The Unwilling Bride Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 staringat 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.

Three
    P aige 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 arookie. 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