The Christmas Love-Child

Shame raced through him, and this time he couldn’t deny the emotion for what it was.

He didn’t deserve Grace’s love. He didn’t deserve her.

But…he loved her.

She was like no other woman he’d ever known. Her faith and honesty. Her willingness to sacrifice herself for others. He loved her. He loved her and he’d let his anger and hurt pride get in the way of his own happiness…and hers.

How could he have been such a blind, selfish fool?

Maksim had money, power, influence—everything he’d ever wanted when he’d been desperately poor as a child. But all his success had somehow become meaningless without her.

What use was it to be one of the wealthiest men in the world, if he didn’t have the woman he loved?

CHAPTER TWELVE

GRACE rubbed the frost off the edges of the train window and looked out at Lake Baikal and the distant mountains. The endless white of the deepest lake in the world was an eerie expanse of snow. Hillocks of razor-sharp ice, ten feet tall, stabbed upward on the edges of the frozen lake.

How many days had she been on the train? Her journey from Moscow blended together in endless dark days and still darker nights. She looked numbly at the tiny village with a few wooden buildings scattered up the hillside. Grace couldn’t read the Cyrillic letters on the sign to even know its name.

Siberia.

She’d hoped taking the Trans-Siberian Railway would raise her desolate spirits, as well as make sure that Maksim couldn’t find her. He would check at the airport and possibly trains heading west into Europe. He wouldn’t look here.

If he bothered to look for her at all.

Her body felt hot in the sweltering train car as she leaned her forehead against the steamy, half-frosted window. But instead of enjoying her childhood dream, she couldn’t stop agonizing about the man she’d left behind.

This train station was just a small platform covered with snow, on which three women wrapped in coats and hats were selling fish, homemade bread and fruit to train passengers. After so many days spent weeping in her packed third-class compartment, hanging out of the window and trying not to smell the stale smoke and sweat, Grace saw oranges and suddenly hungered for the sweet tangy fruit as fiercely and recklessly as Rapunzel’s mother had once longed for rampion in the fairy tale.

Putting her thick coat over her old jeans and sweater, she crawled out of her upper berth and got off the train. She traded a few Russian coins to the old woman in furs, then snatched up the fruit. Grace barely managed to peel off half of the rind before she sank her mouth into the juicy fruit. Tears streamed down her face. It was delicious. It was heaven.

But by the next bite, the orange had suddenly lost its flavor. She stared out at the vast white emptiness of the snow-covered lake and craved something far more.

Her husband.

Her heart twisted in her chest every time she thought of how she’d left him. How she’d lied to him!

I was right to lie about the pregnancy, she told herself. He doesn’t really want to be a husband or a father. I can’t keep him from the woman he loves. Not when I all I want is his happiness, and our child’s…

But at this moment she wanted Maksim so badly she could hardly believe she’d had the strength of will to be so unselfish. She yearned for him. For his touch. For his smile. Even for his haughty glare. She would have taken any and all of it.

The night of the reception, she’d snuck out of the house and managed to sell her mother’s wedding ring for the equivalent of a hundred dollars in a pawn shop near Yaroslavskiy Station in the center of the city.

Every day of her journey had been full of tears. She couldn’t stop thinking about Maksim in love with another woman…thinking of the fact that she’d sold her mother’s wedding ring…thinking of her own unborn child who would have no father.

The kindly Russian provodnika who was in charge of their train car had grown so concerned she’d started sneaking Grace dried fish and borscht from the first-class dining car. An invisible alliance of women who’d been hurt in love.

Grace wondered suddenly if everyone on earth was secretly hiding a broken heart.

She stared blindly across the white snowy expanse of Lake Baikal. In the distance she saw a black truck driving across the frozen lake toward her. The image blurred as her eyes filled with tears.

She hated what she’d done. How she’d lied to him.

It was the only way to set him free, she tried to tell herself. She wiped her tears with the back of a gloved hand. If Maksim knew their unborn child still lived, flourishing and growing every day inside her, he would have tracked her down to the ends of the earth. And she would not have been able to give him his freedom.

Now her own freedom stretched before her like a death sentence. In a few days, at the end of the tracks, she would reach Vladivostok. From there she’d get cheap passage across the Pacific. She would find some kind of job and raise her child in California’s endless sunny days.

And yet the thought of that sunshine was more bleak to her than any rain.

As she took a deep shuddering breath, the black truck whirled to a stop on the other side of the platform in a scatter of snow and ice.

A dark figure come out of it, slamming the door with a hard bang.

He walked toward her, a dark prince coming from the white mist like a Gothic warlord with a long black coat, surrounded by snow and jagged sharp ice like ancient swords left by northern giants.

The orange dropped from her nerveless hands as he reached her.

“Maksim…?” she whispered.

Taking her in his arms, he kissed her fiercely.

“Grace, oh, Grace,” he whispered. “Thank God. I was afraid I would never find you.”

“But what are you doing here? In Siberia?” Still believing that she was dreaming, she reached up to touch his rough cheek. It was thick with bristle. She’d never seen him so unkempt. “You haven’t shaved…”

“This train was my last hope. Oh God. I’ve barely slept for the last four days. Thank God I’ve found you.” She thought she saw a suspicious glimmer in his eyes as he stroked her cheek. He lifted her chin. “Both of you.”

She gasped. He knew she’d been lying!

She tried to open her mouth to lie to his beautiful, powerful face, but she couldn’t do it. A sob rose to her lips.

“I’m…sorry,” she cried, pressing her face against his chest.

“Sorry?” he said gently, rubbing her back. “Oh, solnishka mayo. I am the one who is sorry.”

“I tried so hard to let you go,” she sobbed. “I wanted you to be happy, and I’ve failed….”

“Failed?” He laughed softly, shaking his head. “Don’t you think I know you by now? You have a heart as big as the world. I knew almost at once that you were trying to sacrifice your own happiness for mine.”

“Just as you once sacrificed what you wanted most for my sake.” Tears streamed down her face, wet tears that stung as they froze like hoarfrost against her skin. “But, Maksim, I want you to be with the woman you love—”

“I am with the woman I love,” he said fiercely. He forced her to meet his eyes, and she couldn’t look away from the intensity of his gaze, a whirling blend of black and white, of snow and hot steel. “It’s you, Grace. Only you. The only woman I have ever loved. The only woman I will ever love.”

“Me?” she whispered, hardly daring to believe she’d heard him right.

“My plane is waiting at a private airstrip across the lake.” He put his arm over her shoulders. “Let us go home.”

“Home.” The thought tantalized her. She looked up at him. “Are you sure?”

“I wish to make one thing clear, solnishka mayo.” Reaching for her hand, he pressed it against his rough cheek. “I didn’t marry you just because you were pregnant. Even when I thought I hated you, part of me always knew you were the only one for me. Now I will be yours to the end. You are my princess. My wife.” He put his hand on his heart. “I love you with all my heart, and I always will.”

And to her incredulous wonder, he kissed her passionately on the train platform on the edge of the misty Siberian forest and endless white lake.

As if from a distance, she heard a burst of applause, then yells in Russian, Chinese and a few other languages she couldn’t recognize. Blushing, Grace pulled away from Maksim to see people young and old hanging out of the sliding windows on the train, beaming down at the two lovers, clearly egging them on.

She saw the impish look on Maksim’s face as he wrapped them both in his black coat.

“Today is January sixth,” he whispered. “Do you know what day that is?”

She licked her lips. “Epiphany?”

“It’s also Christmas Eve.”

“Christmas Eve was weeks ago!”

“Russians celebrate Christmas on January seventh. One Christmas isn’t enough for a winter as long as ours.” He glanced back mischievously at the people cheering and hanging out of the train windows. “So let us give our audience one last gift for the season.” He stroked her cold cheek, unfreezing her tears with the warmth of his breath. “Let’s show them what love really means.”

And this time, when he kissed her, it was so long and deep and true that she couldn’t hear the applause or the whistle of the train. She couldn’t hear anything but the pounding of her own heart roaring in her ears, in perfect rhythm with his.