Only the sound of claps and laughter ended the kiss. A little dazed, she looked around. The congregation surrounded them, applauding.
Her face heated, but her heart warmed too.
Everyone smiled. No-one looked to be judging.
Smiling back, she grabbed James’s hand. They bowed like two actors at the end of a performance.
Except it was no performance. The feeling in their kiss was real.
That’s when she knew God truly had healed her. The old Beth would have run and hidden in a cupboard at being the centre of attention this way.
“Perhaps that was a little more than Paul and Peter had in mind when they recommended a kiss of peace in the churches,” the smiling minister said. “Make sure you invite us to the wedding.”
James grinned and his grip on Beth’s hand tightened. “Let me do my own proposing, vicar!”
He tugged her hand and they ran to the open doors together, like two naughty children.
Outside, in the churchyard, he stopped under the golden glow of a lamp and wrapped his arms around her, drawing her close. Melting into him, tenderness and longing filled her.
No more resistance. No more running.
Her legs were too wobbly for her to run, and she didn’t want to. This was exactly where God wanted her to be, although she’d been too stupid and stubborn and afraid to realise it until now.
James gazed down into her eyes, so close his warm breath gently blew onto her lifted face. This time, she didn’t try to look away or hide. Meeting his steady gaze, she knew her love for him shone in her eyes.
The same emotion shone in his, way brighter than the lamplight, with an intensity that made her quiver.
Raising her hands to cup his face, she took a deep breath. It was her time to speak first, instead of hiding behind fear and waiting for James to speak.
“I love you, James.” She smiled, a little fuzzily, blinking back the tears that trembled on the edge of spilling over. Her heartbeat pulsed in her throat. “I love you more than staying safe. I’m not afraid of loving any more. I won’t run away this time.”
The happiness sweeping James’s face was enough blessing. He pulled her closer to his strong body with one arm, while his other hand lifted to gently stoke her hair back from her face. “Oh sweetheart, you don’t know how much I’ve longed to hear you say that. I love you too.”
Rocked by the joy pouring through her like a river, she lifted her face for his kiss. Instead, he pressed his fingers against her lips, and smiled as she kissed them instead.
“I want us to get married. I knew ten years ago I wanted to spend my life with you. But I want you to be sure. So partner me to events at the University. Meet my friends. Meet my parents again. Then in one month’s time, I’ll ask you. Deal?”
She nodded. “Deal,” she murmured against his fingers.
Her heart was already sure, but loved him even more for not rushing her.
Their life together might not always be easy.
Some people might still judge her for her lack of education and for her family.
The thought of the pre-wedding dinner and both sets of in-laws meeting made her shudder.
But with God’s help, they’d make a good life together.
A life blessed with love.
At last, he moved his hand, tangling his fingers in her hair, and lowered his lips to hers.
In their sweet kiss, she tasted the promise of forever.
British English Glossary
As some of the British English terms the characters use may be new to readers, here are meanings for those most likely to be unfamiliar.
Please let me know if there are other British-isms in the book that you’d like defined!
Collywobbles – shakes, panic, nerves
Council house – subsidised rental public or social housing
Estate agent – real estate agent, realtor
Filtch – steal
Hooray Henrietta – a upper class British female with a sense of superiority. Often loud & boisterous in her pursuit of a jolly good time. The male version is a Hooray Henry.
Hyacinth Bucket – a pompous & eccentric social climber from a poor working class background in the 90’s TV comedy “Keeping Up Appearances”, known for her exaggerated accent
Rabbit – to chatter profusely, often without letting anyone get a word in. Rhyming slang: “rabbit & pork” = talk
Sat nav – satellite navigation system for a vehicle
Sink Estate – an area of council housing with high levels of social & economic deprivation. May be hard to move out of
Sixth Form – final two years of secondary education from sixteen and eighteen, needed to enter university
“The Honorable” – a courtesy title given to the younger sons of earls, and all children of viscounts or barons, if they will not inherit any other aristocratic title
Warren – underground burrows of wild rabbits. Boys with the last name Warren are traditionally nicknamed “Bunny”
“What can I do you for?” – a joking play on words implying the person speaking may be out to cheat or swindle you
Acknowledgements
Thanks first and always to God, for creating me who I am, for giving me the opportunity to write, and for His wake-up call that He wanted me writing for Him. I couldn’t be happier to have Him as my Boss.
Thanks to my parents for giving me the hunger to read, the teachers who taught me to read, and the writers of every book I‘ve ever read. Books have been my friends and my delight.
Thanks to my writing friends over the years for support and encouragement. The Sassy Sisters- Maisey, Jackie, Robyn, Jilly, Aideen, Barbara, and Rach. The Fearbusters crew – Maggie, Ferdous, Destiny, and Edith.
Special thanks to the Christian Indie Authors group, who’ve taught me so much.
Most of all, huge and heartfelt thanks to Shannon, the bestest and most gifted writing buddy anyone could be blessed with, for brainstorming, for lots of laughs, for 2000 words a day of emails (yes, I checked!), for prayers, and for going above and beyond in helping edit this book. Not to forget the rowboat! Everything good in this book is down to her. I hope I can do as much to support her.
Thanks to my writing teachers I’ve learned so much from, especially Laurie Sanders.
And, last but definitely not least, thanks to my dear husband Arthur for supporting me in my dreams, even the crazy ones, and being so patient with me. I love you.
Copyright 2014 © by Autumn Macarthur
First Kindle Edition, September 2014. Published in this collected edition December 2014.
Published by Faith, Hope, & Heartwarming
http://faithhopeandheartwarming.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means— for example, electronic, photocopy, recording— without the prior written permission of the author. The only exception is brief quotations in printed or broadcast reviews.
If you obtained this book in any other way than downloading it from Amazon or as a gift directly from the author, please be aware you are reading a stolen copy! Your support and respect for the work of this author by purchasing a copy instead is appreciated.
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.
Edited by Laurie Sanders and beta read by Shannon Marie
Proofread by Trevor Jones
Believe in Me
Love in Store Book 2
Autumn Macarthur
Let us not love with words or speech,
but with actions and in truth.
1 John 3:18
Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened,
and I will give you rest.
Matthew 11:29
About ‘Believe in Me’
Bah, humbug!
The workaholic accountant has good reason to hate Christmas, along with charmers like actor Nick Callaghan, playing celebrity Santa at the failing London department store she has the thankless job of managing.
She’s determined to save her staff’s jobs, Hollywood golden boy Nick just wants to live up to his Mr Unattached reputation and enjoy life. They couldn't be more opposite. But if accepting Nick’s dare – dates showing her the magic of a London Christmas – can raise enough publicity to keep the store open, she’ll do it. Even if she risks falling in love with him in the process.
Can this surprising Santa allow love to deepen his untested faith and learn to commit, while helping Ms Scrooge believe in Christmas, and in God, once more?
Book 2 in the Love In Store series of sweet inspirational romances.
Chapter 1
All Cara Talbot wanted for Christmas was for it to be over.
She hated everything about the holiday.
The false cheeriness. The materialism. The impossible expectations.
Working in Oxford Street, the heart of London's shopping district, she couldn't escape it. A week into December, Christmas was everywhere.
Even at eight in the morning, getting out of the Underground station became an obstacle course. She battled her way to the stairs through leafletters handing out advertising, carollers singing off-key, and charity collectors in Santa suits rattling buckets.
Scrooge had the right idea. Peace and goodwill? Humbug!
Christmas was a sales opportunity, nothing more.
Except Pettett and Mayfield's department store wasn't selling nearly enough, and it was her job to change that somehow. Deputy assistant manager sounded good, but all it meant was she got landed with the management jobs no-one else wanted, and the blame when things went wrong.
Like picking up the pieces after Mrs Pettett's schemes, which started with a bang of hopeful expectation, then always ended in a fizzle of dismal sales.
Nothing suggested the old lady's latest publicity stunt, bringing in Nick Gallagher as the store's celebrity Santa, would be any different. It would take more than some B-list American soap star in Santa's Grotto to bring in enough sales to get the store back in the black.
Divine intervention was closer to the mark.
Cara snorted. No hope of that. God ignored her prayers when she’d needed Him most. No reason He'd answer them now.
Finally, she made it up the steps and out of the Underground, to face even more Christmas on Oxford Street.
The famous lights, still a tourist attraction even though they had far more to do with the latest Hollywood blockbuster than the baby Jesus or a spirit of giving. The shop window displays, glittering calls to spend spend spend.
Sleet bit through her thin second hand coat. Forget a white Christmas. No chance of that. Just sleet, more sleet, and a gusty wind, that sliced into her. Putting up her umbrella was pointless. It would blow inside out in ten seconds flat.
All she could do was pull her woolly hat lower over her ears, tighten her scarf, and push her hands deeper into her pockets.
The red double-decker buses rumbling along Oxford Street tempted her. The bus went nearly all the way to Pettett and Mayfield’s, in warmth and comfort.
But the bus fare cost money.
It was the bus, or breakfast.
A no-brainer.
Breakfast, every time. She didn’t function well without her one indulgence, a morning dose of caffeine and sugar from the coffee shop. Ducking her head against the wind, she marched toward work with a determined heel-toe stomp.
Maybe this time one of Mrs Pettett's ideas would work. She hoped so.
Because October and November's sales figures were abysmal, and the start of December didn’t look much better. Unless something turned the store's fortunes around, and soon, all eighty-six employees, including her, would find dismissal notices in their Christmas stockings.
The piles of shiny items no-one truly wanted or needed in the shop windows she passed blurred. She squeezed her eyes shut.
No! The store wouldn't close. Not if she could prevent it.
She'd do anything.
Including wait hand and foot on Nick Gallagher, if she had to, though she hoped she wouldn’t have to. No doubt she'd end up having twice as much work to do because of the guy. He'd probably be high maintenance and demanding and way more trouble than he was worth. His sort surely was.
Forget that she'd had a massive thing for him back in Sixth Grade. Her first real crush. He'd been so cute in that movie she’d loved, ‘Joey Christmas’. Back then, a storyline about a kid who wanted to be Santa so he could get his parents back together and have a happy family again made perfect sense.
She could probably still recite most of the dialog word for word, but that meant nothing. All the girls at school had been crazy about him, written his name on their pencil cases, dreamed of marrying him when they grew up.
Eleven was a long time ago. She'd believed a lot of stupid things back then.
Believed in love. Believed anything was possible. Believed the world was a great big present from God, waiting for her to unwrap it.
She knew better now. Growing up taught her happy families didn’t last, and a movie star wouldn’t marry a girl just because she had a teenage crush on him.
Even Nick grew up. No longer the cute kid from ‘Joey Christmas’. The quick research she’d done for the publicity release suggested that though he had a squeaky clean reputation, the TV show he acted in had less than savoury storylines. As for that bare chested beach photo of him Mrs Pettett had waved around at last week’s management meeting….
Okay, so the sight might have made her heart beat a little faster. Even more reason to hope Mrs P approved her request to have someone else take care of Nick while he was in London. He’d been her fantasy boyfriend once upon a time, but those days were long past.
She truly didn’t have time to wait on a celebrity. Her job was to come up with other ways to get more people spending money in the store when Mrs Pettett’s plan failed.
There had to be something more she could do to help.
Then maybe her balance sheets would come up with different results. Results saying Pettett and Mayfield's wasn't careening towards financial ruin. But no doubt, today like every other day, no matter how hard she crunched those numbers, she'd fail again.
If only she could somehow pull the rabbit that would save the store out of the hat, instead of feeling she'd personally let down every one of the eighty-five other employees.
The last thing she needed was that added guilt.
The bite of the wind dropped once she turned down an almost hidden cobbled lane. The tourists who stuck to the big name stores on Oxford and Regent Streets rarely visited this quiet area. Neither did those in the know who frequented the discreet storefronts of the most exclusive designers, in other parts of Mayfair.
Like a sweetly frumpy maiden aunt, Pettett and Mayfield's department store mouldered away undisturbed in a sedately unfashionable side street. Nobody wanted to see it close, but nostalgia didn’t bring in paying customers either.
One good thing about the location, there was a decent coffee shop for the workers in the surrounding Georgian townhouses, now converted into offices.
Time for her morning kickstart.
Worth braving the far-too-jolly Christmas tunes and the festive red and green cups for that. Stepping into the welcome warmth of the coffee shop, Cara breathed in the rich caffeinated aroma.
The Santa-hatted barista smiled, turned to his machine, then handed her a grande cappuccino with an extra slug of espresso, like always.
She snuggled her hands around the tall cup, gratefully absorbing the heat while he bagged her usual vanilla danish. The only treat she allowed herself.
If she didn’t somehow pull the store out of the red, she’d lose that, too, along with everything else. She probably should give it up, anyway. T
he money she spent on this could go to the pension fund.
After paying, she reluctantly stepped outside. Her breath puffed clouds of steam into the air. Walking toward the store, she ticked off a mental list of everything she needed to do before the eleven a.m. management meeting.
She'd need that espresso boost more than ever today, for sure.
Then, about to take her first sip, Cara hesitated.
An older homeless man sat huddled in the entrance to the empty offices next door to Pettett and Mayfield's. The doorway would give next-to-no shelter. The flattened cardboard box beneath him wouldn’t do much to keep out the chill of the concrete.
He said nothing, didn't move, didn't speak. Only gazed at her with clouded eyes, sunk deep into his gaunt unshaven face.
Tightness twisted in her chest.
He wasn't begging. He asked for nothing. But his blanket looked thinner than an economy class airline one. It was years since she last flew anywhere, but she doubted they’d gotten any thicker. Her old coat seemed luxurious in comparison.
She couldn't walk on by and ignore him.
He might be someone's father or grandfather.
Even her father.
He reminded her of what might have happened to Dad. Whenever she thought of him, she tried to imagine him managing a sports bar in Spain with the money he’d stolen. The centre of attention, handing out drinks and laughing loudly. The Dad she’d known.
Not sleeping on the streets.
But for all she knew, he might be.
And for all she knew, this man might be one of the employees whose pensions he’d run off with. The money she struggled to repay to the pension fund would never make up for what Dad had taken.
Stepping nearer and bending forward, she touched his cold hand, then held out her steaming coffee cup and paper-bagged pastry.
Love In Store Books 1-3: Collection of three sweet and clean Christian romances with a London setting: The Wedding List, Believe in Me, & A Model Bride Page 13