“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.