Sarah's Sin by Tami Hoag Read Free Book Online

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 milkand 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 beenages 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
compadre.
“You'll have to be a little more careful next time, pal. Climbing trees is a lot of fun, but it's a long way down and there isn't always a pile of leaves handy to land on.”
    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
kapp
without looking up. She looked like a living work of art—“Study of a Nineteenth-century Woman.” A nineteenth-century woman with nineteenth-century sensibilities.
    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