The Unwilling Bride Read Free Page B

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 intohim 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,