this.” But he saw the way she stared at the confection.

  “Not have to, no. But I am much grateful that you have dish antenna since my house does not. Cannot get Star Trek, no way, on my plain old boob tube. And almost late today. It’s nearly four.”

  “I know. And, um, Stefan, I know I’m the one who introduced you to the show a couple of weeks ago, but do you think there’s a teensy chance you’ve become obsessed with Star Trek?”

  “Obsessed? Great word. You betcha, I am happily obsessed, would be devastated if I missed this twoparter with Spock.” Casual and easy, he pushed off his boots and threw his jacket over a chair. Familiar with her house now, he copped a spoon from the kitchen, then aimed for her back den—and the remote control. The picture zoomed on the screen just as Kirk was explaining the Enterprise mission about going where no man has gone before.

  A fitting analogy for Paige, Stefan increasingly suspected—and was conscious of her following him as far as the doorway, still holding the bowl of Russian Cream.

  She had accurately guessed that he had a problem with obsession, although so far, she seemed to think a daily dose of rerun Star Treks was the cause. He was here for Paige, not Spock. And the way to her heart was clearly through her stomach, hence his bnnging the Russian Cream.

  His feelings for her had grown out of control, but as Stefan saw it, that problem was entirely her fault. He was lonesome for a woman, he knew that, but until knowing Paige he had no concept that he was not lonesome for any woman. Just her. Her grace, her eyes, her swift mind, her fanny, her humor, her endearingly absentminded ways—there was nothing about her that didn’t draw him. The more he was with her, it was as if a key had unlocked feelings that he’d buried for years, deep inside him.

  Paige wasn’t immune to him. Even a single kiss had ignited lightning, a heat that simmered like a banked fire whenever they were in the same room together. She could not have missed it, and of course he had noticed her wariness around him. To a point he understood it. No civilized rules had ever obliterated primitive instincts, not where men and women were concerned. The hunt-and-chase of a courtship always aroused wariness in a woman; how could she know if a strange man was a predator seeking prey?

  But he was not a wolf, seeking to conquer. He was just a man, seeking to love. And he’d hoped that time together—and his behaving himself—would naturally build her trust level with him.

  It wasn’t working. If anything, his lady seemed more tense around him instead of less. Helping him was different; Paige was a giver. She willingly accepted his company when she believed he needed help with the language, but Stefan was unsure how long he could pull off the bumbling-Russian-with-the-language routine.

  In his work, he approached any impossible physics problem with patience, perseverance, and the process of elimination. There could be other reasons for her reser
ve. Doubts or concerns about his background, for one. And that was something he was hoping to bring up and deal with…today, if he could.

  Paige was still hovering in the doorway. “You’ll be okay alone? Because I really have to work.”

  “I know you do—you just go right ahead, lambchop. I am fine by myself,” Stefan said easily. Having given permission for her to desert him had worked before, as it did now, to guarantee she would linger a little longer. She felt guilty about leaving him alone, was never quite sure what the etiquette of the situation should be. And by three minutes into the show, invariably her attention was caught.

  It took four minutes, this time, before she perched on the arm of the old leather sofa. Four minutes after that, she’d fallen off that stiff wagon and was hogging her full half of the couch, sitting Indian-style with her legs crossed. He hadn’t taken the spoon from the kitchen for nothing. Once he handed it to her, she leveled scoopfuls of the sweet faster than a kitten who’d been starved of food for a year.

  “I have to get back to work,” she muttered.

  “I know you do.”

  “I don’t even like the old Kirk and Spock episodes half as much as the new version. I just like Picard and Deanna and Data and Worf. Worf is so adorable.”

  Thanks to Paige’s dish antenna bringing in countless channels, he’d seen both versions. “Worf, the monster you like? The prehistorical male chauvinistic caveman? What happened to the lessons on American feminism and sexist behavior and women’s rights and-”

  She gestured with the spoon, shushing him irritably. “There’s a place for realism and a place for fantasy. This is fantasy. I’d probably never marry a guy like Worf in real life, but that doesn’t mean I can’t love him on screen.”

  “Ah. Is this example of American feminine logic?”

  “Stefan?”

  “Yes?”

  “This Russian Cream is better than sin. I’m probably going to make myself ill, pigging out, because it is not possible to resist. I don’t want you to think I’m not grateful. But I’m warning you, if you keep teasing me, I’m probably going to bop you over the head with a pillow.”