Sarah's Sin (9 page)

She looked around the room and bit back a moan of despair. Matt was plainly furious with Mr. Morton, who had expanded his monologue into anti-Semitism. Mrs. Parker was pouring another dollop of brandy into her coffee cup. Blossom was sneaking off with one of the beauty queen's heels. Some grand evening this was turning out to be. The evening from hell.

“So, you're Amish, Sarah,” Mrs. Morton said, dragging the topic back to the one thing Sarah wanted most to avoid talking about. She was quite certain the imperfections in her hostess skills were already glaringly apparent to the one person she wanted most to impress—Matt. Now she would have the spotlight thrown on her background and way of life, which couldn't have been more separate from his if she had been from Mars. And he would be able to see how truly unsuitable for him she was.

And what was the difference? she asked herself. The sooner he came to his senses, the better for both of them.

“Yes, Mrs. Morton, I'm Amish,” she answered politely.

“So what's that like?”

What an enormous question. Sarah sat with her hands folded in her lap, struggling to formulate a reasonable answer, but Mr. Morton beat her to it.

“You've seen what its like, Peg. It's like living in a hippie cult commune.”

“Mr. Morton!” Matt protested, all his newfound protective instincts rearing up inside him. He'd sat through the man's diatribe on every other minority group, but this was the end. This ingrate had insulted Sarah, Sarah the sweet and innocent, and Matt wasn't going to have her subjected to abuse of any kind.

“Well, it is,” Morton pressed on, waving his cigar. “I read all about it. They mate up their young folks like sheep and most of them have two or three wives.”

“Mr. Morton, that's enough!” Matt bolted out of his chair, ignoring the pain it caused him. He was too angry to notice something as trivial as cracked ribs. He leaned toward the older man with a menacing expression. “If you want to be a bigot at least have the decency to do it in the privacy of your own home.”

“Bigot!” Morton exploded. He rocked himself up off the couch. “You can't call me that!”

“I just did.”

“Matt, stop it!” Sarah jumped up out of her chair and tried to pull Matt back to his. He paid no attention to her efforts. He and the guest were nearly toe-to-toe, Matt towering over Morton like an angry avenging angel.

“You're a rude, ignorant bigot. And if you think for one minute that I'm going to sit here and let you insult Sarah and treat her like
some sideshow tourist attraction, you had better think again. Furthermore, I think you owe Miss Troyer an apology.”

Morton's whole fat head turned the color of a radish.

“Matt, stop it!” Sarah hissed behind him. She hooked a finger through a belt loop on his jeans and tried to tug him backward. He wouldn't budge.

“I'm not apologizing to anybody,” Morton said with a snort.

“Then I think you'd better leave.”

“Matt!” Sarah wailed. This was all she needed. As if her reign as manager of Thome-wood hadn't gotten off to a bad enough start, Matt was going to go and throw out the guests!

“W-el-1,” Mrs, Parker said, drawing the word into three syllables. Her gaze had turned glassy. She seemed to be able to focus only the eye with the contact lens in it, and that one she fixed on Morton. Tm with Dr. Thorne. I think you're insuffer-ufferably rude,” she said with a hiccup.

Morton snorted, “That doesn't mean much coming from a woman whose bra size is bigger than her IQ.”

“I don't have to put up with that!” Mrs. Parker said with a gasp. She reached into her purse and pulled out a pearl-handled derringer and waved it around. She rose to her feet,
wobbling on one heel, trying to aim the gun. “You big lump o' Yankee lard!”

Mrs. Morton screamed. Mr. Morton's cigar fell out of his mouth and set the couch on fire. Matt dove for Mrs. Parker and knocked the gun out of her hands. It went off with a loud pop, shattering a decanter of red wine, which spewed all over Mrs. Morton, causing her to believe she'd been shot and making her scream louder. Just to put the icing on the cake, Blossom rushed in howling at the top of her lungs.

The farce had reached its climax.

“I can't believe this,” Sarah muttered. She stood, dazed, on the porch watching the tail-lights of the Mortons' car bob off into the dark distance.

“Good riddance,” Matt grumbled.

Sarah turned on him. “I can't believe you did this!”

“Me!” he exclaimed, splaying a hand across his chest as if she'd just stabbed him. He was the picture of confused, thickheaded male innocence. “What did J do?”

“What did
you
do?” Sarah rolled her eyes and clamped her hands to the top of her head as if she were afraid her temper would force her hair to stand straight on end. “You had to start a fight with a guest!”

“Sarah, the man was insulting you!”

“Ridicule is nothing new to me. I would have handled it.”

“Well, I handled it for you.”

“I wouldn't have fought with him. It's not our way.”

“Yeah, well, it's my way,” Matt said in a huff of injured male pride. He jammed his hands on his hips and scowled. “If the Silicone Queen hadn't pulled that gun, I probably would have punched him in the nose.”

“Wonderful. Violence to defend the nonviolent.” Sarah shook her head at the irony. “I don't need a protector, Matt Thorne. I can take care of myself. I know you come from a violent world, but I am not a part of that world.”

There it was, plainly spoken, the line between them drawn as clearly as if she had taken a stick and pulled it across wet sand. Matt leaned against the porch railing and knocked his head against a post. She was right. In his attempt to defend her innocence he had sullied it with violence. He had dragged her down to a low level by starting a fight over her. He sighed and closed his eyes. Had the world he lived and worked in so tainted him that he had become a part of the problem? He had only wanted to help, both in going to work at County General and in coming to Sarah's defense.

“I only wanted to help,” he mumbled miserably.

Sarah was too caught up in her own worries to notice Matt s pain. A part of her thrilled to the idea of Matt rushing to her rescue like a knight on a white horse, but having that particular fantasy come true was undoubtedly going to cost her dearly. She could see it now. Ingrid would fire her and she would have no choice but to go back to the farm. Her father would try to take control of her life again, and she would end up miserable and married to Micah Hochstetler, doomed to a life of drudgery, never to have an adventure again.

“I'm going to lose my job,” she said with a morose sigh.

Matt turned toward her, leaning his hips against the porch railing. “You won't lose your job. This was all my fault. I'll explain it to Ingrid.” It was his turn to sigh as he thought of how his sister would receive the news, 'Til explain it to Ingrid and then shell kill me with her bare hands. Will you come to my funeral?”

Sarah s mouth twisted into her crooked little wry smile. “Sure. I wouldn't miss it.”

“Will you dance on my grave?”

“I don't know how to dance.”

Reaching out, he pulled her into a loose embrace and swayed a liltle from side to side as he hummed a few bars of a tune. In the dim yellow light of the porch, his gaze caught Sarah's and held it, and the atmosphere of teasing
and camaraderie altered into something thicker and softer and much more serious.

“I'll teach you to dance, Sarah,” he said.

She looked up at him, her heart in her throat. She was leaning against his chest, her hands pressed to the warm cushion of his sweater and the solid muscle beneath it. She could feel his heart beating. He was no dream, no figment of her overactive imagination. He was a man who had defended her honor. He had held her while she cried and then kissed away her tears. He was the embodiment of every romantic fantasy she'd ever allowed herself.

She was falling in love with him. No. She wasn't just falling, she was in love with him. It seemed completely impossible; they'd only just met. But she realized in her heart that she had known him for a long time, for forever. She'd just never really believed she'd meet him or touch him or be tempted by him outside the safety of her dreams.

He leaned down and brushed his lips across hers, and longing pierced her heart like a needle.

“We'd best go back inside,” a voice whispered. It sounded like her own, but she felt strangely detached from it.

“Yeah,” Matt agreed, though he made no move to let her go. “I need to make sure the couch isn't still smoldering.”

“I should check on Mrs. Parker.”

Sarah started to move out of his arms. Matt straightened away from the railing. Their gaze never broke.

I
love her
, he thought with a jolt. The revelation came as an epiphany, glowing with a wondrous light. It stunned him. That was the “something different” he'd felt along with wanting her. Matt Thorne, Romeo of County General, man of the world, avowed bachelor and slave to his career, was in love for the very first time. He'd taken one look at little Sarah Troyer and fallen like a rock. He looked down at her now with a feeling of awe that couldn't have been exceeded had she suddenly turned to gold.

I love her.

He felt a rush inside him as if a fresh wind were blowing all the dirt out of the corners of his soul. Then he crushed her to him, his arms banding her to his body, his mouth taking possession of hers. He kissed her with a rapacious hunger, eager to taste her sweetness and claim it as his.

Sarah arched against him, responding to his kiss out of pure instinct and need. Her body sought the heat of his, softness pressing into masculine strength. Everything about the kiss overwhelmed her and saturated her, and she wondered dimly if this was what it was like to be drunk. Drunk on passion. Drunk on desire.
She gulped it in with a spirit that had been thirsty all its life. She welcomed the thrust of his tongue, the feel of his tender, sensitive hands pressing down her back and over her hips, lifting her into the curve of his arousal.

“Sarah, I want you,” he whispered, peppering her face with quick, ardent kisses. “I want you so much.”

Want. What she knew of the word could have filled a book. She had wanted so much for so long, wanted so many things she wasn't supposed to have, wasn't supposed to need. She wanted Matt Thorne, in her bed, in her life, in her heart. He said he wanted her, but his life wasn't here. It was a world away, a world that would run roughshod over a naive Amish woman. Not that he would take her to it. Matt was by nature a charmer, a womanizer. He might want her now, but in a week or a month he would leave and she would be the one left wanting.

“I have to go inside,” she whispered, and like the coward she was, she turned and Bed to the relative safety of a house where the only other person was a drunken aging beauty queen who wore only one contact lens, carried a gun in her purse, and was married to an invisible man.

Matt watched her go, too undone by the explosion of emotion he'd experienced to go after her. He'd just discovered he was in love for
the first time, and the object of that grand emotion was running away from him. Another first: He had no idea what to do about her. He had wooed and won nurses and neurosurgeons and even a CPA who had an MBA from Harvard—no mean feat—but he had no idea how to go about winning a sweet, gentle Amish girl. She wasn't impressed by his possessions or his clothes or his profession. None of the usual props would do. And maybe that was only right. Real love, the kind he was feeling, wouldn't go in disguise.

Blossom clambered up the porch steps, her long body wiggling like a centipede's. She plopped herself down on Matt's feet, looked up at him, and let out a long, mournful howl.

“Yeah,” he muttered, wincing against the noise. “Sing one for me while you're at it.”

The inn was silent. Mrs. Parker had surrendered her pistol for safekeeping in a locked cabinet and had retired, presumably to relate the evening's events to the enigmatic Tim, who hadn't been roused from their room even by the sound of gunfire. Ingrid's lovely hunter-green camelback sofa sat under a thick layer of fire extinguisher foam like a small volcano that had been rendered dormant. The parlor windows had been opened to fumigate the room with fresh night air.

Sarah moved around her small room with no energy, but no desire to go to bed either. She wasn't going to sleep. She would only lie there, tossing and turning, yearning for a man she couldn't have.

For a while she just sat on the bed looking at the room around her. The walls were a buttery shade of gold, decorated with a hand-painted ivy vine that trailed along the baseboard and around the lace-draped window. Aside from that, there were no adornments of any kind. In keeping with Amish ways there were no pic
tures or wall hangings. The curtain was fancier than anything in her mother's house.

Ordinarily, Sarah thought of this austerity as a simple rule to be followed. Tonight the plainness left an aching emptiness in her. It seemed symbolic of her life, devoid of tangible, touchable happiness. She knew she was supposed to find her happiness in her faith, and she had tried and prayed, but there was simply something missing, and no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't make that feeling go away.

She wondered as she undressed if she would have felt this way had Samuel lived, had their son lived. There was no way of knowing. In all honesty, Samuel had never been able to extinguish the longing in her. Maybe children would have filled that void, but there had been only one, and that child, Peter, had died of pneumonia before he had seen his first birthday.

She hung her plain blue dress in the closet beside her two other plain blue dresses, pulled on a simple white cotton nightgown, and went to the dresser to brush her hair. Sitting on the oak bureau was the little vial of
Evening
in Paris perfume and her
Glamour
magazine. Feeling defiant, she took the top off the perfume bottle and dabbed some of the oily liquid at the base of her throat. The smell was strangely sweet and foreign to her, but she de
cided she liked it, simply because it was something she wasn't supposed to have.

She flipped through a few pages of the magazine, her sense of rebellion building in her like a ball of compressed energy. Her eyes wandered over ads and articles, and she felt somehow less of a woman for never having worn panty hose or makeup. What possible sin could there be in wearing panty hose? How could a pair of aerobic shoes—whatever they were—corrupt her soul? Of course, she knew the standard answers to those questions—
Be ye not of the world and worldly things—
but it all seemed so petty to her. The way she saw it, the real issues of life had nothing to do with wearing lipstick or driving a car.

Frustrated, she heaved a sigh and left the magazine open on the dresser. She grabbed her robe and a towel and headed for the bathroom.

Matt lay on his bed, staring up at the ceiling. He was still dressed. The mind-numbing weariness that had plagued him since the attack was nowhere to be found tonight. All he could think about as he looked up at the dancing shadows of branches on the ceiling was Sarah. She hadn't spoken a response when he'd told her he wanted her, but there had been a mixed message in her wide eyes. Desire and fear. She wanted him too. He knew that in the way a
man in tune with women always knew, by her kiss, by the change in her breathing, by the subtle scent of her skin. But she was afraid of that wanting.

Well, surprise, Sarah Troyer, because I'm afraid of it
too. This new love was an unknown thing to him. He didn't know what to expect of it. Certainly, he had always cared for the women he made love with, and he had always been a considerate partner in bed, but the rules had changed now. The game was different. The stakes were higher. He wanted to give something he'd never given before—his heart. That was scary.

But he was getting ahead of himself, he thought, pushing himself carefully upright. Before he could give Sarah his heart, he had to make sure she would stick around long enough to take it. He had come up with a couple of ideas on the subject of courtship. Tomorrow he would begin the campaign.

He shed his sweater and undid the button on his jeans, then limped barefoot toward the bathroom door, intending to get a glass of fresh water to wash down his nightly dose of pills. His hand stilled on the knob, and he listened intently for a moment. He had heard the tub running earlier and had tortured himself for awhile with the mental image of Sarah bathing, but that had been an hour ago. He heard nothing now and he tried to squelch his
disappointment as he turned the knob and swung open the door.

Sarah stood beside the tub, her hair up in a haphazard topknot with streamers of chestnut silk floating loose around the edges. She wore noting but a soft blue bath towel and a look of wide-eyed surprise.

Matt held his breath lest this vision disappear. He knew he should have done the gentlemanly thing and backed out, closing the door and leaving Sarah to her privacy. He knew that was what he should have done, but there was no way in hell he was going to do it unless she told him to.

Desire sprang to life inside him, a sleeping beast awakened, coiling fire in his gut. The air in the bathroom was warm and steamy, pungent with the scent of heated perfume and woman. And Sarah stood there clutching her towel above her breasts, beads of water still clinging to her smooth bare shoulders. She looked up at him, her eyes midnight blue, her lips damp and slightly parted.

The tension built and tightened around them like an invisible web. Matt let go of the door and took a step closer. Sarah watched him without moving, without speaking, without breathing. He looked completely male and predatory. His black hair was mussed, strands falling across his broad forehead. His dark, glittering gaze was narrow and intense. His
face was taut, all the planes and angles emphasized. His jaw had already begun to darken with a beard. The strong, clean lines of his chest had taken on a sheen from the steam or from perspiration, she didn't know which. Her gaze trailed down past the white tape around his ribs to the undone button at the waist of the jeans that were clinging to his lean hips, and lower, to the evidence of a strong and immediate desire.

Everything basically female in her stirred and throbbed. She was suddenly conscious of the weight of her breasts and the sensitive flesh knotting at their tips. And low in her belly a tight fist of need tormented her.

“I want you, Sarah,” he whispered.

Want. That word had haunted her all of her life. She wanted something to fill the gap in her heart. She wanted Matt Thorne. She wanted him now and she would want him still when he had gone. Why couldn't she, just this once, give in to the wanting? She wanted so badly to know what it was to have a man touch her with the same longing that was in her soul. She knew it wouldn't last. She knew that he would go and she would be left to her quiet life of duty. Couldn't she at least be allowed a beautiful memory to sustain her through a lifetime of longing and lonely nights? Who would that hurt? Where was the sin in wanting to be loved?

Her fist tightened briefly, then relaxed, and the towel fell away.

Matt drank in the sight of her, thinking that this was what a woman was supposed to look like—soft and curvy, her skin glowing, her breasts full, hips rounded. He ached to touch her, to mold those ripe curves to the angular hardness of his own body. Closing the distance between them, he felt the web of sensuality wind tighter around them. He breathed in the scent of it, tasted it on his tongue, then he leaned down and tasted Sarah, pressing his mouth to the spot where neck met shoulder. His hands skimmed up her sides to claim her breasts, testing the weight of them, brushing his thumbs across the distended peaks of her dusky peach-colored nipples. He caught her gasp in his mouth, rubbing his lips over hers.

Sarah melted against him. She felt hot and boneless and alive in a way she never had before. She pressed herself against Matt, moaning deep in her throat at the exquisite abrasion of his chest hair against her nipples. His hands slid down her back, tracing lightly over the hollows and ridges, sweeping down to cup her buttocks. His fingers kneaded her flesh, stroked, caressed. All the while his kiss sent her mind spinning, cartwheeling beyond all sense and control. Only two thoughts held fast: She loved him and she wanted him. Beyond those two thoughts was only sensation.

He bent her back, his body curving over hers like an archers bow, strong and taut. His arousal nudged her belly, urging her to press her hips tighter to his. He trailed his mouth down the column of her throat, his tongue flicking out to catch the beads of moisture left over from her bath. The scent of cheap perfume burned his nostrils, and he smiled at the idea that Sarah, so devoutly plain and simple, was still a woman at heart and pampered herself with hour-long baths and dime-store cologne. He let himself think she had put it on especially for him, and the idea sharpened the edge of his desire even more.

He brought his mouth back up her throat, to her ear, to her temple. He raised his hands to undo the knot in her hair, then stood back a fraction of an inch so he could watch the shining waves tumble down. She was beautiful and she was his, and Matt had never wanted so badly to sweep a woman up into his arms and carry her to his bed as he did in that moment. He moved to do just that, then checked himself, reminding himself it wasn't the prudent thing to do, considering his injuries.

Sarah stared up at him, her eyes dark with passion, her mouth swollen from his kiss. She moistened her lower lip with the tip of her tongue as she moved a hand to touch the quivering muscles of his belly, and a hot surge of
adrenaline scorched away what litde sense he had left.

He led her across the room and placed her on his bed. She pulled the sheet up over her breasts as she watched him hook his thumbs inside the waistband of his jeans. Denims and briefs descended together and he stepped out of them and came to the bed naked except for his bandages. Naked, beautifully aroused, overwhelmingly male.

“Are you nervous, sweetheart?” he whispered, gently tugging the knot of sheet out of her fist and drawing it away from her body.

Sarah glanced up at his face, trying to come up with a witty remark, but her brain refused to cooperate. It had been a long time for her and she had only ever been with one man, a man who had only ever been with one woman. She was suddenly filled with such an overwhelming sense of inadequacy, she was afraid she might actually start to cry. She wanted so badly to please Matt, but she wasn't at all sure she knew how to go about it. He was bound to have sophisticated tastes and know all the subtle secrets of making love, while she knew only that she loved him.

“I'm nervous too,” Matt admitted quietly. The bed dipped beneath his weight as he stretched out beside her. He propped himself up on one elbow and looked down at her face in the thin silver light filtering through the
window. “I want so much to please you, Sarah,” he murmured, echoing her thoughts. Then he set himself to the task.

He captured her left breast in his free hand and rubbed his thumb gendy over her nipple, drawing a soft gasp from her. Murmuring words of approval, he bent his head and caught the tender bead in his mouth, sucking, caressing it with his tongue. Sarah'5 back arched off the bed. She tangled her hands in his short dark hair and moved restlessly beneath him. Electric sensations swirled beneath his mouth and shot all through her, congregating in the pit of her belly.

Knowing exactly what she was feeling, Matt slowly slid his hand down, over the soft slight swell of her tummy and lower, pressing gently with the heel of his hand, groaning in satisfaction as she lifted her hips into the pressure. He cupped her feminine mound, his fingers massaging her soft, warm flesh, parting the delicate petals to stroke the heart of her desire.

Sarah stiffened and moaned, swamped by sensation and yet wanting more. She ran her hands over Matt's strong shoulders, learning every muscle that lay beneath the smooth warmth of his skin. As he slid up her body she let her fingers explore farther still, down the solid columns of flesh that flanked his spine, down to the rounded firmness of his buttocks.

As he bent to kiss her again he caught her by
one wrist and pulled her hand over his hip to wrap it firmly around his erection, showing her exactly the way he liked to be stroked. His whole body shuddered at the pleasure of having her touch him, claim him. Her small fingers explored the length of him, wrung gasps from him as she feathered touches across his velvety tip, stroked downward to cup him. Matt returned the pleasure, sliding his fingers once more through the tight nest of curls at the juncture of her thighs to tease and to test her readiness.

“I want so much to please you,” he whispered again as he shifted his weight and knelt between her legs. “Sarah. My sweet, sweet Sarah.”

As he painted kisses across her face he pulled a pillow down from the head of the bed and eased it beneath her hips. Then, with tender care and touching hesitancy, he eased himself inside her. Slowly, savoring every inch she allowed him, sucking in his breath at how tight and hot she was. He paused to stroke her and groaned aloud when she tilted her hips up and took the whole length of him. There was mind-numbing sexual pleasure, but there was pleasure of another kind as well. A bright, wonderful sense of joy filled his chest as he sank down into Sarah's arms. This was the woman he loved.