Read Online Sarah's Sin by Tami Hoag - Free Book Online

she'd pressed into her dress with books, uncomfortable with his line of questioning. “I don't find you … anything. You're Ingrid's brother. A guest here.”
    “Mmmm … I see,” he murmured, nodding doctor-style. “I take it you enjoy reading,” he said, fingering through the pile nearest him. A collection of Mark Twain, a book on restoring Victorian homes, a hefty tome on the Civil War.
    Sarah stroked her hand over the big book in her lap the way she might stroke a cat, absently, lovingly. “I love to read and to learn,' she admitted quietly. “I read all I can about everything,”
    She loved to learn even though she had been given only a minimal education. Matt thought of the inner-city kids he had dealt with, the opportunities for education that were handed them courtesy of the taxpayers, and which they casually, disdainfully tossed aside in favor of making money selling dope and stealing cars. He imagined what Sarah could have done, given their opportunities.
    “Did you ever think of going to college?” he asked.
    Think of it? She had dreamed of it constantly as a teenager, but the dream had been well beyond her reach. “I couldn't,” was all she said.
    “Your people don't believe in encouraging bright young minds?”
    The remark hurt, regardless of her own private opinions. She shot Matt an angry look. “My place was on the farm. We are farmers and carpenters and wives of farmers and carpenters. What sense would there be in spending money on fancy schools?”
    “None, I guess,” Matt replied softly. Her answer sounded like a line she had memorized out of a book of Amish philosophy. He had thedistinct feeling it was not her own. No one with such a desire to learn could have subscribed to such an idea. But he didn't push the issue.
    He picked up her
kapp
and examined its sheer fine mesh, the carehil workmanship, the delicate ties. She stared at it, too, with a look that was akin to horror, as if she'd just realized she'd been sitting there half-naked. Her hand went self-consciously to her hair. Impulsively, Matt reached up and covered her nervous hand with his own, overlapping it so that his fingertips stroked the crown of her head. He got the impression that she would have sunk down into the netherworld of the sofa with the lint and cracker crumbs and loose change if she could have.
    “You have very pretty hair,” he said soffly. It had the texture and sheen of sable, and there were masses of it wound and pinned and knotted at the back of her head. It nearly took his breath away to imagine what it must look like down. “Why do you hide it?”
    “It is the way of my people. A woman's hair is her glory and only for her husband to see, else it would be
Hochmut
, pride. Pride is a sin.”
    “I think the sin is in hiding away something so lovely.”
    Sarah herself had long wanted to go with her hair loose and flowing for the wind totease and tangle. She associated the sensation with freedom of spirit. But it irked her that she wanted to agree with this outsider who was already so dangerous to her, so she answered with one of her father's most famous infuriating lines. “It's the way of our people, not for you to agree or disagree. Its just our way.”
    “Well, it's not mine,” Matt said pleasantly, smiling when she scowled and batted his hand away from the pins that were holding her bun in place. He slouched against the cushions, letting his arm fall along the curve of the back of the couch. “And I have a feeling it wouldn't be the way of an expert tree climber either.”
    Sarah shuddered at the thought of him reading her mind so easily. “I was a little girl then. Now I'm a woman.”
    “I noticed, believe me,” Matt said dryly. “In spite of the lengths you go to, to hide the fact, I noticed.”
    “Again you make fun,” Sarah snapped, deliberately taking offense. It seemed safer to keep him at an arm's length with bad temper, so she dredged up all she had. She vaulted out of her seat to pace