Chains of Ice Read online

  “I was their circus freak with special powers.”

  “What special powers?” She stilled, held her breath.

  “I can . . . move things. Push things. Hold things. With my mind.”

  What an absurd story. She didn’t trust it for a minute. Yet . . . on the platform, he had caught her, when she would have sworn he hadn’t been physically close enough. Nevertheless, she had been saved.

  He was obviously waiting for her to demand proof.

  She didn’t have the guts. She didn’t want to know. Not here. Not now.

  She resumed playing with the kitten. “What did they have you do?”

  He laughed softly at her cowardice, then picked up his story. “When I was very young, I had no control over my . . . gift. So to make me perform, Gaspard locked me in a cage, put a rug over it—I was always in the dark—then when the crowds gathered, he offered me food . . . from outside the bars. I could only have it if I brought it to myself. It was particularly entertaining if it was a bowl of soup too wide to pass through the bars, and I spilled it and cried.”

  “Okay.” Genny felt like Mama Cat facing a threat to her babies. “This guy locked a little kid in a cage and starved him. He shouldn’t have been allowed to keep you. Where were the authorities?”

  John’s mouth twisted with scorn. “This was Russia in the eighties. The authorities were lucky to be paid. They weren’t even in authority. The circus moved all the time, from here all the way across Siberia to the far sea, then south, then west to the Crimea . . . and no one with any sense challenged Gaspard. No one.”

  She flicked the twig back and forth, quicker and quicker. “And no one had any compassion for a child?”

  The kitten leaped and attacked, wild with the joy of play.

  “I was different. A freak! Everyone was afraid of me. Especially when I got older and refused to do what Gaspard wanted. Then he poked me with a pole until I got mad. I shouted. I rattled the lock, made the straw inside fly around. I wanted to break the bars, but I wasn’t strong enough. My powers weren’t strong enough.” John gazed into the forest, but he was here only in body. His mind dwelled far away and long ago. “The summer I was eleven, my voice changed, I grew tall . . . and I came into the fullness of my powers.”

  She moved the twig more and more slowly. “Did you realize it?”

  “No. No one did. I only knew that Gaspard had trained me well. Every time I saw him, I grew angry; and one day, he poked me with his pole . . . and without actually touching it, I pulled it out of his hands and beat him with it. Beat him until the blood ran. Beat him unconscious.”

  She forgot the twig, forgot the kitten, forgot to play. “Did you kill him?”

  “No. I wanted to, but the audience ran and screamed. The circus workers cowered. One of his daughters, the one who slipped me food on the sly, begged me to stop.”

  “You stopped because she asked you?”

  “Yes. I would have done whatever she told me.”

  “Was she beautiful?” Genny imagined a sloe-eyed, dusky-skinned woman whose every movement was seduction.

  “She was so beautiful.” He spoke worshipfully. “She was a tiny thing, only seven—”

  Genny felt stupid.

  “—and I all of a sudden realized that she was watching me beat her father to death.”

  “And a father, any father, was something you envied.”

  That brought John back from the past. “That’s true. Gaspard was a pitiless bastard. He treated everyone brutally. But his family never went hungry, and the only violence they feared was his.”

  “Praise indeed.”

  “Russia is a vast country filled with unbending rules and petty dictators. It’s tough to be different in Russia. It’s tough to be independent. They were, and no one who challenged Gaspard ever won.”

  “Except you.”

  “Except me.” John sat there, cuddling a baby lynx in his two broad palms, looking as wild as the cat he held. “The little girl unlocked the cage, gave me a little food and a little money—to this day, I don’t know whether her mother gave it to her or she stole it—and told me to get away before the police arrived. So I ran. Stowed away on trains. Hitchhiked the trucks. Made it all the way across Siberia, thirty-eight hundred miles, back to Rasputye. It took two months. I ate raw fish. I ate maggots from the garbage.”

  Mama Cat paced harder, faster, casting more hard glances their way.

  The boy cat pounced on the twig, over and over, trying to make it move.

  “I ate snow, because in some places it never melts. I got back to Rasputye about the same time as the circus,” he said. “I went to Olik and Tanja and begged for sanctuary.”

  “What happened?” Genny’s heart beat as if she’d been racing the whole length of Siberia . . . with him.

  “They tried to sell me back to Gaspard.”

  She felt as if she’d slammed down hard on her face. “What did Gaspard do? Did he take his revenge?”

  “He would not have me. He was still limping from my attack.”

  “Good for you! I wish you had—” She stopped herself.

  “Don’t worry. I’ve killed enough evil men since then.” John wasn’t bragging. He wasn’t proud. He was merely telling the truth.

  “Then what? When you weren’t profitable for those people, the ones who . . . raised you, owned you?”

  “They took me to the station in Apasnee, bought me a train ticket, and told me never to come back.”

  “And?”

  “And I took the train. I found an orphanage. By the time I was seventeen, I was headed to the U.S.”

  Troubled, she had to point out the one salient fact. “Yet here you are now. When you were hurt, you ran away and came back to Rasputye again.”

  Gently he put the kitten on the ground, watched her ambush her brother. “If you ask the people of Rasputye, they say the crossroads draws people like me.”

  “If you ask the people of Rasputye, they say everything we do is controlled by an ancient legend and such silliness.” Genny would not admit to him that Mariana believed fate had drawn Genny here. It made her seem bound to John in some mystical way.

  The kittens rolled over and over, wrestling with youthful enthusiasm.

  “Those people who raised you. Olik and Tanja. Are they still here?”

  “Olik died at sea.”

  “Good.” Genny hoped it was a cold, wet, miserable death.

  “Tanja lives and thrives in Rasputye. She is respected for her business acumen.” With fine-tuned irony, John said, “Selling me was, after all, merely a business decision.”

  Genny opened her mouth to reply hotly, then remembered—she had made a similar decision when she agreed to the deal her father offered. But surely she wasn’t as bad as a woman who sold a child to the circus . . . although perhaps that was only a matter of degree. “I haven’t met her in the traktir.”

  “She seldom visits the traktir. She is far too respectable for that.”

  “Oh, John.” Genny had never seen a man look so alone. She ached for the lonely, abused little boy he had been, and for the desolate, remote man he had become. She was angry at the couple who should have been his parents, at the circus people who so brutally mistreated a child. She wanted to do something for him, melt the anguish behind those cold blue eyes.

  She knelt beside him, put her hands on his shoulders, and looked into his eyes.

  He stared back at her, motionless, waiting, a man whose shoulders were warm beneath her palms, who smelled like clean air, like evergreen trees, like leather, and, incongruously, like lavender shampoo.

  “John.” She needed to say . . . something. Something wise and comforting about how everything would get better soon.

  But that was such a lie. How did one recover from a childhood such as his? What events drove him back here to the place of his torment? And what could she say, or do, to ease his suffering?

  Her heart beat hard. She swallowed to ease her dry throat.

  And she l
eaned into him and kissed him.

  Chapter 18

  It was nothing, really. A brush of her mouth against his.

  But John’s lips were cool and firm, his beard unexpectedly soft, and his eyes fluttered closed as if Genny’s touch gave him pleasure. Beneath her hands, his shoulders flexed and settled, and he gave off a gentle heat.She drew back slightly.

  He sighed as if her retreat disappointed him, but did nothing to stop her.

  So she kissed him again. This time when his eyes closed, her eyes closed, too. That changed the kiss, made it more intimate, less comfort and more sex. It was man and woman now, lonely adults who explored cautiously, afraid of revealing too much of themselves.

  He opened his lips and touched his tongue to her lower lip, the flavor of inquiry.

  Would she allow him more freedom?

  She would . . . she offered him a shy sample of herself, and the pleasure he gave her in return was warm and profound, primitive and sensual. As each moment passed, as he led her deeper into passion, it became increasingly clear that the time he’d spent in the wilderness had stripped away any semblance of civilization. Until this moment, she had never tasted pure, unadulterated masculinity.

  No wonder women lusted after him.

  He allowed her to take the lead, yet she sensed intensity, need . . . passion. Power, his power, hummed beneath her fingertips, feeding the small, shy, hidden bit of wildness within her.

  He went to her head like a shot of distilled virility, and she kissed him more deeply, sinking onto his knee and against his chest. He seemed to be allowing her all the choices, but the way he kissed, as if she were the first, the best, the most important . . . the only. It was flattery and ardor and, oh, the way her body felt against his! The slow thrum of passion moved from his skin to hers, from his heart to hers, from his loins to . . .

  Deliberately, leisurely, allowing her time to protest, he tilted her to lie in his lap.

  Dimly she realized that he was drawing her in, a hypnotism of her body by his, but she didn’t protest.

  Why should she? He held her with one arm beneath her head, the other embracing her waist, and she felt, not threatened, but safe as she had never felt before. And cherished. And worshiped. A firestorm ignited in her, burning away any wariness, taking her out of herself and into him.

  With him, she was whole.

  Giving a small moan, she wrapped herself around him, drew him down to her, opened her lips, and breathed in his soul.

  This wasn’t the John Powell of her dreams. He was not forceful, not arrogant, not relentless. Avni’s friend Halinka had claimed he did everything according to the woman’s desire.

  Right now, Genny believed it. Every movement, every touch was designed for her.

  On the periphery of consciousness, she knew the sand was warm beneath them. She heard the river rippling across rocks, the kittens riotously gamboling. She smelled the sun-warmed pines, and felt the brush of the wind. She was alive as she had never been before . . . and when he lessened the kiss, loosened his embrace, she said, “No,” and tried to bring him back.

  But he took a long breath, and lifted her to sit straight.

  “Genny.” He brushed his lips across her cheek, pushed the tousled strands of her hair behind her ear.

  “Genny.”

  She opened her eyes and stared at him, dazzled by the sunlight and dazed by . . . by the lack of oxygen to her brain. Because that was the only explanation she could give for her reaction to what she had intended to be a comforting kiss.

  And while she still teetered on the edge of sensual oblivion, he looked serious and concerned. “You need to take your pictures,” he said in his deep, calm voice.

  “Right. Sure.” With a bump, she slid off his knee and groped for her camera. Retrieving it, she focused randomly and shot photos of Mama Cat, who posed at the lip of rock overlooking the river. As Genny’s hand steadied, she used more deliberation to capture the kittens as they leaped around. In a voice that sounded as if it came from a great hollow within, she asked, “Would you move the twig and see if you can get them to play with it? It would direct their attention . . . and I promise not to get you in the photo.”

  Picking up the twig, he knelt beside her and thrashed it across the sand, and when the babies dashed over, intent on beating it into oblivion, John asked, “Do you know why I told you the story of my youth?”

  To tear my heart out. “You needed someone to talk to, and I’m a good listener.” Every guy in college had told her exactly that.

  “No. I wanted you to understand, really understand, why you can never take photographs of me. Why you can never tell them in Rasputye that you’ve met me.” He put the twig down. “That’s enough. The kittens are tired.”

  As if he had read her mind, Mama Cat came to get them. She interrupted their play with a paw on the back of the boy kitten. As he lay sprawled on the sand, she picked him up by the scruff of his neck and carried him toward the den, the girl kitten dragging behind them and yawning.

  Genny switched to video mode, catching the maternal concern of the lynx as she fed the boy cat into the den, then nudged the girl cat inside. Mama Cat followed her babies, slipping through the crack in the stone and leaving no trace behind.

  The pictures were going to be beyond anything ever seen before, and Genny was going to win every accolade for her success. Yet it didn’t seem fair. “John, it’s you who knows the forest so well!”

  “I will not be betrayed again.” Gone was the lover with power in his body and passion in his taste. This man was grimly serious.

  Really, what did she expect? That he would have been as overwhelmed as she had been by one little kiss? “No one’s going to believe that I found those kittens.”

  “Make them believe, Genesis. Make them believe.”

  That was the second time he had called her Genesis—and most people, unless they knew differently, assumed her name was Jennifer.

  She put the lens cap on her camera and tucked it away, shouldered her backpack and picked up her coat. “How did you know my name was Genesis?”

  “Genesis. Lubochka’s voice carries well into the forest.” His voice faded as he spoke.

  She turned to him . . . but he was gone.

  Chapter 19

  “I did it!” Genny burst into the traktir,heart pounding with excitement.

  The team was there, all except Brandon, taking an afternoon break.Everyone stopped eating and writing and talking to stare.

  “I got pictures!” Genny held up the camera as if it held treasure.

  From the expression on Lubochka’s face, it did. The big woman rose slowly from her place at the head of the table and extended her arm. “Show me.”

  Genny rushed to her side. They performed a silly tug-of-war as Lubochka tried to take the camera and Genny fought to get the strap over her head. Then everyone gathered around as Genny clicked to the first photo.

  Lubochka took a long breath. Groped for her reading glasses. Looked hard at the small, backlit screen. And said, “Kittens? You got pictures of”—she squinted—“of Nadja with her kittens? Outside in the daylight?”

  “Yes! Yes! It was the most exciting thing I’ve ever done in my life!” Genny’s heart was pounding as hard as it had when she had almost taken a plunge off the cliff.

  A babble broke out among the team.

  Thorsen Rasmussen had not said two words to her all week. Now he slapped her on the back with such hearty goodwill she stumbled forward. “Brilliant,” he said. “You’ll be written up in the journals for this!” Turning to Mariana, he grabbed her and whirled her across the traktir.

  Avni hugged Genny, then shook her, then hugged her again. “You did it. You did it!”

  Reggie lifted her hand, kissed it, and in that fabulous Scottish accent, said, “Congratulations, my dear.”

  “You are our heroine.” Misha grabbed her shoulders and kissed first one cheek, then the other. Leaning over Lubochka, he kissed her in a totally different way, on the
mouth.

  Reggie laughed aloud at Genny’s expression. “They are an odd couple, aren’t they?”

  “I didn’t realize that Lubochka and Misha . . .” Genny wished she’d never started her comment. “That is, Lubochka doesn’t seem to be the type to . . .”

  “I of course cannot speak with any amount of authority on the matter.” Reggie looked wickedly amused. “But the rumor is that she puts him on and spins him.”

  Genny laughed aloud at the mental picture, then laughed again as Misha and Lubochka pulled the memory card from the camera, fed it into the computer, and brought the pictures up in brilliant color on the nineteen-inch monitor.

  The team gathered around and watched the video of the kittens playing, then ran through the stills Genny had taken.

  “You must have been startled to see the cats.” Lubochka pointed at the first pictures Genny had taken and laughed exuberantly. “These are tilted sideways.”

  “Yes . . .” Genny had been shaken, but not by the appearance of the cats. She’d been shaken by the kiss she’d shared with John and his unremitting insistence that she tell no one she knew him.

  “Easily fixed. We have Photoshop! We will tilt them the other way. And crop. We can crop.” Misha pointed at the fourth picture, the one of Mama Cat posed on the rocks. “Look. Look at this one! Nadja came through the winter in prime shape.”

  “She is a beautiful cat.” Lubochka worshiped with her tone. “Genesis, you must tell me where you saw Nadja and her children.”

  Genny had been thinking about how to answer. She didn’t want everyone to know the den’s location. Not everyone respected an endangered species. There were people who would pay to have a coat made from lynx fur, and people who imagined owning a wildcat would be fun. And maybe no one on the team was one of those people, but the villagers of Rasputye were for the most part poor, and Genny didn’t believe in testing their integrity. So she told the truth—but not all the truth. “On the riverbed around the bend from our observation station.”

  “Good.” Lubochka rubbed her palms together. “Later, when we’re alone, we’ll get out the map.”