Ingrid sighed, planting her elbows on the table and rubbing two fingers to each temple. Everyone who knew her knew the story of how she and John had met on a casual double date while paired up with other people. She swore up and down she had known by the time they left the restaurant John Wood was the man she wanted to marry. “Point taken,” she said wearily.

“Maybe you don't think I'm capable of that kind of depth of feeling,” Matt said, continuing on the defensive, his tone particularly cutting because the doubts he was expressing on his sisters behalf were doubts he'd had about himself. “Maybe you think I was just going to go through my whole life married to my career, fooling around on the side with women who didn't expect any kind of commitment from me.”

Ingrid gave him a furious look and slapped her hand down on the table. “Stop it!” she snapped. “Will you just listen to me for two minutes?”

He checked his watch just to needle her and gazed off into the middle distance, waiting.

“Matt, she's Amish. Do you have any idea what that means?”

“She dresses funny and drives a horse.”

“Don't be smart. Do you know anything about the Amish way of Hfe?”

He gave a belligerent shrug. “Its Sarah's religion. That's fine. It doesn't matter. I don't care. We can work around that.”

“It does matter,” Ingrid insisted. “The Amish here are from the Old Order. They're veiy strict in their beliefs, particularly as separatists. Sarah is walking a fine line just by working here. Do you know what would happen to her if they found out she was involved with a Yankee?”

“I'm sure you're going to teU me,” he said, making clear that he didn't want to hear it.

Ingrid went on just the same, bound by a duty to her friend and her brother. “It's called the Meidung. Unless she repented publicly, she would be ostracized, shunned by her people. They wouldn't be allowed to acknowledge her in any way. They wouldn't be able to speak to her or take something from her hand or sit at a dinner table with her. She would lose everything—her faith, her family.”

“You're making this up,” Matt said angrily, knowing he sounded utterly childish.

“I'm not,” Ingrid replied calmly.

“That's barbaric.”

“It's their way, and they have their reasons for it.”

Matt leaned against the window frame and stared out at the farmyard cast in bronze by the late afternoon sun. Sarah was bent over by the barn door, pouring out milk for an assortment of cats. He thought of the way she had spoken of her family, the love that had lit her eyes. He thought of her relationship with little Jacob. Would she be willing to give all that up? Did he have the right to ask her? Was he insane to even consider it?

They'd only known each other a matter of days. But now he'd fallen in love with her in those few days. He'd never felt anything like it. It was powerful and consuming and he couldn't imagine it ever burning out. And it wasn't just lust. He knew lust. Lust didn't have anything to do with the way he felt when he watched Sarah open a book and become in stantly absorbed in the process of learning. Lust didn't make him want to protect her and defend her. It wasn't lust that ached when he saw her tears. This was love, the real McCoy. Just because it had struck like a bolt of lightning out of the blue didn't make it any less real.

He was in love with Sarah Troyer. And now Ingrid was telling him it was against the rules, rules he hadn't even known existed. The sudden knowledge of the stakes and the penalties sent him reeling.

Why hadn't Sarah warned him? Why hadn't she told him this?

“I don't want to see you hurt, either, Matt.” Ingrid had come to stand opposite him, mirroring his stance, her shoulder against the white-painted frame of the window. The look he gave her was bleak, and her heart nearly broke. “Oh, Matt,” she whispered, hugging herself against an inner chill. “You really are in love with her, aren't you? Of all the women who've fallen in love with you, you have to want the one you can't have.”

He was thinking something along the same lines himself. Anger swelled inside him like a balloon, crowding his chest, making it difficult to breathe. Anger at the injustice of it and anger at Sarah. She had let him get in too deep to save himself, and now he was being thrown an anvil. Why would she do that unless her feelings for him didn't run as deeply as she'd professed?

She'd been playing with him. It seemed impossible, yet, at the same time, it seemed the only answer. And he'd thought she was the one who needed protecting! He'd thought she was the naive one. He suddenly felt as if he'd been played for a colossal fool.

In one lithe, violent motion he turned and slammed his fist against the window frame, rattling the glass panes. Without a word to his sister, he stormed out of the house, limping heavily as he crossed the yard going in search of Sarah.

He found her behind the barn dumping a bale of hay into the ring of an old tractor tire that lay on the ground. Her horse looked up from his dinner and pricked his eare, snorting at the sight of Matt as if he could sense the anger that rolled off the man like steam. Sarah glanced up, her eyes widening. She barely had time to straighten before Matt had her by the shoulders.

He gave her a shake and hauled her up against him, making her bend backward as he leaned over her. His face was a mask of fury. “Why didn't you tell me?” he demanded.

“T-tell you what?” she asked, every warning system in her body going on red alert. He was frightening her. Her sweet, gentle Matt was frightening her. The idea itself was enough to make her tremble.

“Dammit, Sarah,” he shouted. “Why didn't you warn me?”

“Matt!” she cried, twisting in his grasp. “Stop it! You're hurting me!”

“Oh yeah? Well, how do you think I feel right now? I've just been informed that if you're caught consorting with me, you'll be considered a pariah and cast out of your society. Why the hell didn't you warn me, Sarah?”

She looked up at him with bleak eyes, the fear instantly gone and sadness filling up the space inside her. “Would it have mattered?”

“Yes!” He released her abrupdy and stepped back, squeezing his eyes shut and raking his hands through his hair as pain and confusion twisted inside him. “No … I don't know.”

His last words came out on a strained, tired whisper. What would he have done differently? Would he have stayed away from her from the start? Could he really have prevented himself from falling in love with her?

“What difference will it make to you?” she asked quietly. “You're from a different world. You will go back to that world because it's where you belong.”

“Oh, I see,” Matt said sarcastically, letting his pain goad him. “You just wanted a little fling. I looked like a nice, safe guy to have a lit tie adventure with, right? You took one look at me and figured I'd never stick around—”

“No!”

“What? Have I got the word 'fickle' tattooed on my body somewhere or something?” he asked, forcing a dry laugh.

“No!” Sarah said, miserable. She could barely look him in the eye. A little adventure was exactly what she had wanted. She hadn't bargained on getting so much more. She had certainly never considered that Matt would end up getting hurt. All along she'd thought only her own heart had been at risk. “I never counted on falling in love with you.”

“You just wanted to sleep with me,” he said, the bitterness in his tone as caustic as acid.

Sarah reacted without thinking, slapping his face hard. “How dare you,” she said, her voice trembling just above a whisper. “How dare you say such a thing to me.”

She turned away from him and through her tears stared at the hand she'd struck him with. Never in her life had she raised a hand to anybody. Now in anger she'd hit the man she loved. Shame throbbed inside her in a physical ache. Shame and despair and heartache. She ran for the relative darkness of the barn, stopping just inside the door, welcoming the coolness and the absence of bright light. For a moment she just let those things absorb her. She breathed in the sweet scent of hay and the mustiness of cobwebs. She listened to two cats playing in the straw of Otis's stall.

“Sarah?” Matt s voice came to her through the haze of her suffering, sounding higher than normal and strained. He cleared his throat and shuffled his feet on the cracked concrete of the barn floor. “Sarah, I'm sorry.” He sniffed and cleared his throat again. “I shouldn't have said that.”

“I came to you out of love,” she whispered, tears spilling past the barrier of her lashes and rolling down her cheeks.

“I know. I know you did,” he murmured, hurting more from the pain he'd inflicted on her than from anything she had done to him.

Trembling, he slid his arms around her and pulled her back against him. He brushed his cheek against the top of her head, encountering the stiff gauze of her kapp rather than the softness of her hair; the barrier of her Amishness in a tangible form. He wanted to tear it off and throw it aside, and at the same time he called himself a hypocrite. Wasn't it her Amishness that had first drawn him to her—her simplicity, her naivete, her sweet nature? He couldn't both change her and have her remain the same.

“I wanted to know what it was to be in love,” she said. “Was that so wrong of me? I knew in the end you would go back to the city and I would be left here to my life, but I fell in love with you. Was it so wrong of me to want to hold on to that for a little while?”

“No.”

'I don't think there can be sin in loving someone,” she said shakily. “Only joy and pain.”

Blinking against the sting of his own tears, Matt turned her in his arms and held her close. Love, the most complex of emotions. Sarah had reduced it down to its simplest elements: A time of joy and a time of pain. Was that really all they were to be allowed? It seemed so little when he had waited so long. He wondered if Sarah felt as cheated as he did. She sounded resigned. He would go back to “the world” and she would remain here, and their love would fade into pain, then into memories. He ached with emptiness just thinking about it. That was the way it would be, though. Even as he wondered if she would go with him if he asked, he knew her answer. She had already given it to him. She wouldn't leave her way of life, wouldn't leave her family.

“What happens now?” he asked. “I don't want to get you in trouble with your people.”

Sarah felt her heart crack. What had she expected him to say? Had she really expected him to ask her for a future? He couldn't change who he was and, no matter how often she had dreamed of it, she couldn't either. There was her family to consider. She couldn't shame them, couldn't leave them. The thought of never seeing them again tore her apart. Then there was the world to consider. What would the big world do with the like of her? She had seen the way it had battered Matt. It would chew her up and spit her out. Matt would tire of her eventually; her novelty would wear off. He was quick to defend her now, but the fact of the matter was she would likely embarrass him if she were transplanted into his world.

No. She'd known all along what they had was this time, the here and now.

“No one knows about us,” she said, hating the need to hide their love. “What we have between us is ours alone. I don't want to give it up, not until I have to.”

Matt tightened his arms around her. “Me neither.”

He wanted to cling to her every minute they had left. He wanted to store up the feel of her and the taste of her and her sweet scent so that when the end came he would have something to take with him. The injured pride that prodded at him to walk away couldn't hold a candle to his desperate need to take as much love as Sarah would give him.

He turned her in his arms and bent to kiss her. Sarah met him halfway, just as hungry to gather memories, to stockpile them for the long nights ahead when all they would have was longing for a touch, the memory of a kiss, the ache of a missing corner of a heart. Their mouths clashed and dueled greedily, insatiably. Each framed the other's face with trembling hands, trying to memorize the texture of skin, the angle of bones. They took deep, thirsty kisses, drinking in flavors and feelings and each other's tears, and heat flared through them in the flash fire of sudden and desperate passion.

Matt tore his mouth away and crushed her against him in an embrace that attempted to imprint his body with the outline of hers. His gaze settled on the bales of hay stacked in tiers beside the aisle and on the heavy woolen horse rug that lay folded over the door of a stall. Within minutes they had the rug spread on a wide flat section of bales and they knelt facing each other, snatching kisses and unfastening buttons.