Free The Thawing of Mara by Janet Dailey

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