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Page 237
ately began coughing. The heat there, too, was overwhelming.
"By the stream?" she asked.
She saw him shake his head negatively in the moonlight, a glint reflecting from his eyes. "Not at night, with the danger of Indians about. No, there is a safe place where we can be alone."
To her surprise, he led her to his own house.
At the door, Mariah hung back. Safe? She recalled the last time she had been inside. The squirrel that had invited her in, her uneasiness at being there without Thorn. Her dismay at seeing his uniform hanging on the wall.
His reaction to seeing her there. To her hands. To her.
She really didn't want to talk to him anyway. How could she explain?
And surely she couldn't do it here.
She grasped for an excuse to get away. "I thought," she said softly, "that it was inappropriate in this time for a man and woman to be alone together like that."
"'This time'? That is the kind of comment I hear from you for which I wish an explanation. That, and why you knew before it happened that the settlers would be followed by the soldiers, and why you are upset this evening."
She couldn't, of course, explain any of it to Thorn. His house was as good a place as any other to dissemble. If he wasn't offended, she certainly wouldn't be. Besides, before Holly arrived, Mariah had been working at the inn alone with two men. She'd probably already mined her reputation in this era.
At least, she noted, the house's shutters were closed. Maybe no one would even know she was here.
She was pleasantly surprised to find Thorn's house even cooler inside than the inn. Its stonework walls and the open windows probably had a lot to do with it.
She watched Thorn's muscles work beneath his clothes as he knelt to stir up ashes in the fireplace and ignite a straw from the resulting lazy fire. He used it to light an oil lantern.
"Sit," he commanded, pointing to the bench beside his worktable. She obeyed, though her eyes strayed toward the

 
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