move on. Ready to live the dream Drew had been forced to abandon.
“Here we are.” He turned the truck into a pine-lined lane leading up to the Thorpe cabin, a wave of nostalgia washing through him as it often did when he drove by. While the porch light lent a cheery note this evening, in broad daylight the place always struck him as melancholy. Lifeless. Although a guy at the church kept an eye on it, that didn’t make up for the absence of the warm hospitality and sound of laughter he remembered. Or for missing familiar faces peeping from the dormered attic windows and the sight of his and Jodi’s grandmas relaxing on the broad front porch.
He turned to Jodi. “I felt really bad when I heard your grandma passed away.” He couldn’t imagine not having his Grandma Jo or Grandma McCrae around. That was one of the blessings of Hunter Ridge he’d sorely miss when he left.
“It’s funny,” Jodi said as she unbuckled her seat belt, “but even though I haven’t been here since high school, when I arrived I almost expected to see her step out on the porch to give me a big hug.”
“Smelling of freshly baked cupcakes and that honeysuckle hand lotion she always used.”
Surprise lit her eyes. “You remember that?”
“I remember a lot of happy times at this cabin.”
While his younger sister and Jodi’s siblings gravitated to each other to do girlie things, he and Jodi had teamed up to shoot baskets, climb trees and build woodland forts. It was difficult to reconcile memories of the somewhat stout, rough-and-tumble freckle-faced tomboy of his youth with the sixteen-year-old beauty who’d blindsided his eighteen-year-old self—and with the woman who sat beside him now.
“What do you say we get your stuff inside?”
But should he ask her if she could spare time for a project her grandma had at one time helped with—providing Christmas cheer for unwed mothers in the region?
Still undecided, he watched as she retrieved the backpack at her feet. Then just as he gave up on the idea and reached for the door handle, her gentle hand settled on his forearm, her eyes sparkling with mischief.
“Thank you—Preacher.”
It was all Jodi could do to get those words out with a straight face. Garrett would be the last man on earth to be mistaken for minister material. But there it was again—that same caught-in-the-act look she’d seen earlier. What on earth had Garrett been up to that his cousin would mockingly call him “preacher”?
He released his grasp on the door handle, his expression uncharacteristically ill at ease. “You caught that, did you?”
“I take it your cousin has a good sense of humor.”
“Grady,” Garrett said, as he slowly rubbed the back of his neck, “has a good sense of humor, all right.”
Obviously he didn’t want to explain. While as a youngster she’d have kept at him, pushed until she all but choked out the whole story, that wasn’t appropriate now. They were two adult strangers whose lives had moved on from each other. People were entitled to their privacy. Goodness only knew, she hoped he’d respect hers.
“I don’t think I want to hear about it,” she said with a teasing lilt, letting him off the hook as she opened the door and climbed out.
In a twinkling he was at the side of the truck, probably grateful for the reprieve, and lifting out the toboggan. He set it on the ground, then snagged several bags and placed them atop it. Pulling two more from the bed of the truck, he handed her one and gripped the heavier of the two in his own hand.
“Ready?” Garrett grabbed the toboggan’s tow rope. “Lead on.”
With the side porch light illuminating the way, they progressed through the snow and up to the porch itself. Garrett held open the screen door as she fumbled with the keys to unlock the dead bolt. Then she stepped inside the dimly lit mudroom.
Ah, the infamous mudroom. Scene of the crime. Or rather the not-so-romantic setting of their first—and only—kiss.
The tiny space had been dark that night, too, an unexpected cocoon of privacy in a cabin teeming with family and friends readying for the Christmas Eve service. Now she self-consciously set the bag and backpack on a counter—the same counter she’d leaned against for support when her legs threatened to give way as Garrett’s lips tentatively touched hers. Or tentatively at first, anyway.
Taking a quick breath, she flipped on the light switch, the bare bulb overhead banishing both the shadows and too-vivid memory. Avoiding meeting Garrett’s gaze—afraid his own memories might have followed hers—she returned to the door and took the proffered bag.
He quickly transferred the remaining ones to the mudroom floor, then propped up the toboggan outside the door. “Looks like that about does it.”
“Thanks, Garrett. I’ll put the sled in the shed later.” She slipped out of the old coat and hung it on a peg of the knotty pine–walled room. “Would you like to come in for a cup of cocoa? Or I could fix coffee.”
In all honesty, she didn’t want to invite him in. The less she saw of Garrett or any other old acquaintances during her brief stay here, the better. She needed time alone to work through things—the aching loss of Anton’s recent death—and to make decisions for her professional future. Time to privately commemorate the loss of an unborn life. This use-it-or-lose-it vacation forced on her at the end of the year couldn’t be better timed. But the introspective hours she craved could too easily be aborted if she didn’t guard them closely.
“Thanks for the invitation, but I have to get back to...” His uncertain gaze darted to hers as his voice trailed off.
What was with him tonight? Garrett in his youth had never been one to act unsure of himself or beat around the bush. “Get back to what? Your female fan club?”
Everything used to come easy to him. Athletics, schoolwork, making friends—and girlfriends. She used to give him a hard time about the latter, masking her own supersized crush.
His mouth twitched. “Believe me, no fan club these days. Actually, I need to get back to the church.”
“Picking up another load of wood for delivery?”
“Not exactly.” He cast a look upward as if appealing to the Heavenly realms. “I have to finish my sermon for tomorrow.”
“Sermon?” She laughed, Grady’s remark finally making sense. “You got roped into delivering a message at the old family church, didn’t you? Garrett, whatever were you thinking?”
He ducked his head slightly, then looked up at her with one eye squinted. “I’m thinking that as the pastor of Christ’s Church of Hunter Ridge, that’s one of my responsibilities.”
What? “Come on, tell me another one.”
A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. “As impossible as it may sound—and believe me, some days it probably seems more impossible to me than it does to you—I’m degreed in church ministry and have been interim pastor here for the past year.”
She stared. He wasn’t joking. His cousin hadn’t been joking.
“Wow, Garrett.”
He chuckled, no doubt in reaction to the stunned look on her face. “Yeah, wow.”
“This is...is quite a stretch. I mean,” she quickly amended, “a turnaround.”
As they’d progressed from Sunday school days to youth group teen years, he’d become increasingly restless, adventurous, more prone to risk-taking. A party boy who’d enthusiastically indulged a wild streak, he’d certainly never anchored himself to anything spiritual, let alone God.
But then, she couldn’t exactly