Unexpected Son

by Marisa Carroll

  * * *

  “I LIKE THAT young man,” Alyssa said softly, watching as Michael Kenton headed toward the door. After it closed behind him, she turned to her husband. “I like him very much.”

  Edward was still frowning as he adjusted the plastic covering over the big green car. “We don’t know anything about him.”

  Alyssa leaned both hands against the high fender. “It’s not like you to prejudge someone, Edward.”

  He shrugged. “But it is like you to pick up strays.”

  She was quiet for a moment. She couldn’t deny that statement. Edward knew as well as she did that it was true. A fleeting image of Liza’s husband, Cliff Forrester, as he’d been years ago when he first came to Tyler—alone, friendless, hurting inside—skittered across her mind’s eye. She could no more have turned her back on him than she could have ignored an injured puppy or kitten on her doorstep. She felt the same way about Michael Kenton, although she was certain he wouldn’t thank her for it.

  “I’m not judging him, Lyssa,” Edward said when she didn’t answer. “I’m only saying it would be prudent to remember where he’s been.”

  “I haven’t forgotten that. I’m also aware that his childhood couldn’t have been a happy one.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Oh, bits and pieces of his background that he’s told to Sarah Fleming and Cece passed on to me. Liza was very impressed with him, by the way,” she added, hoping to blunt his arguments. “And he was very patient with the girls when they were pestering him that day last week.”

  Edward wasn’t about to be sidetracked by the fact that Michael Kenton was good with children. “A lot of people have had less-than-idyllic childhoods. That doesn’t excuse his committing a crime.”

  Alyssa stiffened. “You mean you would have objected to having Michael Kenton join us for Thanksgiving because of something that happened years ago?”

  Edward reached out and touched her cheek. “No, Lyssa. I’m only saying I think we should be cautious of Michael Kenton because of what he’s hiding from us in the here and now.”

  * * *

  THERE WAS A MAN in her kitchen.

  It seemed odd—strange, somehow. There hadn’t been anyone to help her with dinner preparations or cleaning up afterward since Eric died. And even then they had lived in this house for such a short time before the accident that it had always seemed like hers alone.

  And Michael Kenton was definitely a man who seemed out of place in a kitchen. Not because he didn’t know one end of a saucepan from another. He did, and he moved with smooth efficiency and a peculiar masculine grace from one task to the next. But it was as though eating, and the preparation of food, were for him necessary evils, not the soothing, satisfying routines they had always been for her. Nurturing, life-affirming rituals, her father called them—a universal language of love and sharing.

  She was a little bit surprised that Michael had accepted her invitation to help in the preparations of their Thanksgiving dinner. But he had, and she was grateful for the company. More than grateful. Pleased and excited. Aroused. She cut that thought off short, but the truth was she hadn’t been able to get Michael Kenton completely out of her mind since the night of the high-school-awards ceremony. The night he’d kissed her.

  And now he was here, standing beside her at the sink, cleaning celery and carrots for the relish plate.

  Sleet beat against the glass, glazing the panes with a translucent layer of ice. The bad weather was expected to last only a few hours, according to the National Weather Service. A warm front was moving up from the south and the sleet would turn to rain before nightfall. But Sarah worried anyway. A lot of her congregation would be on the move today, coming and going to and from family dinners all over the state. It would be dangerous driving. She said a quick, silent prayer for the safety of everyone on the roads.

  “What a lousy day.” Michael’s thoughts were following the same path as her own. He leaned his fists on the edge of the sink and peered out the window.

  “I don’t mind snow,” Sarah said, aware of the sound of her own voice, overloud in the quiet room. “But I hate ice.” She wiped her hands on a towel and turned on the radio on the counter. The Detroit Lions were playing the Green Bay Packers. The sounds of a football game underscoring their words seemed less intimate, somehow, than music might have been. She didn’t change the station.

  “I should have gotten snow tires for the truck.” He stabbed a celery stalk into the dill-and-chive dip that she’d made from a recipe in the cookbook the Tyler Quilting Circle had published as a fund-raiser the year before. “This stuff’s pretty good.”

  “Thank you,” she said, laughing. “I know raw vegetables are good for you. But they’re better when they’ve got something cool and fattening sticking to them.”

  He tried a carrot next. “Real good.”

  She turned away from the window and opened the oven door, The aroma of roasted turkey filled the warm air. She didn’t want to talk about vegetables. She wanted to know why he’d brought up the subject of snow tires for his truck. A man who intended to head for Florida anytime soon wouldn’t be thinking about buying snow tires, would he?

  “Snow tires are an absolute necessity around here.” Sarah held her breath, waiting for what he would say next. She didn’t have the nerve to come right out and ask him if talking about snow tires meant he intended to spend the winter in Tyler. Spend the winter above her garage, where she could look out of her bedroom window and see the light beside his bed go off when she couldn’t sleep, or when she got up early in the morning while all of Tyler was still in bed, to find that he was awake before her.

  “Yeah, I’m beginning to realize that. I think I’ll stop by Carl’s Garage Monday and buy a set.”

  Sarah laid down the basting spoon and closed the oven door. “That’s a good idea.” It was all she could manage to say. He was going to stay. At least for a little while longer. And knowing him, as she had come to over these past weeks, she knew it would be the last thing he said about his plans for the future.

  Michael swirled a celery stick in the dip and raised it to her lips. “How much longer until that bird’s done? I’m starving.”

  Sarah was smiling when she looked up at him. She couldn’t help it. He was going to stay. He wasn’t going to leave her alone and lonely as she’d been for so long. “You’re not starving,” she scolded, not wanting him to see how much his words had affected her. The smile faded away as his knuckles brushed her mouth and her heart lurched into a rapid staccato beat.

  “I’m starving, Sarah,” he said, his voice as low and dark as the storm clouds overhead. She opened her mouth and he touched the celery to her lips. She swallowed convulsively, almost choking on the cool, tart taste of the dip. He was so close. She had only to take a half step forward, reach up on tiptoe and their mouths would meet. She remembered the last time he had kissed her, experienced again the chaos it had produced in her heart and in her mind. She wasn’t certain she was ready to deal with that kind of emotional upheaval again. She reached out and took the celery stick from his hand, careful not to touch him. Her heart was beating like a snare drum in her chest.

  “We’ll eat soon,” she said, heat coursing through her body, every inch of her alive to his nearness, every nerve ending alert to the anticipation of his touch. “Very soon.”

  * * *

  THEY SAT DOWN in the small, wainscoted dining room at a quarter past two. It had stopped sleeting a little while earlier, just as the weather forecast had predicted. Now it was raining, a soft, steady rain that pattered against the windows, melting the sheet of ice that had clung to the glass since morning.

  Sarah said grace with bowed head and folded hands, conscious even as she asked the Savior’s blessing on them and the food they ate of Michael’s dark gaze on her. They ate quietly for a while, only the
sounds of the radio, now tuned to an easy-listening channel, and the scrape of silver against china intruding on the silence of the dark November day.

  “More turkey?” Sarah asked when Michael had emptied his plate for the second time.

  “I couldn’t eat another bite.” He leaned back and rested his hand on his flat stomach. “Turkey and dressing and all the fixings. You’re too good a cook. I’m getting fat.”

  Sarah shook her head. “I’m not that good a cook. You just aren’t used to sitting down to real meals.”

  “You’re wrong. They feed you great on a lake freighter. The work’s hard and out in the weather, so they don’t stint on the mess.” She didn’t think they had fed him so well in prison, but he didn’t mention it and neither did she. He pushed his chair back from the table and stood when she did.

  “You’re going to have to force yourself to eat a few more bites. I baked a pumpkin pie. It wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without pumpkin pie. I thought we’d have dessert and coffee in the living room. Is that all right with you?”

  She thought for a moment he might refuse the invitation, but then he smiled. “I’d like that. I’ll help clear the table.”

  He didn’t smile often, and when he did it always unnerved her, dazzled her eyes and her heart, like the sun suddenly coming out from behind a dark cloud. “I can manage.”

  “I know. But I want to help.”

  She nodded. “The tray is right behind you on the sideboard.”

  He gathered up dishes and silverware, glasses and serving dishes still half-full of food. Sarah sighed when she looked at them. “We’re going to be eating leftovers all weekend. I hope you don’t mind. I just can’t seem to get the knack of putting only enough food for one or two people in bowls meant to feed a family.”

  “No problem.”

  By the time he’d stacked the last of the dirty dishes in the sink, she had cut the pie, added dollops of real whipped cream and poured the coffee. She carried the tray into the living room and placed it on the coffee table in front of the small, tiled fireplace that was one of the house’s chief charms. She turned on the stereo and joined him on the couch.

  Again they ate in silence, savoring the food and the strong black coffee. Sarah watched from the corner of her eye as Michael made a face and added cream to his for the second time.

  “I’m sorry. I learned how to make coffee from one of our lay teachers at the mission in São Roberto. And in Brazil this is how they drink it.”

  “I’ll get used to it,” he said with a shiver.

  Sarah laughed again. “No wonder you make your own coffee every morning.”

  A hint of color darkened his neck and cheeks. He was blushing. Sarah was entranced. She curled her feet up under her on the couch and sipped her coffee, watching his strong, angular features through the screen of her lashes. Behind her on the stereo, a latin samba was playing—an old record, a favorite from her childhood that she had bought with her own allowance money in Brazil and carried with her ever since.

  Michael set his cup and saucer on the tray and leaned back against the couch cushions, his legs crossed carelessly at the ankles. He was gentled, at peace, lulled by the food and the music and the warmth of the fire.

  Sarah relaxed as she finished her coffee. The sexual tension that had sizzled between them had dissipated as they ate, lulling her into a sense of contentment. This was what Thanksgiving had always meant to her—not so much the number of people gathered around her table for the meal, but the feelings behind it. Fellowship and the sharing of God’s bounty and blessing. If she were alone, she might have gone to her desk and jotted down those thoughts to be expanded into a sermon she could use on an appropriate Sunday. But not today. Today she wanted to stay right where she was.

  She set her cup aside to take up her quilting, a wall hanging in a riot of spring colors, appliqúed with appropriate liturgical symbols. She hoped to finish it in time to hang it on the bare wall behind the altar at Easter.

  She wondered how her congregation would react to seeing it for the first time. A few of the older members, raised in a more rigid evangelical framework, might think it not in the best of taste, but she was pretty sure the rest of the members would rejoice in its color and warmth. It was one of the good things about the denomination that Tyler Fellowship was affiliated with. They were too small and struggling to be hidebound. As far as possible they allowed their member churches to be autonomous, and their pastors were allowed to guide their flocks as they saw fit.

  “Don’t you ever just sit quietly and rest?” Michael asked.

  Sarah jumped, pricking herself slightly with her needle. She’d been lost in her stitching and her thoughts, and she hadn’t realized he was watching her. “I’ve never been able to sit still and do nothing.”

  “What have you been thinking about?”

  “I’ve been thinking that I’m a very lucky woman.”

  He reached out one big brown hand and ran his fingers over the soft cotton surface of the quilt. “The kind of thoughts you’re supposed to have on Thanksgiving?”

  She felt herself blushing. “I suppose so.” He made her feel gauche and naive. She sat a little straighter in her corner of the couch. She wasn’t ashamed of how she felt. She wasn’t going to let him make her think she was. “That’s what today’s for, after all, not just watching football games and overeating.”

  “And it might do me good to contemplate my own blessings a little more closely, eh?”

  “It wouldn’t hurt,” she said tartly, then caught the faint smile on his lips and in his eyes. He was teasing her again, and she’d risen to the bait as she always did. What was it about this man that kept her off balance so?

  The smile was gone. He was serious now. “How are you a lucky woman, Sarah Fleming?”

  “I have a home and friends and a job I love. What more can anyone ask?”

  “You could ask for love itself. A husband. A family. Children.”

  A sharp shaft of pain pierced her heart. She looked down at the quilt, refusing to meet his eye. Her stitches were becoming too large and ragged, she noticed. She was going to have to take them all out again.

  “Of course I want those things. I had love. My husband was a wonderful man. One of the things I mourned the most after his death was that we had no children.”

  “But your having a child wasn’t God’s will?” The angry edge was back in his voice. He hadn’t set foot in the church, except to do repairs, in the almost four weeks he’d been in Tyler. One or two of the congregation had brought it to her attention, but she had reminded them that attending services was not one of the restrictions put on the use of the garage apartment, and nothing further had been said.

  “Possibly. If it was, I accept it.”

  “You just folded your hands and bowed your head and said, ‘His will be done’?”

  “No,” she said, catching and holding his dark, shadowed gaze. “I cried and ranted and beat my fists against the wall. I hated God for a long time. I hated Him for taking my husband from me. I hated Him for leaving me alone to shepherd my flock. I hated what I was doing. I hated lying to everyone, saying that I was all right. That my faith was all right. It wasn’t. Some days it still isn’t.” She shut her mouth with a snap. She had never, never spoken to anyone of what she had just told Michael Kenton. “But those days don’t come very often anymore. And I’ve accepted that Eric is dead and I may never have children. But there are other children to love. And I can be happy that I have TylerTots and my youth groups to guide and counsel.”

  His fingers had stopped stroking the quilt. Slowly, carefully, he lifted his hand to her cheek. “I don’t believe in God,” he said quietly. “I never have.”

  “He exists,” she whispered, struggling to remain Reverend Sarah and not just plain Sarah, a woman who had not been touched like this by a man for
a long, long time. “He is real.”

  “I didn’t say He doesn’t exist. I just said I don’t believe in Him. But if I did, Sarah, it would be because I can see the truth of what you say in your eyes and in your voice.”

  “I—”

  “Shh, Sarah. Be quiet. I don’t want to talk theology. I don’t want to argue about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. I want to think about much more elemental, more human and ordinary things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like I am a man. And you, Sarah Fleming, are very much a woman.” He leaned closer, his lips tracing the path across her lips and cheeks that his fingers had blazed just moments before. She leaned into his kiss, and his mouth covered hers in a rush of fiery heat. There was nothing timid or shy about the contact. It was completely, totally sexual and exactly what she wanted from this man—to be a woman, desired and desiring, no more and no less. For this small space of time it didn’t matter that they were completely unsuited to each other. That he was a convicted criminal, a man whose past was as murky as his future was uncertain, a man who was openly skeptical of all she held most dear.

  Her quilting had fallen to the floor unnoticed. Michael pulled her into his arms and she went willingly, twining her arms around his neck, holding him as close and as tightly as he held her. He was the man she wanted. The man who made her feel whole and human, and female again, and nothing else mattered beyond that fact.

  He moved his hands to her breasts and her breath sifted out against his lips. His fingers moved to the buttons of her blouse, parted the fabric and slipped it off her shoulders. His mouth hovered just above the lace edge of her bra and his tongue flicked out to taste her skin, brand her with its heat and warmth. The passion that had simmered between them all day threatened to boil over again. Michael nuzzled the valley between her breasts, molded her with his hand, brushed his thumb tantalizingly over her pebbled nipple. He held her close against him, searching for the bra clasp between her shoulder blades, and undid it with long clever fingers, freeing her to spill into his waiting embrace.