Aleksei got on the Harley and backed it out before helping her on. The moment she wrapped her arms around him, she felt complete. It was weird to know this man made her feel that way, when the entire rest of the world put her on edge. She tightened her hold, feeling possessive. For a moment, unexpected tears burned in her eyes.
“Scarlet?”
That soft voice got her low in her belly. She’d forgotten their strange, but very strong connection. “I’m all right. It’s just that this is such a perfect day. I didn’t expect it.”
He rubbed his gloved palm over the back of her hand. “I don’t think you ever expect very much. I hope I change that for you.”
She closed her eyes against the burn of tears she didn’t shed anymore. She didn’t deserve to shed them. Had she paid the price for her sins? Was there ever a time when it was enough? She didn’t know. She felt like she had.
The motorcycle roared again, the pipes loud, machine vibrating between her legs, and they were once again continuing along the two-lane highway, away from the tourists and campers who were staying in the grove. She was glad they weren’t going to stay. She wanted Aleksei all to herself. She hoped he did know some secluded places where she could talk to him, not interrogate him, but just talk to him, get to know him. Pretend she was normal. Let the woman inside of her who desperately wanted to come out and live, do so.
Once they turned off the highway onto the roads that wove around heavy forests of tall, impressive redwood trees towering above them, Scarlet found herself staring upward. She couldn’t stop from tilting her head back. It was a little dizzying even though Aleksei rode slow and maneuvered through the tight curves easily on the motorcycle. The sun shone through the canopy in stripes, creating a strobe effect as they rode. There were countless leaves on the road and built up on the ground so one couldn’t see dirt or rocks under the years of trees shedding the needles. Branches and limbs lay haphazardly in the forest along with some hollowed-out trunks. Some trees had fallen over time and lay, the trunks so large they looked taller than she was.
Clearly, Aleksei had come here often. He made his way through the avenue to a small turnout where there was water dripping over a large rock and several tree roots sticking out of an embankment. There was a very narrow trail that she wouldn’t have even noticed and doubted if most people would have. He slowed their progress even more, taking them carefully along the surprisingly well-packed road to a little area with just enough space for him to turn the bike around.
He let her off, turned the motorcycle around and then parked it before getting off himself. Scarlet looked around her. It was eerily silent, reminding her she was off in the middle of nowhere with a man she’d seen in the library for six weeks but really didn’t know. She had no friends. She hadn’t told a single soul who she was going out with or where she was going. He could murder her and bury her body out here and no one would know. Where were all her amazing survival self-preservation skills she’d honed to perfection?
Aleksei pulled off his helmet and dark glasses. “This is it. When I can’t find a library and I need to get away, this is where I come. I call it my cathedral. I’ll show you why in a minute.” He gave her that slow, devastatingly beautiful smile.
The burn started immediately in the pit of her stomach and just continued to move lower. She shivered, awareness of him in every cell of her body. “How did you discover this place?”
“Sometimes my head feels like it’s going to explode when I’m around too many people for too long.” He rubbed his forehead with his gloved hands. “That sounds bad. It isn’t that I don’t like people, it’s just that sometimes their emotions are … overwhelming to me. I need quiet places. Even that makes me sound like I’m crazy.”
It didn’t. She understood completely. That was why she was a librarian. Libraries were quiet and most of the people who entered were there for the purpose of studying or finding books to read or reference. They weren’t there for counseling. Unless you counted the occasional teen.
“I don’t think you’re crazy.” She didn’t remove her gloves either. She watched him take a blanket and a rolled-up small duffel from a compartment of his bike. There was the faintest of trails and he indicated for her to follow him. “This is still a long way from the library, Aleksei.”
“My brothers, sisters and close friends call me Absinthe.”
She was silent for a moment, processing that. “Like the drink?”
“Yeah. Like the drink.”
For the first time he sounded wary, as if he didn’t want her to question him on why his friends would call him that. It would be natural to ask.
“If I ask why your family and friends call you that, are you going to tell me?”
He gave a heavy, exaggerated sigh. “Because they think they’re funny, that’s why.”
He walked a few more steps and she stayed silent, just waiting. She knew he was going to tell her. He didn’t look back at her, but she could tell he was a little embarrassed. This wasn’t about drinking too much. He hadn’t drunk anything alcoholic when they’d gone to dinner the other night. But maybe that was the reason. Maybe …
“In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in France, artists and writers were particularly fond of the drink. I like the written word. I sometimes write shit down. They know it and they just like to give me hell for it. So that’s how it all came about.”
She found herself smiling again. She could see family doing that, particularly brothers. Aleksei did seem to be a man who, on the surface, looked as if he could really take care of himself, but she could see he had the heart of a poet. She knew he read poetry. He never had her get those books for him, he always got them for himself, but she saw them. He seemed confident in himself, not someone ashamed or embarrassed to be caught reading poetry, so more than likely, it was about writing it, or just admitting how the nickname came about.
“Do you prefer Absinthe or Aleksei? Because that matters to me.”
He did look over his shoulder at her and something moved in his blue eyes. Something deep. He turned away from her before she could figure out exactly what it was, but her heart immediately accelerated at what she’d glimpsed.
“Everyone I care about calls me Absinthe. Aleksei died a long time ago.”
The sorrow in his voice had her reaching out to him. She pushed her fingers into his back pocket and kept pace with his longer strides. It was an intimate thing to do. Scarlet wasn’t the type of woman to ever take the lead when it came to intimacy between a man and a woman. First, it wasn’t in her nature, it wasn’t what she preferred, but more, she hadn’t been attracted to anyone in years. She was learning that intimacy and sex weren’t always the same.
Scarlet didn’t know what to think about that declaration. Aleksei died a long time ago. What did it mean? Everyone had a story. She wasn’t alone in hers. From the moment he’d come into the library and chosen that table far away from everyone else, looking so alone yet wanting to be that way, she had known there was a reason for it. She’d touched him deliberately, seeking to find out and yet she hadn’t been able to uncover his secrets.
Absinthe stopped abruptly, reached back and gently took her wrist to remove her hand from his back pocket, retaining possession as he pulled her up next to him, closer than she’d ever been, right up under his shoulder. She found herself staring at the natural arrangement of the tall redwoods. They formed a circular towering wall, with a thick mossy carpet covering the interior. The small “doorway” was two larger trees that were really one that had spread out and looked to have split at some time perhaps a hundred years earlier.
“This is incredible.” Scarlet stepped away from him, shocked. Trying to remember to keep her mouth from hanging open. She could see why he called it his cathedral. It was beautiful. There was even a kind of hushed silence around it, as if the wildlife respected the place. Once she thought that, then she heard the birds with their flitting wings and calls to one another—the chatter of the squirrels and the s
lide of lizards under the leaves.
“Isn’t it?” He looked pleased. “I hike a lot. I hoped you’d like it. I haven’t found evidence of other hikers around any of the times I’ve come.” He stepped past her inside the circle of the trees, taking her hand to tug so she followed after him.
“Do you worry about anyone finding your motorcycle?”
“It’s not that far from here and I’ve got it locked up.”
He sounded very confident. He handed her the duffel bag while he spread the ground blanket. “If you get cold, you let me know. I’ve got another blanket as well as this jacket.”
There was no wind in the trees. The top of the canopy swayed above them, and the trees creaked and groaned continuously, but where they were, the thick trunks were solid and unmoving. She found she liked the sounds. The notes were almost like music, a low symphony playing just for them. She sat on the blanket and pulled off the jacket, expecting to be cold. It was warmer in the forest than she thought it would be. The sun was out and had that same interesting strobing effect as it had on the road, the rays shining through the long branches of needles.
“It’s almost hot, but not quite.”
He nodded. “A perfect day.” He handed her a bottle of water. “You’ve got to be thirsty by now. I should have gotten you something to drink at the grove.”
Scarlet shook her head. “I wanted to be alone with you. I don’t know what it was, but I just had this crazy feeling as if we have this one day together. This one perfect day and I didn’t want to miss one second of it.”
Absinthe frowned, his crystal-blue eyes drifting slowly over her face. “What do you mean, one day together? You planning on ditching me after this? I thought maybe we were building something here. I was hoping we were. I’m just laying it out there, lady. That’s where I am. I’m thinking we might take a stab at a future together. Why the hell not?”
She took a breath. There were a million reasons why the hell not. “We don’t really know one another, Absinthe.”
“That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”
She wanted them to be there for wild sex. They were completely secluded. They could have any kind of sex they wanted, and no one was around to know what they did. She could walk away unscathed. Even as she thought it, she knew that wasn’t the truth. She would never walk away unmarked from him. Already, he had gotten to her. Somehow, in the library, without even laying a hand on her, he’d managed to make his way inside of her.
She took the plates he handed to her. “Tell me about yourself then. Where are you from? Why did you say Aleksei died?”
Those eyes of his jumped to her face. She swore he saw too much. She had her own secrets and she had no right to ask him to reveal his and yet she wanted to know everything there was to know about him. He hadn’t removed his gloves. His jacket had come off, just like hers, but not his gloves. Neither had hers, yet she longed to touch his skin and she wanted to feel his hands on her skin.
“I was born in Russia. I’m sure that isn’t a big surprise.”
He sent her a small smile. This one didn’t reach his eyes and there was no humor in it at all. She waited, suddenly wishing she hadn’t asked him.
“I had an older brother, Demyan. We lived well, I’m told, although to be honest, I don’t remember. My parents were murdered. I do remember that. It’s odd the things a toddler can recall. I see our former house perfectly. I can see my parents. I can remember the things they said, and I can remember the way they were murdered. Every word that was said to them before the gun was fired. I wasn’t more than eighteen months, and my mother was holding me in her arms, but I can recall it verbatim. I wish I couldn’t.”
She closed her eyes. Sorrow hung in the air. She heard it in his voice. More, he said that he “had” an older brother. She didn’t want to ask if those same people had killed his brother.
“I’m so sorry, Absinthe.”
“My parents opposed a political candidate that a man by the name of Sorbacov supported. Sorbacov was very influential at the time. He had the backing of a secret and very violent small division of the military and he used it in order to get his candidate positioned for the presidency. He did that by murdering those who were opposed to and could damage his candidate. He took their children and placed them in one of his four schools to be trained as assets for the country.”
He pulled silverware, napkins and then sandwiches and homemade chips from the duffel bag. “Alena kept it simple for us because I told her we were coming a very long way and we were riding on the Harley.”
She had no idea what to say about his childhood. It was clear he had moved on from that revelation and she didn’t blame him. He’d been honest and she needed to give him something just as honest back. She tried to think what she could say.
“My mother had me when she was very young; she’d just turned eighteen. I never knew my birth father. He was never in the picture. She met my stepfather when I was three. He was awesome. They had my baby sister, Priscilla, a year later. She was the most beautiful girl ever born. I used to tell her all the time she was my fairy princess. She would demand that I read her all the fairy tales nightly and I always did. She never tired of them.”
She drew her knees up and hugged herself tightly, unable to keep from rocking. She rarely let herself go there, but he’d given her that piece of himself, so she was willing to do that for him. She wanted to. It was something real. This was Scarlet Foley. The woman. This wasn’t the bullshit outward shell she presented to the world. She wanted Absinthe to know who she was, at least as far as she dared let him see.
“God, she was so beautiful, Absinthe. I lost her when she was fourteen. My parents too.” She couldn’t tell him how. Not any of them. Or that it was her fault or that she did penance for that every single day of her life and would always. “It’s strange how our lives are so weirdly similar.” Even saying that gave away too much. She didn’t dare look at him. Instead, she stared up at the canopy where the wind set the tops of the trees swaying.
“I’m sorry, literaturnaya ledi, we both have had a difficult time of it. I think we need to stop talking about our past. Let’s just tell each other things about ourselves. I’ll tell you something about me and you tell me something about you. Something easy and fun. My favorite color used to be green, like your eyes. Now it’s scarlet, like your name or the red of your hair, which I’m obsessed with.”
She found herself laughing in spite of the fact that she’d just wanted to cry her eyes out. How could he do that? Turn everything around? She liked that he was obsessed with her hair. She unwrapped the sandwich he handed to her. He looked delicious. She supposed the sandwich did as well.
“I tried to find out last night if you were allergic to anything, but you didn’t answer.”
There was no censure in his voice at all, but she found, for the first time in a long while, that she couldn’t control the color sweeping into her face. She’d found his voicemail and his text, but it was too late to do anything about it.
“I’m sorry, I fell asleep so early. I think the bath made me so sleepy I just went out that fast. Fortunately, no allergies.” She prayed she loved whatever Alena had made to eat. She was going to eat it no matter what it was.
“Good. You still owe me favorite color.”
He’d taken her at her word. She hated that she felt so guilty. Worse, she hated that she’d lied to him. She wanted their relationship to be real. That was impossible when she was deceiving him. “I’ve found lately that I’m really enamored with blue, a particular shade of crystal blue.” That was no lie.
He gave her that slow, melty smile. “Just how warm are you?”
She swallowed the bite of very delicious sandwich that she suddenly couldn’t taste anymore and had no idea what she was eating because his voice had dropped low and sexy. His gaze had drifted over her body, that infinitely slow perusal that dropped the bottom right out of her stomach and made her heart beat right through her clit.
“Ver
y.” That was the truth as well.
He nodded. “I’m getting warm too. There’s no breeze. Take off your T-shirt, baby, and see if that feels any better.”
Absinthe pulled his shirt over his head one-handed and put it to one side. Her breath caught in her throat. Not only did he have more muscles than anyone she’d ever seen, but he had scars everywhere. Burn marks. What looked like whip marks. And tattoos covering them. Interesting ones. The work was incredible, clearly done by the same artist who had worked on his arms. He was incredibly beautiful.
She took a slow swallow of water and pulled off her own shirt, revealing her lacy mint-green bra. She had very few nice things, but she liked beautiful underwear. She’d been hopeful that she’d have a chance to have sex with Aleksei—Absinthe—and she’d worn one of her favorites. The bra framed her breasts, barely containing them. Already her nipples were hard. She had generous nipples and she always thought if she found the right partner, she would enjoy breast and nipple play, but so far that had never really happened. Just being with Absinthe, already she was aching just with his gaze on her.
His breath hissed out. “I don’t know, Scarlet, now I’m just getting hotter. You’re beautiful. When I come into the library, I’m going to know what you’ve got under your clothes.” He lay back, his arms under his head, his gaze hot as he watched her through half-closed eyes.
She found herself smiling at him, feeling sexy. “You always looked at me like you knew what was under my clothes,” she said. Her voice came out breathless. She felt that way.
She found it strange that with others, when she needed it, she had all the confidence in the world. Sexual attraction hadn’t been real with the others, and she’d been totally in control. With him, it was all too real, and he had to be the one in control because for her, it had to be that way, or she didn’t want it. It wouldn’t be good for her. They would never be compatible. Still, that didn’t mean she could make herself trust him, but they were alone, out in the middle of nowhere. She was nervous, excited, thrilled, and she’d never felt more sensual than she did at that moment.
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