that breakfast you promised me.
She cast an anxious glance at Jacob, who was more interested in playing with the dispenser of adhesive tape. She forced herself to back away, step by agonizing step, gnawing on her lip and blinking back tears.
“Your confidence in me is overwhelming,” Matt said sarcastically. “Take some comfort in knowing I can't run away from you. If I screw up, you can pummel me to a bloody pulp with the bludgeon of your choice.” He turned to Jacob and made a face. “Girls. You'd think she'd never seen anything gross before.”
Jacob sniffled and giggled and swung his feet over the table edge.
While Sarah set to work on the breakfast, Matt and Jacob settled themselves at the table and discussed things of interest to boys. Mostly Jacob told Matt everything he knew about farming, how good the corn crop looked, how they were getting ready to harvest, and how he was going to help. He talked a steady blue streak, and Matt looked grave and nodded at appropriate intervals. Sarah watched them out of the corner of her eye, thinking Matt was awfully sweet for listening and asking questions. He probably didn't give a hoot about how dry the corn was, but he paid attention as if it were of great importance to him.
What a good father he would make, she thought, wishing she could ignore the sweet pang of longing in her breast. She set Matt s breakfast down in front of him, along with a steaming cup of coffee, trying not to think about the comfortable domesticity of the scene.
“Does Mom know you are here?” Sarah asked Jacob as she handed him a glass of milk and set a plate of oatmeal-raisin cookies on the kitchen table.
Jacob eyed the cookies like a starving creature, reaching slowly for the biggest one even though he hadn't asked permission. “Ya,” he said. “I had done my chores and Pop said for me to come visit with you.”
“Did he?” Sarah murmured more to herself than to Jacob. She couldn't stop the little rush of temper that spurted up inside her. Isaac hadn't sent his youngest son to merely keep her company or to keep him out of the way on the farm. He had been sent as an unwitting observer. Jacob would eagerly relate all he had seen at the English inn. Sarah would never ask him not to. Her job was her own. She did nothing here to be ashamed of.
Her glance darted to Matt, and guilt slapped splashes of color high across her cheeks. They had kissed. She'd sat right on his bed and let him kiss her.
And Jacob had been scrambling up the tree just outside the window.
“Why were you climbing that tree?” she asked.
Her brother's eyes were round and innocent. He shrugged and talked around a mouthful of cookie. “Because it was there.”
“The perfect reason,” Matt said with a grin.
With the enthusiasm of a lumberjack, he ate the breakfast Sarah had fixed him. It had been ages since he'd had a big, calorie-laden, homemade breakfast. He usually took no time for breakfast, grabbing a peanut butter sandwich or a bagel on his way to the hospital. With his strength at low tide, however, he had no trouble convincing himself that he needed something more substantial. The eggs and fried potatoes and toast went down nicely.
He reached for a cookie and shook it at his new little
Jacob nodded as he drank, some milk sloshing out to dribble down his chin. He wiped it off with his good arm and chomped another bite out of his cookie.
Sarah settled herself in her chair and set herself to the task of mending the tear in her brother's jacket sleeve.
“How far up were you?” she asked, feeling like a weasel for trying to wheedle information out of him. She was no better than her father was for sending him here. Poor Jacob.
“Not far.”
“This is not the place for you to be climbing trees,” she scolded, more cross with herself than with her brother. “The Woods often have guests here who would not appreciate looking out their windows to see little Amish boys staring in at them.”
So that was what the interrogation was all about, Matt mused, chewing thoughtfully on his cookie. Sarah was afraid her brother might have caught them kissing. Strange. She was a grown woman. She'd been married for heav-ens sake. What difference would it make if someone saw them kissing?
He watched her as she worked the needle and thread through the fabric of the coat with vicious stabs and jerks that betrayed her inner agitation. Several strands of silky brown hair had escaped the stranglehold of the bun at the back of her head and drifted down along her cheek into her line of sight. She tucked them back up under her
That was it. She was shy, reserved. The idea appealed to Matt in a way he wouldn't have expected. He was used to women who knew the score, women who moved at a nineteen-nineties pace, women who often as not took the lead in a physical relationship. Compared to them, Sarah was untouched, untried, innocent. Once again he felt a strong surge of pro-tectiveness swell inside him, and tenderness … and desire.
He wasn't going to be able to act on any of those impulses at the moment, however, he re alized with no small amount of regret. Ordinarily, he was relentless in his pursuit of something he wanted—especially when that something was a lady. But his exertions that morning had drained him. Fatigue weighed down on him like an anvil, pressing on his throbbing head, causing the muscles in his shoulders to tense. His ribs were aching, and the wound in his thigh was burning. He needed to lie down before he simply fell out of his chair and sprawled unconscious on the kitchen floor.
“Well, folks,' he announced, carefully standing up. “I think I'd better get back to bed. All this excitement has worn me out,” he said, sending Sarah a warm, meaningful look that caused her to frown and blush.
“You English sure keep strange habits,” Jacob said, reaching for his third cookie.
Sarah batted his hand away from the plate, scowling at him. “Have they set you out to live with the pigs at home? You have such manners.”
Jacob blushed.
“I don't usually spend the day in bed,” Matt explained, unperturbed. “I'm just not feeling so good right now.”
“Maybe you need some castor oil,” Jacob suggested. “That's what Mom always gives me.”
Matt grimaced. “I think I'll pass on that for now.”
“When you are better, Matt Thorne, I will show you how I ride my pony,' the boy said earnestly. “You can come to the farm. To the calves I will show you. It's my job to feed them and help clean their pens.”
“Gross,” Matt said with a wink.
Jacob giggled.
Sarah heaved a sigh and stuck herself accidentally with her needle.
The rest of the day did not go according to the Laws of Dr. Thorne, and Matt didn't care for it a bit. He was too used to being the boss, to being in control. Being an invalid did not sit well. Everything seemed to irritate him. The room was too light, too dark, he missed the noises of the city, he missed the energy, he missed being busy, he missed being able to do whatever he wanted to with his body.
He had gone upstairs after breakfast with the mistaken idea that a little nap would restore the strength he had spent that morning. He'd slept for six hours, awakened only long enough to take his medication and complain a little, then he'd gone under again.
This was no way to win a lady.
It was especially no way to win a lady who wouldn't stick around long enough for him to charm her. Sarah had made herself scarce, leaving only a little bell on the nightstand in her stead.
Matt plumped up the pillows behind him and settled back. He could smell supper cooking. The scent of meat and potatoes drifted seductively up the stairs. Sarah was down in the kitchen cooking for him. What a good wife she would make. Not that he was looking for a wife or knew anything about wives specifically. He'd never been in the market for one himself. It just seemed to him that Sarah would be good at all the traditional wife things. Well, she had been a wife, hadn't she?
He had always been too busy working to think about marriage. He'd spent far more time at the hospital in the last six years than he had at his apartment.
And for what? a cynical voice questioned deep inside him. The words seemed to echo in a hollow cavern in
