Hold Me Tight: Heartbreakers (20 page)

Caught by the enormity of the gift, a family treasure given to her, Jessica turned suddenly to Alexi. The words just flowed from her heart and over her lips. She’d never given them to anyone, but Robert, her dear friend, and to Willow. Given to Alexi, the meaning was richer, sparkling with colorful, fascinating facets of the future, and she knew she could never give them to another man. “I love you.”

He seemed to struggle with his emotions, tenderness mixed with pleasure. Jessica feared she had gone too far, because she hadn’t really given Alexi anything but words, how she felt in her heart. Then he smiled softly and stroked her cheek. “I know you love me, but the words given to me are the best gift. I know that you are afraid and that you have a promise to keep
and that you fear too much. Be brave. That is what I am here for—to listen—and yet you keep yourself from me—what hurts you inside. It is tearing you apart, Jessica. Let me help.”

She shook her head and gripped the old soft quilt, as yet unfinished. Her own mother had given her nothing. How could she possibly fit into this loving family? “You don’t understand. I don’t deserve any of this.”

From inside a lace-edged handkerchief, tucked amid the embroidery basket, Alexi took a small, obviously old black-velvet box. He opened it slowly and spoke quietly, “From my mother’s mother and hers before her.”

In his big workman’s hands, the diamond-shaped onyx stones gleamed amid the intricate design of tiny marcasite and crystals surrounding them. Feminine and fragile, the pieces were connected by gleaming chains in a harlequin pattern. Glittering and shifting with Alexi’s hands, the large V-shaped necklace seemed almost warm and alive.

Alexi opened the sturdy clasp. “Turn around.”

“Oh, no. I can’t wear that.” Another woman had loved it, had loved Alexi, a woman who knew how to give comfort and love and—

He turned her slowly and leaned down to whisper in her ear, “You always make a fuss. This is a small thing. Mom would have wanted you to have it. I want you to keep it.”

“Alexi, this is a family heirloom.”

When the necklace rested against her skin, Alexi studied her. He traced the border of the V-shape upon her sweatshirt and then lifted it to slide it inside—against her skin. “It belongs on your skin, such soft, pale skin. Wear it sometimes, will you?”

She stared helplessly up at him, her emotions trembling inside her. “Alexi, this is too much.”

His eyes were blue and warm and tender, filled with dreams Jessica badly wanted to step into, with a life she couldn’t possibly have. Or could she?

“I have said I love you. It is not too much. You give me so much more,” Alexi whispered, his lips against hers.

Alexi had asked her to marry him.

She’d told him she loved him.

The enormity of that commitment, the simplicity of it, stunned Jessica. Was a future as Alexi’s wife possible?

When Alexi left to work at the tavern, Jessica was alone. She held her breath and inserted the embroidery needle into the quilt block’s flower design that Louise Stepanov had started years ago. The night was quiet, the fire crackling in the freestanding modern woodstove that had replaced the cookstove.

Marriage to Alexi, and everything that it meant to be his wife.
The needle slid into the fabric and then the thread, and Jessica pulled slightly, trying to remember her grandmother’s lessons. The stitches came to life with surprising ease.

She looked at the new floor they had laid together, the large wooden planks gleaming beneath the varnish. At the Stepanov shop, the planks had been cut from beams that had been discarded in the remodeling. The Stepanov men had worked together, sanding and finishing until the boards for the main room were finished.

Meanwhile, Jessica had enjoyed sharing tea at Mary Jo’s with Ellie and Leigh and Ed and Bliss. Tanya had played on the floor with her dolls and Katerina had slept in her mother’s arms. It was a quiet time that Jessica had never had, sharing the things that made a woman’s life.

Those times, visiting with Ellie in her new home and with Leigh, highlighted the emptiness of Jessica’s own life.

She slid the needle into the fabric and, as she worked, watched the petals of the flower grow.

She had an obligation to Robert:
Take care of my son, will you, Jessica? I wasn’t the father I should have been.

Alexi deserved a full-time wife; Jessica knew he wouldn’t tolerate Howard’s threats or interference in their lives. Alexi wanted so little and yet deserved so much.

Jessica began embroidering a little bud, just one petal open, next to the completed flower. The bud seemed to symbolize a new life waiting for her to open it.
She loved Alexi.

But there was so much inside her that she hadn’t met, the
bitterness of her family, that very private part she kept from everyone, the part that had made her disbelieve in everything that she’d found true in Amoteh—that families loved each other and cared for their children, prizing them.

For the next hour Jessica gave herself to the intricate design, flowers and buds on a long waving vine. Focused on her stitches, she let all the strain of running a big corporation drain out of her. She loved Alexi. Was that enough? “Alexi…”

Jessica carefully placed aside her work and rose to study herself in the full-length oval mirror framed by wood; it was a new Stepanov design. She carefully protected the necklace as she eased away her clothing, letting it pool to the floor.

She shook her hair free of its ponytail, ran her fingers through it and studied her tousled look in the mirror. The large V-shaped necklace glittered at her throat, and two months of Alexi had changed that stark, tense look around her eyes and mouth.

Jessica traced her nude body. It was softer now, fuller in her breasts and hips, sensitized by just the thought of how Alexi touched her. His large, roughly callused workman’s hands would run smoothly over her body, intimately sliding within… “Alexi,” she whispered again.

Her emerald wedding band glittered on the hand resting over the necklace. A slow, sweet memory slid through her of a loving man who cherished her—her friend, her mentor, Robert. Ailing badly when they had married, Robert wanted her away from overt and painful gossip, and under the protection of his name. And then one dismal rainy day, she was alone, fighting Howard and running a corporation.

Circled by tender memories of Robert, Jessica slowly moved around the house, turning off the lamp. She gathered all the candles she could find and placed them around the living room. With the candles lighting the room, Jessica removed the ring and placed it in a small box. “Sleep well, Robert. You’ll always be in my heart.”

Jessica ran her hand over the secretary desk that Alexi had created just for her. Then she opened the drawer and slid the box within.

When she turned to the slight sound of a door opening, she found Alexi—big, vibrant, hair wind-tossed and silvery eyes stroking her body, heating it. “It is no small thing that you say you love me,” he stated unevenly as he removed his coat. “It is no small thing that I ask you to be my wife. It is not a night to stay away from you. I thought I heard you calling my name and I came to you. I will always come to you. I will always love you.”

Alexi didn’t want to frighten Jessica. The feverish need to lock his body with hers, to physically merge with her, a woman he loved, was too strong. “I love you,” she’d said earlier.

He knew that her words, given freely to a lover, were new to her lips. She’d probably said them as a teenager and as a friend to a dying man and to Willow. But to Alexi, they had been given as a woman’s truth to a man who had her heart.

Alexi had heard Jessica’s voice, that soft whisper calling him, over the sound of music and the tavern’s customers. Seeing her now, with her hair waving softly around her face, her eyes dark and mysterious, and wearing only his mother’s necklace, his heart raced. In the candlelight dancing upon Jessica’s pale, curved body, her reddish hair, the feminine jewelry looked almost pagan.

“Alexi…” Her whisper was the same as he had heard beckoning him—soft, sensuous, longing.

With graceful movements, Jessica turned to blow out the candles placed everywhere around the room.

When one remained alight, she picked up the candlestick holder and turned toward the bedroom they had created together. Her hair shifted upon her back, that long, sweet, sensuous back, her hips swaying above legs that were slender and yet strong.

Alexi removed his clothes and slowly walked to her. Inside the large bedroom, the floor’s gleaming wooden planks covered by temporary area rugs, a candle burned on top of the tall sturdy Stepanov dresser. In front of the mirror, Jessica stood, her hands busy with the necklace’s clasp.

“Leave it on,” Alexi ordered roughly, and when she turned
to him, a protest on her lips, he bent to lightly kiss her. His hand flattened over the necklace, over the woman he wanted to keep forever. “Please.”

With a sigh, she lifted her slightly parted lips to his, and Alexi’s hand slid lower to cup and caress her breast. The brush of his thumb across her nipple drew her sharp breath, her hands smoothing his tense shoulders. Then her fingers dug in to lock upon him and Alexi felt the immense rush of heat from her, the hunger burning him. With his arms around her, Alexi walked her slowly back to the bed, to the covers and sheet she had turned back.

“Say it,” he demanded roughly, needing once more to hear those stunning words that told him of her love.

“I love you.”

It was enough to send them tumbling into the bed, both hurrying for the physical completion. Then Alexi was sliding into her, her body welcoming his and the passion rising fever-hot between them.

“Alexi…” she whispered yearningly against his lips, beckoning to the equal hunger within him. “Alexi…”

F
rom the cliff trail above the beach, Alexi braced his body against the late March winds. He watched the woman walking on the sand below; Jessica seemed small against the wide expanse of ocean, the overcast afternoon sky.

In low tide, the brown stretch of sand was rimmed by driftwood carried by the waves and deposited on the shore. Jessica made her way slowly around the dark clumps of seaweed, stopping occasionally to pick up a shell, studying it.

As she turned to study the ocean and the jutting black rock rising out of it, wind pushed her jacket against her, her hair confined beneath Alexi’s knitted cap. With Deadman’s Rock a distance from shore, the passage between it and land was dangerous in high tide. Deadman’s Rock had cost many lives, including Jarek’s first wife.

In low tide, Strawberry Hill could easily be reached by motorboat or walking higher on the shore. On that peninsula that jutted out into the Pacific Ocean, Kamakani had once looked down at a land he’d hated, cursing it as he died.

Alexi wondered if Kamakani’s curse would eventually take Jessica away from him. He swallowed roughly; she might be preparing to leave him. Jessica was clearly troubled, silently at work with her needle in the evenings and awake and restless long into the night. He could hear her typing on her laptop, the muffled sounds of a tiny portable printer followed by a shredder chewing paper.

But her struggle seemed to lie inside, a sadness that came to her in the midst of a Stepanov family tea. It lay in her silence as she wrapped herself in the soft, woven throw and stood on the deck, surveying Amoteh and the Ocean; it lay in the way she held baby Sasha close and tender against her. Jessica’s quiet distraction at times had nothing to do with business, rather with an ache and a struggle she would not share with Alexi.

She loved him.
Alexi was certain of that fact. It was in the way she leaned against him, touched him, made long, lingering love to him—almost as if she were storing the memories of him.

If she loved him, how could she hold herself away from him?

Waiting for her to trust him, to tell him what wrapped her so darkly within it, was more difficult than fighting anything physical—something he could battle in his two hands and make right for her.

Small and alone, she stared up at him as though she’d known he would be there….

Then she turned and walked back toward Amoteh, the ocean’s waves framing that small figure hunched against the wind.

Was that how she would walk away from him? The tide erasing her footprints in the sand as if she’d never lain in his arms? As if he’d never found heaven in hers?

He could only wait and, for a Stepanov male, leashing his instincts to protect his love was the most difficult task of all.

“I made this before the baby came. I must have sewed miles then. It’s nothing really, just an idea,” Ellie said as the four
women stood in her sewing room. After what was becoming a very special tea for the women, Leigh, Willow and Jessica watched as Ellie carefully removed a box from beneath folded layers of material. “I want this to be a surprise. We can make this happen, if you all are with me—and even Mikhail doesn’t know. He gets all nervous when he comes in my sewing room. He looks like he’s afraid the lace and thread will get him. He had a battle once with my serger and it got the best of him…. I can handle a sewing machine, but give me an embroidery hoop and a needle and I’m all thumbs. Between us, I thought we could do this….”

She spread out the man’s large shirt on her worktable and studied it critically. She adjusted the flowing sleeves and the wide collar. “I’ve made Mikhail regular shirts before and Alexi is about his same size. Since only Jessica can embroider well now, she’s elected to help the rest of us. It’s the best I could do from the old-world pictures of the Stepanov ethnic festival shirts. Mary Jo enlarged the pictures and printed them so that you can see the original embroidery pattern better. Louise used to make these shirts. I thought maybe Jessica would teach us how to embroider like she does.”

“I would love to learn how to do that,” Leigh said. “I want Katerina to have a little something special on her clothes, from me to her.”

She smoothed her rounded belly. “By the time this baby comes in August, I hope to do well enough to embroider a baby blanket.”

Willow’s eyes lit as she smoothed the fabric. “This shirt is gorgeous. I wish I could sew or do something like this. I didn’t know Jessica could embroider so well until lately. I never thought of her as a…well, artistic craft-type person. I mean, she’s painted my toenails, but she has a real eye for color. Who would know?”

She looked up and grinned at Jessica. “I mean, you always seemed so locked into your work. You’ve changed. Here you are, running the shuttle and working with Alexi—”

“I wasn’t born a corporate fiend, you know, Willow. And
I’m still working. I have to make a statement before the board next week—”

“Lose that job,” Willow stated fiercely. “It was eating you, and that nut Howard is—”

Jessica frowned at Willow, effectively stopping her next words.

Ellie took Jessica’s hand. “I may not seem like it now, but I was in business with my father—a pretty ruthless guy. He’s changed and so have I. Don’t turn your back on what you can have with Alexi, Jessica.”

“I made a promise that I can’t forget. I can’t throw it away.”

“You’ll do the right thing,” Leigh said. “Love has a way of bringing priorities to the top.”

“You need to think of yourself, Jessie,” Willow said softly, and kissed Jessica’s cheek. “Just for once. You’re happy here and you know it.”

Drawn to the shirt, Jessica’s mind was working, traveling over the color and the stitches, to make the designs come to life. “Viktor sent Alexi’s boyhood clothes. I can get some of the designs…. For Alexi?”

“Yes, and for you,” Ellie said with a hug. “You’ve been spending a lot of time with that needle, and I only hope it is settling whatever is bothering you. Sewing did that for me when I was struggling with how I could manage as Mikhail’s wife. We need someone like you to work on the first one—a pilot project, so to speak.”

“I don’t think I am right for Alexi,” Jessica stated quietly. The enormity of being included in a family project, one created out of love, stunned her.

“I think you are. More importantly, he evidently thinks so, too. It’s in the way he looks at you and how you look at him.”

“I love him. But there are things—”

Ellie rocked Jessica in her arms. “Love is the important thing, isn’t it?”

“Oh, gosh,” Willow warned. “Jessie is going to cry. She’s been doing a lot of that lately, and I’ll bet Alexi doesn’t know. I think she’s been holding those tears for years.”

“He’s asked me to marry him. I can’t, not until—”

“Old baggage,” Willow explained solemnly to Leigh and Ellie. “She hasn’t figured out how to handle it yet, but she will.”

At the same time, Alexi was going over figures in the home office he and Jessica shared. Drawn by the constant electronic beeping alarm, Alexi worked free the jammed paper from Jessica’s small printer. He noted that other faxed papers lay curled on the floor beneath the desk. The faxes generally arrived in the evening, while Jessica was working at her small desk.

Her laptop, through which the faxes had been transmitted, had sprung to life, and Alexi quickly noted a roster of past ones—all from Howard.

In straightening the paper from the floor, he noted Howard’s furious handwritten note:
Don’t play games with me, Jessica. You’ve been trying to make me choose between my wife and you for years. It cost me a fortune to get rid of her, but I did. You owe me. H.

Alexi scowled as he read the rest of the faxes, all intimidating Jessica.

And from the inferences, she had been replying, refusing to meet Howard and warning him away from Amoteh.

Alexi had noted that stiffening of her body, that quick frown before she placed the faxes into her shredder. After the first fiery anger at a man who would try to intimidate a woman, Alexi sank into another thought—Jessica did not trust him to open the corners of her life.

When Jessica entered the house, flushed with the spring day, Alexi stood still, battling his emotions. She grinned at him as if she were a child bursting with a secret.

She had one, all right, Alexi thought darkly as she stood on tiptoe to kiss him. “Hi.”

He met the kiss and then moved away. “Your printer was jammed. I cleared it. Your faxes are on the desk.”

“I told them to send them at night, when I’m working—” Jessica frowned at Alexi. “What’s wrong?”

He motioned to the desk and Jessica hurried to read the faxed notes from Howard. Her face pale now, she turned to Alexi. “Alexi, I never promised Howard anything.”

She’d hurt him, and he lashed out at her in quick, cutting words. “You don’t trust me.”

Her eyes rounded and her voice was uneven as she said, “Alexi, I trust you with my life—”

The slice of his hand cut through the rest of her sentence. Deeply emotional, Alexi’s accent framed his words. “You trust me so much that you don’t tell me when another man has been threatening you.”

“Howard hasn’t threatened me.”

“He’s a centimeter from doing so. His expectations are high. And you didn’t think enough of me, of what we have, to tell me that he was pushing you.”

“Alexi, I want all that away from here. I’ve got a new life here—”

He inhaled sharply. “You think that I am here only in the good times. That I will protect you and love you only when you allow? You never come to me for comfort when you are troubled. Instead, you go inside yourself where no one can reach—where my love cannot reach you. How am I supposed to deal with that? You think this is how it should be between a man and a woman?”

Jessica shook her head and braced her body in a way that Alexi understood—she had set her mind. “Howard belongs to another world. I want to keep him there.”

“So that is why you go back—to deal with him.” A new thought stunned Alexi and he delivered it heavily wrapped in his accent. “You think…you think that you are protecting me, don’t you?”

“You have a bit of a temper, Alexi—”

He stared coldly at her, a shield for his bleeding heart. “Do you know how hard it is for me not to go to Howard right now?”

“Yes, I do,” she whispered. “Please don’t.”

“You are asking me to step back—from a man who considers you his property? Who could be dangerous to you?”

Incredibly, to Alexi’s way of thinking, Jessica nodded. “I love you, Alexi. Please.”

Please.
It was the first time Jessica had said the word, had
pleaded with him so desperately. The word went through his pride like a sword. With a curt nod, Alexi walked out of the house.

He didn’t turn back as Jessica called his name—“Alexi…”

He was striding on the beach, battling his frustration, when something hit him lightly in the back. Alexi turned briefly to see Jessica standing a distance away from him, breathing as if she had been running. The child’s ball she’d thrown was Tanya’s, and discarded, it rolled on the sand. “Will you stop walking so fast?” Jessica asked between breaths.

Wrapped in a storm of love and pride and fear for her, Alexi folded his arms. He watched her walk toward him. “Your expectations of me are high, dearest.”

Looking up at him now, Jessica said, “I know this isn’t easy for you, Alexi. But I’m asking just that.”

“Okay.”

“You’re almost breathing fire. That answer was too easy.”

“Not for me. I want your promise that if Howard makes any kind of a move—one that might endanger you, that you’ll tell me.”

“I will. Alexi, please don’t be angry. I—”

Alexi rubbed his jaw with his open hand. A woman’s tears could disable him, and Jessica’s, threatening to spill down her cheeks, were twice as potent. “If you can handle Howard, what else is bothering you?”

She shook her head and Alexi tilted her face up to his. “What else?”

“Don’t you see? I could be like my mother—not a molecule of motherly instinct—”

He shook her head gently. “Is that what’s troubling you?”

“You’re a Stepanov. Look at Jarek and Mikhail. You’re just like them. You should have a family…children. What if I—?”

“I think you are taking a lot on yourself. If we remodeled a house together, and survived that, I think we can surely work through whatever life brings us.”

“You make it sound so simple. And you’re a real complication—one that I love, but, Alexi, I want the best for you. I don’t know that I am what you should have—”

“Do what you have to do. I love you.” Alexi drew her closer and leaned his forehead on hers. “Okay?”

“Okay,” she answered unevenly.

“Of course,” he prompted in the typical Stepanov phrase.

“Of course.”

With only a few days left before she had to return to Seattle for the board meeting, Jessica eased the shuttle van close to Mrs. Talbert’s sidewalk and parked. She opened the handicap door and helped the woman in a wheelchair ease from the van. On the sidewalk now, Mrs. Talbert carefully opened her black purse and gave Jessica two dollars. Payment wasn’t necessary, but Jessica realized that the elderly woman’s pride was important. She pushed the wheelchair onto the house’s ramp, and as Mrs. Talbert entered the house, Jessica retrieved the sacks of groceries.

Finished with her day’s deliveries, and after a tea break with Willow, Jessica scanned the late-afternoon sun. She had just enough time to work in the herb bed she had started recently and, after dinner, Alexi was working at the tavern and she’d curl up to work on his shirt.
Alexi, the man she loved, who understood her need to work through her own life, though his instincts told him to take charge….

The smile on her lips went deeper, warming her heart. She placed the van in gear, and when she arrived at the house, she saw Howard.

He stood beside his sports car, his hands on his hips, surveying the house that Alexi and she had remodeled. With the feeling that it was time to end Howard’s relentless pursuit, Jessica braced herself for the battle.