Table of Contents

Cover Page

Excerpt

Dear Reader

Title Page

About The Author

Dear Reader

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Copyright

“I Didn’t…I Never…Meant To
Lead You On,”

Paige told Stefan.

“Lead me on?”

“Lead you on means to tease you.” She swallowed.

“To make you think I was inviting a chance to sleep with you…”

That, he had no trouble understanding. “We neck, yes. But we did not get it on. We did not hit your sack. You still even have your socks on. No reason to be afraid, Paige.”

“I’m not afraid,” she said sharply.

She was disastrous at fibbing, Stefan noted. She’d come apart in his arms as if she were a lover born for him. That kinship of spirits was rare and precious, and he couldn’t believe he had mistaken her response.

And she was afraid. Of something.

Somehow Stefan had to find a way to uncover whatever it was.

Dear Reader,

It’s the CELEBRATION 1000 moment you’ve all been waiting for, the publication of Silhouette Desire #1000! As promised, it’s a very special MAN OF THE MONTH by Diana Palmer called Man of Ice. Diana was one of the very first Silhouette Desire writers, and her many wonderful contributions to the line have made her one of our most beloved authors. This story is sure to make its way to your shelf of “keepers.”

But that’s not all! Don’t miss Baby Dreams, the first book in a wonderful new series, THE BABY SHOWER, by Raye Morgan. Award-winning author Jennifer Greene also starts a new miniseries, THE STANFORD SISTERS, with the delightful The Unwilling Bride. For something a little different, take a peek at Joan Elliott Pickart’s Apache Dream Bride. And the fun keeps on coming with Judith McWilliams’s Instant Husband, the latest in THE WEDDING NIGHT series. Our Debut Author promotion introduces you to Amanda Kramer, author of the charmingly sexy Baby Bonus.

And you’ll be excited to know that there’s more CELEBRATION 1000 next month, as the party continues with six more scintillating love stories, including The Accidental Bodyguard, a MAN OF THE MONTH from Ann Major.

Silhouette Desire—the passion continues! Enjoy!

Senior Editor

Please address questions and book requests to:

Silhouette Reader Service

U.S.: 3010 Walden Ave., P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269

Canadian: P.O. Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont. L2A 5X3

The Unwilling Bride
Jennifer Greene

www.millsandboon.co.uk

JENNIFER GREENE

lives near Lake Michigan with her husband and two children. Before writing full-time, she worked as a teacher and a personnel manager. Michigan State University honored her as an “outstanding woman graduate” for her work with women on campus.

Ms. Greene has written more that forty category romances, for which she has won numerous awards, including the RITA for Best Short Contemporary Book, and both a Best Series Author and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Romantic Times.

Dear Reader,

I can still remember finding the first Silhouette Desire novel in the bookstores…and rushing home to put my feet up and savor those pages!

I moved to Silhouette over a decade ago. This is “home” for me, and I couldn’t be more thrilled to be part of our Celebration 1000. When I write a Desire novel, I feel as if I’m talking to a fellow sister. I know you. You believe in love and commitment the way I do; you believe in families and healthy relationships…and you have the same problems I do as a woman living in the nineties. My books are to you as well as about you—and that caring between reader and writer is something that someone outside the romance field probably wouldn’t understand. Romances are about us—our struggles, our hopes, our needs. I never had to “work” to create a heroine…she’s every one of you, coping with the problems and trials of a woman today, striving to make the best life she can—and hopefully with a special lover, a man who deserves her.

I see our Celebration 1000 as a celebration of you—all of you Desire readers are the heroines of today. We share our dreams together in every love story.

My best wishes to all of you.

One

Someone was violently knocking on her front door, which Paige Stanford ignored. The phone had been ringing incessantly for the past hour, which she’d blithely ignored, too.

Growing up, her sisters used to tease her that she was so absentminded that she’d probably forget her own wedding. Paige had always vociferously resented that accusation. She wasn’t in the least absentminded. She simply had a gift for intense concentration.

Like now.

Heaven knew what time it was. Paige wasn’t sure when she had last eaten, either—and didn’t care.

Watery winter sunlight poured through the south windows on the bench counter and cement floor. Her whole workshop was strewn with veiners, gravers, chisels and pumice stones, grindstones and Eskimo stylers, drills and sanders and files. None of it would make a lick of sense to anyone but her. A stranger had no way to understand that sometimes it took chaos and a dusty mess to create a treasure of incomparable beauty.

Her eyes were riveted on the exquisite piece of jade. Weeks ago, the jade had been nothing more than a jagged lump of stone.

Now it was a finished cameo.

Paige couldn’t take her eyes off it. She’d made the cameo for her older sister, Gwen, whose birthday was six months away. Starting the project so far ahead was necessary, because it could so easily go wrong. There was no way of knowing, ever, what an innocuous lump of stone or shell would turn into until she started carving. Every stone held a mystery. Years ago she’d picked up an old saying in the sculpting world: “The truth is always there. You don’t have to find it. All you have to do is carve away what isn’t the truth.”

Discovering that truth was what she loved—and what challenged her—but Paige knew better than to claim credit for the result. Maybe it took talent and skill to reveal the stone’s secrets, but either there was beauty and truth intrinsic to the raw material or there wasn’t. As it happened, this particular piece of jade had hidden a damn near breathtaking treasure.

But holy kamoly. When she’d stepped back to study the finished cameo, it was as if a ghost had walked on her shadow. Her arms still had goose bumps, and her pulse had picked up an uneasy, disturbing beat. Her whole work studio seemed flooded with an eerie silence. She felt edgy and unsettled, almost…frightened.

Normally it took an avalanche to shake Paige—and she’d have been real annoyed at the avalanche. She couldn’t even remember being scared since she was sixteen, and that was an incident that had totally changed her life around. She was a practical, no-nonsense, unbudgeably tough cookie these days, and for Pete’s sake, she’d made hundreds of cameos. To have some strange emotional reaction to this one was not only stupid but downright confounding.

Someone thunderously knocked on her front door again. The sound registered like the vaguely annoying buzz of a gnat. She heard it. She just paid no attention.

With an impatient scowl, she examined and reexamined the piece from every angle. There had to be a reason the cameo was giving her the willies. Paige being Paige, wasn’t about to drop the problem until she figured it out.

The slab was a rough oval, perhaps ten inches across, and the image that had gradually emerged from the stone was simply a scene with a woman. Nothing frightening about her. Nothing weird. Like some primitive woods maiden, the woman was bent over a pond of water, gazing at her reflection with an expression as if she were discovering what she looked lite for the first time. She was bare, sitting with her legs tucked under her, the carving revealing full breasts and the slender slope of her spine. A mane of long, flowing hair streamed down her back. Her profile revealed a sensual classic beauty—high cheekbones, a slim nose, mysterious deep-set eyes. Something in those eyes spoke of innocence, a woman untouched by man, yet that innocence was a striking contrast to the inherent sexuality and sensuality in everything else about her.

Paige reached up and scratched her chin. The piece was good. Beyond good. It was totally wrong for her sister—Gwen was unshakably traditional and would have a conniption fit at the nudity. Paige never set out to carve the woman with bare boobs; it was just how the stone came out. Thankfully she had enough time to make an entirely different gift for her sister, but that problem shouldn’t take away from her own artistic sense of satisfaction. Without question, the cameo was one of the best things she’d ever done. She’d lucked out. The jade had magic. And it was always a thrill when she found a stone’s secrets were this wondrous, this precious.

Except for this time. For some absolutely ridiculous reason, her hands were trembling.

From her denim overalls to the calfskin Uggs on her feet to the long, practical braid hanging over her shoulder, Paige wasn’t the trembling type. All her life she’d been a rebel. As a teenager, she’d taken that too far, but as an adult she’d been grateful for those sturdy New England individualist genes. If she hadn’t had the guts to beat to her own drummer, she’d never have had the courage to take up cameo carving as a profession. Being a little weird didn’t bother her, but at the vast age of twenty-seven, she’d never been so ditzy as to believe in the fanciful or impossible.

The woman in the cameo appeared painfully familiar, when she couldn’t be. Paige could not possibly know that woman, that face, that scene. The stone revealed its own secrets, and those secrets had nothing to do with the artist—no sculptor could impose or force an idea that wasn’t inherent in the raw material. The woman had no special meaning for her. Couldn’t. Period. Pfft. End of subject.

So why couldn’t she shake this stupid, silly, and damnably eerie déjà vu feeling?

For a few moments, she was vaguely aware that the repetitive pounding on her front door had finally ceased. But then a new sound intruded-in the background. Apparently her unwanted visitor had entered the house, because she heard a voice calling out. A deep, booming, male voice—positively one she didn’t recognize—coming from the muffled distance of the front hall.

On a scale of one to ten, her interest in chitchatting with a stranger was a negative five. Paige figured it was an even-Steven chance the guy would take off if he found no one home, and she was hidden pretty good. The workshop had once been a porch off a spare bedroom, tacked on to the old Vermont farmhouse as if it were a surprise and handily buried at the end of a wing. She didn’t imagine a thief would choose to announce his presence with a big booming yell, so it was mighty unlikely the stranger represented any threat worth worrying about, and she was loath to break her concentration on the cameo if she had a choice.

It seemed she didn’t.

Faster than gossip could spread bad news, the intruder barreled through her workshop doorway. Paige only had a few seconds to form an impression before all hell broke loose.

A slim memory slapped in her mind of someone—maybe Joanne, the clerk at the grocery store?—mentioning that she had a new neighbor who’d rented the old Jasper place down the road. In a tiny Vermont town like Walnut Woods, Paige knew every face and kissing cousin in the whole burg, so this had to be the newcomer.

Positively, though, Joanne had neglected to mention that the man was genetic kin to a bear. Wild, shaggy black hair framed a ruddy face with high Slavic cheekbones. A thick, wiry beard hid his chin. His eyes were piercing black with the shine of wet onyx. She really only had time for one quick glance—she guessed his age in the early thirties, definitely a man and not a boy—and one fast eyeful took in the cossack boots, the tree-trunk solid torso that stretched well past six feet, and the red-and-black flannel jacket that was dusted with snow and flapping open.

The devil spotted her and started yelling. Roaring, more like. She couldn’t understand a word—she guessed the foreign language was Russian, because he seemed to be bellowing at her in all consonants—and offhand, she suspicioned he was communicating primarily in swear words. His voice volume was accompanied by wild pantomiming gestures indicating he wanted her to come with him. Now.

Paige never obeyed anyone—which he couldn’t know—but the man had to have a rich fantasy life to assume any woman with a brain would obediently take off with a madman of a stranger. Still, he was a strikingly sexy hunk. His breathtaking looks had no relevance to anything. It was just a point of interest; she didn’t run into a lot of men who could make a nun’s hormones sizzle. If she had to be interrupted, he was uncontestably the most fascinating intrusion she’d had in a blue moon.

She waved a hand in a soothing gesture, hoping to calm him down. It was more than obvious that the stranger was overheated, uncontrolled, and beside himself about something. Whatever upset him clearly had to be addressed before she had a prayer of getting rid of him.

“Do you speak English?” she asked.

That stopped him short. “Da…yes.” As if he just then recognized that he was speaking to her in the wrong language, he threw up his hands. The gesture was as exuberantly extravagant as everything else about him. Lowering his voice two volumes, he said clearly and succinctly, “My beautiful lambchop, your kitchen is on fire.”

She blinked.

No one—but no one—had ever called Paige “lambchop.” She’d never even heard such a sexist term in a decade. Whoever had taught the stranger English must either have been ancient or had a mischievous sense of humor—who knew if he realized what he was saying?—but then the meaning of his words registered.

She sniffed. Fast. Sometimes, when she worked with power tools, her workshop picked up a leftover, dusty smoke smell. But this scrabbling hint of smoke wasn’t at all the same odor. And it definitely wasn’t emanating from her workroom.

“Aw, shoot,” she muttered, and took off. Guilt pumped extra adrenaline through her veins. She hit the turn in the hall at a near gallop. No question she’d put a loaf of bread in the oven to bake earlier. She didn’t make her own bread often, but something about all the kneading and pounding and mess invariably inspired the creative juices when she was in a work slump. And it worked that morning, too. She clearly remembered flying back to her shop and diving back into her cameo project with renewed and furiously intense concentration.

She’d just sort of accidentally forgotten about the bread.

The bear tagged her heels as she tore down the white-stucco hall and rounded the corner toward the kitchen. Smoke belched through the room, thicker than cumulus clouds, and at a glance she could see flames shooting from the old wood stove.

A woman who lost track of time as often as she did learned to be an ace pro with emergencies. Her judgment call was quick and came from experience—this wasn’t a 911 problem requiring outside help. It was just a run-of-the-mill ordinary disaster. Coughing—and calling herself a number of colorful names—she raced toward the old-fashioned broom closet and yanked out the giant fire extinguisher.

For an instant there, she’d forgotten she had a side kick. The stranger suddenly leaped into action, as if his first concern had been rescuing any humans in the house, and his second was an automatic assumption that he was needed to take charge. The bear grabbed the extinguisher from her hands and then pushed her—right in the chest!—out of harm’s way through the door.

He shouted something at her, but it was in consonants again. He tried a second time. “I need…cloth! You got cloth thingie?”

She interpreted that he wanted hot pads before opening the oven, but he found the pads on his own. They were in plain sight on the counter, just like about everything else in the old fashioned blue-and-white kitchen. Paige firmly believed in a clean, neat, everything-put-away cooking space. She just never got around to doing it. Good thing, this time, because he found the hot pads and hurled the flaming bread pan in the snow in a matter of seconds. Then he pulled the pin on the extinguisher and let it rip inside the oven.

The fire was out and the hoopla over almost faster than she could spit. The kitchen was still choking from the stench of the burned bread and acrid extinguisher spray, but even that was dissipating quickly. Her stranger hadn’t slowed down yet. One window was already cracked open—her wood stove could toast a small country if there was an outlet for the heat—but now he threw up the sashes on all the rest of the windows. Nice, freezing, seventeen-degree Vermont winter air poured into the room like a blessing.

Her heart was still slamming, so it took a few seconds to get her breath back and assess the damages. The ancient wood stove had a fresh, new coat of blacking, but the old baby had survived fires before. A few more soot stains only added to its character. For the hundredth time she consoled herself that her gift for intense concentration was a wonderful thing, not a dismally disgusting character flaw. Her life would just run smoother if she paid an eensy bit more attention to real life. Thank God, though, it really didn’t appear that there was any serious harm done.

The bear seemed to reach the same conclusion. He whipped around and pinned her with a studying stare. “You okay, fruitcake?”

She blinked. Again.

“Ah. Fruitcake is wrong word, I know.” He thought fast. “Cupcake. You okay, my cupcake?”

She dry-washed her face with a hand. It didn’t seem the time to suggest some changes in his vocabulary to adjust for twentieth century feminist American values. Not before they’d even been introduced. And not while he was beaming at her with a big, brawny, unnervingly sexy grin that somehow made her…rattled.

“I saw smoke from my house. Just little bit, coming from you one open window. Good thing I saw that, huh, lambchop? All gone now. No hurt done. You okay, you house okay, happy to be of rescue.” He held out his hand. “I am Stefan Michaelovich. Your neighbor.”

“Paige Stanford. And I’m grateful that you spotted the smoke so quickly. Thank you for, um, rescuing me.” Returning his handshake was just basic manners. Paige had no idea how such an innocuous, automatic courtesy turned into something else.

His palm clapped against hers and then just laid there—he didn’t pump or shake; he just held her hand in a capturing squeeze. Perhaps people shook hands differently in Russia? She had no problem with that. It was just that the connection was tighter than a plug in a socket, and she wasn’t prepared for the electric shock.

His hand was swallowing bigger than hers, and warm. His grip had all the muscular power of a physically active man, yet his skin was smooth and unscarred, his nails pared short and clean. By contrast, her hands were a disgrace. Nothing new. Unavoidably she picked up calluses and cuts from working so many hours with chisels and carving tools. She never thought about her hands—who cared?—but she was suddenly, strangely conscious of every knuckle and nail, every surface of texture that touched his.

Seconds spun out. She kept expecting him to release her hand. Instead his eyes charged over her face as the warmth of his palm seeped into hers. A clock ticked somewhere. Radiators clanked on. Cold, sharp air gushed from the windows, rapidly obliterating the last of the smoke, and still his gaze honed on her face, stalking every feature as if fascinated by her eyes and nose and mouth.

She had an ordinary nose. Plain old brown eyes. An average mouth with no lipstick or gloss. Her bulky denim overalls entirely concealed her figure, and by this time in the day the single braid dangling down her back was undoubtedly sloppy and askew.

Years and years ago, Paige couldn’t find a skirt tight enough, a sweater skimpy enough, but that was back when she’d been a wild, reckless girl who was determined to test and tease her new feminine powers on every passing boy. She’d wiped every trace of that teenage girl off the map. Fiercely. Completely. Eons ago. There was nothing suggestive about her appearance now—absolutely nothing.

Yet the stranger seemed to find something in her looks that captivated him. He wouldn’t stop looking at her, his attention absorbed, as if he were learning things about her from the nest of their palms and the look of her face. Things she didn’t know. Things she didn’t see when she looked in a mirror.

“Mr. Michaelovich—” she began uneasily.

He swiftly corrected her. “Stefan.”

“Stefan, then. I—” But abruptly she forgot whatever she’d planned to say, because that simply, he released her hand and she was free again. Those few seconds of unnerving silence might never have been. The way he looked at her, the brush of those midnight black eyes on her face and body, the electric plug of awareness between his palm and hers…she must have, simply must have, imagined it.

She drew herself up to her full five foot seven inches, and mentally scrambled for something intelligent and neighborly to say. There wasn’t a man in Walnut Woods that she didn’t get along with; she never had a problem relating with a guy one-on-one—and he certainly wasn’t going to be the exception. “So…you’re living in the old Jasper place?”

“Yes. Just down your road.”

Since that seemed to awkwardly end the conversation, she scrambled for something more. “Are you here with your wife and family?”

A slow waltz of a smile. He was pleased she’d asked. “No wife. No small ones. But the Borges in town—they are family, third cousins, maybe four. They are how I came here, to your Vermont, instead of L.A. or Georgia or Texas. This was only place I had a family from Russia, so good to start from.”

“You plan to stay?”

“To stay in America—oh, yes. I am already studying to become citizen. But am only living in Walnut Woods for couple months, temporary until I figure out jobs and where best to settle. My work is physics. For now I have computer hooked up, real cool, real groovy, can do much work this way. In the long time, though, I will need to find my own kind.”

Although his accent was thick, he wasn’t that hard to understand. She mentally translated “in the long time” to mean “in the long run” and almost chuckled at his use of the ancient “groovy” slang. It was just his last comment that she couldn’t comprehend. “By your own kind, do you mean other Russian people?”

“No, no. Being Russian, not important. French, German, Japanese, would make no difference, either. I mean finding other people in physics, like me, a lab or university where we talk the same work. This is why I come here. Important, this freedom and right to talk with each other. We have many, many problems affecting whole planet. Cannot fix these nature of problems unless we all have freedom to talk together. So I come to America to melt in your pot.” He hesitated. “Have I said it right, about melt in the pot?”

“Right enough. The phrase is ‘melting pot’. People say that America is a melting pot of different cultures.” He sounded like a hard-core idealist, she mused, which somehow didn’t surprise her any more than his physicist background. Never mind the over-whelming shoulders and that wild beard. He only appeared to be an uncivilized bear at first glance. He hadn’t missed anything yet. Those black eyes were shrewd, swift, sharp with intelligence—and maybe saw too much for a woman’s own good.

“I struggle. Reading the language, no problem, and the words in my work, I know. But talking everyday words…” He shook his head with an exuberant grin. “Your language can make me tired quick.”

“You’re doing fine,” she assured him.

“Nyet. Will take time. But I get there. Will be happy when I get past all this struggling part.” He shifted on his feet and looked around again. “Well…you want help cleaning up this mess?”

“No, no. I can handle it myself.”

“Could have had big fire. You work hard concentrating, you forget things like fire, huh? No one else here? Like husband?”

“No, I live alone.” Everyone in town knew she lived by herself, so there was no point in being less than honest.

“Hmm.” She wasn’t sure what he was assessing with that long, lingering hmm, but his gaze was suddenly all over her face again. Then, with one swift move, he pushed away from the counter and loped for the door. “Well, I go home. But you know now I live close if you need help, yes?”

“Yes. And that’s very kind.” She followed him to the door and had just grabbed for the knob when he suddenly pivoted around.

“If it’s an okeydoke, I would sure like to get it on with you, babe.”

Her jaw had to drop a full inch.

“Uh-oh. I say something to offend? I mean to say…hope to see you again. Hope you might put up with my learning new English sometimes? Be like neighbors, friends?”

“I…sure.”

A flash of another high-voltage grin, and then—finally—he was gone. Paige closed the door behind him with a massive sigh of relief. She shook her head. Of course he hadn’t meant that “get it on with you, babe” in a sexual context.

Stefan was obviously having some problems coping with a new language. That someone had taught him a ton of colloquial expressions wasn’t helping. He undoubtedly didn’t realize what he was saying.

The room was freezing—no surprise, with all the open windows—and Paige abruptly hustled to shag them all down and latch them again. When she reached the far south pane, though, she yanked down the window and then hesitated. From that view she could still see him, his shaggy head thrown back as he chugged down her snowy driveway, past the old stone fence until he crossed the road out of sight.

Vermont was Robert Frost country, and her stone fence was typical of a New England neighborhood that strongly believed Frost’s philosophy about good fences making good neighbors. Her friends and neighbors all knew she was a hopeless hermit—a happy hermit—and respected her workaholic habits. Everyone knew better than to interrupt her workday.

Somehow she didn’t think the gregarious Russian had ever read Frost.

As she ambled back toward her workshop, she told herself it didn’t matter. They weren’t likely to run into each other that often. Positively, though, it would be cruel to be unfriendly when they did. If he blithely ran around calling women “babe” and “cupcake” and boisterously suggesting “they get it on,” some woman was going to lynch him.

It wouldn’t kill her to give him a little language coaching. He had to be lonely, trying to adjust to a new country, a new place, new ways.

Paige knew about loneliness. She knew all about having trouble fitting in. Old memories suddenly pushed through her mind like bubbles rising to the surface of a pond. She pushed them back down.

At twenty-seven, she was secure and content with her life-style. Maybe she’d once been as flighty as a fickle wind, but that unfortunate period in her life was long over. These days, nothing budged her from her steady course—except, of course, for that dadblasted strange cameo waiting for her attention in the workshop. Her mind turned to her sisters and to the work waiting for her.

Her new neighbor was about as restful as a tornado. But he was basically just a stranger passing through. No one she needed to worry about. No one who was going to affect her life.

Paige had survived tornadoes before.

Two

The computer screen glowed in the dark, illuminating a complex jumble of mathematical numbers and equations. “No, no, no” Stefan typed on the keyboard. “Four years ago, discovered this didn’t work. Look at line 47. The problem in logic begins there….”

When he finished with the post, he leaned back and rubbed his tired eyes. The mathematician he’d been communicating with lived in Paris, outside the Sorbonne. Through the wonders of a computer, modem and an internet connection, Stefan could teach or argue theory or share ideas with some of the finest scientific minds in the world.

He’d been in America three weeks. Long enough to discover that freedom was far more addictive than any drug. He couldn’t get enough of it.

Growing up in Russia, he had been isolated because of his brain. Patriotism had been drilled into him when he was young—his mind belonged to the state. Forget a movie with popcorn; forget falling in love; forget taking a passel of kids sledding on a snowy afternoon. His brain was a gift, and he had a responsibility to produce for his country, to channel all his drive and abilities toward that goal.

Stefan had no quarrel with any of that. He’d accepted the loneliness, accepted his responsibilities. He never saw the conflict coming that would slowly eat him alive. But physics was his field. Energy. In a world with finite resources, energy problems—and solutions—had increasing power over war, peace, economics, quality of life. Solutions existed, if scientific minds across the world could simply talk together, share what they knew. Repression of knowledge was alien to everything he believed in. Suffering had no country. Certain problems were universal and had no flag. And when he’d had a breakthrough, and discovered he would not be permitted to share his research with other physicists across the world, that was the straw that had broken the donkey’s back.

He’d started saving his rubles. Enough to give him a solid nest egg in America. It took a long time—too long—but the waiting had intensified his feelings and his resolve. America was his country long before he set foot on her soil.

Impatiently he flicked off the computer. The living room flooded with darkness. For a few minutes, there was no sound in the whole house beyond the rumbling of the furnace and the rhythmic tick of a distant clock. As his eyes slowly dilated, he focused on the view from his window, where the snowy landscape was mystically glazed by moonlight. Down the winding road, he saw lights. Her lights.

Thinking about Paige had started to drive him crazy.

He lurched out of his desk chair and ambled to the casement windows. Paige slept in the corner room on the second story of the old brick farmhouse. He guessed the location of her bedroom, because lights never emanated from any other room on that floor at night.

Right now, it was just nine o’clock, and the second story was predictably blacker than pitch. She hadn’t gone to bed yet. But she would—around a quarter to eleven. Her bedtime rituals were as regular as a heartbeat.

Stefan never meant to make a pattern of watching her. One night he’d just happened to glance out, and caught her standing in the window with the light behind her, as she took down her braid. Her house was four hundred yards distance from his, not close enough to see clearly, but close enough to appease his conscience about being a voyeur. He had never seen anything he shouldn’t. She was never naked. Never remotely unclothed. In fact, she seemed to favor sleeping in some big, voluminous garment that resembled a feed sack.

Personally he thought she belonged in satin.

Taking down her hair was the last chore she did before sleeping. She stood at the window, stargazing while her fingers unplaited the long, tangled braid. Then she brushed her hair, always with swift, impatient movements, as if doing a necessary job for the sole purpose of getting it over with.

Personally, he would have brushed her hair quite differently.

When her hair was finally loose, it streamed down her back in a waterfall, past her shoulder blades, as rich as mink, silken, glossy. A man could go crazy, imagining his hands in that hair. Her arms were raised when she brushed back from the crown, and even in that appalling sackcloth garment, her breasts pushed and thrust against the fabric. A man could go crazy, imagining his hands on those firm, full breasts.

She couldn’t be a virgin. Stefan had carefully studied all the American newspapers. He wasn’t sure how old Paige was, maybe mid-twenties. But it was clear no American women were virgins past the age of sixteen. They talked about sex everywhere: ads, TV, movies, national news. Stefan figured he could not assimilate into the culture until he figured such things out—he would not want to offend some woman sometime by accidentally inferring that she did not have reams of sexual prowess and expertise. This was hard. In his country, it was okay if a woman had not slept with the entire Bronco Bills baseball team. Here, a guy might be considered disgustingly repressed if he failed to talk about sex—or worse, if he considered sex to be an intimately private subject. Stefan was trying hard to get on the band tire.

Paige, though, struck him as being on a different band tire, too. Though it seemed impossible, he couldn’t shake the impression that she was asleep as a woman.

He’d seen her working attire—no makeup, the tight braid, the bulky, concealing clothes. Yet it was only natural that she would choose practical, common sense clothing styles with her work. There was a storm of dreams in her dark brown eyes, the passion of emotion. Her movements had an inherent sensuality and grace. And her face had a classic beauty, a damn near mesmerizing beauty, yet she seemed completely unaware of her looks, or how those looks could affect a man.

The morning of the fire, he’d seen the jade cameo in her workshop. It was her. Exactly her. At the time, he hadn’t realized it because his mind had been on the fire. But later, the profile in that jade cameo had come back to haunt him. Later, he’d considered that a woman who created cameos had to have a deeply romantic nature.

Yet she lived alone. Stefan kept an eye out, not just from nosiness but because if she was so absentminded as to start one fire, she could certainly start another. No one watched out for her. No men came calling. She worked all the time, and only seemed to leave the house for groceries. Yet night after night, watching her in that window, he’d seen her vulnerability and loneliness.

He knew loneliness well, but there had always been reasons why it had been difficult to pursue a mate in his life. It was a mind-boggling puzzle why she didn’t have a man in hers.

For three weeks, that puzzle had been gnawing on his mind.

Longer than a man who thrived on challenges could be reasonably expected to stand.

Swiftly he turned his head from the window. His gaze pounced on the telephone. He’d mastered the telephone book his first week in America, read the entire Yellow Pages one night. Finding the number for “Stanford, Paige” was a piece of cake. He considered for a minute, then dialed her number and carried the telephone over to the window.

She answered the phone on the fourth ring, but her voice sounded husky and breathless as if she’d been running. “Paige here.”

“This is Stefan. I not bother you long. I guess you are working—”

“Yes, I was, actually—”

“Just one quick question. When you call police here, you don’t call police, right? You call 9-1-1? That’s how?”

“Yes, for an emergency, that’s exactly h—”

“Okeydoke. Not bother you further. Thank you for the neighborly help, my cupcake.” Gently he hung up the receiver and waited. He counted to ten in English, then French, then started in Russian with aden, dva, tree, chaterrie…the telephone jangled next to him.

As innocent as a virgin, he picked it up. “Stefan here,” he barked, adopting her method of answering.

Her words gushed out like water tumbling from a faucet. “Stefan, for heaven’s sake, are you in some kind of trouble? Do you need help?”

He stroked his beard, thinking he should probably be feeling big guilt for trying such a ruse. Perhaps the guilt would come. Momentarily he was captured by the sound of her voice. “You would help if I were in trouble? You barely know me?”

“We’re neighbors. In America, neighbors help each other.”

“This is wonderful quality,” he said. “We need to spread this American quality of kindness across the world. It would make a difference.”

He heard her release a quick sigh. A lustily, loud impatient sigh. Full of passion. “Stefan, we can talk about philosophy another time. I was worried why you wanted to dial 911. Did you have a break-in?”

“Break-in? I don’t know this phrase.”

“Did you have a robbery? A thief?”

“No, no. No break-in. I am just figuring out how to do things. Not easy. I had much trouble in the grocery store today. Nothing is the same here. I like everything, you understand, this is my country now. But being able to read fluently and talk fluently is not the same, and I seem to be culturally gapped big-time.”

He heard her make another sound—the chortling hint of a chuckle.

“You would laugh at my problem?” he asked her.

“Oh, no.” She sobered quickly. “No, Stefan, I wasn’t laughing at you—”

“I worry fiercely about offending by saying wrong things, doing wrong things. But this is truth—I am utter confusion.” He didn’t have to work to make his tone sound mournful. A little talent for drama was in his Russian genes. “How kind, your neighborly offer to help. Much welcomed.”

“Ummmm…”

“I am close to desperate in this confusion, so your offer to help could not arrive at better time. I feel relief. Big relief. Be over in five minutes to accept this help, maybe quicker.”

Actually it didn’t take him four minutes to burrow into a jacket, hike the snowy road, leap her fence and exuberantly knock on her door. When she opened it, her face had an expression of bewilderment as if she had no idea how this impromptu visit came to be.

Stefan stomped the snow off his boots and closed the door—biting winter wind was gusting in the foyer. Then he smiled at her. Her forehead had a dusty smudge. Her thick brown braid had wisps escaping in a halo around her cheeks. Her black sweater had a hole, as did her jeans, and she was wearing socks, no shoes. But beneath all that was a breathtakingly beautiful woman, and it was a luxury to just look into those velvet brown eyes. “You still working so late, and here, I come and interrupt you. How about I make you something to drink while you keep working, so you not mind this interruption so bad?”

“It’s okay,” she said.

“You’re not thirsty? Not hungry?”

Paige had no chance to consider whether she was hungry or thirsty. She wasn’t sure if she was coming or going, by the time Stefan had been there an hour.

She vaguely recalled his exuberantly insisting that she continue working as if he weren’t there. What a joke. Stefan was an impossible man to ignore. He’d raided her kitchen for a simple glass of water and emerged with a pot of hot coffee, a bottle of vodka under his arm, two mugs and a six-inch-high sandwich—for her. “You forgot to eat, yes?”

It was true—she had forgotten dinner—and because there was no convenient place to set up the snack in her work studio, they’d ended up in the living room.

There’d been no lights on. He’d switched on her grandmother’s ruby thumbnail globe lamp. There’d been no fire in the fieldstone hearth, but he’d fixed that, too—stacked the wood, checked the flue and then lit a match to the kindling. He’d tossed her some couch pillows, pushed a claw-foot stool under her feet and had tipped the vodka bottle into her coffee mug a couple of times now.

“Cold tonight,” he kept saying. “As cold as Petersburg in a blizzard. Need to warm your toes.”

Her toes were cold, not from temperature but from nerves. Stefan seemed to have settled in as solidly as an oak tree taking root. It wasn’t exactly as if he were pushy. It was more like being stuck with a big, effusively friendly bear. Somewhere in that gnarly, wild beard was a boyish grin, a winsomeness—he was clearly trying to help her, to please. It was just…those weren’t a boy’s eyes looking her over by the lap of firelight.

Paige kept telling herself to bury the silly nerves. She’d been working all day, looked like something the cat would refuse to bring home. There was no reason to think he was attracted, no reason not to share a companionable drink with a neighbor. Stefan had thrown himself in the overstuffed blue recliner, a nice three feet away. He hadn’t said one word on any other subject but the reason he came—and heaven knew, he did need help with the language.

“…so I pay this woman, and I say ‘thank you, we hit the sack anytime, chick.’” Stefan shrugged. “Something clearly wrong with what I say. I meant compliment. But she turned color of roses, real quick, real red, and started talking so fast I couldn’t follow. I don’t know what went wrong.”

“Oh, Stefan.” Paige shook her head. “Who taught you English?”

“I learned in school, from early days. But that was always reading more than speaking. In university years, I met Ivan. A friend, a physicist, thirty years older than me, but he had actually lived in America. He knew the real English, the kind people spoke every day. Nothing like textbooks. I studied with him, hard.”

“Um…Stefan,” she said tactfully, “he taught you a lot of slang.”

“Yes, slang, thank God. I discovered on instant arrival that no one here speaks with grammar. Learning all that grammar useless. I am relieved to know slang. I not want to stick out like sore toe.”

“Sore thumb.” Paige corrected him automatically, and then hesitated, unsure how to approach his language misconceptions without hurting his feelings. “About your friend…I’m sure he was a really wonderful friend, and I certainly don’t mean to criticize him…but I’m afraid he taught you some slang expressions that aren’t used anymore. Especially some of the phrases referring to women.”

“Yeah?” Stefan was clearly one of those highenergy, physical men who couldn’t sit still for more than two seconds. Not for the first time, he sprang from the recliner, checked her mug, noted it was empty and splashed in another double dose of vodka and coffee. More coffee than vodka this -time, she hoped. “Explain to me some examples, okay?”

“Well, the thing is, Stefan, if your friend lived here a long time ago, he just wouldn’t have any reason to know that we’ve had a strong political women’s movement in this country over the last couple of decades. There was a time it was okay to call a woman cupcake or chick or doll. In another time, those were terms of endearment or affection—”

Stefan’s shaggy eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Endearments are now forbidden? American women no longer want affection?”

“No, no. It’s not that. It’s just that certain terms have become symbols of women being oppressed.”

“Paige, you are throwing me for a rope. I know about oppression. Oppression has nothing in common with word meaning of affection, not that I understand. You American women seek to oppress affection?”

“No. No, I…” She shook her head, starting to feel utterly confused herself. “The point is that some of those words and phrases became symbols. Symbols of the ways women had been treated like sex objects.”

“Ah. I get you. Much clearer now.” He hesitated. “I think. What is sex object?”

Paige grabbed her mug. She’d been wrong. No matter what proportion of vodka he’d splashed into the coffee, it wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough to be comfortable with the unexpected turn this conversation was taking. She slugged down a gulp of the brew and grappled to explain. “A sex object is when someone is treated like a thing instead of a person. Women wanted to be valued for more than just their bodies or looks. They wanted to be valued and loved for their minds.”

“Yeah? So what is the news here? This is automatic. What man with brain would love half the woman? Why waste time loving less than body, soul, mind, whole caboodle? How else would you love?”

“Um, maybe we’d better try this language lesson another time,” Paige said desperately. Her conscience shot her slivers of guilt for copping out. Before he went to town again—for his sake—he really needed to understand that it wasn’t wise to call strange women “cupcake” or warmly suggest that they “get it on” or “hit the sack.” But to summarize the whole history of feminist philosophy and politically correct language in a short conversation—it just wasn’t that easy. There was clearly a whole difference in cultures.

Or there was a difference in him. An image flashed through her mind of Stefan, making love, inhaling a woman’s mind, body, soul, “whole caboodle.” Blood charged through her veins in an embarrassing rush. He had sounded so matter-of-fact. Maybe loving “whole caboodle” was status quo for him, but it wasn’t anything she was familiar with. And she was utterly confounded how the subject had veered in such an intimately personal direction. They’d started out in the nice, cool North Pole—how had they ended up in the hot climate of Tahiti?

“You are probably frustrated with me. I learn too slow,” he said morosely.

“No, no, you learn very fast. It’s just that learning certain things about any language probably takes a lot of time.”

“Yes, exactly true. But it helps much having someone to explain. I hope we can talk like this again?”

“Sure,” Paige said. What else could she say? She had a bad feeling she’d only further confused him about the language instead of helping him this time. Still, she carefully added, “I’m afraid I don’t have a lot of free time, though, Stefan. I work long hours.”

“I understand. I saw your workroom, your cameos. Maybe you could show me something about your art another time, too, okeydoke?”

“Okeydoke.” When he surged to his feet, Paige abruptly realized that he was leaving—without having to be asked, which was a huge relief—and she swiftly uncurled from the couch and popped to her feet, too. She opened her mouth, intending to say something cordial about his stopping by. Instead a giggle bubbled from her throat and escaped. A giggle. Her. A plain old girlish, giddy, happy giggle. How appallingly silly.

Stefan threw back his head and laughed. “You sleep good tonight, babe. Vodka good for you. Nothing to worry, lyubemaya. Great medicine for the soul.”

Paige didn’t know what that lyubemaya meant, but knowing his fondness for affectionate terms, she figured it was too dangerous to ask. Temporarily her reaction to a couple of spiked coffees was embarrassing her to death. At five foot seven and a sturdy one hundred and thirty pounds, she certainly should have been able to handle a little alcohol. For that matter, she’d never been a sissy drinker, had always taken her brandy in straight shots anytime she had a cold. It just belatedly occurred to her that she hadn’t had a cold in three or four years. “I’m afraid I haven’t had much experience with vodka,” she admitted.

“And I bet you never had borscht? Caviar? Solyanka? We will have to fix all those missing experiences in your life very soon.”

Food, he was talking about. Not love. Not sex. It had to be the hundred-proof liquid sloshing in her mind that made her suddenly think of “missed experiences” in a context with Stefan.

Vodka might be medicine for the soul in Russia, but it wasn’t for her. Positively she was never touching the stuff again if it made her feel this…goofy.

Stefan had been nothing but friendly. A lonely man in a strange country, seeking some basic companionship. Even now, as he yanked on his alpaca jacket, the front hall sconce light illuminated his genial smile, the crinkle of laugh lines around his eyes. It was just his powerful stature that made her five-seven seem defenselessly small. Maybe he was hopelessly gregarious, but he hadn’t done or said one thing to make her worry that he was anything but a kind man. A safe man. A good guy.

“Snowing again,” he noted, as he pulled worn leather gloves from his pockets.

“We’ll probably have a couple more inches by morning.” She hugged her arms under her chest. The front hall was drafty cold. He was obviously ready to leave, so she thought he was just turning toward her to say goodbye. And she saw him bend his head, but she also saw his kind, safe almost-familiar-now smile.

It never occurred to her that a kiss was coming.

It never occurred to her that he wanted to kiss her.

Her mind scrabbled to recall if she’d sent him any come-on body language signals. But of course she hadn’t. Paige hadn’t sent any men those willing body language signals since she was sixteen. And lightning storms weren’t supposed to happen in the blizzard month of January.

She wasn’t prepared, never even got her arms unfolded before they were trapped between his body and hers. A big hand cupped her head. His lips touched hers, more gentle than a whisper, his mouth unbearably soft against the tickle of his rough, wiry beard.

The taste of him was foreign. Alien. Drugging sweet and disturbing. Her pulse zoomed like a skater on the ice for the first time, unpredictable and unsteady and flying way too fast.

That first skimming kiss turned deeper. His mouth rubbed against hers, testing, exploring the texture of her lips, savoring the taste of her. You’d think he hadn’t kissed a woman in the last hundred years. You’d think he just discovered a secret treasure, and her senses wrapped around the smell of leather and alpaca wool and the male warmth radiating from his body.

The speed of light was fast, but not half as fast as the speed of darkness. It had been so long since she’d kissed anyone. She’d forgotten. The exhilaration sweeping through her pulse was more frightening than any danger. She’d forgotten what it was like to feel that innocent burst of yearning, to feel that lusty dizzy spring-fever high, to feel that heady excitement of wanting. Or maybe she’d never known. She’d kissed boys, not men. Never a man who knew how to kiss like he did. Never him.

She meant to bolt, not close her eyes. She meant to push him away, not stand stock-still as if she were caught up in a spell of enchantment. She wasn’t wild anymore. She’d slayed and buried every hint of wildness in her heart, years and years ago, yet it was as if she’d frozen those emotions instead of truly killing them off, because they seeped through her now, billowing loose like a parachute in the wind.

It was his fault. If she could just get a lungful of oxygen, she knew she could catch control again. Yet his thumb grazed the line of her jaw, in a caressing gesture as potent as tenderness. And his kiss turned openmouthed, claiming her response as if it already belonged to him, making her li’ps ache and her head feel thrumming dizzy.

She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. And then, she didn’t have to. He lifted his head. There was a fire in his eyes that hadn’t been there before, sharp and black and hot, yet he pushed back a strand of her hair with a gentle touch. His gaze scored her face, studying her eyes, her mouth, the flush burned in her cheeks that he’d put there. And then he smiled.

“Paige…” He dropped his hand and stepped toward the door, as if nothing but leaving had ever been on his mind. The sudden glint of humor in his eyes, in fact, had the devil’s own mischief. “So you know. That was not about oppression or sex object. That was just Russian way of saying thank you, good night.”

That was it. When he opened the door, a harsh sting of snow blasted in, but then he was gone.

She threw the latch and hooked the chain bolt, unsure whether she wanted to shoot him—or laugh. It would seem she’d gotten one language lesson through to him, if he understood the concepts of “oppression” and “sex object” well enough to joke about them.

She couldn’t seem to laugh, though. Her heart was still slamming too hard. Even when he’d completely disappeared out of sight down the driveway, her pulse was still bouncing off the walls.

That Russian didn’t need language to communicate a damn thing.

Abruptly she realized how late it was. She gathered up the dishes from the living room, then started turning off lights through the house. The last room was her workshop, and when she switched off the overhead from the doorway, her eyes instinctively flew to the jade cameo.

The light couldn’t help but draw her. She’d stashed the jade cameo on a shelf, still unsure what she was going to do with it. But even with the whole downstairs dark, the bright snowy night caught the soft iridescent glow of the stone. It was the nature of jade to appear lit from within, and she found herself staring at the carved woman in profile, frowning hard, not really seeing her but simply thinking.

She used to be wild and impulsive, once upon a time. She used to be reckless, giddy on life and her newly developing powers as a woman, teasing every boy she could attract. And it was never far from her conscience, that a sixteen-year-old boy had once paid the cost for her thoughtlessness and insensitivity.

She’d changed. Completely. Her life was selfdiscipline, work, responsibility. Possibly she was a teensy bit absentminded—hey, there was no way to wipe every single flaw from her character—but she felt good about the woman she’d turned into. She hadn’t hurt anyone. She’d been very careful of that. Her sisters said she was too tough on herself, but Paige stood on her own two feet, strong and sturdy.

Alone.

Safe.

Alone and safe had been paired in her mind for a decade, as natural as pairing peanut butter and jelly. Nothing she’d questioned…until tonight and a wild, wayward kiss that had come out of nowhere.

Around that unpredictable Russian, Paige thought darkly, she had better watch her p’s and q’s.

That settled, she pivoted on her heel and went up to bed.

Three

Paige was too busy working to think about Stefan.

Her legs were wrapped around the spokes of the work stool, her hands around a cup of fragrant Darjeeling tea. At five in the morning—when she had just as determinedly not been thinking about Stefan—she ’d remembered the coral.

The chances of her falling back to sleep wouldn’t make bookie’s odds, and the coral was an excellent excuse to bolt out of bed. So she’d charged downstairs in old black sweats and bare feet, and burrowed through all the boxes of raw materials until she found it.

Sipping her tea—from the second pot, now—she studied the crooked, jagged wedge of coral shell with ruthless concentration. She still recalled the sly, sneaky grin on the clerk who sold her the piece—he’d been real sure he was pawning off a worthless piece on a rookie. Maybe the clerk was an ace pro at textbook geology, but he didn’t know cameos and he didn’t know coral.

She did.

In the middle of the night, when she’d been fighting to get that blasted Russian off her mind, she remembered the coral, remembered the break in the outer layer of the shell, the rich cherry red color the Italians called rosso scuro.

Coral was almost always uniform in color. Finding a piece with two shades was crying rare—and a cameo carver’s dream. Further, the coral that mattered was gem material—true precious coral—not the stuff that came off from reefs in shallow seas, but the stuff that came from down deep. This piece came from down deep, off the coast of Sardinia. No holes, no flaws, no cracks. The shadings were rich and true It’d make a pendant, nothing bigger, but the potential for treasure was there—and hopefully a perfect treasure for her sister, Gwen.

Paige gulped another sip of tea. Energy was biting at her harder than hunger. Her fingers itched to pick up a chisel and start working. But she had to know the piece of coral more intimately than her own heartbeat before touching it. Nothing was more fragile than coral. Nothing as easily broken.

Like her sister, she thought.

Her gaze strayed to the jade cameo on the top shelf. She’d really been stupid. It had always been a mistake, trying to make a present for Gwen in jade. Coral was so much more like her. Probably from its first discovery, coral had been symbolic in medicine and magic. A romantic talisman of beauty and the kind of beauty one put in everyday life, which was exactly like Gwen. Hopelessly romantic. Fragile. Easily hurt, easily scarred, but beautiful on the inside—if anyone could ever get her to believe it.

Too restless to sit, Paige popped off the stool and started twisting the gooseneck stem of her work lamp so the light better illuminated every angle of the coral, her mind on Gwen—and Abby.

Paige had been badly worried about both sisters since Christmas. Generations of Stanfords had lived in the old Vermont homestead until the clan scattered—Abby and Gwen had grown up, moved away, and then their parents had retired to Arizona. The whole crew had argued with Paige about living alone in the old-fashioned, heat-eating monster, but this was home, the roots of the whole family, and they all still gathered here for the holidays. They had this past Christmas, too, but with mom and dad there, both her older sisters had kept a protective lid on any serious conversations.

Paige didn’t need the specifics to recognize that both Gwen and Abby were stressed out and unhappy. Growing up, they’d all fought like snakes and mongeese. Still did. Gwen had made one man her whole life; Abby was all ambition and drive; and Paige was the unconventional rebel. Bickering and teasing was probably inevitable when none of them ever had one single thing in common, much less came close to sharing each others’ goals or dreams.

It didn’t matter. It never mattered. They didn’t have to understand each other to love. The bond between sisters had always been unshakable. Paige always knew when one of them was unhappy. The reverse was just as true. And she’d been frustrated and worried ever since Christmas, that her sisters were having some kind of trouble in their personal lives that she couldn’t do a damn thing about.

A cameo wasn’t going to solve Gwen’s problems. The need was in Paige, to create something for her sister, something that had meaning; something that expressed love. Impatiently she propped her hands on her hips, fiercely concentrating. All raw materials looked like nothing in the beginning. The coral, no different than other shells or stones she worked with, had a secret to tell. It was up to her to find the truth.

The frown on her forehead suddenly eased. Blood started waltzing through her veins. She had it. Automatically her fingers fumbled blind, yanking open the drawer on the left, groping for the India ink pen and the leather-lined vise. Oh, man, it was there; she saw exactly what she wanted to do—

From nowhere, a scraping sound interrupted her concentration. A grating scrape, followed by a mysteriously soft whoomph. Her head shot up. Both sounds came from the outside, but definitely close enough to the house to be unignorable. Someone was on her property. In her driveway.

She heard the sharp, grating scrape again—what on earth was it?—followed by…damn…a wild baritone singing some kind of insane aria. A Russian aria.

She thought, no.

Perching up on tiptoe, she scowled out the window, but couldn’t see anything or anyone from that view. The scrape-whoomph sequence repeated itself again, though. She pushed up her sweatshirt sleeves and stomped down the hall to the next bedroom. From that window, if she craned her neck far enough, she could see a bucketful of snow flying in the air, the silver shine of a snow shovel and, yeah, a disheveled head of coal black hair.

She thought, I’m gonna kill him. And headed for the back door to do just that. An occasional visit, fine. Stefan was alone in a new country and lonesome to talk with someone. Fine. He needed help with his language before he was safe to let loose in public—at least around women—and that was fine, too. She personally knew what it felt like to be a misfit, and she really didn’t mind helping him.

Only the kiss last night had changed things.

She’d spent a sleepless night with Mr. Michaelovich barging into her dreams. Those dreams had been embarrassingly, explicitly sexual, brought on—no doubt—by her celibate life-style. Only no guy had bugged her dreams before Stefan. And neither had any other guy’s kisses.

No one could help what they dreamed, but by George, a woman could control who used her snow shovel.

Bristling from every feminine nerve, she yanked open the back door—and almost earned herself a scoop of snow directly in the face. Thankfully the white powder frosted the overgrown yews next to the door—and by then Stefan had spotted her.

He leaned an elbow on the shovel handle and grinned. It had snowed the night before, four fresh inches of sugar-white powder adding to the foot-deep ground cover. Pine branches sagged under the weight; the naked hardwoods looked as if they were coated with a layer of whipped cream. The whole world had turned white except for one slam of color—him.

His cheeks were redder than apples; his eyes a dancing black. Backdropped against all that stark white, his shoulders looked huge and powerful—a wincing jolt of virile, vital masculine energy in a day that had been so serene, so calm, so peaceful.

“Good morning, my cupcake! You take my breath, you are that sexy this fresh in the morning!”

Paige wiped a hand over her face. Heaven knew what she looked like, but for positive it wasn’t sexy, and he was not going to do this to her again. She was not disarmed by the way his Russian accent wrapped around that antiquated sexist endearment; she was not charmed by the totally unpredictable uses of the language that came out of his mouth. She was aggravated with him for this intrusion. Justifiably aggravated. But the damn man was so exuberantly enthusiastic, so happy, that yelling at him was harder than kicking a puppy.

“Good morning,” she said, echoing him, her tone as formal as she could make it, and then forged ahead, “Stefan, there was absolutely no need for you to come over and shovel my walk!”

“Well, big confession to tell. Guilty confession.” Stefan cocked an elbow on the shovel handle. “I not do this for you. I do this for me.”

“I—pardon me?”

“I work on computer for hours. Very quiet, very silent work. Requires total focus. And this is my work, what I love, no question, but I get desperate for exercise. I have to break in—”

“Break out.” She automatically corrected him.

“Yeah, you understand. Need to break out. I get energy buildup like to burst. I see you have no man, that it snowed last night, very easy for me to shovel your walk for you. Big favor to me, because I am so desperate to vent all this physical energy. I thank you for providing this chore.”

She opened her mouth. Closed it. She scalped a hand through her hair, feeling confused. So far she had yet to anticipate anything the confounded man was going to say. Ignoring the comment about “no man” was easy, but how was she going to argue with a guy who regarded snow shoveling as a personal favor to him?

And those dancing dark eyes mirrored utter sincerity. “I found shovel by your back door. Easy to find. No reason to ask you, I know, because we are neighbors, and like you told me, it is natural for neighbors to help each other in America.”

“Well, I know I said that….” Geezle beezle, talk about getting trapped by her own words. “But this is a little different, Stefan. It scared me, when I heard an unfamiliar sound outside. I didn’t know it was you—”

“Da, I can imagine. You live alone, any stranger could bother you. Not good, this danger, but I will watch over you now, Paige, no need to worry. And I tell you next time I’m here, so you know it’s just me.”

Alarm shot through her. It was funny, really, even sweet that he thought she needed protecting—considering that no man, from the day she was born, had ever doubted that Paige could take care of herself. Her dad used to fret that she took self-reliance to a fault and tease that she was stubborn enough to take on a battalion of marines—but she’d never lacked the courage to stand up for herself. Maybe Stefan had grown up with some outmoded chivalrous values about women, though. And she didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but somehow she was failing to communicate the concept of privacy.

“Stefan, it’s okay—I’m okay—and I really don’t need watching over. I can shovel my own walk, fix my own leaky faucets. I’ve been taking care of myself for a long time, and I’ve known everyone who lives in Walnut Woods all my life. The same families have been here for generations, and I…”

Her voice trailed off. Stefan was shaking his head before she halfway finished explaining. Something was on his mind, because he obviously wasn’t listening to her.

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