A Baby For the Minister Page 14

  She glanced at the church steeple soaring up between the old oaks, then looked quickly away. As long as she and Ethan had each other, they’d be fine.

  They didn’t need anybody else.

  A horn sounded behind her. Startled, she glanced into her rearview mirror to see Jacob waving at her from the cab of his truck. He flashed his lights and motioned toward the church parking lot. He wanted her to pull over.

  Her heart sank when she caught a glimpse of the determined look on his face. She’d been avoiding him ever since he’d told her the news about Adam. If she didn’t pull into that parking lot, Jacob was perfectly capable of following her all the way out to Lark Hill with his hazards flashing.

  She could just imagine what the members of his congregation would make of that.

  Natalie pulled over but left her engine running. She watched in her side mirror as Jacob pulled in behind her, rolling down the window as he approached.

  His eyes looked sea blue in the light of the spring day, and his golden hair shone. Her stomach dipped, and she clenched the steering wheel a little tighter. “Your engine’s skipping.”

  “It’s still running, though. That’s the important thing.” She didn’t want him trying to arrange more repairs, so she changed the subject quickly. “I just made my first blueberry delivery to Bailey’s.”

  “That’s great!” Pause. “How’s...uh...Rufus?”

  Funny. Jacob seemed a little nervous.

  “Same as always. Out of his pen every time I turn around.” She hesitated, but there was really no way around what she needed to say next. “Do you think you could find me a home for him? You offered before, remember?”

  “Sure, and the offer stands. It may take me a few days, though. Rufus is pretty notorious around here.”

  “I hope you can find him a good place. He can be a nuisance, but I’m really going to miss him when I go back to Atlanta. That’ll be in a couple of weeks, give or take, as soon as I get all these blueberries picked off. So you’d better start thinking about who around here owes you the biggest favor.” She forced another smile, but this time Jacob didn’t smile back.

  “You and I need to talk, Natalie.”

  “I’m kind of in a hurry, Jacob. Ethan’s overdue for his nap, and...”

  “Please.”

  Natalie sighed. “Okay.” She turned the key in the ignition, silencing her engine. Hopefully, it would start up again when she needed it to. Smack-dab in front of Jacob’s church was the last place she needed to get stranded. “What do you want to talk about?”

  Instead of answering, he rounded the car and opened the back door. Before she could protest, he began unfastening the carrier part of Ethan’s car seat from its base.

  “Jacob,” she protested. “I really only have a minute. Can’t we talk here?”

  “No.” He headed toward the church with the baby carrier swinging gently from one arm, leaving her no alternative but to trot behind him.

  To her surprise, once inside the church, he didn’t turn left down the hall that led to his office. He went straight through the big doors into the empty sanctuary. He walked down the center aisle, carrying Ethan toward the front of the church.

  She’d never been inside a church when it was completely empty before. The vaulted room was hushed, and their steps were muffled by the thick carpet. The sun flowed silently through the stained glass windows, spattering quivering cubes of colored light all over the white walls.

  Pine Valley Community Church wasn’t fancy. The windows were only colored squares, not Bible pictures, and the pews were plain blond oak. But it had a peaceful, welcoming air that she liked.

  Strange how friendly churches could feel when they were empty.

  Jacob led her to the front pew, where she’d sat during the service, and set Ethan’s carrier carefully on the floor.

  He sat, and she sank slowly down beside him. His eyes found hers, and there was such a strange, dogged look in them that she forgot all about herself and her problems.

  She leaned forward and rested her hands lightly over his. “Jacob, what is it?”

  His fingers tightened around hers with a strength that surprised her. “I’d like to talk to you about staying in Pine Valley.”

  Chapter Twelve

  He had his reasons all ready. In fact, he’d probably spent more time preparing for this conversation than he had for his first sermon.

  Natalie didn’t give him a chance.

  She pulled her hands free of his and stood up. “There’s nothing to talk about, Jacob. Trust me, I’ve looked at this from every angle. There’s just no way it works. Now, I’m sorry, but I really do have to get back.” She reached for the handle of Ethan’s baby carrier.

  “Natalie, please.” He stood up, too. “Wait.” He had a feeling if he let her walk out that door now, she’d be walking right out of his life. “At least hear me out. I think you owe me that much.”

  He knew the minute the words were out of his mouth. It was exactly the wrong thing to say.

  She turned back toward him. “I owe you?”

  “That’s not what I meant, Natalie. It’s a figure of speech.”

  “But in this case, it’s true, isn’t it? I really do owe you. In fact—” She pulled a folded wad of bills out of her pocket, peeled off some and held them out. “Here. I know this is just a drop in the bucket, but consider it a down payment. I’ll get you the rest when I can.”

  He made no move to accept the money. This discussion sure had gone south in a hurry. “Natalie, please. That came out all wrong. Can we start over?”

  “You know what? I wish we could.” Her voice thrummed with so much feeling that he knew she wasn’t just talking about this conversation. “This time I’d know better than to rack up debts I have no way of repaying.” She set the cash down on the pew.

  “I don’t want your money, Natalie. I never did. Be fair. You’re the one who kept insisting on repaying me. I know you feel like you owe me, but you don’t. That’s not the way this works. We’re—” he fumbled for the right word, and had to settle on one that didn’t quite cover it “—friends. Friends don’t have to pay each other back.”

  “I may not be as educated as you are, Jacob, but I’m pretty sure you’re wrong about that. Friends do pay each other back. They help each other. And that’s how I know we’re not friends.”

  He stared at her. “What are you talking about?”

  “You! Me!” She made a frustrated gesture. “This! What you’ve been giving me isn’t friendship, Jacob. It’s charity. I know you’re using my situation to make a point with your church board, but—”

  “What? Who told you that?” If it was Arlene, so help him...

  “That’s not important. What’s important is that you didn’t tell me. You didn’t tell me about all the trouble you’ve been having with this Digby guy or about how you could maybe even lose your job. In all the time we’ve spent together, you never even brought it up. You’ve been helping me with my problems ever since we met, but I didn’t even know about yours. That seems pretty one-sided to me, Jacob.”

  He shook his head. “You’re wrong.”

  “Am I?” She started ticking things off on her fingers. “You’ve spent money I know you couldn’t spare buying me groceries and a whole baby nursery and clothes. You paid to have my car fixed. You drove me to the hospital and stayed with me when Ethan was born. You’ve fixed crazy Rufus’s fence more times than I can count. You’ve changed diapers, and cleaned up spit-up, and you even located Adam for me. Not that it did much good.”

  “And you think you owe me for all that?” The sharpness in his tone finally caught her attention. She stopped, her lips parted, staring at him. “If anything, I owe you. I loved doing all those things.” She slanted him a skeptical look. “I did. Why is that so hard to believe? You think you’re the only person who knows what
it’s like to be lonely? You’re not. Before you and Ethan came along there was a hole in my life you could drive a truck through.”

  “Lonely? You?” At least now she was listening to him. Her eyes searched his. “I find that a little hard to believe.”

  “It’s true. You remember when we met you told me you didn’t have much family? Well, I don’t have much family, either. My parents died in a car accident not long after I got out of college. The closest relatives I have are a set of second cousins who live in Oregon. I haven’t seen them in years.”

  “You never told me that.”

  “You never asked.”

  He watched the play of emotions across her face. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I didn’t.”

  “It’s okay. I understood. You had plenty of your own stuff to worry about. But the truth is, Natalie, I haven’t had anything resembling a real family for years. I’ve filled up that space in my life with my work, with my church family. I’ve stayed late with them at hospitals and funeral parlors. I’ve driven them to their cancer treatments. I’ve helped them move, and I’ve babysat their hyperactive Labradoodles so they could take their kids to Disney World. I’ve spent my weekends painting Sunday school classrooms and fishing broken crayons out of the church nursery sink. And that’s all fine and good, but you know what the problem with that is?”

  Natalie shook her head.

  “Sooner or later you have to go home. You have to go back to an empty apartment, to eat some stupid microwave meal by yourself, and then stare at the walls until it’s time to go back to work again. And trust me, that’s not nearly as much fun as I’m making it sound.”

  A smile flickered across her face, but she nodded seriously. “You don’t have to tell me. I know what it’s like, being alone.”

  “Then you should understand why I’ve loved every single minute I’ve spent with you and Ethan. It felt almost like...having a family of my own.” He offered her a small, careful smile. “Spit-up, dirty diapers, crazy fence-busting goat and all.”

  It worked. She smiled wider. “All that’s not as much fun as you make it sound, either.”

  She was joking back with him. This was progress. “It is to me. And I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about the stuff going on here at the church. But it wasn’t because I wanted our relationship to be one-sided, and it definitely wasn’t because I was using you to make some kind of ethical point to my board. I didn’t even want to think about this church when I was with you. You and Lark Hill and Ethan were my escape.” He stopped and looked around the quiet sanctuary. “Don’t get me wrong. I love this place, and I love every single member of my congregation. But I’ll admit, there are some of them I don’t like all that much.” Natalie laughed softly, and he smiled.

  He loved to hear her laugh.

  “I’m sorry,” he added, even though he wasn’t. “I guess that’s a rotten thing for a minister to say.”

  She shook her head. “No, don’t apologize. I understand.”

  “Trust me. I don’t want to talk to you about staying in town because I’m so charitable. If anything, I want to help you stay because I’m so selfish. Because I can’t stand the thought of my life going back to the way it was before you and Ethan came here.” He waited a few seconds, trying unsuccessfully to read her expression.

  “Well, we have that in common, I guess,” Natalie admitted finally. “I’m not too excited about going back to the way my life used to be, either.”

  “Then stay.” She still looked unsure. “Will you at least pray about it?”

  She hesitated, then nodded. “Okay. Yes. I’ll pray about it. If this works out...well, it might be a good thing for Ethan. Once there was this neighbor who had a little girl about my age. My mom...wasn’t home much, so I used to stay at their apartment a lot. I called him Uncle Steve, and he kind of looked out for me. He helped me with my homework and let me eat supper at their house sometimes. I really missed that when he got a better job, and they moved away. I’d like Ethan to have somebody like that in his life, somebody like you, I mean. I think it’d be...nice.”

  It didn’t sound nice to Jacob. It sounded sad. But she was leaning toward staying, and he should just leave well enough alone.

  But still. An honorary uncle.

  That had three-legged turtle written all over it.

  “Natalie? I’d love to be a part of Ethan’s life. That’d be great. But...that’s not all I’m asking you to consider here. I want to be a part of your life, too.”

  She’d leaned over, reaching for the baby carrier again, but she froze. She straightened and turned back in his direction. The silence stretched on long enough that it made him a little uneasy.

  Natalie nibbled on her lower lip, the way she tended to do when she was uncertain. Finally, she said, a little too lightly, “Well, sure. If I stay, we’ll be friends, too, you and I. Real friends, this time, though. No more one-sided stuff.” She paused. “That’s...what you’re talking about. Isn’t it?”

  “Yes.” He hesitated, but he had to be honest. “Absolutely. To start with. But I was hoping, maybe...” Good grief, this was hard to put into words. “That in time...when you’re ready...that our friendship could lead to...possibly...something else.”

  That shock on her face wasn’t exactly encouraging. Wait, surely she didn’t think he meant...

  “Of course, my intentions are...you know, completely honorable.” He winced. “Sorry, that sounded really stupid.”

  And people wondered why he was still single.

  “No. Not stupid.” Natalie still looked a little taken aback, but at least the color was coming back into her cheeks. “A little...crazy, maybe. But not stupid.” She hesitated, her eyes still locked with his. She didn’t seem to know exactly what to say. “I’ll...uh...”

  “Pray about it,” he finished hopefully.

  “Yes.” She nodded, still looking a little dazed. “Right. I will.”

  “Good.” He looked down at Ethan, snuggled in the car seat, sound asleep. He was sporting a bib Jacob had picked out, one with a red airplane zooming across its terry cloth front. “I’ll carry Ethan out to the car for you.”

  “No.” Natalie blinked. “No, I’ve got him. Thanks, though.” She picked up the carrier and started for the door.

  Halfway up the aisle, she halted, looking back at him. “And just so you know, Jacob, I think you’re the least selfish person I’ve ever met.”

  Jacob stayed where he was and watched until the oversize door thumped shut behind her. Then he sank back down on the pew. He might as well stay right here.

  Natalie wasn’t the only one who had some praying to do.

  * * *

  The following Thursday afternoon, Jacob sneaked a glance at his watch under the meeting room table. Quarter till six, and so far the church board spent the whole time dithering over what type of hardwood floors should be installed in the fellowship hall, and whether the finish should be English Oak or Walnut Bronze.

  Jacob had blanched when he’d caught sight of the estimate for the flooring. Just as he’d feared, this building project was getting more ambitious—and costly—by the day. He’d tried twice to interject some common sense into the discussion, but Abel Whitlock had been the only member to back him up. The rest of them seemed solidly in Digby’s camp.

  In any case, he knew the whole floor debate was nothing but a smoke screen. The church board members kept shooting uneasy glances in Jacob’s direction, but nobody had been brave enough to bring up the real reason for this meeting yet.

  Fortunately, he wasn’t the only one getting restless. “All right, now. I reckon we’ve talked nonsense long enough.” Abel Whitlock shifted in his chair. “We might as well get along to the point of this meeting, so we can all go home.”

  “Maybe we should postpone.” High school principal Andrew Carlton darted another nervous look in Jacob’s direction. “It�
�s getting late.”

  “Oh no, you don’t. I’m not about to waste another perfectly good spring afternoon cooped up inside because none of you have the guts to speak plain. Like I told you before, I don’t hold with talking behind people’s backs. Somebody say whatever it is you came here to say, and let’s get this over with. I’ve got my milk cow to see to.”

  A strained silence fell across the table as the twelve members of the board looked at each other.

  “Fine. If nobody else will say it, I will.” Digby Markham spoke up from his strategic position at the end of the long table. “The truth is, Jacob, we met this afternoon to discuss your lack of support for this fellowship hall project. We made it clear to you that this would be the primary focus of the church for the foreseeable future and that you’d need to make it your top priority. You don’t appear to have listened.”

  Digby Markham was accusing him of not listening? That was ironic. Jacob took a deep breath and tried to hang on to the shreds of his patience. “I’m sorry you feel that way, Digby. And if the church is determined to build this thing, I’ll certainly be as supportive as I can be. But the truth is, I don’t believe that the primary focus of any church should be building itself a fancy fellowship hall.”

  “But it’s an investment,” young Darren Ellerbee spoke up earnestly. “If we build a really nice one, we can rent it out for weddings and other events and recoup our money.”

  “We’re a church, not a convention center,” Jacob pointed out. “I think—”

  “That debate is closed,” Digby interrupted. “We’ve already heard enough about what you think, Stone. The decision’s been made, and you need to get in line.”

  “Come on, Digby.” Jack Lifsey, who ran the local feed store, darted a worried look at Jacob as he spoke. “Settle down. We’re all on the same team, here, aren’t we?”

  “That’s my question. Are we?” Digby raised an eyebrow and looked at Jacob. “From what I hear, you’re playing for Good Shepherd’s team these days.”