Jennifer Greene - The Unwilling Bride

“Paige…” He dropped his hand and stepped toward the door, as if nothing but leaving had ever been on his mind. The sudden glint of humor in his eyes, in fact, had the devil’s own mischief. “So you know. That was not about oppression or sex object. That was just Russian way of saying thank you, good night.”

That was it. When he opened the door, a harsh sting of snow blasted in, but then he was gone.

She threw the latch and hooked the chain bolt, unsure whether she wanted to shoot him—or laugh. It would seem she’d gotten one language lesson through to him, if he understood the concepts of “oppression” and “sex object” well enough to joke about them.

She couldn’t seem to laugh, though. Her heart was still slamming too hard. Even when he’d completely disappeared out of sight down the driveway, her pulse was still bouncing off the walls.

That Russian didn’t need language to communicate a damn thing.

Abruptly she realized how late it was. She gathered up the dishes from the living room, then started turning off lights through the house. The last room was her workshop, and when she switched off the overhead from the doorway, her eyes instinctively flew to the jade cameo.

The light couldn’t help but draw her. She’d stashed the jade cameo on a shelf, still unsure what she was going to do with it. But even with the whole downstairs dark, the bright snowy night caught the soft iridescent glow of the stone. It was the nature of jade to appear lit from within, and she found herself staring at the carved woman in profile, frowning hard, not really seeing her but simply thinking.

She used to be wild and impulsive, once upon a time. She used to be reckless, giddy on life and her newly developing powers as a woman, teasing every boy she could attract. And it was never far from her conscience, that a sixteen-year-old boy had once paid the cost for her thoughtlessness and insensitivity.

She’d changed. Completely. Her life was selfdiscipline, work, responsibility. Possibly she was a teensy bit absentminded—hey, there was no way to wipe every single flaw from her character—but she felt good about the woman she’d turned into. She hadn’t hurt anyone. She’d been very careful of that. Her sisters said she was too tough on herself, but Paige stood on her own two feet, strong and sturdy.

Alone.

Safe.

Alone and safe had been paired in her mind for a decade, as natural as pairing peanut butter and jelly. Nothing she’d questioned…until tonight and a wild, wayward kiss that had come out of nowhere.

Around that unpredictable Russian, Paige thought darkly, she had better watch her p’s and q’s.

That settled, she pivoted on her heel and went up to bed.

Paige was too busy working to think about Stefan.

Her legs were wrapped around the spokes of the work stool, her hands around a cup of fragrant Darjeeling tea. At five in the morning—when she had just as determinedly not been thinking about Stefan—she ’d remembered the coral.

The chances of her falling back to sleep wouldn’t make bookie’s odds, and the coral was an excellent excuse to bolt out of bed. So she’d charged downstairs in old black sweats and bare feet, and burrowed through all the boxes of raw materials until she found it.

Sipping her tea—from the second pot, now—she studied the crooked, jagged wedge of coral shell with ruthless concentration. She still recalled the sly, sneaky grin on the clerk who sold her the piece—he’d been real sure he was pawning off a worthless piece on a rookie. Maybe the clerk was an ace pro at textbook geology, but he didn’t know cameos and he didn’t know coral.

She did.

In the middle of the night, when she’d been fighting to get that blasted Russian off her mind, she remembered the coral, remembered the break in the outer layer of the shell, the rich cherry red color the Italians called rosso scuro.

Coral was almost always uniform in color. Finding a piece with two shades was crying rare—and a cameo carver’s dream. Further, the coral that mattered was gem material—true precious coral—not the stuff that came off from reefs in shallow seas, but the stuff that came from down deep. This piece came from down deep, off the coast of Sardinia. No holes, no flaws, no cracks. The shadings were rich and true It’d make a pendant, nothing bigger, but the potential for treasure was there—and hopefully a perfect treasure for her sister, Gwen.

Paige gulped another sip of tea. Energy was biting at her harder than hunger. Her fingers itched to pick up a chisel and start working. But she had to know the piece of coral more intimately than her own heartbeat before touching it. Nothing was more fragile than coral. Nothing as easily broken.

Like her sister, she thought.

Her gaze strayed to the jade cameo on the top shelf. She’d really been stupid. It had always been a mistake, trying to make a present for Gwen in jade. Coral was so much more like her. Probably from its first discovery, coral had been symbolic in medicine and magic. A romantic talisman of beauty and the kind of beauty one put in everyday life, which was exactly like Gwen. Hopelessly romantic. Fragile. Easily hurt, easily scarred, but beautiful on the inside—if anyone could ever get her to believe it.

Too restless to sit, Paige popped off the stool and started twisting the gooseneck stem of her work lamp so the light better illuminated every angle of the coral, her mind on Gwen—and Abby.

Paige had been badly worried about both sisters since Christmas. Generations of Stanfords had lived in the old Vermont homestead until the clan scattered—Abby and Gwen had grown up, moved away, and then their parents had retired to Arizona. The whole crew had argued with Paige about living alone in the old-fashioned, heat-eating monster, but this was home, the roots of the whole family, and they all still gathered here for the holidays. They had this past Christmas, too, but with mom and dad there, both her older sisters had kept a protective lid on any serious conversations.

Paige didn’t need the specifics to recognize that both Gwen and Abby were stressed out and unhappy. Growing up, they’d all fought like snakes and mongeese. Still did. Gwen had made one man her whole life; Abby was all ambition and drive; and Paige was the unconventional rebel. Bickering and teasing was probably inevitable when none of them ever had one single thing in common, much less came close to sharing each others’ goals or dreams.

It didn’t matter. It never mattered. They didn’t have to understand each other to love. The bond between sisters had always been unshakable. Paige always knew when one of them was unhappy. The reverse was just as true. And she’d been frustrated and worried ever since Christmas, that her sisters were having some kind of trouble in their personal lives that she couldn’t do a damn thing about.

A cameo wasn’t going to solve Gwen’s problems. The need was in Paige, to create something for her sister, something that had meaning; something that expressed love. Impatiently she propped her hands on her hips, fiercely concentrating. All raw materials looked like nothing in the beginning. The coral, no different than other shells or stones she worked with, had a secret to tell. It was up to her to find the truth.

The frown on her forehead suddenly eased. Blood started waltzing through her veins. She had it. Automatically her fingers fumbled blind, yanking open the drawer on the left, groping for the India ink pen and the leather-lined vise. Oh, man, it was there; she saw exactly what she wanted to do—

From nowhere, a scraping sound interrupted her concentration. A grating scrape, followed by a mysteriously soft whoomph. Her head shot up. Both sounds came from the outside, but definitely close enough to the house to be unignorable. Someone was on her property. In her driveway.