Once and Always Read online

  Sam turned to look at May. Her cheeks and the tip of her nose had pinkened in the cold, and he wished he could touch her. Just one more time.

  She’d been leaning over his shoulder but jerked back and scowled at his movement. “Or something. What?”

  “Thought I told you to go to your car,” he said mildly.

  “It won’t start.”

  “Shit.” Sam glanced at the little black Beetle. “Okay. Let me take a look at it.”

  Her eyebrows winged up her forehead. “Gosh, do you think your testosterone will make it go?”

  “Behave, May.” Sam guided Kasyanov across the highway and to his squad car.

  May trotted behind. “No, really, I bet that’s why it wouldn’t start for me. Too much estrogen.”

  The wind was picking up, driving darts of snow into Sam’s face. He opened the back door to the squad car and settled Kasyanov in it—sitting bolt upright, clutching his suitcase—and then turned to May, standing between him and her Beetle.

  She waved her arms over her head. “Probably you’ll just have to squint at my car, all manly and stuff, and vrooom!”

  He looked at her patiently. “Do you mind?”

  She dropped her arms. “What?”

  He took a step, bringing their bodies so close together her pink little nose nearly brushed his chest.

  She tilted up her chin.

  He leaned down until he could smell that sweet scent she wore. Until he could watch her pupils expand and the flush spread up her cheeks. Until he could almost taste the salt on her lips. “Do you want me to try your car. Or not.”

  He watched the soft skin of her throat move as she swallowed. “Okay.”

  She held out her keys.

  “Coward.” Sam took them and stepped around her, careful not to brush against her body.

  “Hey!”

  He ignored her, walked to the Beetle, and pulled open the door, leaning down to push back the driver’s side seat all the way before sitting and inserting the key into the ignition.

  Three minutes later he shook his head. “It’s not even turning over. Probably your starter. You’re going to need that looked at.”

  May huffed from outside the car. She hadn’t sat down beside him, as if she’d thought it was best to keep her distance. “Like I couldn’t figure that out for myself.”

  At least she was smart enough not to mention his hormones—or hers—again.

  He got out and locked the Beetle before handing the keys to her. “I’ll give you a lift and send a wrecker back out, but Becky says they’re backed up. It may be tomorrow or later before they can get your car in to the garage in town.”

  May frowned down at her keys. “I don’t have too much choice, do I?”

  “Not really.” He turned to walk to his squad car and then realized she wasn’t following. “Well?”

  She opened her mouth as if to argue.

  He raised his brows.

  She snapped her mouth close and pivoted to make her way to her Beetle. Sam strolled behind her, watching as she opened her passenger car door to retrieve her purse before stamping to the trunk of the Beetle. He was right behind her when she opened it. He grabbed her suitcase and the smaller, black case with a handle sitting beside it before she could. The smaller case was surprisingly heavy.

  She huffed. “I can carry that.”

  “Yup.” He weighed the smaller case. “What’s in this?”

  “None of your business,” she snapped.

  He gave her a look, then turned and led the way back to his squad car, toting her bags. Everyone seemed to have one of these black roll-aboard suitcases but him. Must mean he didn’t do much airplane travel—at least not anymore. Not since giving up his former career in the army.

  He pushed that thought aside as he put May’s suitcases in the trunk, and then helped May into the front seat.

  Sam opened the backseat door and looked at Kasyanov. If the car skidded at all, that suitcase was going to break the man’s nose. “Better let me stow your case in the trunk. Safer.”

  He expected an argument, but Kasyanov bit his lip and released his death grip on the suitcase.

  Sam stuck it in the trunk next to May’s and slammed the lid shut before getting in the squad car. He checked over his shoulder and then pulled onto 52 carefully. Even with the wind the snow was beginning to pile up, and he didn’t want to spin out as well.

  “Your uncle’s?” he asked May without looking at her. She made the trip up from the cities every couple of weeks or so to stay for the weekend with her uncle, George Johnson. They’d first met on this very stretch of highway when he’d pulled her over for speeding. That’d been almost two years ago.

  A lot had happened since then.

  “You know that’s where I always stay,” she said.

  He shrugged one shoulder. “You were at the Coot Lake Inn in August.”

  She blushed at the memory, and Sam felt himself getting hot in an entirely different area. “He doesn’t have any air-conditioning. I was going to melt if I didn’t get a motel room.”

  Sam decided it wasn’t in his best interest to pursue that line. “Staying long?”

  “Through the weekend.”

  He signaled and turned onto County D. “Then you might like dinner tonight.”

  “No, I wouldn’t.”

  “Tomorrow night?”

  “Nope.”

  He felt a muscle in his jaw tense. Why did she have to make it so hard? “You sure? Marie’s put Rocky Mountain oysters on the menu at the Laughing Loon Café, special. Thought that’d be right up your alley.” He glanced at her. “Being a ball buster and all.”

  She inhaled. “Well, you thought wrong.”

  And the damnedest thing was that the little hint of hurt in her voice made him want to gather her close and tell her he didn’t mean it, not really.

  Six months she’d been running away from him, throwing insults and withering scorn like grenades in her wake, and for some reason he couldn’t give up the chase. He’d begun to think he was getting off on her cutting words—which was disturbing as hell.

  And cutting words were all he’d received these last months.

  Before that, though, there’d been that night. One night only. That night she’d whispered words that hadn’t left bruises on his skin. Her body had been open and warm and soft beneath his, and she had seemed—this sounded silly, even in his own mind—but she had seemed like home.

  He’d been chasing that warm home ever since.

  “The turn’s here,” she said, gesturing to the sign for Pelican Road, as bossy as ever.

  “Yup.” He didn’t bother pointing out that he knew where Old George lived. He signaled and turned on Pelican, then slowed, driving carefully. Off the highway and with brush along the road as a windbreak, the snow was beginning to pile up.

  Pelican Road ran around the sound side of Lake Moosehead, the bigger of the two lakes bracketing the town. Coot Lake was the smaller lake but had better fishing, though the entire north half of the lake was in the Red Earth Ojibwa Indian Reservation and was marked off with white buoys. In summer, you could catch a mess of sunnies in a morning’s fishing on either lake, a walleye if you were lucky.

  Beside him, May shifted, and he smelled it—whatever flower scent she used. Maybe just her shampoo, because it wasn’t strong, just there. Lingering in the heated car. Making him think of August humidity and the damp skin between her breasts.

  The squad car was heavy with silence, broken only by Kasyanov, breathing through his mouth.

  “There it is,” May murmured quietly, as if she felt it, too.

  Sam pulled into the drive of a low, red-stained cabin. On the other side of Lake Moosehead new multi-million-dollar “cabins” had been going up for the last twenty years. This side of the lake, though, was weedy with no beach—artificial or otherwise—which meant the cabins were mostly from the forties and fifties. No a/c in summer, and sketchily retrofitted plumbing and heat.

  Sam killed
the engine and watched the cabin. The lights were out.

  “He even home?”

  “Yes, of course.” She was already struggling with her seatbelt. “There’s no need to get out. Just pop the trunk and I’ll grab my stuff.”

  “I can carry them in for you.”

  “No.”

  “May—”

  “It’s okay.”

  Her glare was so fierce that he raised his hands. “Fine.”

  “Just leave it.” For a moment some emotion crossed her face, something more vulnerable than her generally warlike expression.

  He ignored the mouth-breathing from the backseat. “You know I’m not going to do that.”

  Any softness in May’s expression was gone so quickly he almost thought he’d imagined it. She shook her head once, and then she was out the car door.

  He watched in the rearview mirror as she tramped around to the back of the squad car and retrieved her suitcase and the little black case. She carried them to the cabin and set the cases down before knocking on the front door.

  There was a moment’s pause, then the door opened and she disappeared inside without a glance backward.

  Not that he’d been expecting one.

  “Sir?” Kasyanov cleared his throat nervously. “Sir, perhaps we go now?”

  “Yeah.” Sam put the squad car into reverse. He glanced at Kasyanov as he looked over his shoulder to back from the drive. “Next stop, Coot Lake Inn.”

  Chapter Three

  Maisa shut her eyes, leaning for a second against the inside of the cabin door, just taking a breath. One frigging mistake half a year ago, and for some reason she just couldn’t get past it. Every time she saw Sam it seemed to reopen the wound—made it ooze blood and impossible longing. She swallowed. Just get over it, damn it!

  Maisa straightened, readying herself for the inevitable grilling from Uncle George.

  Except when she opened her eyes the old man was half turned away from her, didn’t seem to’ve even noticed her bizarre entrance at all.

  Something was wrong.

  It wasn’t anything that someone else might’ve noticed, but Maisa had been studying her dyadya since she was a very little girl. She knew when he had a certain squint that he wasn’t pleased, that when the right corner of his mouth kicked up he was amused, and when he was tense or nervous his shoulders raised a little and stiffened.

  As they were now.

  Then, too, there was the cigarette dangling from his lips.

  She inhaled as her spine snapped upright.

  “I thought you’d quit.” She plucked the cigarette out of his mouth as she stomped past him.

  “It was only the one, little mama,” he said behind her.

  “Only one?” She looked pointedly at the cheap glass ashtray beside his big LazyBoy. The ashtray sat on an old metal folding TV table and overflowed with butts and ash. She stubbed out the cigarette she’d taken from him.

  The old man shrugged. “Maybe more than one.”

  He was a tall man, her great-uncle, but in the last couple of years as he’d entered his seventies, his shoulders had begun to stoop and he had a little sloping belly now. His iron-gray hair was as full as ever, though. Dyadya combed it straight back into a pompadour and used pomade to keep it in place. His ears were overlarge for his head, and his eyes drooped down at the corners. Deep wrinkles had imprinted themselves on his weathered face so that he looked like he was perpetually in mourning.

  Those sad eyes watched her now without any welcome.

  She scanned the main room but saw nothing out of the ordinary. The recliner sat directly in front of the TV, the pink velour worn thin by Dyadya’s butt and head. The little kitchen table behind it was piled with old mail and a bowl full of red apples. There was no place to actually sit and eat at the table, which wasn’t a problem since Dyadya did most of his dining in the recliner. On the TV table, beside the ashtray, a newer laptop sat with a glowing screen. Over by the simple redbrick fireplace there was a cheap particleboard bookshelf crammed to overflowing with paperbacks. Most were in Russian, but a few American thrillers sat there as well. And on the wall, high up near the ceiling, was the single framed picture: a black-and-white photo of Saint Basil’s Cathedral. The kind that could be bought for a few rubles in any tourist shop in Moscow.

  She looked back at Dyadya. “You forgot I was coming.”

  “I was not expecting you today.” He shrugged, not quite an admission.

  “I told you two weeks ago that I was coming up this weekend. It’s not my fault you don’t keep a calendar.” She dropped her cases by the green plaid love seat sitting at an angle to the recliner. She shrugged off her jacket and pulled off her beret, letting them fall to the love seat.

  “Phtt.” Dyadya waved his hand like he was batting a fly. “And who keeps a calendar, I ask you.”

  “Me, for one.”

  A faint smile curled Dyadya’s wide mouth. “Ah, but you are a woman of business, Masha, mine. I am but an old man. What use is the keeping of time for a man in his last years?”

  Maisa’s eyes narrowed. Generally Dyadya was pretty pragmatic—not one to bemoan his age. Was there truly a problem with his health? Had his memory begun to go?

  She swallowed and crossed to the kitchen. “Well, since you weren’t expecting me, do you have anything for supper? My Beetle stalled out on 52, and apparently it’ll be tomorrow before it can be towed and looked at. I’ll have to take your pickup into town if you need groceries.”

  Dyadya was trailing her. “But how did you get to my cabin, then?”

  She tensed a little, but didn’t turn around. “Sam West gave me a lift in his squad car.”

  “Did he?” His voice sharpened.

  A battered soup pot was simmering on the stove. She lifted the lid to distract him.

  “You are lucky.” Dyadya was at her elbow as she inhaled the fragrant steam. “Borscht. I started it this morning and I think it will be just right for you and me in an hour or so.”

  “Good.” This time Maisa didn’t have to fake the smile—she’d loved borscht since childhood, when Dyadya would make it on cold winter days.

  She glanced at the frosted kitchen window. This certainly counted.

  “You need to get some insulation on the windows in here.” She followed Dyadya back into the living room. He rolled as he walked, a man who had been muscular in his youth and still had the long ropy arms of a wrestler. He settled into his recliner and she took the love seat.

  Dyadya pulled out his cell phone from his breast pocket and looked at it before putting it away again. “And how was Samuel West?”

  “Fine.” Maisa shrugged, brushing a bit of lint off her black jeans.

  “That is all you can say?” Dyadya tutted. “He is a good man, that West. You could do worse, my Masha.”

  “Good.” The word tasted bitter on her tongue—like a mouthful of regret. “He’s a cop.”

  “And so?”

  “And so you know the problem with that.” She arched her brows at him pointedly. “Do you want me to end up like Mom?”

  “Your mother, she was always a romantic.” Dyadya said. “And your father—you should pardon my words—is a durak.”

  “He’s an idiot and an asshole,” Maisa corrected.

  She hadn’t seen Jonathan Burnsey since the day in the second grade when he’d walked out on his family. And because he’d never married Irina Nozadze—even though Mama had put his surname on her birth certificate—there was no divorce and no settlement. Mama should’ve taken the bastard to court for child support, but Irina Nozadze was a timid, emotionally fragile woman. She’d simply been too frightened to challenge an up-and-coming assistant city attorney for Minneapolis. As a result they’d never had any sort of support—financial or otherwise—from Jonathan. Maisa had taken care of her mother in middle school and high school and had put herself through college, working nights and on the weekends.

  Jonathan had been a good guy, too—a man who prosecuted criminals for
a living. It was precisely because he’d been on the side of good and the law that he’d left her mother. The Nozadze family was most definitely not law-abiding. His association with her mother might have been detrimental to his all-important career.

  “Samuel West is not the same as your papa,” Dyadya said gently.

  “He’s a cop and a good man. You said it yourself.” Maisa pursed her lips. “He’s close enough.”

  Dyadya picked up the TV remote, fingering it as his brows knit. “You have grown hard, my Masha. I do not know if this is a good thing or a bad thing.”

  “Maybe it’s neither.” Dyadya’s troubled tone made her chest hurt, but on this she could not waver. Sam came too close to the steel walls guarding her heart. He was much too dangerous to the woman she’d made of herself. “Maybe it just is.”

  “Perhaps this is so,” Dyadya said. “And your mother? How is my niece?”

  The change of subject was a relief. She ran her fingers through her pixie cut, ruffling her fine hair, which had been flattened by the beret. “She’s dating some guy she met down at the grocery.”

  “You don’t like him.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know him, really. He seems all right—better than the car salesman she was dating last summer—but it doesn’t matter, does it? He’ll leave her in another couple of months, or she’ll see someone else she likes better.”

  Dyadya grunted noncommittally. “And your father?”

  Maisa raised her eyebrows. “You know we don’t see him. Why do you ask?”

  “As a man grows older, sometimes he regrets decisions he made in his youth.” Dyadya smoothed his thumb over the edge of the remote where the paint had been worn away from use. The thumbnail was missing on that hand—the right—as was most of his forefinger. “I wondered if your father had discovered that yet.”

  “No.” Maisa’s voice was very firm. “And he never will.”

  “Perhaps.” Dyadya tapped the remote against his knee. “Perhaps not.”

  “You’re brooding. What’s happened?”

  “Nothing, Masha mine,” the old man said. “Nothing at all.” He tossed the remote into a basket that held old catalogs beside his chair. “But tell me. How is your business? Are you making good money?”