Keeping his voice without inflection, he explained, “My father worked in logging camps when my parents were first married. The accommodations were drafty bungalows. My mother never complained, but when my father was able to buy into a mill and make his own lumber, he built her a proper house. I used that floor plan as a starting point.”
Clair cocked her head, her whimsical smile sad enough to puncture the heart he’d hardened to get through this. “You always surprise me when you’re sentimental.”
“Sentimental?” The word arrested him. He suddenly saw the monument for what it was. He’d told himself he was building a place to go to, anticipating time to relax once he defeated Van Eych, but it turned out this was yet another attempt to resurrect the dead.
“I thought I just lacked imagination,” he dismissed, hiding his perturbation by circling a finger in the air, urging her to turn so he could help her out of her coat.
She huddled deeper into the thick folds for a moment, long enough for questions to flash into his mind like so many charges off one fuse. Armor against him? Didn’t want him too close? Didn’t want to risk his touch? Wanted to be ready to run when he stopped watching her long enough?
With a skittishness she hadn’t shown since that first day, she offered him her back.
As he stepped behind her, she tensed and cleared her throat but only said, “It’s not a lack of imagination to surround yourself with the familiar.”
Her scent clouded around him, so evocative of their closest moments his abdomen tightened. Heat poured into his loins. He ruthlessly controlled himself and drew her coat off her shoulders, focusing on the inane conversation to dispel the sexual awareness overwhelming him.
“Trying to fix the past by using what’s left in the present is foolish.”
“Don’t call it foolish!” She spun. Her hair whipped his knuckles in delicious castigation.
He inhaled and she folded her fingers into fists that she tucked under her bent elbows.
“The trinkets I have of my parents’ could have belonged to anyone,” she charged quietly. “They don’t offer the kind of memories that would let me pay this kind of homage. Your parents loved each other and you cherish that. There’s nothing foolish about building that into your home. I’d give anything to have a house built on love.”
She really knew how to skewer a man. How did he explain that he’d taken the love in that house and personally caused its loss? He clenched his teeth so hard his jaw ached.
“This was a stupid idea,” he muttered in Russian, wondering how he’d imagined they’d be “safe” here. He brushed past her. “I’ll get the luggage in and start a fire.”
* * *
Clair could have walked away. She was half sure Aleksy wouldn’t stop her. Bundled for the weather, passport and credit card secreted in her pocket, she even got as far as trudging into the snow off the front porch.
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.