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She caught herself staring at nothing again, and she jerked back to attention. Her heart beat a little too quickly for a few seconds, and then she tried to tame one more lock of hair by pinning it out of her face too. With most of the curls on the back of her head, Jane decided she could leave the bathroom and not die of embarrassment.
Her heels clunked on the old wood floor in the generational home, and she expected to find her father nursing a cup of coffee and reading something on his device at the kitchen table. He didn’t disappoint, because the lawyer in him did everything exactly the same every single day.
Jane wanted to scream with his routines, because she didn’t like doing the same thing every day. She wouldn’t eat the same food for breakfast; she wouldn’t get ready in exactly the same way; heck, sometimes she even drove different roads to work, just to have some variety in her otherwise completely, utterly, horribly stale life.
“Hey,” Daddy said with plenty of admiration in his voice. “It’s beautiful, Jane.” He set aside his device and smiled at her with all the fatherly love a man could possess.
Jane sighed, her shoulders slumped as she finished the walk to the table.
“Oh, boy,” Daddy said. “Your cousin is getting married in an hour. You better straighten up before then.” He didn’t say it unkindly, but he’d known Jane for all the years of her life—almost three decades now—and she needed a firm hand. A strong voice. Someone to tell her when she was acting like a child or irrationally, when, unfortunately, she did both sometimes.
Since starting at HMC last year, she’d gotten better. Or so she thought.
“What’s eatin’ at you?” Daddy asked when Jane said nothing.
Sometimes Momma had cornbread biscuits on the table for breakfast, but today wasn’t one of those days. Gerty and Mike had chosen an eleven-thirty ceremony time, so they could feed everyone lunch, have an early afternoon dance, and be done by three.
Mike had gotten them airplane tickets to Spain or France for a river cruise, and that only made Jane’s jealousy double. She wasn’t exactly jealous. Not really.
“Daddy,” she said carefully. She’d been waiting for Cord Behr to ask her out for months now. That dream had started to dry, wither, and die, but Jane still held onto the very last root with everything she had. If he’d even so much as sprinkle a drop of water on it, her hopes of going out with him would spring back to life.
“I’m sittin’ right here,” he drawled.
“I can’t get my thoughts right.” Jane put her face in her hands, then remembered that she and Molly had spent a significant amount of time that morning doing their makeup. Jane loved Molly more than she could describe, as the woman had been like a second mother to her once she and Hunter had gotten married years ago.
Jane babysat their kids sometimes, and with her mood being attached to literally everything in her life, she sometimes came home from that weeping and wondering and begging God to let her know when she’d be able to start building her own family.
“Remember how you used to tell me how impatient I was?”
Daddy cocked his head. “I was not expecting that.”
Her daddyhadoften told her she needed to learn to be patient—and Jane had taken that to heart. She’d worked and worked on accepting that not everything happened exactly when she wanted it to. It sure seemed as if the Lord wanted her to keep learning that lesson, but Jane wasn’t sure why.
Had she not been patient enough?
With her job? With the men she dated? With herself?
With Cord?whispered through her mind. She would not ask her father about him. Not again. She felt certain Cord would never speak to her again if she pressed the issue on him.
“I feel like I’ve been working so hard to be patient,” Jane said. “I’m trying to find someone to marry, but it just doesn’t seem to be working out.”
Daddy reached over and covered her hand with his. Jane pulled back on her emotions. “I feel like I’m patient at work when I’m waiting on others to do their job so I can do mine. I’m patient with the time it takes to truly change my mind and heart, and while I still think it’s slow, I’m doing it.”
“Yes,” Daddy whispered. “You are, Jane. I’ve seen it.” He gave her another warm smile. “This is just about finding a boyfriend?”
“Not all of it.” Jane exhaled heavily again and looked past her father and out the window. She could see the roofs on a couple of cowboy cabins—Cord’s included. He lived alone now, and he’d been working the farm for just over fifteen years.
“But yes,” she said. “All of it. Having someone to share my thoughts with, the things I don’t understand, the things I love, the things that bother me…I want that.” She met her father’s eye again, and he nodded slowly.
He’d aged well, probably because of the amount of exercise he did. The man loved to run, and he’d even done the Boston Marathon in his mid-forties, before he’d married Momma and started having more kids.
Silver lined his temples now and salted his beard and mustache. Momma kept his hair trimmed, and the shortest of it didn’t seem to hold as much darkness as it once had. He was a powerful presence in any room he entered, and especially so in his midnight-black suit, the dark blue tie already knotted precisely around his neck.
Jane wore a deep blue dress that matched his tie, and since she was ready an hour before the wedding started, she was probably more like her father than she wanted to admit.
The Hammonds were never late, she knew that. In fact, if she showed up fifteen minutes early to a family brunch, she’d be the last one there. It had driven her to the brink of madness in her mid-twenties, but now she simply expected to get jazzed for showing upbeforethe agreed-upon time but after everyone else.
“I know you do, sweetheart,” Daddy said. “You’ll get it.”
