The Unwilling Bride. Jennifer Greene

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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

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