The Thawing of Mara

by Janet Dailey

  "Not yet." Her answer was needlessly clipped and abrupt. She tried to cover it by picking up the leaves that had scattered over the edge of the bag.

  "Mara is something of a perfectionist," Adam explained in an uncomplimentary tone. "She keeps looking for the same quality in others and refuses to compromise."

  Tight-lipped, Mara offered, no defense since she felt she needed none. Gathering up the open end of the leaf bag, she attempted to carry it to the driveway, but the moisture of the wet leaves made it too heavy for her to lift.

  "Let me carry that for you?" Sin offered, and took a step toward her.

  "I can handle it," she insisted with a stubborn flash of independence.

  Sin hesitated, then lifted a shoulder in silent concession. Straining, Mara dragged the plastic bag across the ground. The muscles in her arms were trembling from the effort by the time she reached the driveway. Determined not to show the effect, she walked back to pick up the rake again and set to work on the leaves in the other quarter of the yard.

  All the while, Sin stood near her father, talking to him and watching her. It was a distinctly unsettling experience. The last pile of leaves didn't have to be bagged since she used them to cover the flower bed in front of the house.

  "Why don't you rest for a while, Mara?" her father suggested when she had finished that. "You're making me tired just watching you work. You can rake the rest of the yard tomorrow."

  "I think I will wait until tomorrow," she agreed, taking off her work gloves and unconsciously flexing her fingers. "The forecast was for more sunshine." In truth, she was exhausted and needed a rest, if only until the afternoon. "It's getting too cold out here for you."

  "You're probably right," he agreed, which told her he was getting chilled. She walked to the back of his wheelchair and turned it toward the house, so far, she had pointedly ignored the man with her father, but Adam wasn't going to follow suit. "If you aren't doing anything special, Sin, why don't you come into the house?"

  Mara froze in cold anger. "I doubt that Mr. Buchanan would want to neglect…Miss Taylor for long, Adam. You overlooked the fact that she's probably waiting for him at the cottage."

  "No, she isn't," Sin offered quietly. Unwillingly her dark gaze was drawn to him. "Celene didn't accompany me this weekend."

  The information caught her by surprise. It unnerved her and she sought to cover her confusion by responding sharply, "What do you do? Devote one weekend a month totally to rest?"

  "Something like that," he agreed lazily.

  "If no one is waiting for you, is there any reason you can't come in for a while?" Adam questioned.

  "None that I know of," Sin answered, his gaze flickering to Mara in silent challenge, but she refused to rise to the bait. It was one thing to argue with her father and another to argue with Sinclair Buchanan.

  Without waiting for any more to be said, Mara began pushing her father's wheelchair toward the ramp leading to the front door of the house. The uneven brick walkway made the going difficult. Her arms were already tired from all the raking. When she reached the ramp, a hand came around her to grip the chair handles.

  "I'll take it from here," Sin told her.

  "I can manage," Mara returned stiffly.

  "Your father isn't a bag of leaves, and you had enough trouble with that." He firmly pushed her out of the way and guided the wheelchair up the ramp with an ease that Mara knew she wouldn't have been able to fake.

  At his backward glance to see if she was coming, Mara offered a grudging, "Thank you," and walked up the ramp to open the door. Once inside, she immediately excused herself. "I have to clean up."

  Her bedroom and bath was on the second floor. As she climbed the front stairs, Sin and her father went into the study. After bathing, Mara put on a pair of camel tan slacks and a matching sweater with black and tan horizontal stripes. She used the rear staircase that opened into the kitchen. From the front of the house she could hear the muffled sound of male voices in conversation.

  The coffeepot was empty, so she made a fresh pot. While the coffee perked, she put away the breakfast dishes she had left to dry on the draining board. When the coffee was finished, she poured herself a cup and sat down at the table. After the bath and change of clothes, a cup of coffee was all she needed to relax.

  The door to the kitchen swung open before she had taken her first sip. The tension that she had fought so hard to remove threaded back through her nerves as Sin Buchanan walked into the room.

  Minus the bulky jacket, his physique was still formidable. Even the rough weave of his sweater seemed in keeping with the raw vigor of his manliness. He paused inside the doorway, his gaze sweeping slowly over her. Mara felt his inspection as surely as if he had touched her.

  "Was there something you wanted?" She was sitting rigidly in her chair, a charged alertness in her senses.

  "Your father sent me in to ask if there was any coffee," Sin explained his presence in the kitchen, moving forward with a quietness that was surprising in a man his size.

  The steaming cup of coffee on the table couldn't be overlooked any more than the aroma of fresh-perked coffee in the air. Mara found his level gaze difficult to meet. To avoid it, she rose from the table.

  "Yes, there's coffee. I'll fix a tray and bring it in to you," she offered in a coolly unresponsive voice.

  "There's no need for you to bring it in. I'll wait and carry it in myself." He came to the counter where Mara had placed a serving tray.

  "It isn't necessary." She didn't want him waiting. She wanted him gone.

  "Why should I walk back empty-handed?" Sin countered with infuriating logic.

  Mara didn't pursue the argument as she began arranging the mugs on the tray. "I hope Adam hasn't bored you with a lot of talk about the Civil War."

  She made the barbed comment for want of something to fill the silence. Her father rarely bored anyone; he had been born with the gift of charm. Even her mother had gone on loving him after he had deserted her for another woman. Mara suspected the only reason she was immune to him was that she was his daughter.

  "I don't remember his mentioning anything about the Civil War," Sin remarked. When she set the sugar bowl and spoon on the tray, he reminded her, "I don't need any cream or sugar for my coffee, thank you."

  "What have you found to talk about?" Mara reached into the cupboard for the insulated coffee server.

  "Many things," was his ambiguous answer.

  "Including me, I suppose." There was a bitter taste in her mouth as she said that.

  Sin watched silently for a moment as she poured the hot coffee from the pot into the server. "What makes you think we would have discussed you?"

  "Nothing. Forget I said it," Mara shrugged, angry with herself. She set the server on the tray. When Sin would have picked it up, she stopped him. "Just a minute. I'll put some cookies on a plate." Her father knew she had baked oatmeal raisin cookies yesterday and she suspected he would send Sin back to the kitchen if she didn't include some on the tray. But in defense of her action, she explained, "Adam has a sweet tooth."

  "Why do you refer to your father by his given name?" The gray head was tipped at an inquiring angle, smoke-blue eyes studying her with disconcerting directness, "In almost every other respect, you seem typically old-fashioned."

  "It's what I prefer to call him," was as much as Mara would say.

  "And your reasons are private," he concluded.

  "My reasons are between Adam and myself. That doesn't include outsiders." Her cool glance let him know exactly to which category he belonged.

  "But it has something to do with the estrangement between the two of you." He watched her arrange the cookies on a plate. "Adam mentioned he was crippled in a car accident."

  "Yes, that's right." Mara replaced the lid on the cookie jar.

  "It's a pity that it had to happen to such a vital man," Sin commented.

  "It's possible that he got what the deserved," she suggested, knowing how callous her comment sounde
d and not caring. And she didn't particularly care what he thought of her for saying it.

  His gaze narrowed slightly. "Do you resent so much having to take care of him?"

  "I don't have to take care of him, Mr. Buchanan. I chose to take care of him because he's the man who fathered me." There was a haughty air to the tilt of her chin.

  "It would be perfectly natural for a young single woman to resent the demands on her free time to care for her crippled father, especially a young woman as beautiful as you," he commented.

  "Compliments don't mean anything to me, Mr. Buchanan." She added the plate of cookies to the tray. "I've been around Adam too long not to have learned that they have little value beyond the moment they are spoken."

  "You don't care much for your father, do you, Miss Prentiss?" It was a quiet accusation.

  "Do you?" she returned.

  "I haven't known him very long, but he strikes me as a likable, intelligent man," he stated.

  "But you don't know him as well as I do" Mara replied, indicating that this was the only explanation she needed to give.

  "Mara the bitter. You were appropriately named, weren't you?" he commented.

  "Weren't you?" Mara suggested smoothly.

  Laughter rolled from his throat in a low chuckle. "And I thought you were the type that turned the other cheek."

  "We all make mistakes, Mr. Buchanan," she murmured.

  The sounds of laughter faded, but it still glinted in his eyes. "Except you, Miss Prentiss?" An eyebrow lifted in mocking question.

  Determined not to let the discussion continue any further, Mara picked up the coffee tray and turned to him. "I believe you said you would carry this into the study."

  The full force of his gaze was directed at her. "Is the conversation becoming too much for you?" Sin guessed accurately.

  "I'm tired of being a source of amusement for you." She didn't mince words in her answer, letting them be as cold and harsh as her anger.

  "You take yourself and life too seriously," he chided, "You have to learn to laugh at things."

  "There are too many things that I don't find very funny, Mr. Buchanan." Again, she offered him the tray. "If you aren't going to carry this in I

  will."

  Sin held her challenging look an instant longer before reaching for the tray. His tanned fingers naturally encountered hers as he took the tray handles from her grip. Their contact was hard and warm and brief. It seemed to leave an invisible imprint on her skin, because the sensation remained long after the contact was broken.

  Alone again in the kitchen, Mara discovered her cup of coffee had become cold. She emptied it in the sink and refilled it from the pot. But she couldn't find the same contentment that had preceded Sin's entrance to the kitchen.

  The house was too confining, made smaller by the voices of the two men in the study. The bright sunlight shining outside became more inviting. Mara would have preferred slipping out the back door, but her strong sense of duty wouldn't permit her to go for a walk without informing her father of her intention.

  Taking her heavy plaid parka from its hook, she put it on and walked through the house to the parlor-turned-study. Sin was the first to see her when she appeared in the double doorway, but she avoided looking at him to direct her attention to Adam.

  "I wanted you to know I'm going for a walk. I'll be back in an hour," she told him. "Would you like anything before I leave? More coffee?"

  "Maybe some more cookies?" Adam suggested with a bright gleam in his eye. "Sin sampled them. They were very good, as usual."

  "The cookies were good," Sin reaffirmed her father's statement.

  "If you'd like more, I'll get them, but I wouldn't want you to spoil your lunch, Adam," said Mara.

  "No, you're right. If I eat any more, I won't want lunch," he agreed, and glanced at Sin. "Mara's specialty is really lemon pie. It's always as cool and tart as its maker."

  Mara turned away. "I'll be back in an hour." She walked to the front door, never hearing Sin's response to her father's jibe.

  Chapter Five

  THE MIDDLE OF NOVEMBER arrived with blustering winds and cold temperatures. The ground was hard beneath Mara's feet as she trudged along the rutted track to the cottage, a small bag of groceries under her arm, It would have been faster and easier to take the car to deliver the supplies, but they were so few to carry that she had chosen to walk.

  The air was sharp and clear, an invigorating morning punctuated by the puffy clouds of her breath. A swirling wind rustled the thick carpet of leaves in the woods, the dark, skeletal outlines of the tree limbs etched against the blue of the sky.

  This last week Mara had rarely ventured out of the house. Adam had caught a cold and she had spent most of her time looking after him. Her life had been very sedentary and the exercise of this brisk walk felt good.

  Adam's fever had broken in the night. His temperature had dropped to near normal that morning. When she had left the house, he had been resting comfortably, assuring her that he would probably sleep for an hour or so.

  Glancing ahead of her, Mara saw the cedar shakes of the cottage roof through the dark columns of tree trunks. She wondered which day Sin would be coming to the house to visit her father. Since that first social visit, Sin had regularly called at the house once a weekend to see Adam. Mara had no idea what the two men talked about, and she never asked.

  Nor did she revoice her objections to having Sin Buchanan as a visitor in the house. It would have given him too much importance to make an issue of his visits with her father. So Mara spent most of her time ignoring his presence in the house during his visits.

  As she approached the front door of the cottage, she reached into her jacket pocket for the key. Although she had continued to run the advertisement for a housekeeper in the paper, she hadn't had any more replies. Spending a couple of hours there Monday and Friday mornings had become part of her routine, another one of the chores she did on a regular basis.

  It required both hands to unlock and open the door. Setting the grocery bag on the stoop, she inserted the key in the lock and turned the doorknob at the same time as the key. She pushed the door open, slipped the key back in her pocket and picked up the groceries.

  Entering the cottage, she walked across the living room to turn up the thermostat, only to discover it hadn't been turned down. She stared at it for a puzzled instant, then shrugged. Monday morning was when Adam had woken up with the chill and a fever. In her haste to get back to him, she had probably forgotten to turn the heat down in the cottage after she had cleaned.

  She carried the grocery bag into the small kitchen and set it on the counter. Unbuttoning the cumbersome parka, she slipped it off and draped it on the back of a kitchen chair. The nippy walk to the cottage had numbed her senses. She had taken the first item out of the bag before she noticed a familiar aroma in the air.

  In disbelief, she glanced at the coffeepot plugged into the wall, the fragrant smell of fresh coffee coming from its spout. At almost the same instant she heard a footstep from the vicinity of the bedroom, and pivoted toward the sound.

  Sin's frame filled the archway to the bedroom. Clad only in a pair of rough brown denims, he walked into the kitchen. The hard, muscled chest looked deceptively trim. His naked skin was the color and smooth texture of leather stretched across his build, broken only by the V-shaped pattern of golden dark chest hairs.

  The frosted steel hair was uncombed, its thickness in attractive disarray. Lines of sleep had softened the harsh carving of his features, but his eyes were alert as he took in the look of shock on Mara's face.

  "Good morning." His greeting sounded so natural that it made her wonder if she had got her days mixed up. Was it Friday or Saturday? No, it definitely was Friday.

  "What are you doing here?" She recovered enough to demand, then remembered, "I didn't see your car outside."

  "You didn't look. My car is there, parked alongside of the cottage," Sin informed her, his steel-blue eyes regarding her w
ith lazy interest.

  Alongside the cottage—that explained it, Mara realized. Since she had walked instead of driving, her angle of approach to the cottage hadn't given her a glimpse of the far side where his car was.

  "Then you're the one who turned the thermostat up and made coffee," she concluded, relieved that it hadn't been an oversight on her part.

  "I must be," he agreed, "unless there's a ghost haunting the cottage that you didn't tell me about." His mouth curved into a half grin. "Did you think you were going mad?"

  "I…I had a lot of things on my mind," Mara faltered in her own defense. "Adam has been sick with a cold all week. He's better now. But it was possible I might have overlooked a few things Monday."

  "Not you," he taunted. "You're Miss Perfect."

  "Why are you here?" His biting comment brought a chill to her voice. "It isn't Saturday."

  "I decided at the last minute to come up a day early. Is that all right?" Sin asked, knowing that he didn't require her permission. "I don't recall reading any restriction in the lease that said I didn't have the use of the cottage seven days a week."

  "Of course there wasn't," Mara retorted impatiently. "But you could have let me know you were changing your routine."

  "I told you it was a last-minute decision. I didn't think you would appreciate a telephone-call in the middle of the night." His explanation held a hint of challenge.

  "The middle of the night," she unconsciously repeated his phrase.

  "Yes, it was after midnight before I decided to drive up here a day early," Sin elaborated on his previous explanation.

  At that hour of the night, Mara doubted that he was alone. That thought prompted another that maybe he hadn't made the journey alone. She glanced beyond Sin to the bedroom where a corner of the sleep rumpled brown satin sheets could be seen.

  Sin followed the direction of her look and her thoughts. "There's no one with me, if that's what you're wondering." Amusement edged the hard corners of his mouth when her dark gaze flew back to him.

  "You've been spending more and more of your weekends alone lately," Mara observed. "Aren't you worried that you might get bored without anyone to entertain you?"