Sarah's Sin

He looked dead.

Sarah Troyer sat beside the bed, her eyes wide and unblinking as she stared at the man whose care she had been charged with. He lay motionless, only his head visible above the black-and-purple quilt that covered the bed. He was perhaps thirty-two or thirty-three, but he seemed older in his unconscious state. Even in the amber glow of the bedside lamp, his skin was the color of parchment. His left eye was swollen along the brow and discolored like a peach gone bad. A neat line of stitches embroidered his chin at an angle. In spite of his injuries, his face was strong and handsome, with a high, broad forehead and bold black brows, a stubborn-looking chin and a wide, well-defined mouth that kept drawing her gaze like a magnet.

“Melanie, Melanie,” he mumbled, a hint of a smile turning up the corners of his mouth. “Kiss me where it hurts.”

A warm sensation wriggled through Sarah from the top of her head down, prickling her scalp beneath the fine white mesh fabric of her Amish kapp and curling her toes in her sensible black shoes. It wasn't just fear and it wasn't just guilt, this feeling. It was excitement. For once in her quiet, sheltered life she was going to have an adventure.

Automatically her mind spun out the words like a gossamer thread to weave a story with…. Once upon a time …

“Oh, man, I've died and gone to Little House on the Prairie.”

At the sound of the masculine voice Sarah jerked awake, her body snapping to attention faster than her foggy mind. The jolt of all her muscles coming to life at once sent her shooting off the edge of her chair. She landed with a thud, her bottom connecting solidly with the hard braided oval rug beside the bed.

While the idea of helping a lovely lady up appealed to him enormously, Matt Thorne didn't move an inch. He couldn't; he ached in so many places, the electrical impulses his brain sent to his muscles kept shorting out en route. Bleary-eyed, he merely stared at the feminine face now peering up at him over the edge of the bed.

Her quick trip to the floor had left visible only the top of her head, two enormous dark blue eyes, and an impudent tip-tilted nose. Though her hair was mostly covered, he could see that it was thick and rich brown. She wore it up but whisper-wisps escaped their bonds to curl around the edges of her face.

She had on an old-fashioned kind of nurse's uniform he'd never seen before—a blue dress with a black apron over it and a small white cap that seemed to have been fashioned out of stiff gauze. She looked like a student nurse from some religious college for virtuous young women. Beguiling innocence radiated from those fathomless blue eyes. There was an untouched quality about the ripe curve of her cheek. A virgin nurse. Not a bad fantasy, Matt decided, mustering a ghost of his notorious smile.

“Isn't this a little above and beyond the call of duty?” he asked, his voice still rough with sleep. “Or is vigil-keeping a speciality at Our Lady of Guileless Chastity School for Girls?”

The blue eyes blinked at him, then went on staring. A shy young thing. Somewhere beneath the layers of bruises and teeth-grinding pain, Matt s sixth sense stirred to life. It was his personal built-in woman-o-meter, a kind of finely tuned radar that alerted him to all the subtle nuances of the women around him. It was in part what had made him a legend in the corridors of County General. It homed in now on the delightful young lady peering over the edge of the bed at him like a cornered mouse waiting for the house tomcat to pounce.

“You can relax, Blue Eyes,' he murmured, shifting a little on the bed and wincing as an invisible knife of pain slipped between his cracked ribs. Tm in no condition to endanger your standing with the good sisters of your order”

Sarah felt a guilty flush creep into her cheeks. He thought she was a nun, but she doubted nuns let their hearts go racing at the sight of eyes as dark and sparkling as a starlit night. She doubted nuns let their stomachs flip-flop at the sound of a mans voice.

She had meant to sit in the chair only a moment or two, but she'd dozed off and her cursedly vivid imagination had taken the fragile thread of the story she'd begun and whipped it into a full-blown tapestry of a dream wherein she had nursed Matt Thorne back from death's door and he had then swept her away on a romantic whirlwind tour of the world.

And he thought she was a nun. So much for her fantasy. The practical half of her wondered why she persisted in indulging in romantic daydreams anyway. They were not at all the sort of thing she had been raised to think about or expect. An Amish woman's life was one of servitude to God and her family. Tours of the world were well beyond her experience or expectation, so what was the point in dreaming about them? Of course, the insatiable, incorrigible dreamer in her had hidden be hind her cowardice and had no answer with which to soothe her conscience. With a fatalistic sigh she pushed herself to her feet and dusted off her skirts.

“I am not a nun, Matt Thome,” she said, irritated more by her own disappointment in herself than by his mistake.

Her voice was soft and husky, accented with the flavor of a German dialect that must be her first language. Matt liked the way it sounded—homespun and warm. He managed to spread another of those sweet melting smiles across his face. “There's a welcome piece of news.”

Sarahs heart skipped. His voice was little more than a whisper, but it was strong and as warm and textured as a woolen blanket. She imagined she could feel it drift from his mouth and wrap around her. Heat flared under her skin. She took a resolute step back from the edge of the bed and folded her hands primly in front of her.

“I am Amish,” she stated in the way a costumed guide at some living history theme park might.

“Amish,” Matt repeated absently, taking another look at her.

He couldn't shake the feeling that she looked untouched, unspoiled, from the top of her little white cap to the tips of her black shoes. She looked young—maybe eighteen or nineteen. She wore no makeup, no jewelry, just the costume of her people and a look of wide-eyed innocence that was touching his heart in all its most tender places. Her dress was long-sleeved and hung nearly to her ankles. Any womanly curves it might have inadvertently revealed were covered by her apron. She looked like a vision out of the last century, and he wondered if he was indeed conscious or just having a very bizarre dream. What was an Amish woman doing beside his bed?

A little more of the drug-induced mist cleared from his mind, and for the first time since waking up he took a look at his surroundings. The room was vaguely familiar, furnished with antiques, the wallpaper a dark blue background with a riot of tiny flowers strewn over it. The place smelled pleasantly of lemon oil and potpourri. He dredged up a fragment of memory about leaving the hospital—not as he had left it nearly every day for the last six years, as head honcho of County General s emergency room, but on the other side of the wheelchair, as a patient. That seemed like weeks ago, even though he doubted it had been a day since he'd been released. Nothing like a few painkillers to warp a man's sense of time.

“Ingrid,” he mumbled. “Ingrid brought me here. Jessup, Justice, J-something.”

“Jesse.”

His smile was automatic, a conditioned response to the stimulus of a woman's voice. It wasn't full voltage, but even at half power it was usually effective in weakening feminine defenses. “I'm pleased to meet you, Jesse,” he said in a voice like silk.

Sarah felt her knees go soft, and a brief fluttering of panic beat in the base of her throat like a butterfly's wings. She had never had this kind of reaction to a man before, not even to her late husband. She had read about it, but had decided it was something only English women experienced. She had envied them the excitement, but now that she was feeling it firsthand, she didn't much care for the sensation.

Taking a deep breath, she steeled herself against Matt Thome's charm and scowled at him. “I'm not Jesse. The town is Jesse. My name is Sarah Troyer.”

“Sarah,” Matt said and sighed dramatically, letting his head roll across his pillow. “That's even better,” he said, glancing sideways at her. “Sarah is a lovely name.”

“So is Melanie,” she said pointedly, crossing her arms over her chest in an unmistakable gesture of feminine pique.

Matt's brows pulled together in confusion, and he hissed at the explosion that involuntary action set off on the left side of his head, the side that had connected with the butt end of a sawed-off shotgun. “Melanie?”

“You called out to her in your sleep, and now you can't remember even who she is?” Sarah clucked her tongue in disapproval. “Ingrid warned me all about you, Matt Thorne, you and your charming ways.”

She said “charming” as if it were on par with “homicidal.” Matt frowned at the thought that his lovely nurse might be as virtuous as her appearance suggested. That kind of attitude could take a lot of the fun out of his recuperation. With his good eye fixed on Sarah, he gingerly eased himself into a sitting position, leaning back against the headboard. This had to be Ingrid s idea of a practical joke—saddling him with an Amish nurse.

Sarah Troyer. His brain grudgingly gave forth another tidbit of memory. Ingrid had hired an Amish girl to cook and clean at her newly opened inn in southeastern Minnesota. And she had apparently forearmed the girl with tales of his reputation. As if he would actually ravish the innocent maid! As if he was in any condition to. He groaned a little as pain throbbed through him like a pulse.

“Speaking of Ingrid, maybe you should go get her,” he said, thinking he had a bone or two to pick with his sister.

First of all, she had been entirely too highhanded in suggesting the hospital release him into her custody, as if he were a criminal with a history of jumping bail. And then she had carted him down to this rustic little backwater town, when he had a perfectly good condo in Minneapolis and any number of delightful female friends to see to his recovery. There was Nurse Newman and Carrie from radiology and that cute little lab tech—what was her name? Oh, yes, Melanie, that Melanie. His sigh of remembered contentment almost drowned out Sarah's tiny reply.

“She isn't here.”

“I'm sorry, what did you say?”

Sarah screwed up her courage. It was one thing to have the adventure of caring for an unconscious person and fantasizing a bit in the private theater of her imagination. Confronting the living, breathing, speaking, half-naked man was another thing altogether.

The quilt had fallen precariously low as he'd propped himself up, leaving his upper body bare and hinting at the fact that if he wore any drawers at all, they were mighty brief indeed. Sarah jerked her gaze up from the edge of the blanket in an effort to avoid further speculation and almost groaned aloud at the sight of a firmly muscled chest dusted with black curls. Curls that whirled into a line and disappeared beneath the pristine white bandage that had been strapped around and around his ribs to hold the cracked bones in place. And below that bandage was … Oh, dear.

“Ingrid isn't here,' she squeaked, her gaze darting all around the room in a desperate effort to keep from staring at Matt Thome's naked chest. “She's gone to Stillwater to deal with an emergency at the inn there.”

“When will she be back?” he asked, scratching his chest.

Sarah gulped hard. “D-d-days,” she stammered, her head swimming at the implications of her folly. What had she been thinking about, agreeing to stay in the same house with this man? Had she really thought he would remain obligingly asleep for the duration so that she would have to cope with only a figment of her imagination? She had never thought the conscious man would be so … compelling, so … undressed.

“Days,” Matt repeated. “What about John?”

She gave him a blank look. “John?”

“John Wood. Ingrids husband. You know. Tall guy, smokes a pipe.”

“Yes, of course I know John,” she said in a rush, the apples of her cheeks turning a delicious ripe red. “He is gone to California to do research for one of his travel books.”

A smile tugged at Matt's mouth as he realized his little nursemaid was nervous. His radar told him there was a strong signal of attraction here—both ways. It was obvious the prim Miss Troyer didn't know how to deal with it. Her big indigo-blue eyes darted from side to side, up and down, lighting everywhere but on him. Her shyness delighted him and excited him in a way that seemed subtly different from anything he'd known before.

“Having trouble with your contact lenses?” he asked, amusement thrumming through his voice.

“What?” Sarah made the huge mistake of looking at him. He captured her gaze with the magnetic force of his dark eyes and held it.

“You seem to be having some trouble with your eyes.”

“My sight is fine,” she murmured. As a girl she had always longed for a pair of spectacles because they were the only kind of adornment an Amish girl was allowed. Now she wished for them for a different reason. She could have pulled them off and cleaned them and fiddled with the earpieces, busying her hands and giving herself an excuse to not look at Matt Thome.

He regarded her with his warm dark eyes, eyes sparkling with mischief and who knew what else. The devil himself probably had eyes just like that; eyes brimming with temptation. Locks of black hair fell across his forehead in a way described as “rakish” in books. Now that he was awake and upright, his injuries weren't nearly so distracting as they had been when he'd been asleep. It had to have something to do with the inner life force of the man, the electricity that glowed in his eyes and hummed in the air around him. Sarah felt it pour over her, exciting her as it went. She took another step back, her cowardice rising inside her like a shield.

“What are we supposed to do while Ingrid is away?” Matt asked. “As if I couldn't come up with a couple of wonderful ideas on the sub-ject.”

“I'm to look after the inn,” Sarah said. “And you.”

“Oh, I like that plan,” Matt said, laughter in his eyes and voice. “Just think of the fun we can have together.”

Sarah shook a finger at him as if it were a magic wand that could force him to do her bidding. “You are to stay in bed.”

“My favorite place to be—provided I'm not alone.”

“Well, you're sure going to be alone here,” she said tartly, finding a little bit of the sass that had always brought her a glower of disapproval from her father. With this man it only seemed to generate more of his teasing humor.

He chuckled weakly, wincing a bit and laying a hand gingerly against the white bandage that swathed his ribs. “Oh, come on, Sarah. Have pity on a poor cripple. You're not really going to make me stay in bed all alone, are you?”

“You bet.” She nodded resolutely.

“Them I'm afraid I'm going to have to make a speedy recovery. I can't stand the idea of having a beautiful nurse and not being able to chase her around the bed.”

Beautiful. Sarah did her best to ignore his compliment. To accept a compliment was to accept credit for God's doing. It was Hochmut—pride—a sin. She didn't need to be charged with any more of them than she already had. So she brushed aside the warm glow that threatened to blossom inside her and decided to match him teasing for teasing. “The shape you're in, I'll have no trouble getting away.”

Matt closed his eyes briefly against his assorted pains. “I'm afraid you're right about that. Tell me, do I look as bad as I feel?”

She gave a little sniff, stepping closer to the bed as her initial skittishness subsided. “I don't suppose you feel as bad as you look, else you'd be dead.”

Matt gave her a look. “Gee, don't spare my feelings here, Sarah. Lay it on the line.”

“I'm sorry,” she said, having the grace to blush. “I'm much too forthright. It's always getting me into trouble.”

“Really?” Matt chuckled. “I can't imagine you in trouble.”

“Ach, me, I'm in trouble all the time,” she admitted, rolling her eyes. A secretive little Mona Lisa smile teased her lips as she stepped closer to the bed.

A sweet, warm feeling flooded through Matt. It wasn't exactly lust. It was … liking. Sarah Troyer was beguiling him with her innocence, and he would have bet she didn't have the vaguest idea she was doing it. “What kinds of things get you in trouble?”

Her smile faded and she glanced away. Wishing for things I shouldn't want. Wanting things I can't have. But her thoughts remained unspoken. The flush that stained her cheeks with color now was from guilt. She was what she was, and she should be grateful for the things she had, she reminded herself, tamping down the longing that sprang eternal in her soul. Like weeds in a garden, her father would say, they must be torn out by the roots. Somehow, she had never had the heart to dig that deep and tear out all her dreams.

She realized with a start that Matt was watching her, waiting for an answer. “Neglecting my work gets me into trouble,” she said quietly, eyes downcast to keep him from seeing any other answers that might be revealed by those too-honest mirrors of her true feelings. “I had best go down and see to making you some supper.”

“In a minute,” Matt murmured, catching her by the wrist as she turned to go. Her skin was soft and cool beneath his fingertips, like the finest silk. He'd always had an especially acute sense of touch, and now he picked up the delicate beating of Sarah's pulse as if it were pounding like a jackhammer. He wondered if she would even know what a jackhammer was, and he marveled again at how untouched she seemed to him. He felt like the most jaded cynic in comparison.

She would know nothing about the kind of violence that had disrupted his life. Street gangs and drug wars and inner-city desperation were the trappings of another world, a world far removed from farm life and people who disdained automobiles as being too worldly.

For a moment all the weariness and hopelessness caught up with him, and he wondered what it would be like to just chuck it all, plant a garden and buy a horse. He wondered what Sarah Troyer would think if he told her that. He knew what his friends in Minneapolis would think. They would think he'd gone nuts. Sophisticated, cosmopolitan Dr. Matt Thome a gentleman farmer? Absurd didn't begin to cover it. His concussion had to be worse than he'd realized, he thought, dismissing the notion.

He wanted to ask Sarah about the shadows that had crossed her face an instant before she had answered his question. He found he wanted to know all about her. He wrote it off as a combination of boredom and natural curiosity, and conveniently ignored the fact that he was not usually so curious about the deep, dark secrets of the women in his life.

It wasn't that he was so self-absorbed, he didn't care. It was more a matter of practicality. His career took precedence over all else in his life, and it left little time or energy for deep relationships. He wore his title of hospital Romeo with ease and good humor, and thought of all-consuming romantic love in only the most abstract of ways. So when Sarah Troyer turned back toward him, her eyes as blue as twin lakes under the sun and as round as quarters, he put the jolt in his chest down to a reawakening libido and counted himself lucky to be among the living.

“I think I might need a little help getting up,” he said, his voice a notch huskier than usual.

“I think you might need to get your hearing checked,' Sarah said breathlessly. She extricated her arm from his hold and stepped out of his reach, absently rubbing her wrist as if she could erase the tingling his touch had roused. “You are not to get out of bed.”

“You take things too literally,” he complained. “I'm not to get out of bed much”

“At all.”

He gave her the superior look that normally brought bossy nurses to heel and said dryly, “Look, trust me on this. I'm a doctor.”

“Yes.” Sarah nodded, unmoved. “I can see how well you have healed yourself so far.”

“Fine,” Matt said, scowling, his doctors ego not taking well to pointed truths. “Don't help me. Ill manage.”

It occurred to him that he would have ordered a patient in his condition to remain in bed, but then he wasn't a garden-variety patient. He was a physician. He knew his own limits—most of the time. He certainly knew one of his limits, and it had been reached. He was getting out of this bed, duty-bound maid or no duty-bound maid.

Taking great care to move slowly, he eased his legs over the edge of the bed and waited for his head to stop swimming. Out of deference to Sarahs undoubtedly delicate sensibilities, he pulled the black-and-purple quilt around himself toga-style, then he took as deep a breath as his taped ribs would allow and rose.

The earth tilted drunkenly beneath his feet and he staggered forward in an effort to keep himself from falling. The quilt dropped away as he reached out to grab onto something— anything—to steady himself. The “something” his hands settled on gasped and squirmed. His eyes locked on Sarahs for an instant, an instant full of shock, surprise, and the unmistak able sparks of attraction, then they both went down in a tangle of arms and legs, quilt, and ankle-length cotton skirt.

Sarah gave a squeal as she landed on her back. Matt groaned as he came down on top of her, pain digging into his ribs and pounding through his head. A red-hot arrow of it shot down his left leg and a blissful blackness began to descend over him, beckoning him toward the peace of unconsciousness, but he fought it off. He sucked a breath in through his teeth, held it, expelled it slowly, all the while willing himself to remain in the land of the living.

After a moment that seemed like an eternity, the pain receded. He slowly became aware of the feminine form cushioning his body. There really was a woman under all those clothes, he thought, mentally taking inventory of full breasts and shapely legs. His hands had settled at the curve of her waist, and he let his fingers trace the angles of it. She was trim but womanly. Very womanly, he thought, groaning again, but this time in appreciation as she shifted beneath him, and the points of her nipples grazed his chest through the cotton of her gown.

“Are you all right?” Sarah asked, trying to sound concerned as a whole array of other feelings assaulted her—panic, desire, guilt. Matt Thome was pressed against the whole length of her, and while there might have been some question about his health, there was certainly no question about his gender. She squirmed frantically beneath him, only managing to come into even more intimate contact with him. She had automatically grabbed him as they had fallen, and now she found her hands gripping the powerful muscles of his upper arms. His skin was smooth and hot to the touch, and her fingers itched to explore more of it. How she managed to push the thought from her head and speak was beyond her. “Are you injured?”

“Me?” Matt said dreamily, his thick lashes drifting down as his smile curved his mouth upward. “I'm in heaven. How about you?”

“I'm being pinned to the floor by two hundred pounds of dead weight,” Sarah said irritably, using anger to burn away the traitorous threads of longing. She had no business thinking such … such … carnal thoughts about this man. She hardly knew him and, even if she had known him from birth, he was out of her reach. She had to be content to confine her secret yearnings to her imagination where they did no one harm.

“Gee, Sarah, you sure know how to bolster a mans ego,” Matt complained. He raised himself up on one elbow and looked down at her, one black brow arched sardonically.

It seemed to Sarah that no part of him needed bolstering, but she didn't have the chance to tell him that. With a clatter of toe-nails against the hardwood floor, Blossom arrived on the scene. Ingrid Woods basset hound hurled herself into the room, skidding to a halt beside the heads of the fallen, and set up a terrible howling. Sarah winced. Matt swore liberally and clamped his hands over his ears. Blossom gulped a breath and flung her head back again with such force that her front paws came off the floor. The sound was pitiful, mournful, but, most especially, it was loud.

“She thinks you're attacking me!” Sarah yelled at Matt, smacking him on the shoulder.

Blossom snatched another breath and hit a note that should have shattered every glass in the house.

Matt rolled carefully off Sarah and struggled to stand, grabbing hold of the oak nightstand to steady himself. He sat on the chair beside the bed, staring in disbelief at the dog as Sarah pushed herself to her feet as well. Blossom let out one more good howl, then settled herself on Sarahs feet, apparently content that the danger had passed. Looking at the dog, with her woeful brown eyes and furrowed brow, Matt found it impossible to believe so much sound had come from such a little animal. She looked up at him with her speckled nose and pendulous lips and sighed with satisfaction of a job well-done. Sarah bent over and stroked the dog's head.

“Good girl, Blossom.”

Blossom beamed, breaking into unrestrained panting, her doggy lips pulling back into an obvious smile.

“Leave it to my sister,” Matt said, sticking a finger in his ear and wiggling it back and forth in an effort to restore normal hearing. “She couldn't have a Doberman or a German shepherd or any other self-respecting guard dog that would merely take a chunk out of an intruder. She has to get one that renders its victims permanently hearing impaired. I hope darling Blossom catches her and John in the throes of passion some night.”

Sarah chuckled at the thought, but the laughter caught in her throat as her eyes settled on Matt. He was indeed all but naked, wearing nothing except bandages and a pair of teeny-tiny burgundy briefs that left little to her overactive imagination. The air in her lungs turned hot, and her jaw dropped.

“What's the matter?” Matt asked, his voice soft with amusement and something like compassion. “Haven't you seen a man in his underwear before?”

“Only my husband,” Sarah murmured. And Samuel Troyer had never looked quite like this. He had certainly never made her feel what she was feeling now—all shivery and weak.

The word hit Matt on the head like a hammer. Husband. He shuddered with dread and disappointment. “You're married?”

“I&m a widow.”

“I'm sorry,” he said automatically, but with genuine feeling. She seemed too young to even have been married. To be a widow at her age was truly a tragedy. He watched her busily straightening her skirt and apron, dusting off imaginary lint. From the way she avoided his searching gaze, he thought she must still be hurting from her loss. He had no way of knowing what she felt was guilt. “He must have been very young.”

“He would have been twenty-five this year … like me.” Even though it had been a year since he'd gone, she still wished she had been a better wife to him.

“What happened?”

“A farming accident.”

“That's a shame. Do you have children?”

She couldn't quite keep from flinching at the question. He meant no harm, she knew. He was trying only to express his concern and his sympathy. He couldn't know the depth of the wound that particular question struck.

“No,” she said shortly.

Dislodging the basset hound from her feet, she went to the bed and began straightening the covers with brisk efficiency. She turned the sheet down and fluffed the pillows. She dis missed the topic of her husband and her widowhood so thoroughly, Matt thought he might have imagined the whole interlude, but he knew he wasn't that groggy. And now he knew there was a lot more to Sarah Troyer than blue eyes and innocence.

“Let this be a lesson to you, Matt Thorne,” she said. “You had ought to stay in bed. You're not strong enough to be up and around.”

“That's probably true,” he admitted, taking the black terry robe she thrust in his direction without looking at him. He eased his arms into the sleeves, pulled it around him, and tied the belt. “But I'm afraid some things can't wait— like a trip to the bathroom.”

“I'll find you a chamber pot.”

“No thanks. No offense, Amish, but I'll walk on my lips before I stoop to using a chamber pot—no pun intended.”

Sarah lifted her chin to a sanctimonious angle and intoned her father's favorite words. “Pride goeth before a fall.”

“Yeah, well,” Matt said, unchastened. “I goeth to the bathroom. Are you going to help me get there, Nurse Troyer, or do I get Blossom the Wonder Dog to drag me?”

Blossom gave an outraged booming bark and darted away, hind feet chasing her front like a child's pull-toy as she disappeared into the dark hallway.

Sarah heaved a much-put-upon sigh and planted her hands on her hips. “All right. Ill help you. But youll come back to bed and stay there after?”

“Scout's honor.”

“I don't know anything about no Scouts. It's your honor that worries me.”

“And well it should,' Matt said, doing the best Groucho Marx imitation he could considering he could only waggle one eyebrow.

Sarah just blinked at him, looking mildly bemused.

Matt was crestfallen. His Groucho always won him smiles and giggles. “You don't know the Marx Brothers?”

“I don't think so,” Sarah said, handing him his cane. “Do they farm around here or are they from the Twin Cities?”

“Never mind,” Matt shook his head and chuckled, utterly charmed by her naivete and the effect it had on his own slightly tarnished soul.

She was a gem, this Amish girl, a natural pearl. In spite of the dents she put in his ego, she was exactly the bright spot he needed in his life right now, when everything in his day-to-day world seemed bleak and hopeless, when he'd almost given up hope of ever finding any goodness in the world again.

Maybe he'd have to thank Ingrid after all.