Read Online Healing Hearts (Easton Series #2) by Anna Murray - Free Book Online Page A

was just as well, because he’d be the first to step into her snare.
       They ate in comfortable silence,
and when finished he rose and helped to clear the dishes. Then he took the
large cast iron pot out to the porch and filled it with water. He hauled it
back and set it on the stove.
      “What are you doing?” she asked when he
went out again and hauled a hip tub into the kitchen.
       “The doctor is ordering a bath,”
he grunted. “You can go first, and I’ll follow.”
       “That’s . . .   thoughtful. I’d, I’d like a bath. I-I
like water.” She smiled brightly.
       “Trail dirt,” he explained, and he
returned her smile.
       “Oh, yes! I tasted it every time I
licked my dry lips on the ride back.”
       He laughed. “Get used to it. The
warm water will also soothe your twisted ankle.”
       “It’s already much improved.” To
show him how much she skipped to the sink and collected soap. She pulled a
towel from the shelf above.
       Jed had a feeling she was
downplaying the pain, but he said nothing. Instead he moved around her as she
worked at the sink. He lifted the hot water from the stove and poured it into
the tub. Then he disappeared onto the porch, and moments later he returned,
hauling cool water to mix in.
       He dipped a hand into the bath.
“It’s just right. I’ll wait in the parlor.”
       Jed lit a lantern and strode from
the room, taking the rest of his mail and the town newspaper. In the sitting
room, Jed lit a second lamp and settled himself on the horsehair sofa. The
house was quiet in the twilight, and after a while he heard a splash as Hannah
immersed herself in the tub.
       “You all right?”
       “Yes, thank you, it’s very nice,”
she called back with childlike glee.
       Jed scanned the headlines but had
trouble focusing on the words in the articles, owing to the contented sighs and
moans emanating from the kitchen. Instead of reading he imagined Hannah running
the soap up and down the white skin of her arms and shoulders, shoulders with loose
chestnut hair caressing them.
       He had a nagging suspicion, and he
couldn’t help himself. He had to confirm his blind diagnosis. Tiptoeing to the
arch separating the kitchen from the hallway, he peered into the dim light.
Hannah’s wet head, was tipped back, her eyes shut as she savored the warmth of
her bath. The lavender-permeated the moist air, heated by the stove, settled
like a warm blanket around him. Jed breathed in the sensual scene, with a
careful, deep breath, so as not to be discovered.
       As his mouth watered inexplicably,
Hannah rose and stepped out of the tub. Jed took in a heart-slamming view, as
his eyes travelled down her torso:   White shoulders, firm breasts, flat abdomen, and a small waist curved
into lovely hips. His lust and arousal drove him to stare openly, and his gaze
might have stopped at the place of most interest to a man who hadn’t had a
woman in two years, but something oddly misshapen caught his eye further down,
on her legs.
         His mouth opened slightly when he saw the
scars trickling down the front of her left thigh and leg, like melted candlewax.
Burnt flesh.
       Jed swallowed and rubbed the back
of his hand across his mouth to suppress a choke. Hannah’s secret stood naked
in the glimmering twilight, her mysteries stripped in the blink of an eye: Her
fear of fire, her frantic reaction when he’d attempted to lift her skirt during
his cursory examination earlier that day, and the curious way she avoided
attention from men. Her childhood trauma was raw and heart-wrenching, and she
or someone else -- likely her parents -- had turned what they perceived to be a
lack of wholeness into a contradictory sentence of limitation and liberation.
The one thing she seemingly wasn’t allowed, marriage, had freed her to pursue
what other women were denied: Education and profession.
       Like him, she was permanently
scarred, but she carried it silently, and with