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Marrying Minister Right
Annie Jones
It was the happiest day of her life…Until Heather Waters was cruelly jilted at the altar. Yet now that very church is a beacon of hope for the tornado-ravaged town. With her charity mission, Heather finally comes home to High Plains and faces the man she believes betrayed her trust that day: Reverend Michael Garrison.As they work together to restore the town's faith, Heather's own heart remains in tatters. Until Michael, along with his precocious niece, helps her realize she's truly found Minister Right.
“Please don’t run, Heather.”
Michael watched Heather flinch. He’d said those words to her before, and on the steps of this very church. He’d gotten a face full of flowers—her wedding bouquet—the last time. This time he got much worse.
Heather turned and looked him straight in the eye. In that moment he saw unmasked all the hurt and disappointment she had carried with her all these years.
“Please, Heather.” He came down one step, and then another, his hand extended. “Please stay. And then we can—”
What? Take up their lives where they left off? With her looking to the wrong people and places for happiness? And him, wishing she’d just once look at him, really look at him and see how much he loved her?
After the Storm:
A Kansas community unites to rebuild
Healing the Boss’s Heart—Valerie Hansen
July 2009
Marrying Minister Right—Annie Jones
August 2009
Rekindled Hearts—Brenda Minton
September 2009
The Matchmaking Pact—Carolyne Aarsen
October 2009
A Family for Thanksgiving—Patricia Davids
November 2009
Jingle Bell Babies—Kathryn Springer
December 2009
ANNIE JONES
Winner of the Holt Medallion for Southern Themed Fiction and the Houston Chronicle’s Best Christian Fiction Author of 1999, Annie Jones grew up in a family that loved to laugh, eat and talk—often all at the same time. They instilled in her the gift of sharing through words and humor, and the confidence to go after her heart’s desire (and to act fast if she wanted the last chicken leg). A former social worker, she feels called to be a “voice for the voiceless” and has carried that calling into her writing by creating characters often overlooked in our fast-paced culture—from seventy-somethings who still have a zest for life to women over thirty with big mouths and hearts to match. Having moved thirteen times during her marriage, she is currently living in rural Kentucky with her husband and two children.
Marrying Minister Right
Annie Jones
Special thanks and acknowledgment to Annie Jones for her contribution to the After the Storm miniseries
Therefore put on the full armor of God,
so that when the day of evil comes, you may
be able to stand your ground, and after you have
done everything, to stand.
—Ephesians 6:13
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Questions for Discussion
Prologue
July 10
10:00 p.m.
Wichita, Kansas
“That’s it! I am officially changing my name.”
The old door to the main office of Helping Hands Christian Charity slammed, echoing through the darkened hallway. The charity’s founder and long-time director pushed her straight light brown hair off her shoulders and stared at her name printed in gold on the frosted glass. “I am no longer Heather Waters.”
Mary Kate Madison, her assistant, marched onward flicking off lights as she headed down the hallway. She raised her voice to be heard over the drone of the TV in the lobby, calling back, “Not this again.”
“From this point on, I am going by what everybody and their dog seems to know me as.” The thin soles of Heather’s three-year-old, faux-leather bargain pumps kept a quick rhythm on the scuffed linoleum floor. “Heather Willya!”
“Did you say Heather Will You?” Mary Kate asked as she charged on ahead of her boss.
“Will ya,” she corrected above the hum of the TV in the lobby. “As in Heather, will ya sign these forms? Heather, will ya see if you can find a few more dollars for this cause or that? Heather, will ya juggle your schedule to host an important meeting of the Interfaith Community Needs Assessment Council?”
“You love being counted on and we all know it.” Mary Kate, who at twenty-three was five years younger than Heather but still tended to play mother hen, clucked her tongue as she reached the well-lit and finally vacant lobby. In the doorway she pivoted and held up her hand. “Oh, wait. Check the doors to make sure they’re locked as you come down the hallway, if you don’t mind, will you?”
“That’s Ms. Willya to you!” Heather called back. She rattled a doorknob, found it secure and moved on. “All is as it should be. Everything is safe and secure and we can trust—”
“Hey, didn’t you come from High Plains?” Mary Kate cut her off.
“High Plains?” Heather stopped in her tracks. “Why do you ask?”
Mary Kate pointed to the TV hung high in the lobby.
“An F3-level tornado devastated the small community of High Plains, Kansas, yesterday evening,” the TV announcer was saying.
“What?” Heather stepped forward. She’d been so busy with work that she hadn’t heard any news all day.
“The destruction is widespread,” the announcer went on. “Emergency crews are on the scene. We are still waiting to see if there are any deaths or serious injuries.”
Dead or injured? In High Plains? Heather staggered forward toward the small, flickering screen. A knot tightened in her stomach.
“You grew up there, right?” Her assistant looked from the broadcast to Heather then back to the broadcast.
“Yes, it’s…” A place she had not visited or even so much as driven through since she had left it behind a decade ago. Heather couldn’t imagine rubble where once had stood homes and businesses.
To her surprise, an aching sense of the familiar washed over her. The threat of tears blurred her vision. “It’s home.”
All her life that was all she had wanted. A real home. Her mother tried so hard to make one for their family. But no amount of love and kindness on her part had made it happen. Nothing either of them did could make Heather’s father love her.
“At present the town is using High Plains Christian Church, which escaped virtually unscathed in the storm, as a base of operations.”
The image of the simple old white church flashed on the screen and the world seemed to spin backward through time. Her cheeks flashed hot. Her knees wobbled for only a moment before she took a deep breath and shut her eyes to steady herself.
The day she left High Plains for good, never looking back, she was supposed to have been married in that very church. As long as she lived she would never forget opening the envelope in the sanctuary where she had spent so many joyous days of her life. In that envelope, delivered by a private investigator hired by her fiancé’s family, she found a truth her mother had taken to her grave. Edward Waters was not her biological father.
And John Parker, son of the wealthiest family to ever live in High Plains, wanted nothing more to do with her. There would be no marriage. For only a moment Heather had blamed the private investigator’s report. But young as she was, she wasn’t foolish enough to think that in this day and age someone would refuse to marry a person because of her lineage. No, Heather now understood why Edward Waters never would love her and that, despite his many youthful professions, John Parker had never really loved her.
Her world had fallen apart that day and she had crumbled with it. She had come so far since that wretched day. Yet this awful reminder of her hometown proved to her that she may have moved away, but she had not wholly moved on.
“Built in 1859, the church remains much as it did then, a beacon to those in need.” The reporter spoke with a cultivated calm that belied the tragedy of the situation. “We interviewed the minister from the church earlier today and here’s what he had to say.”
Heather raised her hand to block the screen from her view. “I’ll look this up online later tonight. It’s just horrible but…it really doesn’t have anything to do with me anymore. It’s not like I even know anyone there any—”
Just then, between her splayed fingers, she caught a glimpse of a broad-shouldered man with wavy dark brown hair. He looked rumpled but in charge.
“Michael.” Heather dropped her hand to her throat and fought to drag in a breath deep enough to allow her to speak above a dry, shocked whisper.
The years had treated him kindly. Given him fullness in the face and the beginning of lines fanning out from his startlingly blue eyes. Still, there was no mistaking him. “Michael Garrison.”
“You know him?” Mary Kate’s head whipped around.
The picture began to break up.
“I’m sorry,” the news anchor came back. “We seem to have lost that connection. We’ll go back to it after this message.”
Heather exhaled slowly, her eyes on the TV where moments ago she had confronted her past. “Yeah, I know him. Or knew him. That is…I thought I knew him.”
The Three Amigos. Everyone in town had called Michael, her and John Parker that from the time they had all been the lousiest players on a fairly lousy Little League team. They had formed a bond then—John, “Take-A-Hike Mike,” so called because the only way he could get on base was to get hit by the ball and get a walk; and “Heather Duster.” She threw herself into every base, trying too hard, wanting it too badly. Needing to prove she could do it, she would dive headlong, gritting her teeth and sliding with all her heart.
“You can never tell where Heather is standing until the dust settles,” the coach would say.
From grade school through high school, nothing could separate the trio. Until one day during the summer between their junior and senior years. That was the summer that John Parker kissed Heather. Suddenly, three became a crowd. Michael hadn’t seemed to mind; he wanted the best for his friends, he had said. He wanted them to be happy.
That’s what he had said.
“So you do know him, or what?”
“I know him.” Heather nodded, her eyes on the screen waiting to see if they would return to the story shortly. “The last time I saw the man, I threw my wedding bouquet in his face.”
“You were going to marry him?” Mary Kate stabbed her finger at the TV.
“No, he was just—” A friend? A friend would never have done what Michael Garrison had done. In many ways, his role in what happened that day had hurt Heather more than John’s. She knew why John couldn’t go through with the marriage. Even though she still chafed at the way he had handled it, she had found a grudging respect for the fact that he hadn’t gone forward with wedding vows he knew he could not honor for a lifetime. But Michael? Why had he gone along with it, allowed her public humiliation and done nothing to stop it? That, she could never understand. “Michael Garrison was just a—”
“Tell us, Reverend Garrison, what can people watching do to help?” The news correspondent had come back on. He thrust the mic into the bleary-eyed, disheveled minister’s face.
Such a good face. Heather could still see the kindness and commitment in the way he stood firm among the chaos and destruction. In the fact that he looked as though he had not rested since the storm had hit. In the fact that he was willing to speak on behalf of those who could not, at the moment, speak for themselves, with no regard for his own needs.
“Reverend Garrison,” she murmured, shaking her head. Michael had always talked about entering the ministry, but she had never heard if he had actually followed through on that.
He stroked the stubby shadow of bristles along his jaw. When she had last seen him, he’d hardly been shaving at all. He had been so young then. They all had been.
