She sent him a quick, joyless smile. “Oh, you know how it is. Christmas can be a bittersweet time.”
“Are you missing your family?”
She turned to face him then looked down at her toes. “Yes and no. Sadly, I don’t miss the family I have, but I do miss the family I don’t have. Strange, isn’t it?”
“I’m not sure I follow you,” he admitted.
“You couldn’t,” she told him with a shake of her head. “But we ought to miss family, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” he said simply, “but family is sometimes a burden.”
Her round, blue gaze sharpened. “Is yours?”
He wanted to tell her then, everything, about his losses and disappointments, his fears and heartbreaks, his hopes and needs, but he didn’t dare.
“Some of them are,” he answered evasively. “I miss my sister and niece, though.”
“Oh? Will they come for Christmas?”
Sadness stabbed him. “I doubt it.” That was a half-truth at best, though, and he suddenly wanted very much to give Robin better, so he followed it with a flat “No.”
For some reason, she seemed almost as disappointed as he felt. “That’s too bad.”
“Will your family come here for Christmas?” he asked.
She didn’t even pause to think. “Oh, no. They wouldn’t.”
“Will you go there?” It hadn’t occurred to him until that very moment that she might, and he suddenly realized that all his plans would crumble without her.
As was her custom, she mulled over her answer for a moment, but then she shook her head. “No, I won’t go there.”
Ethan didn’t try to hide his relief. He let it beam out of him. “I am selfishly glad. I don’t think I could pull off this centennial Christmas without your help, and I wouldn’t want to try.”
She smiled then, genuinely smiled. He clasped his hands behind his back, the sudden need to reach out and pull her against him shaking him to his toes. Instead, he offered to walk her to her car. It was the gentlemanly thing to do, after all, though he was having some trouble with the gentlemanly thing at the moment.
As she drove away into the night, he prayed for guidance. And self-control. It had been a very long time since he’d felt anything like what Robin Frazier stirred in him.
For a moment, long-dormant memory swamped him. Suddenly he was back in Los Angeles, standing on the curb in broad daylight, Theresa beside him. He heard the squeal of tires and the sharp, rapid staccato of gunshots. He felt himself flinch and throw up his arms, dropping to his knees as dust and bits of concrete stung his skin, and then as abruptly as it had begun, it was over, except that almost at once the iron-rich smell of blood rose into his nostrils, coating the back of his throat. He opened his eyes to find Theresa on her back with her dark hair spread across the sidewalk, her arms flung haphazardly across her slender body, a neat hole in her forehead and another in her neck, her dark eyes wide but unseeing, as he tried in his panic to keep her from leaving him. Some part of him had known from the first glimpse that she was already gone, but he’d had to try.
He hadn’t tried to hold a woman since then, and he never meant to.
“Ah, Lord,” he whispered, “don’t let me go back there. Give me courage, wisdom and guidance, the strength to realize all that You plan for me and to walk away from anything that is not Your will. Anything and anyone.”
No matter how compelling.
Somehow, when Robin was with Ethan, she felt strangely disconnected from the pitfalls that surrounded her. She knew intellectually that any relationship around Jasper Gulch was potentially problematic for her. As soon as her deceptions were discovered, people were bound to choose sides, and most would undoubtedly side against her and with the Shaws. Still, Ethan’s very presence tended to make her awareness of that fact fade into the background. That was part of what made him so dangerous.
As soon as they parted company, however, her thoughts would begin to seethe with very reasonable doubts and fears. She would quite naturally recall that her position in Jasper Gulch was tenuous at best, even with Ethan himself, perhaps especially with Ethan. No minister would look kindly at a woman who had come into a community under false pretenses and perpetuated the lie for months on end. That being the case, she wondered again if she should go on seeing Ethan. He seemed to addle her thought processes and blunt some of her emotions while exciting others.
Recalling that Ethan had told her to pray about things before she made a decision, Robin prayed that night, asking for clarity and wisdom. Exhausted, she fell asleep, assuming that God had essentially told her to leave Jasper Gulch, the Shaws and Ethan Johnson behind. Yet, when she woke in the morning, she found that she had just enough time to dress before the young pastor arrived to pick her up—and no time to arrange for anyone else to accompany him on his mission. Then Mamie showed up at her door with a pair of sturdy work gloves, snowshoes, a small handsaw and a plate of hot, melt-in-your-mouth cinnamon rolls about three inches thick to combat the cold air that she let in with her.
What else could Robin do but hurriedly dress and wolf down cinnamon rolls while coffee percolated and Mamie made the bed? Ethan showed up while Mamie and Robin were demolishing the third of four monster cinnamon rolls and happily helped himself to the last one.
“Just think,” he quipped, “I’m keeping you both from the sin of gluttony, and at detriment to my own soul, too, as I came here from breakfast at Great Gulch Grub.”
They all laughed, then Robin confessed, “You might have kept Mamie from the sin of gluttony, but not me. I’ve already eaten way too much.”
“That makes two of us, then,” he said, mopping the icing from the plate with his finger. “Guess we’d better get out there and work it off.”
She finished her coffee, enjoying the bite of the black brew juxtaposed against the sweetness of Mamie’s cinnamon rolls, then rinsed the cup, gathered her things and went out into the cold, leaving Mamie to lock up behind them. God, Robin supposed, didn’t mean for her to leave Jasper Gulch right away after all. Otherwise, would He have allowed her this feeling of sweet, joyous anticipation after her long night of doubts?
They drove out to the McGuire’s Double M Ranch in Ethan’s old car because it had all-wheel drive, which he said had come in quite handy, given that some of his congregation lived as far as forty miles outside town. He played music through his smartphone connection along the way, and Robin found herself singing along with some of her favorite praise songs and hymns.
He smiled at her from time to time and once said, “You’re more accomplished than you let on.”
She shook her head. “No, not really. I don’t have much range or resonance. I really can only sing in groups.”
“Nothing wrong with that.”
“I suppose.”
As they drew near the new sprawling house with its blue metal roof and deep porches, Jack and Olivia came out to meet them. Both wore nothing more than their shirtsleeves, though Olivia had pulled the cuffs of her sweater down over her hands. The twenty-eight-degree weather didn’t seem to faze them a bit. Guess that came from being natives to the area. When Robin and Ethan got out of the car, Jack leaned a shoulder against the porch support and looked up at the sky, a uniform shade of pale gray today.
“Mornin’, Ethan, Robin. Good day for you. Temperature ought to top out above freezing.”
Bundled up like a polar bear, Robin smiled wanly. She supposed thirty-three was, technically, above freezing.
“You’re going to have