gotta admit you looked the part.” But she sure didn’t right now, with that silky hair cascading around her shoulders and a smile lighting her brown eyes. Those very assets had been his downfall the night a transformed sixteen-year-old Jodi showed up in town after a few years’ absence, leaving him stupefied and devoid of common sense.
Sort of how he was feeling at this very moment.
Not good.
After his most recent disappointment in the romance department, he’d steered clear of serious involvements. And for an interim pastor, this wasn’t a good time to start rethinking that choice. So why had it popped into his head that her arrival in town might be the answer to a prayer he’d uttered but twenty minutes ago?
His office assistant Melody Lenter—an energetic lady about his mom’s age—had called around lunchtime, informing him her father in Texas had a heart attack and she and her husband were on their way out of town. She’d have to bail out on overseeing the annual Christmas project she’d single-handedly spearheaded for the past twenty years. Between wood deliveries, he’d spent the afternoon phoning church members, trying to find someone to fill her shoes—but to no avail. He’d barely called out to God that someone had to cover for Melody—he sure couldn’t take on one more thing—when the capable and ever-dependable Jodi appeared on his doorstep.
Answered prayer? Or a desperate, not-too-bright idea?
“So where’s the motorcycle? And—” She peeked at the back of his head. “What happened to the ponytail?”
Although still waiting for her to zero in on Grady’s “preacher” comment, he managed a laugh. “The tail’s a thing of the past. I have an SUV now, but a motorcycle’s stashed for the winter in a Hunter’s Hideaway barn.”
The motorcycle made some in his congregation uneasy, which wasn’t surprising considering the noisy nuisance he’d made with one as a teenager. No doubt he hadn’t been high on the church’s interviewee preferences list for a few members. But his Grandma Jo, a force to be reckoned with, convinced them—and him—that his filling in while they searched for a permanent ministerial replacement would benefit all involved.
Coming back, though, hadn’t been easy. Nobody in town had a clue what it took to regularly face his old friend Drew Everton and the accusing stares of those who held him responsible for Drew’s debilitating injuries. While Drew insisted he wasn’t to blame, others weren’t so forgiving.
But his year’s commitment at Christ’s Church would be up at the end of the month, and he was more than ready to 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
