The world was still and quiet. The low clouds had pulled back from the horizon enough to let a glimmer of dying sunlight slant across the pristine blanket that surrounded the house. Instead of forging a path to the road, she was drawn into a bower of trees where the bare branches hung around her like silver-shot lace.
As she absorbed the sight, she conjured a picture of her own face with darker hair behind the curtain. Her own voice said, Come out, love. Daddy’s home.
In the time it took her gasp to condense on the air and disintegrate, the memory was gone.
Clair brushed at where snow drifted down and left tickling paths on her cheeks, eyes closed now, listening to her own jagged breaths as she tried to decide if it had been real. Why now? What did it mean?
Nothing, of course. It was fanciful imaginings brought on by talk of nostalgia and childhood. She still longed to run inside and tell Aleksy she had remembered her mother.
Oh, she ought to run from him, never mind the fading light and long walk in the cold! But why? He’d never once hurt her. Not on purpose. Maybe he’d said some things that were a little too blunt and honest, but he was always conscious of his strength around her. If he found the least little bruise from their intense lovemaking, he berated himself and kissed it better. He wasn’t going to turn into some maniac who wanted to harm her.
In fact, what he’d turned into was a man who’d ejected himself from her bed before she’d had to refuse him. His personal code of honor had forced him to. That action didn’t fit against one of the most dishonorable things a person could do, and it made her want answers, not escape.
Penetrated by the cold, Clair picked her way back to the house, stepping in her own footprints so she wouldn’t further mar the immaculate field of snow. She walked around to the back of the porch, stamping her feet and then sweeping the snow away before stepping into the kitchen rubbing her arms and shuddering.
Aleksy stood pouring vodka into a short glass. He knocked it back before saying, “Finished making snow angels?” through his teeth.
“Are you drunk?” Her equilibrium was yanked by that unexpected twist.
“Russians don’t get drunk.” He poured another one, then stoppered the bottle and stowed it in the freezer. “They get tough.” He moved, loose but steady, to where a tin of cocoa sat on the bench. He spooned some into a cup and poured steaming water from the kettle. Before he handed it to her, he tipped half the contents of his vodka into it. “Warm up. You’re not used to this kind of cold.”
Clair cautiously put away her boots and hung her coat. The hot mug of cocoa filled her cupped hands with warmth. She let the steam rise to scald her frozen nose.
“Are you hungry?” he asked. “I can make soup.”
“Maybe later,” she said, faintly bemused at this domesticated side he was revealing. Not exactly the “tough” he was referring to.
He leaned on the refrigerator, staring so hard at her she should have smoldered and caught fire. “I watched you out there, waiting to see if you would run. You looked about twelve with the snow past your knees.”
Clair felt twelve again, sinking into a miasma of confusion, hormones flashing like dysfunctional neon lights, the weight of adult emotions threatening to overwhelm her.
“I just wanted to stretch my legs,” she lied.
He snorted, swirling the clear liquid in his glass. “There was a time when I took for granted the girls who walked in front of my house. More than one did before I had whiskers and a scar.”
“You want me to believe females haven’t been falling on your doorstep all your life, scar or no scar?” She forgot about the vodka in her drink until she sipped and it bit back. Heat slid through her all the way to her toenails.
“The young girls were different,” he mused into his glass. “They were like you, the kind who knew they wanted to marry and have a family.”
“I don’t know that,” she said, flat but strong, eyes immediately seeking a place to hide. “I might have believed it when I was twelve, but it’s not something I still fantasize about.” That felt like lying again. She sipped her cocoa, savoring the glowing warmth that spread outward from her midsection. “Too many lessons in remaining realistic,” she added, recalling all those childish hopes and adolescent crushes that had amounted to nothing.