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Page 125
illuminated by the small light of her candle and the greater brightness of the moon. In all her travels, no matter how far from a city she'd been, she'd never seen as many stars in the night sky of her own time.
Amazingly, she loved it.
Still, the edge of the forest loomed before her, and she shuddered. There were Indians out theremaybe even that Nahtana, lurking and watching for his next chance to . . . what? She didn't want to know. She recalled, too, her foray into the woods the previous nightand her encounter with the wolves. The rustling of leaves in the slight breeze and the night birds' calls did nothing to dispell the eeriness. She picked up her pace.
There was an extra horse in the stable, a pretty white mare that must belong to the mousy guest who'd just arrived.
In her room, Mariah put down her writing utensils and lit her betty lamp, hanging it on the wall. When she closed the inside wooden shutters at the windows the room filled with the unpleasant odor of burning lamp grease. She moved the small table close to the bed, avoiding the clothes tree where her laundry now hung. She sat on the edge of the rustling mattress, uncorked the ink bottle and lifted the quill pen.
For a moment, she stared at her right hand, recalling the feel of Thorn's fingers surrounding hers. Something as warm and slow-moving as heated maple syrup moved through her, and she closed her eyes. Thorn was getting under her skin, and she didn't like it. Not one bit. It was one thing for the screenplay Matilda to fall for her Thorn, but for Mariah to feel anything for the real thing was absurd. Not when his moods were as changeable as the surface of a river.
"It's just lust, dummy," she told herself. The softly spoken words had the chilling effect she wanted. Matilda and her experiences notwithstanding, Mariah would stay far away from Thorn.
She stared at the ink-spotted paper, thinking. For self-preservation, she needed to anticipate everything that might happen here, all the screenplay's episodes.
Writing small, wrapping her words around the blots, she

 
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