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 but because if she was so absentminded as to start one fire, she could certainly start another. No one watched out for her. No men came calling. She worked all the time, and only seemed to leave the house for groceries. Yet night after night, watching her in that window, he’d seen her vulnerability and loneliness.
He knew loneliness well, but there had always been reasons why it had been difficult to pursue a mate in his life. It was a mind-boggling puzzle why she didn’t have a man in hers.
For three weeks, that puzzle had been gnawing on his mind.
Longer than a man who thrived on challenges could be reasonably expected to stand.
Swiftly he turned his head from the window. His gaze pounced on the telephone. He’d mastered the telephone book his first week in America, read the entire Yellow Pages one night. Finding the number for “Stanford, Paige” was a piece of cake. He considered for a minute, then dialed her number and carried the telephone over to the window.
She answered the phone on the fourth ring, but her voice sounded husky and breathless as if she’d been running. “Paige here.”
“This is Stefan. I not bother you long. I guess you are working—”
“Yes, I was, actually—”
“Just one quick question. When you call police here, you don’t call police, right? You call 9-1-1? That’s how?”
“Yes, for an emergency, that’s exactly h—”
“Okeydoke. Not bother you further. Thank you for the neighborly help, my cupcake.” Gently he hung up the receiver and waited. He counted to ten in English, then French, then started in Russian with aden, dva, tree, chaterrie…the telephone jangled next to him.
As innocent as a virgin, he picked it up. “Stefan here,” he barked, adopting her method of answering.
Her words gushed out like water tumbling from a faucet. “Stefan, for heaven’s sake, are you in some kind of trouble? Do you need help?”
He stroked his beard, thinking he should probably be feeling big guilt for trying such a ruse. Perhaps the guilt would come. Momentarily he was captured by the sound of her voice. “You would help if I were in trouble? You barely know me?”
“We’re neighbors. In America, neighbors help each other.”
“This is wonderful quality,” he said. “We need to spread this American quality of kindness across the world. It would make a difference.”
He heard her release a quick sigh. A lustily, loud impatient sigh. Full of passion. “Stefan, we can talk about philosophy another time. I was worried why you wanted to dial 911. Did you have a break-in?”
“Break-in? I don’t know this phrase.”
“Did you have a robbery? A thief?”
“No, no. No break-in. I am just figuring out how to do things. Not easy. I had much trouble in the grocery store today. Nothing is the same here. I like everything, you understand, this is my country now. But being able to read fluently and talk fluently is not the same, and I seem to be culturally gapped big-time.”
He heard her make another sound—the chortling hint of a chuckle.
“You would laugh at my problem?” he