Sarah's Sin Read Online Free PDF

those conveniences because we believe they act as corrupting influences on the family, but we don't claim they're evil nor do we begrudge others having them,” she explained. Personally, she had never understood how a toilet could corrupt anybody, but she kept her opinion to herself. “Hold still now or you'll be short a nose.”
    It was only after she had finished shavinghim that Sarah brought up the one question she had been wanting most to ask Matt. She sat back with the damp towel wound around her hands. She knew she should move to the chair beside the bed, but she had grown comfortable sitting next to him, and in truth she enjoyed the small tingle of pleasure that came from her hip brushing against his leg.
    “Ingrid told me you'd been injured in some kind of attack, but I didn't understand.”
    That makes two of us
, Matt thought. He considered himself sophisticated, worldly, experienced. Still he had a difficult time dealing with the senseless violence of gang warfare. He couldn't imagine how he was going to explain it to Sarah. He wasn't sure he wanted to. But she sat beside him, waiting patiently, looking so eager to learn something about the Big World.
    “I'm in charge of the emergency room at a hospital in the Cities,” he began. “Its a county hospital in what has become a very bad part of town. We see a lot of victims of crimes, a lot of criminals.” He broke off, frustrated. “Do you know what street gangs are?”
    She nodded solemnly. “I read about them in Ingrid's
Newsweek
magazine.”
    The idea of Sarah reading
Newsweek
threw him for a moment, but he shook it off and went back to his explanation. “Well, gangs have been growing in the Minneapolis areaover the last five or six years. Gangs from Chicago and Los Angeles are moving in, calling it 'Moneyapolis' because of the potential for profit they see there. Consequently, we're starting to see a lot of gang-related crime and violence.
    “This time it happened right in my emergency room—with me in the middle of it. The Disciples and the Vice Lords got into a little disagreement over a drug deal.” He pointed to the bruise above his left eye. “I got hit here with the butt of a shotgun. This is where I connected with the edge of a cabinet,” he said, indicating the stitches on his chin. “I've got three cracked ribs, and the bandage on my leg is hiding a nice big bullet hole.”
    His account was a much-tidied version of the explosion of violence and hatred that had rocked the ER that night. He deleted the blood and gore and the fact that a sixteen-year-old Vice Lord had ended the evening as a corpse. He didn't tell Sarah that an innocent child had been wounded by flying glass from a broken cabinet door or that he himself had sustained a concussion and a bruised kidney in addition to his other injuries. He could see that the G-rated version had upset her enough.
    Sarah felt herself go pale as Matt calmly tallied his injuries. He was so matter-of-fact about it. The idea of that kind of violence shook her to her very core. That one humanbeing could do such terrible things to another was beyond her understanding. She had lived such a sheltered life, a life narrowly structured around faith and family. And she had wanted for so long to escape that rigid structure and explore the world beyond. It frightened her something fierce to know such awful things happened in that world she was so eager to discover. She tended to think of it in wonderful terms, that it was full of amazing things to learn and experience, when it undoubtedly held equal amounts of suffering and evil. Whenever that realization struck her, she felt naive and foolish, and now she felt fear for Matt as well.
    “You could have been killed,” she murmured, shivering at the thought.
    Matt looked at her with sympathy for her now-sullied naivet6. “Yeah,” he said softly, reaching out to cover her small hand with his.
    Funny, he thought, that he was the one who had been attacked, but it