Course of Action: Out of Harm's WayAny Time, Any Place

by Lindsay McKenna

  “This road leads to the village of my grandmother,” she told the driver. “She taught me her language when I was young.”

  “Your grandmother, eh? Who is she?”

  “Her name is Katerina Solkov. Katerina Baustus before she married my grandfather.”

  “I don’t know her.”

  The suspicion that accompanied the flat statement didn’t surprise Anna. Isolated and clannish, the people of these mountains were known for their distrust of outsiders. Once they accepted a stranger into their midst, however, they would share their last crust of bread with him.

  “My grandmother was born in the mountains but moved to Kiev as a young girl.”

  “So why do you come?”

  “I want to show the land of my ancestors to my...to my husband.”

  Annoyed, she delivered a swift, mental kick for stumbling over the word. And for the flush that crept up her cheeks as the husband under discussion ambled up and slid a possessive arm around her waist.

  “Is there a problem, sweetheart?”

  The question was easy, the meaning behind it not so much.

  “No problem.”

  She tried for a honeymoonish smile. The effort hurt her cheeks. Exercising what she considered admirable restraint, she didn’t twitch away from Duke’s loose embrace.

  “I’m just satisfying this gentleman’s curiosity about the tourists who nearly ran him off the road.”

  The driver watched their exchange from the cart, waiting only until it was done to issue a gruff request. “You will move your car so I may pass, yes?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Easier said than done, Anna soon discovered. She held her breath while Duke backed up, foot by careful foot, until the road widened enough for the cart to squeeze by. Even then Duke had to pull dangerously close to the edge.

  “Don’t stay in the jeep,” Anna pleaded.

  “There should be enough room. But just in case...”

  He climbed out and hauled their backpacks from the rear seat. Dropping them beside her, he went back to help guide the cart past the precariously parked vehicle.

  The driver tipped Anna a grudging nod as he passed. She returned it, holding her breath as he inched by. She was just beginning to relax when she heard a crunch. One of the logs protruding from the back end of the cart had put a deep crease in the jeep’s fender.

  “Damn.” Duke surveyed the damage and shook his head. “Hope I don’t have to foot the bill for the repairs.”

  “Surely not! You’re on official business. If you explain how...”

  The white squint lines at the corners of his eyes crinkled, and the slow grin she was beginning to recognize as an intrinsic component of his personality tipped the corners of his mouth.

  “I’m kidding, Anna.”

  “Oh.”

  “If special ops personnel had to pay for every piece of equipment they dropped, blew up or otherwise destroyed, we’d have to mortgage our homes and sell our wives and children. Speaking of wives...”

  He glanced at the cart disappearing slowly down the steep grade. The driver was just visible, staring back at them over his shoulder. Duke recognized a perfect opportunity when it smacked him in the face.

  “The driver still looks suspicious.” He slid a hand under Anna’s ponytail and cupped her nape. “We’d better make this look good.”

  Chapter 4

  Duke intended the kiss as a blind. A tactical move to allay the driver’s suspicion of the strangers in his mountains. Maneuvering the seductive Anna Solkov into his arms was merely a secondary objective.

  Yeah, right! He recognized that for the lie it was the moment his mouth covered hers. One taste, and he was in a free fall. A long, slow glide that picked up speed and intensity with every second he had her in his arms. Instinct said he’d better yank the ripcord. Raw hunger overrode instinct.

  Shifting his stance, he brought her closer and deepened the kiss. She stiffened for a moment. Two. Then her mouth opened under his.

  Yes! A surge of pure male triumph shot through him. But despite the need that kinked his gut, he kept his hold loose. He fully expected her to pull away at any moment. When she didn’t, the last remaining corner of his mind that hadn’t imploded from the taste and the scent and feel of her finally told him that he needed to end it.

  Reluctantly, he broke contact and raised his head. Her lids lifted. He expected—hoped!—to see the slumberous smile of a well-kissed woman in her cinnamon-brown eyes. Instead they met his with a cool disdain that punched an asteroid-sized hole in his ego.

  “You’ve been wanting to do that since that night in Pete’s Place, haven’t you?”

  “Pretty much,” he admitted.

  “Then it’s just as well we got it out of the way.”

  Still cool, still maddeningly aloof, she pushed out of his arms and picked up her backpack.

  “Now we can focus on the mission.”

  Duke had been shot down before. Not often, though, and not with such casual disdain. His only consolation was that she’d responded. Just for a second or two, but she’d responded. He’d felt her body lose its stiffness, caught the hitch in her breath before her mouth opened under his. Still, as he hooked the strap of his backpack and trailed her to the jeep, he tried to convince himself he wasn’t leaving a big chunk of his manhood lying in the dirt road. It was a tough sell.

  “Better let me pull away from the edge before you get in,” he warned gruffly.

  Anna managed to maintain her air of nonchalance until he had the jeep repositioned. Once she climbed in and they were headed back up the steep grade, the facade almost crumbled.

  She could still taste him! Still feel his taut, muscled body against hers! And every time she succeeded in blocking the sensations, the vehicle would hit an incline. The muscles in Duke’s thigh corded as he worked the clutch. His arm grazed hers as he shifted. Anna edged as close as she could to her side of the jeep but the seat belt wouldn’t let her escape him completely.

  She didn’t want these wild sensations. And she certainly didn’t need the distraction they were causing. Granted, some of her antipathy to Duke Carmichael had faded. And yes, she’d almost swallowed her tongue when she’d seen him working out at the gym. Despite the increasingly chill mountain air, the memory of his rippling muscles and hard body made her sweat a little under her turtleneck. Thoroughly annoyed with herself, she whipped up the map and studied their tortuous route.

  * * *

  A little less than an hour later they rounded a turn and her grandmother’s village came into view. The cluster of dwellings was strung along a narrow shelf carved out of the timber. The valley dropped off below, and the mountains towered above.

  “It hasn’t changed at all!”

  The exclamation burst out of Anna before she noticed the satellite dishes. They sprouted from the steeply slanting roofs of a few dwellings and perched on balconies of several others. Everything else looked very much the same, though.

  One main street bisected the village. Faded Cyrillic letters on the sign above the only shop indicated it still did double duty as a post office. Chickens pecked in the dirt outside the houses scattered along both sides of the street. The homes were predominantly clapboard and small but brightly painted—to be more visible in the deep winter snow.

  The road into the village led past a church, with its twin spires topped by onion domes. Wreaths of dried wildflowers hung from the rusting Greek-Catholic iron crosses in the cemetery.

  “My great-grandparents are buried there,” Anna told Duke. “And that’s the house where my babushka was born. I think a cousin five or six times removed lives there now.”

  She nodded to a rectangular, single-story dwelling. Its brilliant blue paint was flaking off, baring the weathered boards beneath, but its window boxes were filled with late season flowers that defied the cold fall nights. A wreath with a profusion of colorful streamers decorated the front door.

  As expected, their arrival generated intense s
crutiny by the few locals out and about. A bearded shepherd driving his flock through town stared at them with narrowed eyes. A woman beating a carpet hung on a clothesline halted in midswing. The two young children with her stopped playing to gape. The boy wore a knitted sweater and a miniature version of the black, flat-brimmed cap Anna always thought of as a Zorba-the-Greek hat. The little girl had round blue eyes and a thumb stuck in her mouth. Her long braids were woven with bright ribbons.

  That was another thing Anna suddenly remembered. The Hutsuls’ love of color. They expressed it in their brightly painted houses and in the clothing they donned for weddings and other special events. On those occasions, the women topped rainbow-colored skirts with exquisitely embroidered and beaded blouses. The men tucked their pants legs into their boots Cossack-style and cinched their equally colorful shirts with wide leather belts. She was recalling one especially flamboyant party when she caught sight of a familiar face.

  “Stop!”

  Duke hit the brakes for the second time, and Anna swung out of the jeep. Although she and the stoop-shouldered woman just emerging from the village store were actually cousins several times removed, she used the time-honored title bestowed on older women by younger generations.

  “Auntie? Auntie Oksana?”

  Her cry caught the other woman by surprise. Turning a wrinkled walnut of a face, she squinted through cataract-clouded eyes as Anna rushed forward.

  “It’s Anya. Katerina Solkov’s granddaughter. Do you remember me?”

  “Anya? Little Anya?”

  “Yes, although I’m not so little anymore.”

  Her eyes widening beneath her flowered kerchief, Oksana beamed a smile that almost got lost in her wrinkles. “You’ve come for another visit?” She peered eagerly in the direction of the jeep. “With my dear, dear cousin Katerina?”

  “No, Auntie, my grandmother is well but too frail to make such a long trip. I’ve come with, uh, my husband.”

  Oh, for God’s sake! She had to stop stumbling over that word.

  Okay, it wasn’t the word itself. It was the intimacy it implied. Anna had worried enough about playing the role of love-struck bride before Duke pulled her into his arms. Now...

  Now the prospect of lying close to him for the next few nights had her all tangled up in knots of nervousness and rigidly suppressed need.

  “So you have married at last!” the older woman exclaimed. “In her last letter, your grandmother said she feared this would never happen.”

  “Yes, well...”

  Before Anna could spiel out her carefully scripted cover story, Oksana’s blurred eyes dipped to her belly.

  “But you’re not yet pregnant?”

  “No, not yet.”

  “Ahhh.” She wagged a knowing finger. “You must not waste too much time, Anya. You’re not as young as most brides. If you nibble the fruit but spit out the seeds, you will never give your babushka babies to kiss and cuddle.”

  Laughing, Anna acknowledged the age-old lament of Ukrainian mothers and grandmothers. “The babies will come, Auntie, in time.”

  “If you say.” Her squinty gaze shifted to the jeep. “So this is your husband?”

  “It is.”

  “You! Come here!”

  The order was in Ukrainian but Duke had no trouble interpreting the imperiously crooked finger. Dutifully, he climbed out of the jeep.

  “This is my grandmother’s cousin,” Anna told him. “My Auntie Oksana.”

  He smiled a greeting, which the old lady didn’t return. Instead, she subjected him to an up-and-down that left him feeling pretty much like a raw recruit being sized up by a lantern-jawed drill sergeant. Correction. Make that a prize stud about to be put up for auction. Auntie’s gaze lingered on his crotch long enough to make him acutely uncomfortable.

  Duke figured he’d read her narrow-eyed assessment right when she cackled something in Ukrainian and Anna turned a dull pink. He had to ask.

  “Did I pass inspection?”

  “Auntie wants to reserve judgment until she, uh, sees how the big knob grows on the branch. It’s an old Ukrainian saying,” she added, not meeting his eyes. “It means...”

  “I get the drift.”

  Another exchange between Anna and her auntie followed. Both women employed gestures and a series of vigorous head-shakes, but Duke could tell who won the debate.

  “She insists we stay at her house,” Anna said, confirming his guess. “She says her spare bedroom is empty since her grandson left for the university.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “You sure? She’s kin to my babushka. Either one of them could give that granny you told me about a run for her money.”

  “I’m sure.”

  * * *

  Three hours later Duke admitted he might have committed a tactical error. Granny Jones had nothing on Auntie Oksana. The woman was relentless.

  First, she insisted on feeding them. Boiled mutton. Stuffed cabbage leaves. Beets simmered with onions. Crunchy, sugared fried dough.

  “This is called hvorost,” Anna said as she savored a bite. “It’s a traditional Ukrainian dessert that’s been passed down for untold generations.”

  Duke thought hvorost tasted pretty much like deep-fried newspaper but he manfully consumed several pieces.

  Once Auntie had stuffed her guests to the groaning point, she invited what seemed like the entire village to greet them. Her tiny four-room house was soon jam-packed. A pungent combination of leather and sweat permeated every room, and lethal, home-brewed vodka flowed like spring water.

  Her guests accepted Anna warmly but were obviously reserving judgment on Duke. The women eyed him with assessing glances that turned to smirks and knowing nods when they put their heads together. On learning that he was a sergeant in the U.S. Air Force and a former star football player, the men engaged him in a somewhat one-sided discussion over the differences between American and European-style football.

  All of the guests appeared to have donned at least a portion of their Sunday best for the impromptu gathering. Duke couldn’t remember when—or if—he’d ever seen such a collection of colorful shirts and intricately embroidered blouses. He was commenting on the bright plumage to Anna when Auntie shouted from across the room.

  “Anya!”

  Waving an arthritic claw, the old woman negotiated the crowd with a younger one in tow. A distant memory tugged at Anna as she eyed the slender, green-eyed blonde but she couldn’t pin it down until Oksana announced her name.

  “Do you remember Elena? The daughter of my sister’s third son? You and Elena played together when last you visited.”

  “It’s been too many years,” the blonde protested. “Anya won’t remember.”

  “But I do!”

  The years rolled back and a disjointed sequence of events spilled out of Anna’s memory bank.

  “You shared your dolls with me. And you were in love,” she reflected with a grin. “Seven or eight years old, and so much in love with that handsome little boy we both tagged after. The one with the cowlick. What was his name?”

  Elena’s friendly smile evaporated. “Marko,” she said stiffly. “His name was Marko. He was my husband.”

  The was indicated trouble, but Anna wasn’t sure what kind until Auntie tsked and shook her head.

  “Such a young man, such a terrible accident.”

  “It was no accident!” Fire blazed hot and green in Elena’s eyes. “He was murdered, I tell you!”

  Her sharp retort rifled through the crowded rooms. Heads turned, a few women sighed audibly and more than one set of male eyes rolled. Elena caught the reaction and cursed. Spinning on a heel, she thrust her way through the crowd and out the door.

  “I’m so sorry, Auntie.” Stricken, Anna apologized for her unintentional gaffe. “I didn’t mean to upset her.”

  “How could you know? She still hurts, that one, and doesn’t want to let go of it.” Oksana sighed and pushed away the sadness. “Come, meet the wife of my nephew�
�s brother-in-law.”

  Duke snared Anna’s arm as her honorary aunt forged a path through the crowd. “What was that about?”

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  * * *

  Later didn’t come for several hours. Darkness had dropped like a curtain. The temperature dropped with it. Cold air whooshed in every time the door opened and yet another guest trooped out.

  By the time the last one exited, Anna had started to sag with fatigue and Duke was feeling the vodka’s kick. He’d understood only one word in a dozen aimed in his direction. His Russian was ten years old and of the Moscow variety. Nothing like the dialect of the Carpathian mountain people. He couldn’t mistake Auntie Oksana’s sly expression, though, when she insisted they leave the cleaning-up for morning. With a shooing motion of her gnarled hands, she herded them to her closet-size second bedroom.

  Duke had brought the backpacks and duffel in earlier so he was prepared for the room’s minuscule dimensions. The twin bed was a problem, though. The only way he and Anna could both fit in it was if they spooned, and spooned tight.

  The bed was shoved against the far wall, leaving barely enough space on the near side for a skinny nightstand with a lamp and vase of dried flowers. Above the bed Auntie had hung an elaborately punched tin icon containing a picture of the Virgin Mary. Crowded against the foot of the bed was a collection of garments hung on a wooden pole below a shelf nailed to the wall.

  Auntie had pushed the clothing to one end of the pole to carve out room for their backpacks. Wedging herself into the tiny room, she pointed to a zippered cloth bag on the shelf above the pole.

  “She wants you to lift it down,” Anna explained.

  “No problem.”

  Duke placed the cloth bag on the bed and backed out the door to give the women room to maneuver. Auntie caressed the bag with her gnarled hands for a moment, then tugged at the zipper. Duke was sure as hell no expert on quilts, but in his untutored opinion the one she drew out of its protective bag qualified as a work of art. Birds and flowers and vines formed rings of brilliant color. Centered among them were large, entwined initials.