Scent of Darkness (19 page)

"No hidden depths? No skeletons in your cupboard?"

"No." She spread her arms wide. "What you see is what you get."

But he didn't look at the body she offered as distraction. His gaze never left her face.

She worked for the man, had for four years, and she'd learned to read his moods. She prided herself on knowing what he thought.

But right now, she couldn't read his expression. His eyes were shadowed; his face was enigmatic. She knew his deepest secret.

So how was it possible he had become a mystery to her?

Chapter 18

With elaborate casualness, Ann stretched a hand toward her coffee cup. ""Where did my cookie go?"

Jasha pulled it from beneath his knee and handed it to her. "Hiding, Ann?"

She looked at the slightly mashed breakfast cookie. "It was?"

"No. You are." He was still kneeling over her, still too close, still knowing too much and revealing too little.

"From what?" She looked into his face, but she couldn't sustain the full-frontal contact for long. "Besides the Varinski."

"I don't know. But I can't wait to find out." Jasha rose and walked back to his packing.

She sat up. Her coffee was cold.
She
was cold, and more scared than she'd been when she'd seen him become a wolf, more scared than she'd been when she'd removed the arrow. She'd never thought Jasha would want to talk to her, find out about her background . . . but then, she'd never thought he would want her to meet his family. In fact, she'd been a little vague about what would happen after she seduced him. She'd had this idea that they would have an affair, a lot of good sex, really, really good sex, a lot and often sex, and then . . . and then what? She'd go back to work for him, see him every day, buy his girlfriends flowers, purchase his next fiancee's ring?

Ann shot him a glare. Not in this lifetime.

Or maybe he'd fall madly in love with her, he'd want to marry her, and they'd live this ideal, problem-free life together forever, just the two of them?
Jasha?
The man who called or e-mailed someone in his family every day?

Ann hadn't really thought this through. One of the things that had seduced her was his dedication to his father and mother, his brothers and sister. He seemed the kind of man who could have been Beaver Cleaver's father: proud, thoughtful, a good disciplinarian.

Of course a man like that would think her background was important. She had to give him something, and really, what was wrong with telling him the truth?

Or at least . . . some of it.

She rummaged in the bottom of the sleeping bag until she found her clothes. Then ever so casually and quickly, as she dressed, she said, "I'm an orphan."

He didn't react. Didn't clutch his chest and edge away as if her bad luck were contagious.

"I don't have any family." As she buttoned her shirt, she shivered from the cold.

He didn't glance up from his work. "Really? No family at all?" She could tell he was listening, and listening intently.

"No family at all. I grew up in an orphanage in Los Angeles."

"How did you get there?"

"The nuns took me in." Had he noticed she dodged that question? She'd had a lot of experience.

"You were raised in a convent?"

"Not in a convent!" Her laugh was carefully light-hearted. "It was a Catholic orphanage attached to a convent."

"That explains a lot."

What did he mean by that? Did he know how many hours she'd spent looking in on the nuns, sharing their life, learning their rhythms? Yet despite her desire to be part of a family, any family, she'd always known she wasn't welcome in the convent?

And after Sister Catherine . . . after that, she was welcome nowhere.

But she could pretend, so she babbled on. "Usually babies get adopted or at least put in foster care, but I was premature, in the hospital for four and a half months. The doctors didn't give me good odds, but I survived, and I finally got out of the incubator and into the orphanage. Sister Mary Magdalene said I was the ugliest baby she'd ever seen."

His eyebrows rose steeply. "That's harsh."

"Sister Mary Magdalene prided herself on not mincing words." An understatement. "But I've seen the pictures. I was this long, scrawny, hairless thing. The doctors already knew my eyesight was bad, and they were afraid there would be a lot of future problems, so no one wanted to take me on." She touched the mark on her lower back, then lay back in the bag to pull on her pants. "An orphanage isn't the best place to grow up, I guess, but we were in a bad part of LA, and an orphanage isn't the worst place, either. I should have been grateful—"

He straightened up and looked at her, amazed.

"I
was
grateful," she said swiftly.

"Really? Who told you that?"

"Sister Mary Magdalene."

"Do me a favor. Don't ever be grateful to me for anything."

She liked the way he said it, wryly and as if things had returned to normal. Glancing around at the wilderness, she said, "Right now, I can't think of anything I should be grateful to you for."

"The coffee."

"Self-preservation on your part." She sat on the bag and pulled on her socks and tied her shoes. "You knew I'd kill without caffeine."

"Yeah, I'm not the only one who grows teeth and claws. We just do it for different reasons."

He was teasing her . . . until he wanted more details.

But now he knew the almost-biggest shocker, and she could filter the rest through a screen of droll laughter. His wolf senses couldn't smell a half-truth . . . could they?

"Where did you go last night? You said something about a rat?" Completely dressed, she rolled up the sleeping bag.

He had draped a canvas over a hump in the ground, and he pulled it away in a flourish.

He'd created a little cage of twigs, anchored it to the ground, and inside—

She shrieked. "That's a
rail"
She kept the icon in her pants pocket, and she grabbed it as if protecting the Virgin—or asking the Virgin to protect her.

The rat ran in circles, looking for a way out, digging at the ground, clawing at the wooden bars.

"You brought a
rat
here and it was right there the whole time we were sleeping? A nasty, horrible, bug-eyed, disgusting . . ." She couldn't speak for shuddering.

"Don't like rats, huh?" he said with dry understatement.

"Rodent. Filthy, awful. . ." She remembered them at the orphanage, breaking into the pantry, scurrying around the babies, menacing in their size and their malice. "I hate them."

"I brought it here for one reason." He reached into his pocket.

"You're not going to
kill
it, are you?" She clutched the sleeping bag to her chest like a baby's blankie.

"I thought you didn't like it."

"I don't kill everything I don't like. If I did, you'd be in deep trouble right now." She glared as malevolently as the rat.

''Watch." He pulled out the plastic Baggie containing the tracking device. Taking it out, he wrapped it in a piece of cookie and offered it to the rat on the tip of his finger.

"Be careful!" she squealed.

The rat sniffed, then scraped the proffered meal off his finger and swallowed it whole.

With a smile, Jasha pulled the twigs out of the ground and let the rat go. It ran in circles, then dashed into the underbrush.

Ann found herself on top of a tall boulder, screaming. She didn't remember how she'd got there.

Jasha stood below her, offering his hand to help her down. "I never imagined my calm, unflappable Miss Smith could be such a
girl."

"Is it gone?" She tucked her feet under her and refused to take his hand.

"Yes, and in case you missed the point, it's taken the tracking device with it in its belly. Rats have fast digestive systems,, but he's not going to stop running for a while, and he's lame. There's a good chance an owl will pick him up, or a cougar, and he'll be in another belly and traveling farther than ever. . . ." Jasha must have seen her horror. "I didn't break his leg. It looks like he caught it on something . . . and why do you care? You don't like rats."

"I know, but I don't want anything to die."

"Everything
dies. The point is to die in a state of grace." Jasha's lids drooped over his brooding eyes. "The Varinski believes the tracking device is in me, and he'll be after the rat, and not us. Come on. Take my hand. We've got to get going, and in the opposite direction of that rat."

She slid down the rock and into his arms. "So if he's lucky, he'll find a pile of rat poo, and if he's unlucky—"

"He'll find a cougar."

He held her for a minute and looked at her as if he wanted to probe the depths of her mind. "You seem so softhearted, and yet I think that beneath all the uncertainty, you hide a core of steel."

"Yes. But it's rusty steel."

He smiled, as she meant him to. "I don't think so. And I think, before this is over, we'll discover the truth."

The truth? She shivered.

What frightened her more? The thing that pursued them? Or the chance that Jasha wotild discover that his assistant hid a past and a secret that damned her as surely as any devil's pact?

And if he did find out, how could she explain something she didn't understand herself?

Chapter 19

Jasha was right. When Ann camped with him, it was fun.

By seven o'clock, they had reached the campsite, a small, protected grove of trees high in the mountains with a stream nearby where she could wash her face and hands. By nine, he had caught trout, cleaned them, and cooked them over a carefully built fire. By the time the northern sun was finally setting, they settled down with a feast of fresh fish, huckleberries, slightly stale sourdough bread (produced with a flourish from his backpack), and a really good bottle of Wilder Wines's 1997 Sangiovese sipped directly out of the bottle.

Food had never tasted so good, the flames warmed her hands and face while the air cooled her backside, and seeing Jasha across the fire from her gave her a thrill every time she looked up—and she looked up often.

A campout wasn't the way she'd imagined their affair would progress, but it was pretty darned wonderful.

By the time the stars had started to dimple the night sky, Ann had laughed so much she thought she might be tipsy. That was the only reason she could imagine why she made the mistake of saying, "Tell me about this deal with the devil. Who was the idiot who thought
that
was a good idea?"

An owl hooted. The stream burbled. A tall spiral of smoke slithered up toward the dark heavens, and the trees whispered in the wind.

Yet Jasha didn't answer, and worry seeped into her mind and stained her carefree pleasure.

Had she offended him?

Today he'd been Jasha Wilder, kind, intelligent, thoughtful, needing help, consulting her . . . yet now the fire lent shadows to his face and flame to his eyes, and she remembered, really remembered, that he'd been the wolf that chased her through the woods, held her down, and forced pleasure on her.

He took a drink from the bottle, then wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. His voice, when he spoke, was slow and deep, reciting the story he seemed to drag from the depths of his mind. "The first Konstantine Varinski was a bad seed, a child given to cruelty, then a man who reveled in wickedness. People on the steppes said he was the devil, and that's saying something, because a thousand years ago, life in Russia was brutish and short, and only the strongest survived. After years of vicious behavior, his father threw him out and told him to make his own way in the world."

Ann slid off her log to get closer to the fire, and wrapped her arms around her knees. "Did he throw him into the snow?"

"I can only hope so." Jasha passed her the bottle.

She took a drink, then passed it back. "He was a psychotic? Maybe a serial killer?"

"If you want to put a nice face on it. To me, he sounds like a sadistic son of a bitch. For years, he wandered the steppes, fighting and raping and pillaging, and everywhere he went, the rumor that he was the devil continued to grow." Jasha threw two logs onto the fire, and a shower of sparks rose toward the stars. "Finally the devil himself took note."

A shudder worked itself up her spine.

"Legend has it that the Evil One came to destroy the impostor. But Konstantine knew what he wanted. He offered to do the devil's work for him, and after some negotiation, the devil agreed. To seal the deal, he demanded that Konstantine destroy the Varinski family icon.” Jasha stared into the heart of the blaze. "I told you about Russians and our icons, and how an icon of the Madonna is considered a miracle."

Jasha was an American. He'd been raised here. He said his family had no ties to the Old Country. Yet he'd said
our icons.
"Yes. You told me."

"The Varinski icon was not one painting of the Virgin, but four, each portraying a different stage of her life."