My Special Angel (8 page)

“How?”

“I don’t know how. That’s something we are going to have to work on together.” He tenderly stroked the dark circles under her eyes. “The first thing you have to do is rest more. This obviously has you very upset, and I can sympathize with you on that, but you need your sleep.”

“I need my music more.” She didn’t need to be told she looked like hell. She had a mirror at home. She knew exactly what she looked like.

“No, you need to relax. Maybe the music is trying to come back and you’re too wound up to notice.” His hands gently brushed her hair aside and massaged the tense muscles in her neck. “Have you ever been to Hidden Valley?”

She tilted her head forward and sighed as Owen’s warm fingers worked their magic, easing the pressure from her neck and shoulders. “As in the salad dressing?”

“No.” Owen chuckled. “Hidden Valley is a secluded valley about ten miles out of town. Not many people know about it, and the ones who do keep it to themselves. It’s a small piece of paradise with gurgling streams, a small waterfall, and acres of blue skies and green grass.”

“It sounds lovely.”

“Great.” He gave a final squeeze to her neck. “I’ll go fix a picnic basket, and we’ll be on our way.”

“Wait a minute.” Nadia quickly turned around and frowned. “I didn’t say I was going anywhere.” She didn’t like the determined gleam in Owen’s eyes. “I have things to do back at the ranch.”

“What do you have to do that is more important than getting back your music?”

Nadia worried her lower lip with her teeth. “If I go with you to this Hidden Valley, who is to say the music will return?”

“Who’s to say it won’t?”

She was torn. Was there a possibility that the music would return if she went on a picnic with Owen to this hidden paradise? Could she afford not to go? She had vowed to put a great deal of distance between Owen and herself. He was too tempting, but now, with the disappearance of her music, could she risk not seeing him? What would happen if he was right, and the music would only return with his help? Surely she had enough control to keep her heart safe for one afternoon by keeping their relationship on some level of friendship. “If I go, it would be out of friendship, nothing more.”

Owen nodded his head and smiled. He got the message. “I only have one question?”

“What’s that?”

“Do you prefer fried chicken or bologna sandwiches?”

* * *

Nadia glanced at the other two cars parked at the side of the road and took the quilt Owen handed her. “I thought you said only a few people knew about this place.”

Owen picked up the heavy wicker picnic basket and shut the hood of the trunk. He glanced at the two other cars. “Don’t worry, we probably won’t even run into them. There’s more than a hundred acres of woods and meadows.”

“I have more than that on the ranch, and every time I turn around, there’s always someone there.”

He chuckled and led the way to a dirt path hidden between two massive pine trees. “I can imagine.”

Nadia ducked beneath a low-hanging branch and glanced around for ‘No Trespassing’ signs. There weren’t any. “Who owns all this?”

“We do.” He held a branch back so that she could pass.

“We do?”

“You’re a taxpayer, aren’t you?”

“At times more than I care to be.” She looked around her with interest. The forest was thick with massive trees and the sweet smell of peat. The path Owen was following was nonexistent, and the air was a good ten degrees cooler and still damp from the previous night’s late thundershower. “The government owns all this?”

“They bought it back in the seventies and earmarked it for a park.” He held her hand and helped her step over a fallen log. “It’s our good fortune that they haven’t come up with the funds yet to knock down half an acre of trees to blacktop a massive parking lot, asphalt a couple of miles of trails, or throw up dozens of picnic tables.” He grinned, and waved an arm toward a patch of sunlight streaming through the thick trees ahead of them. “In other words it’s still as nature intended it to be—natural.”

Nadia stepped into the clearing and stared in awe at the beauty surrounding her. The valley was spread out below them, and the mountains were above them. The path Owen had been following had brought them straight into paradise.

“What do you think? Can you relax here?”

She had never missed her music as much as at this moment. The melody this valley could inspire would surely rival anything Brahms or Liszt ever wrote. “Beautiful doesn’t begin to do it justice.”

He reached for her hand and gently squeezed it. “My sentiments exactly.” He started to pull her through some tall grass and toward another clump of trees. “Come on. The best spot for a picnic is on the other side of the valley.”

* * *

Nadia rolled onto her back and groaned. “I can’t believe all that food you packed. Who were you expecting, sumo-wrestling park rangers?”

“I didn’t see you complaining five minutes ago when I pulled out those two thick slices of chocolate cake.” He chuckled as he finished packing away the remaining food and pushed the basket out of the way. Nadia looked so relaxed with her face raised to the sun and her bare toes wiggling in the soft grass at the foot of the quilt. The picnic had been a stroke of brilliance on his part. Not only was he getting to share some time with Nadia, but the shadows that had to be haunting her in his office had disappeared. He wasn’t sure if he wanted the music to return—she might start in again about how they weren’t right for each other.

He wasn’t claiming that it was Nadia who was to make Aunt Verna ecstatically happy and start pulling out the family Bible to add another name to the frail pages. But he wasn’t going to discount the possibility either. He was thirty-three years old, and he recognized a good thing when he saw it. The physical attraction between Nadia and himself would be downright frightening if it weren’t so exciting. She was intelligent, caring, loving, and unbelievably sexy. He owed it to himself, as well as to her, to push this relationship as far as it could go. As his aunt Verna was so fond of reminding him, he wasn’t getting any younger. If he wanted to have those six kids he always dreamed about, he’d better start thinking marriage.

He turned his head and glanced over at Nadia. She was turned onto her side with her arm under her head as a pillow. Her eyes, which could dance with laughter or burn with desire, were halfway closed, and a sleepy smile played across her mouth. She was studying him. He reached into his pocket and placed a coin on the blanket between them. “Penny for your thoughts.”

She smiled at the copper coin. “Is that all they’re worth?”

“It depends on what they’re about.” He teasingly jingled the coins in his pockets.

“I was thinking of you.” She placed a hand over her mouth and tried to smother a yawn. The sun was dissolving all the tension in her body with its warmth. She felt as if she were melting into the quilt.

“Ah.” He placed another coin next to the penny. “Will this cover it, then?”

She chuckled softly at the shiny dime and pressed her cheek farther into her arm. “That’s about right.” She closed her eyes as contentment settled over her. “I was wondering why some woman hadn’t pinched you up by now.”

“Pinched me up by now?”

“You know—brought you to the altar, followed by two-point-three children, a dog, and an orthodontist bill.”

“The saying is ‘snapped me up,’ not ‘pinched me up.’” He pulled a long blade of grass and idly twirled it around his fingers. “So you think I’ll make a great catch?”

“Trout make a great catch. You would make a great husband.” She stifled another yawn. “So why aren’t you married?”

He gazed at her. She looked partially asleep, all soft and cuddly. “The right woman never tried to snap me up.”

“Hmmm...” She nodded her head somewhat, closed her eyes, and mumbled, “Maybe she should have tried to pinch you instead.”

Owen frowned. Here they were discussing the main topic of conversation in Crow’s Head, his marital status, and Nadia had fallen asleep! Didn’t she care that he was the most eligible bachelor in the western part of the state? Hell, it could be the entire state for all he knew, and the one woman he wouldn’t mind answering a few questions for couldn’t even bother to ask them.

He reached over and tenderly brushed a curl off her face, then tucked it behind her ear. She looked like an angel, all soft and heavenly. Thick, dark lashes were fanned out against her cheeks, and her lips were softly parted. He could detect a small smile playing at the corner of her mouth, and he wondered what she was thinking.

Stretching out beside her, he watched, entranced, as the sunlight played across her face. He wondered what it would be like to wake up next to this woman night after night, year after year.

Nadia wiggled her nose and brushed her hand across her face. Something was disturbing her sleep, and she wanted it to stop. When the irritating insect tickled her nose again, she stuck out her lower hp and blew. Her eyes flew open as a deep chuckle sounded next to her ear. Rich brown eyes, the color of thick, creamy chocolate stared back at her. Owen’s eyes. She’d know them anywhere.

She smothered a yawn and glanced around. The sun had moved halfway across the heavens. “Oh, my! Why didn’t you wake me?” She quickly sat up and gazed down at the man still stretched out on the quilt He looked as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

“Do you know you talk in your sleep?”

“I do not!” She ran her fingers through her hair and tugged at her shirt. A frown pulled at the smooth skin of her brow as she studied his relaxed expression. “Do I really?”

“Uh-hmmm ...” He idly twirled the piece of long grass he had used to tickle her nose between his fingers.

“What did I say?” He looked as if he knew a secret. Was she reading more into his expression than was there?

“I couldn’t understand most of it.” His lips twitched with some hidden amusement.

“I was mumbling?” She tried to remember what she had been dreaming about and came up with a blank. It could have been anything, or everything.

He frowned at the blade of grass for a moment before looking up at her. “No, you weren’t mumbling.” A devilish grin lit up his face. “You were speaking in some foreign language.”

“Russian?” He shook his head. “German?”

“No.”

“Polish? Czech? Slovak?”

Owen stared at her in awe. “How many languages do you speak?”

“Fluently?”

He raised his gaze toward the heavens. “I’ll bite, fluently.”

“You bite what?”

He chuckled and bit back his response. Nadia didn’t seem ready to listen to what he would like to nibble on. “It’s a saying, like ‘I give.’ “

She frowned momentarily at the slang. English was the hardest language she had ever learned, and she still had her doubts about ever attaining perfect fluency. “Counting English, I speak eight different languages.”

Owen whistled softly. “What university did you attend?” He’d had four years of Spanish, between high school and college, and had promptly forgotten it all. Crow’s Head, North Carolina, wasn’t the hub of cultural diversity.

“I didn’t attend any university.” She didn’t like the gleam of admiration she had noticed in Owen’s gaze. There was absolutely nothing special or remarkable about her education. “I just earned my GED two years ago in New York, and I haven’t found the time to sign up for any college courses yet.”

Owen’s mouth dropped open in astonishment. “Where did you learn so many languages, then?”

“When you’re living in Russia, it pays to speak Russian.”

“You lived in Russia?” He never met anyone who’d lived in Russia before.

“And Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria, Germany, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria—just to name a few.”

“A few!”

“My family believes in being well traveled.” She shrugged her shoulders. “When someone asks me where I grew up, I just reply, ‘Europe.’ It’s easier than naming all the different countries.”

“But where was your home?”

“The vardo was my home—we took it with us everywhere we went.” She reached over and picked a fat cloverleaf. Today wasn’t her lucky day; it had only three leaves. “We are the Romany people—Gypsies, Owen, not your average American family.”

“So what made you leave Europe and come to America?”

“The fighting.” She gazed off into the distance and stared at the peaceful mountaintops and fluffy white clouds dotting the brilliant blue skies. “I was sick of the wars. Everywhere we went, it was the same. People wanting to overthrow their government, killing each other in the name of religion, and countries splitting into smaller countries and calling it democracy.” A shiver shook her slender body, and she hugged herself as tears filled her eyes. “It became a very dangerous place to live for a family that wouldn’t choose sides. They figured if you weren’t for them, you were against them. All we wanted was to be left in peace.”

Owen sat up and moved closer to her. Lord, what she must have seen and lived through in her young life. He placed his arm around her shoulder and gently drew her toward him. “You’re safe here.”

She leaned into his warmth and closed her eyes against the memories and fear. The memories of her first twenty-three years of life living in Europe, and the fear from the four and a half years she’d worried about her family still there. It had taken her that long to get them all out. They had refused to come to America unless they all came together. So for more than four years she’d worried, never knowing half the time even what country they were in. The sporadic phone calls came all too infrequently, and CNN became more of a curse, with its hot-spot journalism and up-to-the-minute reporting, than a help. Europe had had so many hot spots in the last four years that they should have just called it Hades and been done with it.

“Why did you pick America instead of some other country, such as Canada, or Scotland even?”

“Because it’s a place you could feel homesick about.” She turned her head and glanced up at him. “When I was eight, I attended a school in West Germany for about six months. The teacher was an American married to some military officer stationed over there. She used to tell such wonderful stories about Toledo, Ohio, that I knew she was homesick for America.” She smiled self-consciously. “I guess I made up my mind right then and there that I would be going to the United States.”