AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“You say that as if you care. Do you, Vidalia?”
She didn’t look up and she didn’t answer. So he caught her chin with his forefinger and tipped her head up, and he was surprised to see tears sparkling on her thick lashes.
And what happened next, well, he didn’t have much control over that at all. Because if he had, it wouldn’t have happened. He looked at her for about a second longer, and then he kissed her.
Her arms crept round his neck, and his slid around her waist, and she kissed him right back, and that made him want to kiss her even more, which resulted in her kissing him back even more. They sat there on that fallen log, all wrapped up in each other, making out like a couple of horny teenagers. And when he lifted his head and stared into her beautiful dark eyes, there was snow falling on her hair. Tiny white flakes of it drifted down all around them. It wouldn’t stick. And come morning, no one would even know it had ever happened.
It was like a gift, just for the two of them.
She smiled up at him. “I’ve been praying for snow,” she said softly.
“Are your prayers always answered, Vidalia?” he asked. He wondered if, in her experience, God answered her prayers as quickly as He had just answered Bobby’s own. He’d asked what he should be doing with the time he had left, and God had sent him Vidalia. He’d as much as told him to go ahead and spend his final days with her, just the way he wanted to.
Made him wish he’d talked to the Big Guy more often. He hadn’t expected it to be that easy or for the answer to be that immediate, that clear. Unless it was just his imagination, and coincidence, and wishful thinking.
She was nodding hard. “Always, Bobby Joe. Every single time I pray, I get an answer. Every once in a while, though, the answer is no.”
He nodded at her. “So you’re still a believer?”
“Look around us,” she said turning her head and looking at the stars, the waterfall crashing down, and the gentle fall of snowflakes in the dark. “How can I not be?”
His heart knotted up and told him right then that he was as much in love with this woman as he had ever been. And he knew it wasn’t fair not to tell her the truth, not when it seemed like she might be feeling fondly toward him as well.
But not yet, not tonight. Tonight was too special, too magical to ruin with talk about death and dying.
He slid his arm around her shoulders, held her near to his side, and continued looking at the sky and noticing how you could hardly tell the stars from the snowflakes, way up high. “I need to get a Christmas tree for the Long Branch,” he said.
“Well, I need to get one for the Corral,” she told him. “What do you say we do it together?”
“I say, you bet. How about tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow’s great. Perfect, in fact. It’s Sunday, so it’ll have to be in the afternoon. I go to church in the morning.” She took a deep breath, lowered her eyes. “You could come with me, if you want.”
He was quiet for a long moment. “I um...God and I are working through some issues right now, Vidalia. We’re communicating, Him and I. But I’m not quite ready to visit Him at home just yet.
She frowned and studied his face through the snowflakes, but he didn’t elaborate.
CHAPTERFIVE
Vidalia was like a kid on Christmas Eve for the rest of that night. She didn’t drive home, she floated on a cloud of romantic pink fluff she hadn’t felt since....
Well, heck, since Bobby Joe had left town so long ago.
She felt as giddy as a seventeen-year-old in love for the first time. And maybe that was unseemly and maybe it was silly, but it was. That’s all. It just was.
She got herself home and took a long hot shower and didn’t sleep a wink all night. Just laid there, imagining how it would be if she and Bobby could start over. Imagining how it would be if he stuck around Big Falls, and what people would think about that. And yet all that time, there was a dark shadow lurking in the back of her mind, casting a pall over her excited, romantic thoughts. The secret she’d kept from him. The one that was standing smack in between the two of them. But she pushed that shadow out of her mind and kept it at bay, just like she’d done for the past twenty-plus years.
She was up before dawn, bustling around the kitchen to get Sunday dinner underway. It was a family tradition. Even on Sundays when the girls and their families didn’t come to church, they always came to Sunday dinner. And while she didn’t want to get ahead of herself here, she was thinking of inviting Bobby Joe and his sons too, if they felt like coming along.
She was halfway through chopping onions to go into her famous pot roast, when the shadow of her guilt escaped from where she’d buried it, jumped up and hit her square in the chest, knocking the breath right out of her. Here she was, acting like she was about to embark on a new romance. But it wasn’t new at all, was it? It was an old attraction that had led to the biggest sin she’d ever committed, which she had then compounded by adding the biggest lie she’d ever told.
She had no business feeling giddy or romantic or excited at all. And if anything was going to develop between her and Bobby Joe McIntyre, she had to take care of all of that old baggage first.
Because chances were, once he knew the truth, he’d never forgive her.
She should’ve told him long ago. It was the only stain on her soul, and it was a big one.
“Mom?” Selene had come in all but silently. “Are you crying?”
