Like everyone else in the room, Uncle Dave lowered his head. “A moment, ha!” he whispered to Taylor. “If there’s anything hot on the food table, it’ll be stone-cold by the time he—”
Taylor wrapped his hand in hers, gave a gentle squeeze. “Uncle Dave…” she said around a grin.
“Well, it’s true,” he insisted.
Alex crouched near Uncle Dave’s ear. “No problem. I hear there’s a new microwave in the kitchen….”
The minister raised his hands just then, and thanked the good women of the parish who’d prepared the food, the youth group for setting up the tables and chairs, the men’s club for volunteering to clean up afterward. He gave thanks to God for a lovely summery day.
“Wonder why preachers never get laryngitis,” Uncle Dave muttered.
“They pray for strong vocal cords?” was Alex’s answer.
“Honestly.” Taylor sighed as their shoulders lurched with laughter. “You two are worse than a couple of rowdy boys. You’re going to get us—”
A red-taloned hand reached from behind and rested on Taylor’s shoulder. “Shh!” came the angry demand. “If you can’t show any respect for the pastor, at least show a little for the Lord!”
Taylor narrowed her eyes at her uncle, then at Alex. “Just wait,” she mouthed as the pastor said his final, booming “Amen!”
“Think I’m gonna get into line,” Uncle Dave said, “before all the potato salad is gone.” Nodding, he grinned at Taylor. “You know it’s always the first thing to go.”
“Maybe this year,” she said quietly, wiggling her eyebrows and grinning, “it’ll be the second thing to go….”
Alex laughed. “Good to meet you, Mr. Griffith.”
“Dave,” he corrected. “Good meeting you, too.” And with that, he was gone.
Alex cleared his throat. “If you can tell me who the red-nailed lady was, I’ll explain, save your good name.”
Shrugging, Taylor waved his offer away. “Mrs. Abernathy is always looking for reasons to scold people. The way I see it, the three of us made her day.” Pausing, she tilted her head. “Say…I didn’t know you were a member of Resurrection parish.”
“I’m not. But my mother is.”
“Really? Who’s your mother? Maybe I know her.”
“If you didn’t know her, I’d be surprised.” He pointed at an attractive white-haired woman across the way. “She’s the president of the ladies’ auxili—”
“Helen Martin? But your name is—”
“My father passed away a long time ago, and Mom remarried.”
“Small world.” Then, tilting her head the other way, she raised one eyebrow, remembering that Mrs. Martin had joined the church just over a year ago. “Why haven’t we seen you at services before?”
He clamped his teeth together, as if suddenly something had made him angry. Very angry. “I’ve been away for a while.” Just as suddenly, the friendly smile returned. “And now I’m back.” He shrugged.
She wondered where he’d been. How long he’d been gone. Why he’d been gone. And what, exactly, had inspired his return home. The questions must have been apparent on her face, because Alex said, “It’s a long, boring story. Suffice it to say my hitch in the navy is over, and I’m grounded now, in more ways than one.”
Grounded? Did that mean he’d been a pilot? He’d been grinning when he said it, but she couldn’t help but notice the smile never quite made it to his eyes. Taylor could almost picture him in a flight suit, standing beside a sleek airplane, helmet under his arm and—
“Why don’t we join your uncle in line. I think he may be right. That potato salad seems to be goin’ mighty fast.”
He offered her his arm, and just as Taylor moved to take it, Mable Jensen grabbed her elbow. “Taylor! I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Come with me, dear, there’s someone I want you to meet.”
Alex’s smile dimmed as Mable whisked her away, and he sent the same two-fingered salute he’d sent her in the airport tunnel. She looked away for only an instant, then turned back to ask him to save her a seat.
But in that instant he’d disappeared.
Chapter Two
Alex waited half an hour for Taylor to come back. He sat at the end of a long table, one arm slung over the back of the folding chair beside his own. “Sorry,” he told anyone who showed interest in the empty seat, “this one’s taken.”
Once it sank in that she wouldn’t be joining him for the meal, he wolfed down his stone-cold food. The level of his disappointment made no sense, especially considering he’d spent, what, ten minutes in her company? Maybe this was the reason he’d always been partial to tall, blue-eyed blondes…because it was less disappointing when they didn’t show up?
Maybe, except, what was this?
This was ridiculous, that’s what. To be fixated on a young woman barely bigger than a minute, well, it just wasn’t Alex’s style. He’d always been so cool, so sophisticated where women were concerned.
He wanted to go home, slump into his easy chair and find an old war movie on TV. So for the life of him, Alex didn’t understand why he stayed, why he chatted with other brunch attendants.
That wasn’t entirely true. He knew, as he nodded and smiled and talked about the weather, that the sole purpose of his participation in the banal conversations was in the hope they might lead to information about Taylor Griffith.
He was about to ask an elderly woman if she’d seen Taylor when his mother, Helen, spotted him. Smiling, she waved. There was no mistaking what that “look” meant. She seemed as happy as a mother could be, believing he’d taken her advice, finally, that he was making an attempt at getting back on track, into “the stream of things.”
Helen had been at him for months, saying he needed to socialize more, get busy building a new life. And that couldn’t start, she’d insisted, until he first started talking about the accident. “You could have died in service to your country. That’s not something to hide—it’s something to be proud of!”
It was a hot button, but out of respect for her, Alex chose not to respond. Besides, he couldn’t imagine admitting the truth aloud, not even to his own mother: The mission had been a failure because he’d taken the coward’s way out.
A thousand times he’d relived those last milliseconds of the flight, searching his mind for the one thing he might have done differently, the decision that might have saved him and the Falcon. It was humiliating, not having a clear memory to help him understand what had gone wrong. That, in itself, Alex believed, was proof of his ineptness as a pilot.
Not an easy thing to admit, when flying had been his life for nearly a decade; when, for generations,
