The Unwilling Bride Read Free Page A

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 hechugged 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
    T he computer screen glowed in the dark, illuminating a complex jumble of mathematical numbers and equations. “No,