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
