Page 97 of Stolen By the Billionaire
And he’d put Sarah in danger, so now he was duty-bound to be her protector, not her lover. He would not toy with her.
An instant later, when Blaze found his hand reaching for her with the intent of cradling her cheek and drawing her lips to his, he pressed his hand firmly against the tile and leaned back away from her, the ceramic floor chilling his butt through his slacks like the icy waves of the Pacific.
Sarah broke eye contact with him and looked over at the glassed-in shower on the other side of the bathroom. “I mean, you don’t need to fix my fence. I’m used to running the farm without help. I can do it. When I was a kid and labor costs were so much lower, my dad always had a hired man around to help with the chores. Heck, my mom paid one of the Amish teenage girls to come in for a few hours a day to help clean the house.”
She glanced up at him again, but Blaze didn’t interrupt her. His throat was so cramped that he wasn’t sure he could speak.
She continued, “Um, okay. My family’s always been tight with the Amish community. We weren’t Amish or even Mennonite, but my mom was from Kalona and had been raised among them even though her family was Evangelical. Between the farm and my mom’s quilting, we hung out with Amish people a lot. My mom was kind of accepted into the community even though she wasn’t a member of their church. She wore simple clothes and could weave a basket with the best of them. Her best friend was my aunt Ruth, who was Amish and not my aunt. Ruth told my mom once that she was ‘not really English, that she had an Amish soul,’ and my mom clung to that like it was a telephone pole in a tornado.”
Blaze listened to her, soothed.
Their pinkie fingers on their hands, pressed to the bathroom tile where they sat, were an inch apart.
She kept talking. “I mean, my name is Sarah, the most common Amish name for girls ever. Other people outside my friend group in high school thought I was lapsed Amish or rebelling. Abigail, the friend of mine who’s taking care of my farm, is Aunt Ruth’s daughter.”
He nodded and waited.
Their hands were just fractions of an inch apart, a paper-thin slice of the dark marble tile showing between them.
Sarah paused for a beat and looked at his face, still turning toward him. “I think my mom wanted to convert to the Old Order Church, but my dad was Orthodox Catholic. There was no way he would’ve ever converted to any Protestant religion, especially an Anabaptist one. He called Roman Catholics ‘radicals’ because they didn’t follow ancient Christianity. We drove over to the Orthodox church in Pella every Sunday. He didn’t want to attend the one in Iowa City because Iowa City is pretty much Gomorrah, according to my dad—New York City is Sodom—and it’s also Greek Orthodox. He couldn’t handle the wrong kind of Orthodox.”
Though Blaze was still looking at her face, he felt Sarah’s pinkie graze his.
Blaze was a predator by nature, and prey had tripped his instincts. He leaned toward her and captured her hand under his, a tiger snatching a rabbit that had ventured too close.
He shouldn’t.
His palm and fingers closed on hers, a loosely held quarry fluttering in his grasp and then stilling. If Sarah tried to pull away, her hand would have slipped out of his easily, but she didn’t.
Her delicate bones were so small that Blaze could have crushed her hand like a songbird in his oversized paw. She must have calluses on her palm from farm work, but in his hand, still rough from years of slogging through swamps holding his rifle and working on machinery, her skin felt like flower petals.
Neither of them looked down at their joined hands.
Blaze didn’t need to because he’d already caught what he’d been hunting.
Sarah’s sable eyelashes fluttered. Her wide-open eyes looked startled but not frightened.
Distract.
Blaze asked, “What kind of Orthodox was your father?”
Sarah inhaled through her nose, still watching his eyes. “Russian.”
Yes, they were Russian Orthodox because her father had been the castaway son of Stanley Bell, and that was why Sarah was Mary Varvara Bell’s niece and Stanely’s granddaughter. It fit together.
Sarah said, “But you should know that. I thought you said you were friends with Logan.”
Her question was hesitant, like she’d found a flaw in his story and might be on the verge of distrusting him again.
Blaze told her, “Logan rarely talked about his life before he went to live with his grandfather, other than once about the night he left. Even that was only once.”
“But he must have gone to church while you were at boarding school.”
“Services at Le Rosey, the boarding school we attended, were Lutheran. It took him a while to pick up the liturgy.”
“Logan went to Protestant services?”
Blaze inclined his head to the side and curled his fingers more tightly around her hand. Muscles in his shoulders and back were unraveling knots he hadn’t known he had. “He seemed uncomfortable at church for a while.”
