Marrying Minister Right

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“I don’t know if it will make things better, Michael, but I am here for the time being.” She could not promise to mend their friendship or anything more than this: “And I’ll stay until I can hire another worker to represent Helping Hands. I’ll do whatever I can for the town.”

“Great.”

The clanging bells interrupted them again. Michael jerked his head toward the church. “Let’s start by dealing with those bells.”

“It’s not an emergency, is it?” she asked over the slamming passenger door. “I assumed they were on a timer. Just a normal part of life here.”

“Then you assumed too much, my friend. There is no normal life around here these days. But I don’t think for a minute it’s a real emergency. At least not until I get my hands on that niece of mine.”

Chapter Three

When they reached the church, Michael dashed up the front stairs, taking them two at a time in his rush to get to his niece. Or maybe he did it, just a little, to show Heather that he wasn’t still that ungainly, hesitant kid she had once known.

Heather held back. She gave a quick glance in the direction of the river then down the street. “Maybe I should leave you to this while I go see how things are at the cottages.”

The bells stopped ringing.

Heather backed away.

“What? No.” Michael followed her lead, retracing his path until he had gone halfway back down the stairs. “Please, don’t run off.”

He’d said those words to her before, and on the steps of this very church. Then he’d gotten a face full of flowers. 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.

For an instant his attention was divided. But only for a second. Many times a day Avery pulled something to demand his attention and he gave it to her. Heather, on the other hand, had stayed out of his life for far too long for him to simply let her slip away again.

“Please, Heather.” He came down one step and then another, his hand extended. “Please stay. This won’t take long and then we can—”

What? Take up their lives where they left off? With her turning 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?

“Just…come inside. We’ll…take things from there,” he said softly.

Her whole body went straight and stiff. Her hands balled into fists at her sides. She tipped her head to one side and her hair swept over her shoulders.

Anxious. Uncertain. Agitated. Distressed.

Someone else might have used those kinds of words to describe how she looked just then. If asked, Michael would have said she looked…

“Amazing,” he muttered.

“What?” She tilted her head back and narrowed her eyes against the brightness of the August sun.

“To see you here after all this time. To have you back in High Plains and here at the church.” He took his eyes off her just long enough to glance up at the church doors, trying to urge her to come with him. “It’s pretty amazing, don’t you think?”

“Not exactly the word I’d use.” She shook her head then shut her eyes. “Besides, being at the church isn’t the same as…I don’t want to go in the sanctuary, Michael.”

“You what?”

“It’s silly, I know, after all these years.” She lifted her chin and met his gaze at last. “But I’m just not ready.”

“Okay. That’s okay. There’s no reason to go in the sanctuary now. The bells are controlled by a computer in the room right off the choir loft.” He stepped down again, his hand still out to her. “Of course if you don’t get over this anxiety by Sunday, you’ll miss out on hearing me preach.”

He wanted her to hear him preach. The thought was as close to vanity as Michael had ever had. He wanted the girl he had loved for so long, whom he would always love, to hear him do what God had called him to do.

“I won’t be here Sunday,” she said flatly.

Michael lowered his hand. “Oh.”

“But if you really want me to stay now, I guess I can come in and look around.” She gazed toward the cottages, her shoulders rose then fell and she turned to him and gave him a crooked smile. “I don’t suppose you have a place where I can set up a temporary office for my charity?”

“I don’t know what you’ll need, but feel free to see if there’s enough unoccupied space in the basement.” So maybe she wouldn’t stick around long enough to see him in the pulpit. Still, he had made a breakthrough.

He spread his hand on the wind-battered paint of the church’s outer door and pushed it open.

She followed him up the stairs, tucking a strand of her long hair delicately behind her ear as she looked down at her feet.

He grinned so broadly it actually made his cheeks ache, unable to take his eyes off her even as he held the door open. She passed through and he hurried forward to lead the way.

The walls around Heather Waters’s heart might not have come tumbling down but they had cracked. If she spent the day with him, he could show just how sorry he was for whatever he had done to hurt her. He could prove to her that he was a better man than the awkward, fumbling kid who—

“Oof!” The handle of the old vacuum gouged him right in the gut seconds before his momentum carried him headfirst over the mangy old thing.

His arms flailed. The soda cans slipped from his grasp. He kicked his leg to try to regain his balance. Bad idea.

His borrowed T-shirt ripped. One can of soda rolled off down the steps. The other bounced off the wall and began spewing a stream of foam high into the air. Michael took a full face-plant into the ever-filthy-from-the-tornado-aftermath carpet.

“Michael, are you all right?” Heather rushed toward him, her hands outstretched.

He was fine. Or as fine as any man could be under the circumstances. Still, he thought of groaning and playing up the injured angle in hopes that Heather might cradle his head in her lap, stroke his hair and tell him—

“It worked! I wasn’t sure it would, but look, here you are. It really worked!”

Michael looked up to find Avery standing over him, beaming with pure adolescent pride.

“What worked?” He pushed himself up to his elbows, then to a sitting position, then, clumsily and reluctantly, to his feet. He smacked dust from his shirt and grumbled. “Don’t tell me you set the vacuum cleaner—the vacuum I asked you to put away for me—here, then rang the bells knowing I’d come running and trip over it?”

“No.” She hesitated and Michael couldn’t read if that was because she was lying or because she was secretly wishing she had thought of a plan that clever. “Mr. Paisley had some kind of attack or something. He was coughing and saying he couldn’t breathe and he ran out the door.”

“Yeah, we already heard about you and Mr. Paisley and your attempt at reverse vacuum cleaning.” Michael considered giving the old vacuum a kick for emphasis but reined in the impulse in favor of showing Avery, and Heather, his calm, even-tempered, mature side.

“I didn’t attempt to clean anything.” Avery sneered. “I was putting the thing away. Like you told me to.”

“Oh, so that man’s choking and gasping was actually my fault?” Michael looked down, first at his tattered shirt then at the soda-soaked carpet and shook his head. “And the bell ringing? Am I accountable for that, too?”

“Well, if you’d gotten back with the drinks sooner…” She made a face. “Of course, now we don’t have any drinks at all.” She heaved a sigh. “Anyway, I figured somebody needed to know that that Paisley guy had hit the road so I rang the bells because I knew you’d come. You always come when there’s something that needs to be done, Uncle Michael. Even if what needs to be done is yelling at me! Especially if it’s yelling at me!”

Michael froze, his head still down, and chided himself for not putting it all together more quickly. What Avery had done, knowingly putting herself at risk of getting in trouble to help someone else, was, in its own odd way, a selfless act. Hardly the kind of thing the kid would have done just a few weeks ago. “Wow, Avery.”

“Wow, that was good, or wow, that was dumb?” she asked, her nose crinkled.

Before he could answer that, Heather stepped up and pitched in, righting the old vacuum as she gave Avery a nod of approval and said, “I think what you did was pretty ingenious.”

“Hear that, Uncle Michael?” The kid puffed out her chest and hooked her thumb in her overall strap again. “I’m a genius! Guess it runs in the family, huh?”

“Actually?” He stuck his fingers through the big hole torn in his loaner T-shirt and wriggled them. “I reacted kind of like a dope. Maybe genius is the kind of thing that skips a generation.”

“Like athletic ability?” Heather gave him a friendly nudge in the back before she turned her attention on Avery. “Your uncle never could get out of the way of anything. Not even a slow, high-arching softball thrown by a ten-year-old. He was clearly out of his league with this piece of sophisticated machinery.”

“That was then.” Michael pushed the vacuum against the wall then turned to face the pair so happy to give him good-natured grief. “This is—”

“Now let me get this straight.” Avery waved her hand to cut Michael off and focused her whole bright expression on Heather. “You knew Uncle Michael when…Hey! Are you her?”

“Her? Her, who?” Heather put her hands on her hips and planted herself between Avery and Michael. “Should I know what you’re talking about? Or rather, who you’re talking about?”

“The girl.” Avery said it in a way that only a young teen could. In a world-weary, acerbic tone, implying that it was so obvious she was embarrassed at having to articulate it even in this small way for him.

“That’s enough, Avery.” Mortified, Michael nabbed his niece gently but firmly by the arm and spun her around to point her toward the stairs that led to the basement. “Why don’t you go make lunch, as I asked before?”

“The more you try to get me out of the way, the more you might as well blast it from the bell tower yourself.” Avery did not budge. “This is the girl.”

Had he always been this conspicuous in his love for Heather? Suddenly he wondered if she had known all along and secretly felt sorry for him. Maybe that was why she had stayed away. Maybe that was why she seemed so reluctant to hang around now.