Love Story for a Snow Princess (Siren Publishing Classic) (6 page)

“My family died,” she told him in the rehearsed tone it had taken months to perfect. “They died in a car crash last year.”

She braced for his apology, his pity, and the fumbling words from someone who hasn’t a clue what to say.

But he did none of those. He just studied her steadily from beneath dark, sooty lashes before looking back to his food to resume eating.

She let out a shaky breath and resumed her closing duties, making sure salt and pepper shakers were full, cleaning out the coffeepots, and getting them set up. She finished wiping the tables and closed the front of the stove. By the time she was finished, so was he. She cleared away the dishes and washed them up before setting them off to the side. She took one last look in the kitchen to make sure everything was put away before heading back into the front of the restaurant.

Paden was still there, waiting. He had put his coat on but held his hat and goggles.

“You ready?” he asked.

She didn’t know quite what to say, so she nodded and headed over to the hooks, grabbing her coat and zipping it up. She put on her hat, scarf, and gloves and exited through the door that Paden held open for her. The lock was a simple push button, anyone trying to break in wouldn’t have a hard time, but Thea decided Miki knew this town and its people better, so she didn’t worry too much.

Unlike last night, there was no wind kicking up white dust clouds. The sky was clear, and a thousand stars twinkled down. Thea’s mouth fell open as she stared at the wondrous night sky.

“It’s beautiful,” she whispered.

Paden stopped his trek and looked first at her and then upward. “Don’t see this in the city.”

“No, you don’t,” she murmured. “People like to blame smog, but it’s simply too much light. I live on the ocean, and sometimes I can look out over the water and see the stars in the distance but nothing like this.”

“What made you want to be a mail-order bride?”

The question pulled her abruptly back. She swallowed and hunched her shoulders, her muscles stiffening under his expectant stare.

“That’s a personal question,” she said softly.

“You don’t answer personal questions?”

“Do you?” she shot back.

Paden only shrugged. “I moved here to have peace and quiet to write my books.”

She didn’t believe him. His answer was too smooth, too polished, and too quick. Had she been a regular person, however, she would have accepted it at face value, but she had her own practiced statement and recognized the falseness in his tone.

“Ditto,” she said instead, “except for the book part.”

He raised an eyebrow at her but let the subject drop. “So why didn’t you marry him?”

“Again, personal.”

“You know there are a couple of bets going on about you, that you’ll stay and which man you’ll marry. Not many pretty girls come to River Ice, so you’re a hot commodity right now.”

It took her a moment to process the last part of his sentence. Her brain sort of went haywire when he called her pretty. She blinked. “Which man is winning right now?”

Again, he looked at her with one eyebrow raised. Thea came to realize this was his surprised look.

“It’s pretty much even between all the single men, but the majority thinks Caleb will wise up and whisk you away.”

“I never pictured you as a gossiper,” she replied.

He shrugged. “All I’ve been hearing for the past few days is Panthea Snow this and Panthea Snow that. I feel like you’re a celebrity.”

She waved away his words. “I’m here till the snow breaks is what I am. But River Ice seems like a nice place.”

Paden snorted. “There are about five hundred people living here, and 70 percent are male. Everyone is showing you their nice side on purpose.”

“Not everyone,” she muttered under her breath.

But Paden must have supersonic hearing because he stopped and took her arm. She looked at him under the faint lights from the town and stars above. His eyes were in shadow, but she didn’t need light to know he studied her.

“You think I’m not nice?”

“I’m sure you’re a lovely person. I must be the one who brings out the disagreeable in you.”

“You almost froze to death your first night here! Sorry if I was a little curt about it.”

“All right, I get it! You don’t have to—”

He kissed her. All coherent thought fled her mind as his lips settled on hers. At first it was just chaste, a mere brush of mouths. But then he leaned into the kiss, and his tongue grazed the seam of her lips seeking entrance to the dark caverns of her mouth. She allowed him access, and his tongue slipped in to dance with hers. It was a bold kiss, a long, sexy, sensual one that demanded a response, and to her surprise, she gave it. Her body strained against his as far as the bulky coats would let them and she grasped his shoulders. His hands snaked around her to pull her into him. Fire zinged through her blood, and her heart pounded with desire.

Then, suddenly, he pulled back. She half fell forward from his desertion, catching herself by shifting her foot. Her lips tingled at the loss of his.

She still couldn’t see his eyes, but his mouth flattened out in a straight, unfriendly line. “The hotel is right up this hill,” he said, his voice strangely distant. “Good night, Thea.”

And then he left her, standing in the snow, turned-on, and absolutely bewildered.

Paden berated himself all the way back to his snowmobile which he’d parked behind the Suinnak restaurant. How foolish he was acting, over a wounded girl no less. Like he could offer her something better, kind words of understanding or some shit. Those eyes of hers had gotten to him. From the first moment he’d seen the emptiness in those gray eyes, it had called to the
thing
inside him. Only someone who had lived through hell had those kinds of eyes, and damn if it didn’t entice him.

Why had he kissed her?

One minute he had been watching her lips as she griped at him, and the next his had been on hers. And it had been…amazing. For a moment, a very brief moment, he had believed the monster was gone, and he’d let his mind wander to the possibility that maybe, just maybe, he would be able to have normal feelings, that it would be okay to kiss the girl and live happily ever after. He’d never had a kiss that felt so nice, so right.

And then the monster inside him woke up. Paden punched his leg, hard, to fight it back, and the pain temporarily soothed the demon who wanted more. It was enough, however, to allow him to get back to his home, to put away his snowmobile and trudge from the garage into the warm house. Truthfully, his home was far larger than one man needed in River Ice, Alaska but the monster didn’t like small, confined spaces. Fifteen hundred square feet stood almost empty, with tall, double-paned windows stretching two-stories tall with a non-furnished great room.

The beast inside roared, and Paden groaned. He fell to his knees, pressing the palms of his hand into his eyes. He wasn’t sure if he was trying to gouge out his eyes or not, but the discomfort felt good.

He had thought it was over, that the monster…the demon…was gone. He had done
everything
they had told him to do! The doctors had told him he had to be alone, to deactivate the thoughts that made
it
come alive. He had isolated himself, and he had created his own empire here in the Alaskan wilderness in order to retrain his brain.

And all it took was one kiss to erase ten years of work.

Like a scorpion hidden in the dark, the monster struck with a poison that eroded his soul. It ate its way from the outside in, layer by layer, until the venom reached his heart. He couldn’t run.

Slowly, little by little, he died.

Hurt me
, it whispered.

Cut me up.

Carve out this evil.

And then be happy.

The voice danced softly through his mind. It seduced, sounding like heaven. Peace. All it required was blood.

Paden rose to his feet and stumbled into the kitchen. He banged into the countertop, hitting his hip, and the monster purred. His hand shot out, and he clutched the butcher’s block like it was a lifeline.

In some far distant corner of his mind, he thought how he’d just bought them six months ago. It had been the first time he had allowed knives in his home, one of the reasons why he always took his evening meal at Miki’s restaurant. He’d thought he had won. He’d thought he was safe.

The voice taunted him again, and the need grew. He grabbed one of the knives, one of the smaller ones, and he brought the blade to his arm. He slashed at the voice, at the beast that burned though his blood. Pain exploded through his body, along with pleasure. Exquisite pleasure in the most basic form.

Bliss.

Because once the monster was appeased, it disappeared again. For a while, the voice quieted.

The next morning, Thea still hadn’t figured Paden out. The kiss had wormed its way into her nightmare. The crash still happened, the blood still dripped, but somehow Paden was there kissing her, holding her as if to shield her from the horror of it. For the first time in a year, she hadn’t woken with a strangled scream.

She had left the hotel with a lingering sense of confusion. The last thing she wanted to do was transfer some sort of attraction she felt toward him as a way to mask her heartache. Nothing spelt psychological problem quite as well as using sex for a Band-Aid.

She breathed the crisp morning air in deep, the cold biting through her lungs and jerking her senses awake, a lot better than a cup of coffee. The sun blazed warmer than yesterday. Maybe they were gonna get the thaw everyone had been predicting yesterday around the Suinnak fire.

People waved at her as she made her way carefully through the town. Snowmobiles weaved their way over the snow-covered streets skillfully avoiding the occasional dog sled. She saw the bank and headed for it. She walked into the warm interior seconds later.

“Hello!” came the friendly greeting from the teller. Thea was immediately impressed there wasn’t an inch of thick plastic separating her and the grinning woman.

“Hi,” Thea said. “I need to set up an account.”

“Certainly. Let me get Mr. Quinn.”

Half an hour later, Thea walked out with access to money, which was a good thing, considering her next step was to the boot maker next door.

“Good morning,” she called out in the small store. The walls were overflowing with shoe patterns of all sizes as well as pieces of leather in every color. The sharp smell of hide burst through her nose so sharply she could practically taste it.

A small man wearing magnifying glasses perched on the end of his nose walked from the back room. He was slightly built and thin, with a bald patch surrounded by curly white hair.

“Hello,” he said in a raspy voice. “How can I help you?”

“Are you Thistle Vann?”

“I am.”

Thea raised one leg. “As you can see, I’m in desperate need of decent boots.”

The man looked over his glasses at her Ugg boots and raised both eyebrows.

“So you are,” he agreed. “I don’t think you can wait for me to make you some.”

“Oh. I don’t really have a choice, unless there’s a shoe store here?”

He gestured to the doorway he walked through. “I have boots back here. Come on and take a look.”

Thea frowned and hesitated. First rule of being a girl was never follow strangers into a back room to look at shoes.

The man shook his head. “The front room is too small for stock. I promise, all legit.”

“Oh, right,” Thea replied. “Of course. Um, after you?”

* * * *

When Thea left the story an hour later, she sported brand-new waterproof boots lined with something called faux shearling. The boots were black and laced up the front. She especially loved the rubber outsole with its covering of tiny spokes that could be slipped on in a minute to help prevent slipping on ice. Her feet felt warm and dry for the first time in days.

She hurried down the street, able to walk confidently instead of hesitating over mounds of snow. As she passed in front of the medical clinic, Paden walked out, and the two stopped in front of each other. It was the first time she had seen him in daylight, and she couldn’t help but stare. The generator lights of Suinnak had in no way distorted his stunningly sexy appeal, but now he was almost too handsome to be real. She wondered how on earth the women in River Ice weren’t throwing themselves at his feet.

“What are you doing here?” he asked gruffly as he did that one-eyebrow thing.

Oh
, she thought,
that’s why. His sunny disposition.

“I got new boots,” she said, gesturing to her feet. “Aren’t they cool?”

He glanced at them. “Good brand. Congratulations.”

Somehow he made the compliment sound insulting. She bristled and looked at the medical sign behind him. “Are you sick?”

“What?”

She nodded to the building.

“No,” he replied, his tone cautious. “I…had a little accident in the kitchen. I didn’t have bandages.”

“You don’t have bandages in your home?”

He shrugged. “I didn’t think I needed them anymore.”

Thea thought was a very odd thing to say. “How badly did you cut yourself?”

“Not bad enough to need stitches.”

“But bad enough to come to the doctor?”

Again, he shrugged, this time looking uncomfortable. He looked past her, as if wanting to leave, and though she really had nothing more to say to him, she also had the inclination to keep him with her.

“So, um, will you be at Suinnak’s tonight?”

He hesitated, licked his lips, and nodded. “Yeah.”

“So I guess I’ll see you. At Suinnak’s, of course. Usual time.”

“Yeah, usual time.”

“Good, good.” She bit her lip. “Well, um, take care, you know, of yourself. Be careful in the kitchen.”

“I bought some Band-Aids,” he assured and patted his coat pocket. As soon as he said it he got this funny look on his face, as if he couldn’t believe what he’d just said, opened his mouth, then closed it before abruptly turning and walking away from her, without one word of good-bye.