The Baby Quilt

Emily looked up at the mountain of male muscle towering over her. She didn’t know why he seemed so much bigger to her now than he had outside. But she didn’t think it wise to stand there watching his glance move over her face while she tried to figure it out. “It would help if you’d sit down,” she murmured and turned to gather supplies from the bathroom.

He’d drained the glass of lemonade she’d left for him on her well-scrubbed pine table and was leaning back in one of its straight-backed chairs when she returned and set everything on the table beside him. He was following her every move. She could feel it. But she didn’t let herself meet his eyes. She focused only on the fabric covering his biceps. She’d noticed the snags before. What she hadn’t noticed was the tear in the seam.

“I’ll fix your shirt for you,” she said, leaning over so she could lift his sleeve and see how far up the scrape went.

“Don’t bother. I have another one in the car. Wait a minute,” he muttered when he felt the sleeve scrape his sore skin. “I’ll just take it off.”

Before she could say a word, he’d bent his dark head and grabbed a handful of fabric between his shoulder blades. Seconds later, he dragged the garment over his head.

Emily swallowed hard as he dropped it to his knee. Until two years ago, Daniel had been the only man she’d seen in any state of undress. He’d worked hard and ate well, but his thin build had not been what one would call impressive. Justin’s…was. His shoulders were broad, every corded muscle in his tapering back and carved arms beautifully defined.

She’d seen pictures of statues depicting such beautifully proportioned men. She’d even seen pictures of men themselves in ads for skimpy underwear, though the first few times she’d encountered them while flipping through magazines at Mrs. Clancy’s and at the grocery store, she’d nearly turned pink with embarrassment.

The image of a half-naked man no longer startled her as it once had. Mary Woldridge, a checker at the market who’d become her friend, even said she was no fun to watch at the magazine rack anymore. The real thing, however, was rather disturbing. So was the four-inch-wide swath of bruised, raw and abraded skin that ran from Justin’s biceps to the top of his shoulder. Little splinters were visible between the streaks of blood that had dried and crusted in places, any one of which could have caught on his sleeve with his movements and caused a fresh jolt of discomfort.

He would have been terribly uncomfortable working with Mr. Clancy. But it was the thought of how he’d been hurting while he’d shielded her and her child that had her reaching to touch the skin below his reddened flesh.

“You’re already bruising,” she murmured. “Does it feel like you chipped bone?”

“I don’t think I did anything like that. It just feels a little sore.”

She met his eyes, sympathy in her own as she straightened. She needed more light.

Justin watched her turn away, the soft fabric of her dress shifting against her slender body as she moved across the room. The dress itself was modest to a fault. Demure, he supposed, though it wasn’t a word he recalled ever having reason to use before. The sleeves nearly reached her elbows and her delicate collarbone was barely exposed. But the memory of how she’d looked with the wind molding that fabric to her body had been burned into his brain. All too easily, he could picture the fullness of her high breasts, the curve of her hips, her long, shapely legs.

Thinking of how exquisitely she was shaped beneath that formless garment had his body responding in ways that were not wise to consider in such an intimate space. So he forced his attention to what she was doing as she turned back to the table and touched the match she struck to the wick of the oil lamp she’d set there. Moments later, a bright glow illuminated her lovely face. That light gleamed in her hair, adding shimmers of platinum to shades of silver and gold as she replaced the glass chimney and positioned the lamp near the jar of vividly colored flowers.

With the scrape of wood over scarred pine flooring, Emily tugged a chair next to his and sat down beside him.

“Are you hurt anywhere else?”

He held up the thumb of his left hand. “Just a couple of slivers. I can get them if you have any tweezers.”

She reached toward a gauze pad. “I have a needle,” she told him, pulling out the one she’d brought and sterilizing it in the wick’s flame. “You have them in your arm, too. Here,” she murmured, replacing the chimney once more. “Let me see.”

His bare chest was terribly distracting. Trying not to think of how incredibly solid it had felt, she took his thick wrist and moved his hand closer to the light. With his hand resting palm-up on her table, she could easily see two fine slivers of wood in the pad of his thumb.

His hands distracted her, too.

They were strong, broad and long-fingered. Good hands. Capable hands. Yet, they were nearly unblemished. There were no calluses, no scars, no healing scratches. Only the fresh-looking scrapes and nicks he’d earned that afternoon.

Fascinated, she started to touch the smooth pad at the base of his fingers, only to pull back as if she’d touched fire the instant she realized what she was doing.

“What’s the matter?”

With a sheepish smile, she ducked her head and went to work on his thumb, deftly slipping out a sliver with the needle and wiping it onto a gauze pad. “Your hands are very smooth. I’ve never seen a man’s hands that weren’t scarred and callused from years of work. Except maybe Dr. Fisher,” she amended, thinking of the kindly old physician in Hancock who’d delivered Anna. The other sliver joined the first. “But I can’t honestly say I paid any attention to them. Yours are the only ones I’ve noticed.”

“Is that good or bad?” He posed the question mildly, absorbed as much by her lack of guile as her brisk efficiency when she dabbed on peroxide with a cotton ball, then blotted at the bubbles. “No calluses, I mean?”

“There are some who would say that soft hands mean a person is idle. But Dr. Fisher is a very busy man. And you work with your mind.” She tipped her head, still looking intrigued as she finished with dabs of antibiotic cream. “Your hands don’t look soft, though. And they didn’t feel that way at all.”

“They didn’t?”

Emily kept her head down as she slowly wiped a bit of cream from her own fingers. “No,” she murmured, but she would give him no more than that. Her last observation had slipped out before she considered what she was saying. He didn’t need to know she could still imagine how comforting their solid, masculine weight had felt against her back when he’d wrapped her in his arms. He didn’t need to know how drawn she was by their strength. How drawn she was by him.

“I’m relieved to hear that.”

She thought he might be smiling—the way he had when he’d teased her about her chain saw. But he wasn’t smiling at all. He was watching her as if he knew very well she was thinking of his hands on her body. And she was. Though until his glance slowly wandered to her mouth, she hadn’t considered that he might have been thinking of that, too.

She wasn’t comfortable with the awareness shimmering between them. That was as obvious to Justin as the faint tremor in the breath she drew and the chips of sapphire darkening in her eyes. He wasn’t all that comfortable with it himself. But it was there, thickening the air, snaking through his body and washing wariness over Emily’s fragile features.

Pressing her hand to her stomach, she blinked twice and reached for the peroxide to continue with her task.

Clearly flustered, trying not to look it, she promptly knocked it over.

“Oh, mein!” She gasped, bumping the bottle again as she snatched for it. Solution spilled over the edge of the table. It pooled on the wood, splashed on his pants.

“I’ve got it.” Catching the bottle before it went over the edge itself, he turned it upright and saw her grab a towel.

“I’m so sorry,” she murmured, mopping at the wet spot on his thigh. “I wasn’t paying—”

“It’s okay. Really.” Catching her wrist, he stilled her frantic motions. “It’s okay,” he repeated, ducking his head so he could see her eyes. “Honest. No harm’s done.”

“I’m not usually so—”

“Emily.” Beneath his fingers, he could feel her pulse, its beat as frantic as a trapped bird’s. Incredibly with her mouth inches from his, his own didn’t feel much calmer. “You don’t need to be nervous with me.”

“I can’t seem to help it.”

His glance swept her guileless face. There wasn’t an ounce of cunning in this woman. Nothing false or deceptive about her. She didn’t seem to have any natural defenses at all.

Deliberately ignoring the urge to tug her closer, he slipped his hand from hers. “What was that you said?” he asked, thinking she needed to protect herself better if she was ever going to make it on her own. “What language?”

All she’d said was “Oh, my.” Emily told him that as she pulled back, handing him a towel for his pants, and made herself focus on wiping up the table. “It’s Pennsylvania Dutch.”

She must have been even more rattled than she’d thought to have reverted to the only language she’d heard spoken until she was six years old. She rarely spoke the old German dialect at all anymore. Except to Anna once in a while, so she’d know something of her heritage. She’d learned English in school and had spoken it most of her life, but she’d worked hard over the past two years to pronounce her words the same as her neighbors. She didn’t want to be different. She wanted to belong.

Desperately.

Something like caution entered Justin’s deep voice. “Isn’t that what the Amish speak?”

“In their homes and to each other. In the Old Order communities, anyway,” she said, returning her attention to his abraded arm. “But they speak English, too.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I was Amish,” she said, gently wiping antiseptic over his scraped skin. “And we were Old Order.”

She turned away, picking up her needle again. When she turned back, she frowned at his biceps. “You have one here that looks awfully deep.” Apology touched her eyes even as she began picking at the stubborn splinter. “I’m sorry if it hurts.”