“What?” Jacob had been prepared for Digby to say just about anything at this meeting, but that was a surprise.
“It’s the only way your recent behavior adds up. The Larkeys have always attended Good Shepherd. Everybody knows that. From what I’ve heard, Cora Larkey is one of their biggest financial supporters, and I know for a fact she has no intention of moving any of that support to Pine Valley Community. And Pastor Michaelson’s getting mighty close to his retirement, and he’s had a terrible time getting over that flu he had.” Digby sat back in his chair and steepled his fingers in front of his stomach with an air of satisfaction. “That’s why you skipped out on your responsibilities here to help him out at that Larkey wedding. And of course, that’s the reason you don’t support our church building a nice fellowship hall. You’re planning to jump ship.”
A hubbub of alarmed voices broke out around the conference table.
“Is that true?”
“Are you leaving us to preach for Good Shepherd?”
“Of course not,” Jacob assured the agitated men.
“Oh no?” Digby leveled a challenging glare across the table. “Why else would you be spending so much time out at Lark Hill hovering over that woman Adam Larkey dumped at the altar? It’s the only explanation I can think of that makes sense.”
“It’s not the only one I can think of.” Abel Whitlock sounded amused, and Jacob shot him an exasperated look.
Too late. Digby raised his eyebrows. “I hope you’re not suggesting that the pastor of our church has a romantic interest in an unmarried mother. Especially not one who’s supposedly planning to marry another man. That’s just about the only thing I can think of worse than the explanation I’ve already come up with.”
Heads swiveled in Jacob’s direction, waiting for his denial. All except for Abel, who’d turned brick red and looked like he wished he’d stayed home and milked his cow.
Jacob tried to think of a way to balance discretion and truth in his response. “Natalie’s engagement to Adam Larkey didn’t work out,” he said finally.
He hadn’t denied it. The men shifted uncomfortably in their chairs and looked at each other. Nobody seemed to know what to say.
“This,” Digby pronounced solemnly, “is precisely why no minister should be unmarried. My nephew, for instance, made it a point to find a suitable young woman before he graduated from seminary. His future congregation will never have to deal with a scandal like this.”
“Don’t exaggerate, Digby.” Andrew Carlton spoke with the authority of a man who managed teenagers for a living. “It’s not like Jacob had a child out of wedlock himself.” He chuckled drily. “Now that would be a scandal.”
The room went suddenly very still. Half the men in the room, the ones who knew about Jacob’s past, exchanged significant glances. Digby straightened up in his chair, suddenly alert, and Carlton looked from one man to another, his brow furrowed.
“What? Is there something I don’t know about?”
Oh brother. Might as well get this over with. “Apparently there is, Andrew. Before I became a Christian, my college girlfriend and I gave a baby up for adoption.”
“Which doesn’t matter worth a hill of beans to us right now,” Abel spoke up from his corner.
“Well, of course, you’d say that, Whitlock, since your own wife—”
“I’d stop right there if I were you, Markham.” Abel’s voice was quiet, almost lazy, but there was an unmistakable thread of steel in it.
Digby started to speak, then took another look at Abel and thought better of it. He turned back to Jacob. “Well, this explains the attachment you seem to have to Natalie Davis. Birds of a feather, I suppose.”
“But we’re all birds, Digby,” Carlton put in, casting an apologetic look toward Jacob. “None of us are perfect, and we’ve certainly all made our share of mistakes.”
“And some of us seem determined to keep right on making them, apparently.” When the principal tried to interrupt him, Digby waved an impatient hand. “No, Andrew, it’s time for us to speak bluntly. I didn’t hear Stone denying that he’s got a personal interest in this Davis woman.”
“Now, now. The preacher has a right to his personal life, Digby,” Jack Lifsey put in. “And anyhow, you were just saying yourself that you didn’t hold with bachelor ministers.”
“Yes, but in this case, the woman is completely unsuitable. No, Andrew, don’t shush me. You finally want to find yourself a girl and get married, Stone? Fine. We’re all for it. There are plenty of decent women in Pine Valley for you to choose from. A fact you ought to know since our wives have pretty much introduced you to every single one of them over the past few years. You’ve never shown the slightest interest, and now you’re chasing after a woman like Natalie Davis? Of course, now that I know your own history, I’m a lot less surprised.”
“You know, you’re stomping around on some mighty thin ice, Digby.” Abel studied his fingernails. “Take it from me, a man’s words can get him into a peck of trouble, if he’s not careful. Even a preacher has his limits.”
Jacob realized his fists were clenched in his lap, and he forced himself to relax them. Lord, help me keep my cool.
“Stone’s the one who’d better be careful. This board has its limits, too.”
“Digby—” Several voices protested at once. The banker shook his head stubbornly.
“This man has given us more than enough trouble already. We wouldn’t be looking at so much fund-raising now if he hadn’t spent the last few years throwing away all our money on coffee shops and prison outreaches and mission trips to all sorts of nasty places. And now he’s taking up with a woman like that? It’s shameful, is what it is. I say let Good Shepherd have him. If we don’t draw a line now, where’s it going to end?”
“I can answer that question.” Jacob stood. He’d had enough. More than enough. “It’s going to end right here. Right now. You’ll find my resignation in your in-boxes tomorrow morning.” He left the room before any of them recovered enough to speak.
In fact, he was almost out of the church before Abel Whitlock caught up with him. “Whoa, there.” He turned to face the lanky farmer, who scanned his face quickly. Abel nodded slowly. “All right then. It wasn’t just temper. No point in my asking you if you meant what you said back there. I can see plain enough that you did.”
“Every word.”
“If I’d kept my trap shut, it might not have come to this. I’m sorry, Jacob. You know me—I’m always sticking my foot in my mouth.”
Abel looked sincerely troubled, and Jacob clapped his friend on the back. “Don’t worry about it. It was going to have to be dealt with sooner or later. Might as well get it over with.”
“So she’s something special to you, is she? This Natalie?”
“She is.” Jacob nodded, and in spite of everything, he could feel the grin spreading across his face. “She really is.”
“Well, that’ll make it a mite easier to see you go, I reckon. For some of us, anyway. But all the same, I’d count it as a personal favor if you wouldn’t let on that I had anything to do with it. Folks around here are right fond of you, Digby Markham notwithstanding. Including my Emily.” Abel tilted his head toward the conference room, where a rumble of raised voices could be heard. “And she’s not the only one. I imagine Digby’s catching it right about now.”
Jacob chuckled. Now that his decision had finally been made, his heart was feeling lighter than it had in a long time. “To be honest, I hope he is.” He offered Abel his hand. “Thanks for giving me the heads-up about this meeting, Whitlock. I appreciate it.”
Abel accepted the handshake with a firm grip and a nod. As Jacob followed his friend through the door, he automatically paused to give it the extra tug it always required to shut all the way.
He stood there for a minute, his hand resting on the familiar dented handle. Then he took a deep breath, tur
ned away from the church and headed for his truck.
* * *
The blueberries were ripening too fast.
Natalie stripped the heavy twig of its dusky blueberries and moved quickly on. She’d only visited half a dozen bushes, and her pail was already brimming. Even worse, the ground was studded with overripe fruit. She wasn’t keeping up.
There had to be a more efficient way to do this, but she had no idea what it might be. Plucking each berry off its stem individually was taking forever. No wonder blueberries were so stinking expensive in the grocery store. She sure hoped Bailey was charging a mint for these.
She edged around the large bush picking as quickly as she could, Ethan contentedly snuggled in the baby sling she’d wrapped around her middle. Ever since she’d cut her deal with Bailey Quinn, Natalie had been praying that God would bless these bushes.
Well, he’d definitely answered.
She stopped and looked around. Bushes stretched in every direction, and every branch sagged with berries. As best she could tell, most of the unripe ones would turn blue at roughly the same time.
Soon.
She had no idea what she was going to do about that, not with a baby to look after and her part-time job to go to. Even if she picked twenty-four hours a day, she didn’t think she could get even half the berries off the bushes before they spoiled.
And Bailey was counting on these berries. She’d sent some samples to restaurants, and she’d shown Natalie the stack of orders that had come back. She couldn’t disappoint Bailey. Not to mention that Natalie needed every penny of the money Bailey would pay her.
She couldn’t stay at Lark Hill much longer, not now that she knew Adam wasn’t coming back. If she returned to Atlanta, she’d need the money for the deposit on that studio apartment. Then again... She wondered what the going rent was in Pine Valley. If she stayed...
If she stayed. Every time those words came into her mind, which was frequently, her heart gave a weird little lurch.
Her heart had been doing all kinds of strange things ever since the conversation she’d had with Jacob. She’d been trying to think it over, to pray, like she’d promised, but she hadn’t gotten very far.
She still couldn’t quite wrap her mind around what Jacob had said. The idea that a man like him, a minister no less, was even a little bit interested in a woman who got a case of the shudders every time she went inside a church... Well. It was kind of hard to believe.
But she wanted to believe it. She really did.
The problem was, she just didn’t see how it could work out, not unless something changed.
The goat suddenly bleated, and she jumped. She had absentmindedly left the blueberry field and wandered back up toward the farmhouse. Typical. Every time her mind revisited those moments in the church sanctuary, her feelings rose up in one big fluttering cloud, and her brain went on vacation.
Rufus had escaped again, and he wanted to see what she had in her pail. She offered him a couple of blueberries. He gobbled them up greedily, leaving a smear of purple juice on her fingers.
“What do you think? Should I stay, Rufus?” The goat blatted at her again, straining to get to the bucket she’d lifted out of range. He chewed on a fold of Ethan’s sling instead. Natalie took a step backward, and the goat snorted at her irritably.
“Natalie?”
She glanced in the direction of the house, and her heart went still.
Adam was standing in the side yard, his battered green knapsack on the ground beside his feet. An unfamiliar car was parked sideways in front of the house.
“Adam?” She stood there frozen. Beside her, Rufus tensed. His neck stretched in Adam’s direction, and his floppy ears twitched. Suddenly, the goat took off at a gallop, heading for Adam at full speed. “Rufus!”
“Hey, buddy! Looks like somebody is glad to see me.” Adam held one hand out. “No hard feelings about me taking off, right?”
Rufus never slowed down. He lowered his head and butted Adam squarely in the stomach, knocking him flat onto the ground.
“Adam! Are you all right? Rufus! Bad goat!” Pressing Ethan against her, Natalie set down her pail and hurried as quickly as she could to where Adam lay prone in the grass, coughing and gasping for air. Rufus pranced around him, pawing the earth and snorting.
“Wow.” Adam levered himself up on one elbow and watched Rufus uneasily. “That dude holds a serious grudge.”
Natalie stood over him, looking down at the man she’d almost married. His light brown hair was tousled and long. He was wearing some sort of twine bracelet tied around his wrist and a mud-colored T-shirt that said Live Life Lazy. He stared up at her, his hazel eyes round with surprise. His lips were chapped, and the end of his nose was a delicate pink.
He looked about twelve years old.
His face is too soft, Natalie thought. Jacob’s was different. Not hard exactly, but firmer and stronger somehow, even with those dimples of his.
Adam clambered to his feet and brushed off his cargo shorts. Ethan shifted and whimpered against her, and Adam took an involuntary step back. Then he glanced at Natalie with an embarrassed expression.
“That the little guy?”
“Yes, this is Ethan.” Natalie felt a strange reluctance, but she carefully folded back the fabric of the sling so that Adam could see the baby’s face. Ethan blinked his eyes and worked his mouth before falling back to sleep. With the sunlight on his round cheek, and his wisps of baby-fine hair standing out like a halo, he looked adorable. Natalie’s heart swelled with love and pride.
Adam craned over to peek at the infant, but he didn’t move closer. “Wow. He’s really tiny.” Rufus gave a warning snort, and Adam took another uneasy step backward. “Hey, Nat, you got anything to eat in the house? I’m starving.”
Tiny. That was Adam’s only reaction to his son? Natalie’s mind slipped back to Jacob rocking Ethan in the hospital, his tired face full of wonder as he looked at the sleeping newborn.
She blinked and came back to the present. “Sure, there’s food. Come on inside. Not you,” she added as Rufus made a move to follow them. The goat gave her one last, disgusted look, then trotted off to gobble up the berries in her abandoned pail.
In the kitchen, she settled Ethan in his bouncy seat while Adam rummaged through the refrigerator. He tossed containers of food on the table, jerking open drawers until he found a fork. He wiped his nose on his shirtsleeve and dropped his lanky frame into a chair.
He cracked open the plastic tub of chicken salad and began eating directly out of the full container. Natalie felt a flash of annoyance. Adam did things like that. Drank out of the milk cartons, left his trash lying around. He didn’t just look like a kid; he acted like one, too.
A confusion of emotions jostled around in Natalie’s stomach as she pulled out a chair and sat across the table from him. She didn’t know what to think, and she definitely didn’t have a clue how to feel right now.
“This stuff is really good. I’ve been sick, so I’ve been off my chow for a while. I’m just now starting to get my appetite back.” That explained the runny nose and the stuffy sound to his voice. Natalie made a mental note to put any leftover chicken salad into the trash. “I’ve gotta say, the kitchen sure looks better than the way I left it. Sorry about that, by the way.”
“I thought you weren’t coming back.” The words came out before she could stop them.
Adam paused in midchew. He glanced at her, then refocused on digging around in the container with his fork. “I wasn’t.”
“What changed your mind?”
Adam dropped his fork into the salad and pushed the plastic tub away. “Nana Cora. After that park ranger found me on the trail, I figured I might as well come back and check on Nana. You know, see how she was doing.” He darted another quick glance up at Natalie’s face as he spoke, probably to see if she was buying his explan
ation. She wasn’t. She figured Adam’s visit to Cora had a lot more to do with Adam’s finances than his grandmother’s health. “She’s been sick, and she wasn’t much in the mood for company, but before I left she made me promise to come out here and see you and, you know...” Adam nodded in Ethan’s direction. “Him. Make sure you have everything you need.” Adam’s expression brightened a little. “Which, from the look of things, you do.”
No thanks to you, Natalie added silently. “How is Cora doing? Last time I spoke to her, she was getting over the flu.”
“Better. She’s kind of in a wad, though, over you getting the church involved in family problems. She says she told you that wasn’t a good idea, but you went ahead and did it anyhow.”
Natalie felt a pang of guilt, but then straightened her shoulders and pushed it aside. This wasn’t her fault. “If you’d come back when you’d said you would, or answered any of my texts, I wouldn’t have had to ask the minister to find you, Adam.”
“Yeah, well.” Adam shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “That wasn’t the part she was so upset about. She was mad because some guy called and got on her case about the preacher having to pay for your food and the baby’s stuff.”
Natalie stood up so fast that the legs of her chair screeched against the linoleum. Ethan startled in his bouncy seat and set up a thin wail of protest. “What?”
“Wow, Nat. Calm down, okay? She’s already sent the dude a check, so it’s all taken care of. But she made it pretty clear that’s the last check she’s planning to write. For either one of us.”
Natalie gathered up her crying son then and sank back into her chair. She pressed Ethan against her, soothing him, and refocused her attention on Adam. Oddly, he didn’t really seem that concerned. In fact, he looked more relaxed than she’d seen him since she told him about the baby. “How are you going to manage?”
“I’m getting by.”
“How?”
“Uh.” Adam glanced down at the table. “Well. You know.”
“Oh.” Natalie nodded slowly, remembering the unfamiliar car out front. Three guesses who that belonged to. “You met a woman.”
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