It was very difficult to imagine him with a wife and a baby. He looked like the kind of man who walked alone. Like the cowboy who rode off into the sunset at the end of the story. Rugged. Independeat.
Which was exactly the kind of woman she was. Well, maybe not the rugged part, but certainly independent. A husband wasn’t part of her immediate plans. And babies...babies were a far-off someday on her list.
She loved her work. She’d started as a clerk in Madame Yeltsy’s smallest store when she was just seventeen.
And she loved dating, too, when she had the odd evening off. Movies. Dancing. Dinners. The thrill of meeting new people. She had just never been in love. She was beginning to suspect it was the fabric of fairy tales, that women more imaginative than she was were able to convince themselves that that ordinary guy in the suit and spectacles was really Prince Charming.
This was no Prince Charming sitting under the dome light glowering at her. And yet she had the strangest feeling. That she was about to learn a good deal about love.
She had a sudden urge to take that ring out of her purse and hurl it into the night before it ruined everything.
He reached over her and opened the rear door of the car. She slid out. How far from Vancouver were they? It was very cold out. Snow was mounded by the sides of the road. Huge trees loomed all around them, and beyond that mountains towered, one shade darker than the night.
He held open the front passenger door of the vehicle, and she knew she had no option but to get back in. She was already shivering. He went around to his side and got in. His mouth was set in a grim line, though he turned up the heat for her.
They passed a sign that welcomed them to Eliza. “Population what?” she asked him incredulously.
“Twenty-two,” he answered. “Twenty-three with Angelica.”
The firm, uncompromising set of his mouth discouraged her from asking who Angelica was.
He pulled through the whole town in about fifteen seconds. She saw an old general store and a service station, both closed. Golden light from several regal-looking old houses washed out across snowy yards. The town could have easily posed for Christmas cards. She wished for her camera.
Several seconds later, he turned the car up a dark lane lined with snow-laden trees.
“Christmas trees,” she couldn’t help saying.
He snorted. “Fir trees don’t grow this high up. Spruce. Lodgepole pine. Balsam.”
She slid him a look. If she was ever in a plane crash over the wilderness, he was the one she wanted with her.
The lane forked, and headlights glanced off a large tin Quonset building before illuminating a little log cabin. It stood on a rock foundation, pretty as a picture, with the snow surrounding it, drifting off the roof, capping the rock chimney. The covered porch held a rocking chair—no, two rocking chairs—one big and one small, and a neat pile of chopped wood.
It, too, would have made a beautiful photograph if it wasn’t so wrapped in darkness.
“Go in,” he said. “The door’s not locked. Bathroom’s on the right.”
She shot up the shoveled stone-lined pathway to the house. No little wife waiting to give him a kiss? Where was the baby?
It was very cold out, but despite that, she paused just for one moment, stooped and touched the snow. It was deliciously cold, and she scooped a handful and tasted it cautiously. It tingled in the most marvelous way, then turned to nothing on her tongue.
She became aware he was watching her over the open trunk of the car, and her behavior in the snow embarrassed her. She hurried up the few steps, across the porch and into the house. She groped for a switch and found it to the right of the door.
She had entered directly into the living room, and once again she itched for her camera. Hardwood floors and log walls gleamed golden. A river-rock fireplace dominated the cozy room.
Signs of a child were everywhere. A tub full of toys, a big rubber ball, a floppy dog with one button eye, a hamper full of clothes that needed folding.
But no sign of a woman. The furniture was placed at military angles. There were no curtains on the windows, no lace doilies, no pictures on the walls, none of those little things that spoke of a woman’s touch.
“He has a wife,” she told herself firmly.
She found the bathroom easily enough and again couldn’t help but notice a lack of feminine influence. No rug, no tank cover, no frilly shower curtain with matching priscillas at the window.
One toothbrush. No, two toothbrushes. One big and black and masculine. The other small and pink with a picture of the Tasmanian Devil dancing on the handle.
He was divorced. Obviously. Maybe his kid came to visit him on weekends.
She would have loved to take a quick snoop through the medicine cabinet, but she had given up that brand of voyeurism at a party where the hosts had filled up their bathroom cabinet with marbles. To this day, she was grateful that she hadn’t been the one to set off that particular avalanche.
“In here,” he called when she came out of the bathroom.
She followed his voice back into the living room and through a rounded archway into the dining room and the kitchen adjoining it. It was a small area, the hardwood floors and log walls again giving an illusion of coziness where there really was none.
No tablecloth over a scarred oak table. No tea cozy over a plain white pot. No oven mitts with pictures of cows hanging above a sparkling clean oven. No turnip and carrot magnets on the fridge.
Again the word “military” entered her mind. The room was spotless, and everything precisely in its place. The potential was incredible.
“This is a lovely home,” she said, noticing the French panes on the windows.
“Sit,” he ordered her.
He was feeding logs into a small black stove. He had left his jean jacket somewhere and was wearing a short-sleeved sport shirt that showed beautiful arm muscles that rippled effortlessly with each piece of wood he added to the fire.
“Is this how you heat?” she asked in amazement.
He looked at her as if she was from another world.
She was.
“Primitive,” she murmured under her breath. Watching the muscles play under his shirt as he hefted another log into the fire, she felt a pretty primitive feeling of her own.
“Well?” he said when he was done. He sat back on his haunches and folded strong arms over the hard wall of his chest.
She took a deep breath and started by introducing herself and telling him where she was from and how she had come to be in Vancouver. She told him all about Martin Ying and then her chancing upon the little jewelry shop.
She liked the way he listened, his head cocked slightly toward her, his eyes narrowing in all the right places, stopping her every now and then and
