by Noelle Adams
Retreat
Balm in Gilead: Book Three
Noelle Adams
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 by Noelle Adams. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means.
Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Epilogue
Excerpt from Christmas with a Prince
About Noelle Adams
One
Cecily Evans had managed the Balm in Gilead Center for Rest for eight years, and she’d owned it on her own for three, ever since her original partner retired. She had enough experience now to know when she was about to get dumped.
Bob was the pastor of a large church in Raleigh, and he’d been holding his leadership retreats at Balm in Gilead since they’d first opened their doors. He’d been one of the first people to take a chance on a newly opened spiritual and physical rest center—something no one had ever heard of—and she’d gone out of her way to show her appreciation by always giving him his choice of April weeks for his retreat and giving him a substantial discount on the rooms no matter how booked they were.
But after all these years, he was about to dump her. She could hear it in his voice.
She made a point of settling her features into her normal, tranquil expression—even though their conversation was on the phone and he couldn’t see her—because she didn’t want even a trace of her rising emotions to be heard in her voice.
“I do understand that your leadership retreat is still six months away,” she said, smiling intentionally at her empty office so her tone would reflect it. “But we’re booked solid a year in advance now since we were featured on Faith and Fabulousness a few months ago, and I just need to confirm your reservation.”
Bob hemmed and hawed on the other end of the call, obviously uncomfortable and not wanting to provide the needed confirmation.
The tense feeling got heavier in her chest. “You’ve come every year since we’ve been open, but I don’t like to assume your reservation is confirmed. If you’re rethinking it this year…”
“We’re just looking at other options. You know how people are. Always finding something to complain about.”
Cecily did know how people were, but she couldn’t help but wonder what the specific complaints were about Balm in Gilead. If she’d known, she would have tried to address them.
“And it’s awfully expensive,” Bob added.
“I’m already giving you a discount because you’ve been so loyal to us from the beginning. I can’t reduce the price any more and still meet expenses.”
“I know. I know. We’re just looking at other options.” He sounded like he thought she would be offended.
She wasn’t offended. This was a business, after all.
But she was a little bit sad.
She’d gone out of her way to remain loyal to Bob and his church because they’d always been loyal to her.
“I completely understand,” she said after taking a moment to ensure none of her emotional response was evident in her voice. “I just need to know one way or the other whether to confirm your reservation. If you can let me know by the end of week?”
Bob agreed, sounding relieved at the reprieve from the final decision.
Cecily hung up and stared at her computer screen, on which was displayed her perfectly organized email inbox. She breathed a few times, talking herself down from the irrational feeling of betrayal.
It was silly. Bob could make whatever decisions were best for him and his church. It wasn’t personal.
It wasn’t personal.
And just because she’d made financial sacrifices to make sure she could offer Bob the lowest rates possible for his retreat didn’t mean he’d necessarily take his leadership team to Balm in Gilead every year.
When he canceled—and she knew now he would—the empty slot in her schedule would be filled in less than a day. She had a waiting list since the center had gotten so much good press after being featured on an incredibly popular Christian blog.
It wasn’t the loss of business that bothered Cecily.
She shook off the feeling of loss and pulled up Facebook on her computer, hoping for something to distract her.
The first thing she saw was a picture her sister, Mercy, had posted of her and her husband on their vacation to Hawaii.
Their father had died in his sixties, when the girls had been in college, and their mother had died a couple of years ago. So Mercy was all Cecily had left of a family. For a long time both the sisters had been single, so they’d always traveled together. They were just a year apart, and they’d always been close. But a year ago—at thirty-five—Mercy had gotten married, so Cecily had lost her vacation partner.
She was happy for her sister—of course she was—but it was hard not to feel a very small sense of loss.
Cecily was thirty-seven and single. She was happy with her life and professionally successful. It had been nice to have someone to go on vacations with, but naturally Mercy would now take vacations with her husband.
Cecily scrolled through her Facebook feed, looking at pictures and reading posts from her friends. Nearly all of them had spouses and families, people who walked through life with them.
Cecily had a lot of friends—from college, from graduate school, from seminary, from professional circles, from the local church she attended. But they all had their own lives, and she was rather isolated on the Outer Banks, which was made up of very small towns and mostly populated by tourists and weekenders.
Living here full time as a single, professional woman didn’t make a social life easy.
She hadn’t dated in two years.
If she wanted to have dinner with a friend, she had to either drive at least two hours or else plan well in advance so they could make arrangements for their families.
She’d read research study after research study about how spending time on social media made people feel lonelier and more discontent than they otherwise would have felt, and she realized that effect was happening to her at the moment.
So she closed down Facebook and breathed deeply, telling herself truths about her life rather than listening to those sneaky lies that kept whispering she was alone and she didn’t really matter to anyone.
When her phone rang, she was happy to see it was Kara, one of the few single women who lived in the area and whom she could legitimately call a friend.
“Hi, Kara,” she said, smiling as she picked up the phone.
“Cecily! It’s so good to talk to you. How are you doing?” Kara’s voice was cheerful, bubbly, excited—as it always was—and it immediately made Cecily feel better.
Kara had been living in Charlotte, but a few months ago she’d moved to the Outer Banks to live with her aging parents. She didn’t currently have a job, but she spent a lot of time working on her lifestyle blog, which seemed to be modeled after Faith and Fabulousness and which Cecily knew Kara had big ambitions for. She was just a couple of years younger than Cecily, and Kara had made a point of getting to know her.
Cecily had appreciated it.
They chatted for a few minutes, and then Kara asked about scheduling a photo shoot for an article she was writing on Balm in Gilead. Cecily didn’t normally let random bloggers get privileged access to the center, but Kara was a frie
nd and so she was making an exception.
They left the date open for sometime next week, and Kara said she’d let her know once she’d talked to the photographer she was going to use.
It was all perfectly amicable—nothing unusual or surprising in the conversation.
“Fabulous!” Kara exclaimed. “You’re awesome, absolutely incredible. You know that, don’t you?”
Cecily chuckled. “Is there any good way to answer that question?”
“You don’t have to answer. I just have to say it. So thank you so much, and I’ll call you as soon as I know something.”
Cecily said goodbye and put down her phone, feeling that something had been off about the conversation. There hadn’t been anything obvious, but she felt uncomfortable, slightly rattled, disturbed in the way she was when she’d intuited unpleasant undercurrents but hadn’t yet processed them enough to identify.
She sat for a minute, thinking over everything that had been said and what might have been implied. Then she gave her head a firm shake, brushing off the discomfort.
She was probably just imagining it.
Standing up, she smoothed down her pale blue shirtdress and walked out of her office. Zeke was cleaning the pool this morning, so she headed outside to the back of the building.
She found him bending over at the edge of the pool with a net, trying to fish out a few stray leaves. Today he wore a pair of beat-up camouflage trousers and a bright purple T-shirt.
The shirt was a little tight, and her eyes focused unconsciously on the size of his biceps beneath his sleeves and the impressive muscle development of his abdomen, which she could clearly see beneath the stretched fabric.
Despite his hideous taste in clothes, he had a very fine body. No doubt about that. It was big and strong and hard and masculine.
For a moment Cecily had trouble lifting her eyes to his face.
When she did, he was peering at her with startlingly blue eyes above his unkempt beard. He didn’t say anything, but he was clearly waiting for her to speak.
She cleared her throat, telling herself to get it together.
This was Zeke. Zeke. He worked for her.
And even if he didn’t, he was romantically unavailable in every way.
She really couldn’t be ogling his body.
When several seconds had passed and she hadn’t yet found her voice, Zeke’s thick, dark eyebrows arched inquisitively. “Something wrong?”
“Not at all,” she said quickly, pleased when her voice sounded mostly cool, slightly prim. Her regular voice. “Of course not.”
“What do you want then?”
The tone and words would have been rude had any of her other employees used them, but with Zeke it was just everyday conversation. “I wanted to tell you that Kara is arranging for a photo shoot next week, so we’ll need to have the place in great shape. Do you think you’ll have the garden ready by then?”
Zeke scowled.
“If you need extra help, we can hire—”
“No!”
Cecily lifted her eyebrows since his voice had been rougher than normal.
“I don’t need extra help,” he muttered in a moderated tone.
Zeke was responsible for nearly all the upkeep of the building and grounds for Balm in Gilead. He’d been working for her since the center opened. He supervised the housekeeping staff, and he maintained most of the outdoor areas himself, only bringing in extra hands a few times a year for the big jobs.
“All right. I’m sure everything will be perfect. Kara said…” When she saw Zeke scowl again—a more intentional scowl than his typical bad-tempered expression—she trailed off. After a moment she asked, “Do you have a problem with the photo shoot?”
He frowned.
Reading his expression and understanding that he didn’t care about the photo shoot, she tried again. “Do you have a problem with Kara?”
He snarled, his lip curling up and causing one side of his beard to lift.
That was it then. He didn’t like Kara.
“What is your issue with Kara?” she asked, brushing a few stray hairs back into her low bun.
Zeke didn’t answer. He’d leaned over the pool again and was fishing out the last leaf with his net.
Cecily found herself staring at his tight butt beneath his trousers before she realized what she was doing. Then she immediately averted her gaze. “Zeke, Kara is my friend.”
He snarled again, this time paired with a low sound in his throat, almost like a growl.
For no good reason Cecily was feeling rattled again. Zeke would never be an easy man or an easy employee, but she knew him well by now. They’d worked together for years. She could usually predict his moods, his opinions, which issues were likely to get under his skin.
She’d never imagined he’d care anything at all about her friendship with Kara. “She is my friend. Why on earth would you think she shouldn’t be?”
He didn’t answer, of course. He just rolled his eyes at her before pulling the net out of the water.
“Don’t give me that look,” Cecily said, an edge to her voice that was very rarely there. “Believe it or not, I’m not overrun with friends, so I’m not going to—”
“You have plenty of friends,” Zeke snapped, straightening up and facing her directly. “You don’t need her to pretend to be a friend to you.”
Cecily blinked, shocked by both his directness and his uncharacteristic verbosity. “She’s not pretending to be my friend. She actually is.”
“She’s using you.” His eyes were smoldering, and his jaw was clenched beneath his beard. He was always grumpy and never smiled, but she’d rarely seen him so intense about anything.
His intensity was creating jitters in her belly, her chest, that she had absolutely no idea what to do with.
She didn’t react to Zeke this way.
She just didn’t.
“That’s ridiculous,” she replied, managing to maintain the calm she always prided herself on. “Why would she be using me?”
“To get something. People like her always do.”
Cecily actually knew what he was referring to. Kara was one of those people pleasers who occasionally drifted toward brownnosing. Cecily had never been like that herself. But that didn’t mean Kara was a bad person or untrustworthy. “She would have no reason to use me. She might not be perfect, but nobody is. She’s my friend.”
Zeke made another low growl.
Cecily tried very hard not to shiver at the sound of it. What on earth was wrong with her today, responding to Zeke in that way?
She took a deep breath and blew it out. Then she squared her shoulders and said calmly, “Regardless of what you believe, Kara is my friend. I’m not going to dump her because you’ve developed this irrational antipathy toward her.”
Zeke snarled.
“So you’ll have the building and grounds ready for the photo shoot next week? It will probably be Wednesday or Thursday.”
He snarled again but with a slight inclination of his head.
“Very good. Thank you.”
She turned on her heel and walked away from him, wondering why her heart was racing and her breath was coming out in little pants. Her cheeks were flushed, and they seemed to get even hotter as she became aware of them.
This was absurd.
He was Zeke.
Just Zeke.
He wasn’t the kind of man that appealed to her, the kind that was likely to get her blood pumping this way. He was ornery and frustrating and hardly ever talked. He wasn’t even attractive.
Okay, that last part wasn’t true. He had a little something going in the looks department, despite his horrible clothes and lumberjack beard. She’d been noticing it more and more often over the past year, although she always tried to push away the thought immediately. Zeke was definitely attractive.
But still…
Most of the time, she didn’t even really like him.
His wife had died several years ago, just befo
re he’d started working for Cecily, and he’d never gotten over the loss. He’d retreated from the world completely, and he wasn’t going to come back.
Not for anyone.
Not for her.
And she wouldn’t even want him to.
Their working relationship was good. She wasn’t sure how Balm in Gilead would survive without him.
That meant she overlooked his bad attitude most of the time.
And that also meant she couldn’t start seeing him in any other way.
***
That evening, Cecily was still feeling a little blah and a little rattled, so she closed down her work email earlier than usual and took a long, hot bath with a glass of white wine.
She was feeling better afterward as she pulled on a tank top and a pair of pale blue cotton pajama pants. She glanced at her phone since she’d heard the email notification chime a couple of times, and when she saw whom the emails were from, she pulled them up.
The first one was from Vivian Harper, who had been a guest at Balm in Gilead a few months ago and whose story on Faith and Fabulousness had led to the center’s recent burst of popularity. Vivian’s note was short and friendly. She’d recently gotten married to her business partner, Jeff, and they were checking in to see if she had room for them to have a staff retreat at Balm in Gilead next year.
Cecily smiled, feeling a tension in her chest relax a bit at this evidence of appreciation and loyalty.
The other email was from Daniel Duncan, who was a pastor in a small town church in the mountains of North Carolina. He and his wife had visited Balm in Gilead a few months ago for a weekend away, and he was wondering if she’d have any interest in doing a workshop on spiritual rest at his church.
Cecily was asked to do talks and workshops fairly regularly, but she usually turned them down. She didn’t like to travel all the time, and she didn’t like to commit to activities that might distract her from her most important work here at the center.
But she knew from experience that getting away, trying something different, was a good way to break her out of her current mood. Plus she really liked Daniel and his wife, and a month from now would be peak time for the leaves in the mountains.