Holly: The Christmas Bride (The Brides of Paradise Ranch (Sweet Version) Book 9)

by Merry Farmer

  “We…I…um…” George blinked, at a complete loss. “It’s Christmastime,” he said, as if that was an argument in and of itself. “There’s so much to do. The pageant for the Christmas Day service needs to be put together. We haven’t even started rehearsals yet. I can’t just leave and let others handle that sort of responsibility.”

  “The Lord has granted me great honor and responsibility in carrying His Word,” Robbins said, spreading his arms as if giving a sermon right then and there. “It is my mission and my charge to spread His Word in any way possible.” He paused, then added. “I know how to run a church and give sermons, even at Christmas.”

  George was certain the condescending tone in Robbins’s voice couldn’t be his imagination. The man didn’t think very much of him. Any other day, George would have been happy to debate theology with Robbins and argue his personal approach to saving souls. But his own soul was so agitated that he didn’t know where to begin.

  “I can’t abandon my flock when they need me,” he told Howard.

  “Hmm.” Howard rubbed his chin. “Your commitment to Haskell is admirable, George.” He rubbed his chin some more. “Of course, there is another solution to this situation, and it’s standing right in front of us.”

  “God’s ways are many and mysterious,” Robbins said.

  Howard gave him only a slight sideways glance before going on. “You can continue with the pageant, George, and Robbins here can take over the regular Sunday services. That way you have time to enjoy a bit of a honeymoon, but you won’t have to feel as though you’re shirking your duties to do it.”

  “I don’t know.” George hesitated.

  Howard leaned closer to him. “I’d have a hard time giving up the Christmas pageant myself. It’s my favorite service of the year.” He winked for good measure, then before George could protest or argue him out of the idea, Howard straightened and said, “It’s done, then! George will continue with the Christmas pageant, and Robbins will take over regular Sunday services. I can’t wait to see what both of you come up with.”

  He slapped George on the arm and smiled broadly at Robbins. Robbins indulged Howard with a thin return smile. That only set George’s nerves on end more. It was one thing for Robbins to have no respect for him, but anyone who looked at Howard as though he was a deranged child was not the sort of person George wanted to have any kind of dealings with.

  And yet, the satisfied look on Howard’s face told George he was stuck with Robbins. Yet another problem added to the list that he had no idea how to deal with. He could only pray that they would all make it through the Christmas season in one piece.

  Chapter 5

  By Sunday, George’s worries had grown even bigger.

  “Is it true that you’re not giving the sermon today?” Olivia Garrett asked as she and Charlie and their brood came into the church. “Congratulations on your marriage, by the way.” She smiled at Holly.

  “Thank you,” Holly answered, head slightly lowered, the blush painting her cheeks fierce. She’d been the center of attention since the church doors opened, and the one thing that hadn’t changed in ten years was that she hated being the center of attention.

  “It’s true,” George answered. “Howard invited Rev. Robbins to town to perform mine and Holly’s wedding ceremony, then asked him to stay to help out with my duties for the Christmas season.” At least, that’s what he was telling people.

  “It should be an interesting diversion,” Charlie said, his smile knowing. He patted George on the arm as Olivia urged the family forward to take their seats. “We’ll be looking forward to seeing you up there again soon.”

  “So what’s this I hear about someone else giving the sermon today?”

  George barely had a moment to take a breath before Jarvis and Alice Flint and their children stepped up to take Olivia and Charlie’s place.

  “You remember,” Alice answered her husband’s question before George had to. “Virginia mentioned the minister that the WSGA recommended to perform Rev. Pickering’s wedding was extending his stay.” She smiled at Holly. “We’re so happy that Rev. Pickering has finally tied the knot.”

  “Holly, this is Jarvis Flint and his wife, Alice. They’re some of Haskell’s first citizens. Jarvis is Virginia Piedmont’s foreman out on her portion of Paradise Ranch.”

  “Oh? It’s a pleasure to meet you.” Holly greeted the Flints with a warm smile, but her nerves were still apparent.

  At least, to George they were apparent. Holly always had done a good job of hiding her feelings from the outside world, but they’d been close enough that he had learned what the slightest variation in the tension around her mouth and the flicker in her eyes meant. He had to admit, there was a certain intimacy in knowing what she was feeling when no one else did.

  “I can’t wait to see what this new preacher is all about,” Jarvis went on.

  “If that’s what you want, we’d better take a seat,” Alice prompted him.

  Several more couples and families streamed in as the first of the hymns began. George greeted them, introducing Holly, and answering the same questions over and over. Yes, a new preacher would be giving the sermon. Yes, he was very pleased to be married now. Holly held her own, but when the last hymn reached its final crescendo and they took the opportunity to slip onto seats at the back of the church—alongside Bonnie’s girls—George could see the relief practically dripping off of her.

  That relief stiffened to discomfort once more as he sat beside her, their shoulders brushing. He still hadn’t sat down to talk to her about their past, present, and future. He could barely bring himself to make small-talk with her across the dinner table. He’d been avoiding her as often as not, avoiding the perplexing, irritating, uncomfortable feelings that pulsed through him every time he thought of her. He was still sleeping on the sofa, and he had made good and certain that she didn’t see him with his shirt off a second time.

  His reticence couldn’t last. It wasn’t healthy to keep so much distance from her, so much unresolved. Worse still, the more time he spent around her, the more her scent permeated his clothes as they hung in the wardrobe together and the sound of her voice filled his thoughts even when he wasn’t talking to her, the more he caught himself wishing that he could hold her in his arms and tell her everything would be all right. He’d started daydreaming about kissing her and making it all better. But those thoughts only seemed to stop up his throat even more, make it harder to air what needed to be aired.

  His inner torment came to a sudden stop—as did everything else in the church—when the door to his office opened and Robbins stepped onto the chancel. He was still dressed in black and walked with his head lowered, a black leather Bible clasped in his hands in front of him. The congregation held its breath as he walked slowly to the pulpit, and then right past it to stand in the center of the chancel. Even then, he merely stood there with his head bowed. Not a soul in the sanctuary dared to breathe.

  Then, at last, Robbins raised his head, staring out at the congregation with fury in his eyes. He took a deep breath and declared, “God hates sinners!”

  Half or more of the congregants flinched in their seats. George winced.

  “God hates sinners,” Robbins repeated, his voice growing even louder. “And we are all sinners! We are all wretched and lowly sinners with no hope of salvation. Our lives are like offal to God. Our ways are like excrement. Each and every one of us must repent! I tell you, we must repent and recognize that we are lowly, we are hideous in His sight!”

  The congregation squirmed, their attention glued to Robbins, as if they feared breathing or moving a muscle lest God struck them dead on the spot. George squirmed as well, but his discomfort came from an entirely different place. He peeked to his left at the handful of Bonnie’s girls in attendance. Their heads were lowered, and looks of abject misery lined their faces.

  “As Romans 6:23 tells us, ‘The wages of sin is death.’ Death!” Robbins shouted.

  The congrega
tion jumped. A few children burst into tears.

  “Ezekiel 18:4. ‘The soul who sins will die.’ Genesis 2:17. ‘For in the day you eat from it, you will die.’ Romans 5:12. ‘Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, so also death was passed on to all men, because all sinned.’ Death!”

  A gasp sounded from the stunned congregation.

  “But all of those passages contain references to salvation for the good and humble,” George muttered. “He’s taking it all out of context.”

  “‘Do you not know that when you offer yourselves as obedient slaves, you are slaves to the one you obey, whether you are slaves to sin leading to death, or to obedience leading to righteousness?’ Romans 6:16!” Robbins boomed. “You must obey God! Obey Him! For the wages of sin is death!”

  George sat there in stunned silence as Robbins continued to build up a head of steam, chastising the citizens of Haskell and taking them to task for their evil ways. “He doesn’t know a single one of these people,” George muttered. “He doesn’t have the first clue about the abounding goodness of each and every person in this town.”

  “Oh dear.” Holly clapped a hand to her mouth. When she turned to George—who stared back at her with a questioning look—her eyes grew wider. “It’s Rev. Tavernier,” she whispered.

  George’s moment of confusion burst into remembrance so sharp he nearly laughed. “Of course.” A wide smile replaced the consternation on his face. Rev. Tavernier had been a popular preacher in his and Holly’s neighborhood in Baltimore when they were children. His sermons had been the stuff of legend, not just for how many people they drew into the cavernous, stone church, but for how many of those men and women ended up on their knees in tears at the front of the chapel, begging for God to save them—through Rev. Tavernier, of course—before the service was over. George had never known a more distasteful style of religion.

  Although at the moment, it looked like he would be getting to know it all over again.

  “Isaiah 3:11. ‘Woe unto the wicked! it shall be ill with him: for the reward of his hands shall be given him.’ Woe shall befall all of us, sinners, sinners, sinners that we are,” Robbins bellowed.

  “Not exactly the most encouraging topic for the Christmas season,” Holly murmured, leaning closer to George. “What about the Light of the World and ‘I come to make all things new?’”

  “Who needs new things when you’re a hopeless sinner?” George whispered in reply.

  Only when Holly snorted in her efforts to stifle a giggle did he realize he’d deliberately made a joke. In church. During a sermon. And he was a pastor.

  “I don’t approve of this,” he tried again on a more serious note. “Yes, we all have sin, but God is a good, loving god. He is Good itself, and He wants nothing more than to gather us home to Him, regardless of the stains we have on our souls.”

  Pearl Pettigrew was sitting on his other side, close enough to hear him, and she nodded. Her chin tilted up with wounded pride, but pride nonetheless.

  “I hope Howard sees reason when all this is done,” George whispered on.

  “And worse still, we have sinners amongst us,” Robbins shouted, throwing out his arm to point straight to the back of the chapel.

  A cold shiver ran down George’s back. It took him a few gasping seconds to realize that Robbins was not pointing at him, but was instead singling out Bonnie’s girls.

  “Harlots and jezebels have no place in God’s house. The stench of their sins soils us all. The blackness of their lusts corrupts those of us who hang by the thinnest thread in God’s favor. The wages of sin is death!”

  Most if not all of the congregation swiveled in their pews to get a look at Bonnie’s girls. Anyone who didn’t know who they were would have seen nothing more than a row of modestly-dressed women with perhaps too much rouge. They shrank under the scrutiny of the congregation, even though most of the faces that watched them wore confused or pitying expressions. A few wore looks of disgust and condemnation, though, and that was enough.

  George sat straighter, ready to defend Bonnie’s girls’ right to attend church, but Robbins grabbed for the congregation’s attention before he could say a thing.

  “You are all sinners,” he accused them. “Not a one of you is any better than those harlots.”

  It was too much to hope that Robbins would absolve or raise up the girls as he began his new attack. He left them drooping and sniffling in their back row as he went on with his tirade.

  “All of our souls are as black as coal. It is only through God’s grace that we are saved. And He will not save all of us.”

  “No!” one of the men who had glared at the girls shouted.

  Robbins fed off of the interruption. “God saves only those who follow Him. He plucks His faithful from the depths of the pit.”

  “Amen!” someone else called out.

  “He scoops up those who fear His name out of the flames. He raises up those who become like slaves to Him.”

  “Like slaves to him!” someone shouted.

  “Lord, save us from the pit, we beseech Thee.” Robbins lifted his hands, appealing to the rafters. “Save your humble sinners, Lord.”

  “Save us,” another congregant called out.

  “We come to you humble and wretched, Lord. Save us!” Robbins cried out.

  “Halleluiah!” a woman shouted, then stood.

  “Halleluiah, amen!” another added.

  Before George knew it, a good part of the church was on their feet, shouting and raising their arms and calling out for salvation. His gut twisted. He couldn’t criticize them for their faith or for being moved by the spirit, but neither could he shake the feeling that Robbins had another motive entirely in whipping the congregation into a passion.

  “I’ve been to revivals before,” Holly whispered, louder as the congregation burst into a spontaneous hymn, “but this is nothing like those.”

  “Something’s not right about it,” George agreed.

  “Praise is wonderful when it is given freely because of God’s glory, but this feels more like a snake oil show,” Holly went on.

  “Should I put a stop to it?”

  For the first time, Holly looked squarely at him. Her eyes were wide, and just a bit frightened. “How can you without interfering with the people who are genuinely moved?”

  George let out an impatient breath. “I can’t. You’re right. We’ll just have to sit here and wait it out.”

  He settled back in his seat, but nothing about his posture was easy or accepting. Without thinking too hard about it, he reached for Holly’s hand and squeezed it as his congregation got carried away on a wave of fire and brimstone.

  Holly felt stunned and wrung out by the time Robbins’s long, fiery sermon finished. It had taken her right back to those childhood Sundays, sitting in the thrall of Rev. Tavernier, terrified. Part of her wanted to find it hard to believe, hard to accept that good people could be so carried away by a dark and pointed sermon. The rest of her knew all too well how intoxicating a passionate message could be, how desperately good people wanted to feel the workings of the Holy Spirit in their hearts. Even if the message came at someone else’s expense.

  She had been sick with worry when the women who worked for Bonnie Cole had quietly gotten up and slinked out before the service was over. And Bonnie had been so filled with gratitude the other day when she explained over tea at the hotel how important it was for them that George allowed them to attend church in spite of their profession. Now Holly was desperately anxious that the girls would be the target of unkind feelings as a result of the sermon.

  “I’ve never seen anything like that,” Emma Meyers said after the service was finally over, as she, Katie, Eden, and Holly helped set up the church’s weekly potluck lunch in the gymnasium of the school, just across the meadow from the church.

  Katie laughed. “I have. We had a priest back in County Sligo, in Ireland, who had read all about the revivals going on in America an
d attempted to pepper up his homilies. They were brutal to sit through.”

  “Not everyone thought Robbins’s sermon was brutal,” Holly said, sad about the whole thing.

  Eden merely shrugged, setting up the potluck with one hand while she carried her baby on her other hip. “Folks need a little stirring up now and then. They’ll get carried away for a while, then they’ll get tired of being so worked up all the time and settle down.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Holly sighed.

  “I’m always right,” Eden added with a wink. “And things always settle down and work themselves out in the end.” She gave Holly a final, meaningful look, then marched over to another table to help with efforts there.

  Holly lowered her head, feeling the flush come to her face. She hadn’t been that obvious about her unease with George. Then again, Eden had a special kind of perception that came from an unusual life. Plus, they were friends. There was nothing she could do about it now, though, but continue to work setting out dishes for the potluck and preparing to feed George’s congregation.

  “So has Two Spots said whether the tribe will be able to stay up near Branson Creek for the winter?” Emma asked Katie as the three of them finished up their table.

  Holly blinked at the apparent jumble of words.

  Katie must have seen her confusion. “Emma’s husband, Dean, and my husband, Aiden, are the Indian agents for the area,” she explained. “They work primarily with the Cheyenne. We’ve been friends with some of them for, oh, a long, long time.” The light in her eyes hinted that it was a long, long story as well.

  “Things haven’t been easy for the Cheyenne.” Emma picked up the explanation. “This is technically their land. We are the interlopers.”

  “Aye, but there’s nothing we can do about that now,” Katie sighed, her accent growing thicker for a moment.

  Emma hummed in agreement. “Dean and Aiden do their best to fight for the Cheyenne’s rights, but the government isn’t particularly open to the idea that they have every right to inhabit the land of their forefathers the way they see fit.”