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Page 139
"Here." He dipped a small amount of soup onto the spoon. As he brought it to Holly's mouth, Mariah left her room.
As she walked through the stable and across the compound toward the inn, she noticed no strange horses. If their guests had arrived, they must have come by water.
She heard loud dumping and soft mutterings as she opened the kitchen door. To remove loaves of bread, Thorn was shoving the long-handled paddle into the recess in the fireplace used for baking. He shook his head in apparent irritation as he worked, causing the ends of his long hair to sway at his collar. The full sleeves of his white shirt slid along his arms while he carried the bread on its wood paddle and set it down on a table.
"Hi," she said cheerfully.
"You have work to do, Miss Walker," he growled.
"What did you ever do without me?" As she took the paddle from him, their hands brushed. Startled at the contact with warm, hair-sprinkled skin, Mariah glanced at Thorn. The heat in his gaze was speculative, suggestive, as though he had ideas of what he would like to do with her.
Ideas she shared and found more than a little appealing.
Ideas she dared not have, not here, in this time, with this man.
She moved with deliberate calmness to pick up a loaf and set it down beside the others. "How many guests are here?" she asked. Her matter-of-fact tone was perfect, not letting on in the least that she'd been unnerved.
"Three," he said. "A family. And to answer your earlier question, what I did without you, before you arrived here, was to rely on René. He had no distractions like sick intruders to take him from his work."
Instead of throttling him, Mariah put down the paddle and pulled a tankard from its shelf along the wall. "Maybe when Holly is feeling better," she snapped, thumping the cup down on the table, "she can apologize for having been attacked."
"Holly? She's awakened enough to tell you her name?" Mariah nodded as she continued gathering wood and pew-

 
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