Sweet Blessings. Jillian Hart

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СКАЧАТЬ get into bed, young man. Hurry up.”

      He ran, feet pounding as he raced out of her sight. The squeak of the box spring told her he’d jumped onto his mattress and was bouncing around, all boy energy, even this late at night.

      If only she could harness it, she thought wistfully, as she bent her aching back to blow out the other candle on the little dinette set in the eating nook. Every bone in both feet seemed to groan and wince as she headed down the hall, drawn through the darkness by the light in her little boy’s room.

      Westin was waiting and ready, tucked beneath his covers. A candle in a stout holder—Kelly must have placed it there—shone brightly enough on the pillow to reveal the boy’s midnight-blue bedspread with the planets sprinkled all over it. The rings of Saturn. The storms of Jupiter. The icy moon of…Jupiter? She couldn’t keep straight which moons belonged to which planets, but she should know it by heart because it was nearly all Westin talked about.

      “Kelly and I saved the chapter on black holes for you to read, Mom!” Big blue eyes sparkling, Westin hid a cough in his fist and scrunched back into the pillows. Snoopy, clenched tightly in the crook of one arm, was apparently anticipating the wealth of information on black holes, too.

      “I’ve been looking forward to this all day.” Amy settled onto the bedside and held the heavy library book open in her hands. The spine cracked, the plastic cover crinkled and she breathed in the wonderful scent of books, paper and ink. She cleared her throat and began to read.

      As exciting as gravity was, and as awesome as it was to hear about some stars exploding their matter into space, while others sank into themselves, Westin’s eyelids flickered. He yawned hugely and fought hard to stay awake. When she got to the part about gravity sucking light and matter into the net of a black hole, Westin’s lids stayed shut. His jaw relaxed. Snoopy kept watching her, however.

      She slipped a bookmark between the pages and set the book on the nightstand. She just watched her son sleep for a few minutes with her heart full. Then she rose, blew out the candle and shut his door tightly.

      The hall was pitch-black. Hail still rattled against the walls. Listening to the wind groan, Amy slipped into the darkness of her room. There was a tiny reading light, run on battery power, on her headboard. She unclipped it and flicked it on. It was a faint light and not strong enough to scare away the deep shadows from the room.

      The uneasiness was still inside her. It was the loner. Tonight he’d somehow breached the careful shield she kept around her. Maybe it wasn’t that he’d broken through her defenses as much as she saw through his. And what she saw there reminded her of hard lessons she’d learned.

      When a person lost her innocence, there was no way to get it back—even if she surrounded herself with family and friends, lived in a small rural town where she’d lived nearly all her life, where she knew everyone, where nothing bad hardly ever happened.

      She could work hard, do her very best, pay her bills on time, make a home, raise a son and sometimes, like tonight, there would be something that would remind her.

      Some wounds ran too deep to heal. And there lived within her a scar that cut into her soul. She was as lost as the loner had seemed to be. And as wounded.

      In the dark, alone in her room, she felt revealed. In an act just short of desperation, she switched on the clock radio by her bed and forgot the lights were out. Tonight there would be no soothing twang of familiar Christian songs to lull away some of the void.

      She hurried about her bedtime routine, the little habits reassuring her, making her feel as if everything was in its place. She washed her face, flossed, brushed her teeth, smoothed cream on those little lines beside her eyes and mouth. She changed into her soft flannel pajamas and knelt to say her prayers.

      The storm was moving on. The hail turned to rain as she crawled under the covers, and then to silence.

      But it wasn’t a peaceful silence.

      Chapter Three

      Heath growled in frustration from beneath the pillow that he’d wedged over his head. But it wasn’t working to block out first light.

      It was his brand of luck. His motel room faced east—and that meant bright searing sunlight was finding its way through the gaps in the fifty-year-old curtain, and it lit up the place like a lighthouse’s beacon. The light seemed to pulse and dance because the old heater that clattered like a hamster running on a squeaky wheel all night long and wouldn’t turn off, was spewing hot air full-blast beneath the curtains.

      Oh yeah, it was another night in a long string of countless nights without much sleep to speak of. His eyes were gritty, his mind numb and his back muscles aching from the sagging mattress. By the time he’d stepped into the shower, he was already resigned and so the fact that the water stayed cold even when he’d turned the knob to full force hot didn’t bother him so much.

      These days not much did. His single duffel bag was ready to go and waiting by the door. He never bothered to unpack. When he was dried off and dressed, he tossed his toothbrush and half-rolled tube of toothpaste into the bag’s side pocket. He then added his unused razor. He scraped a hand over his two-day stubble—not too long to itch yet and he didn’t care if he looked a little on the scruffy side.

      He squinted into the mirror as he zipped up the duffel. The man who looked back at him had the weary look of a drifter. The worn-down-to-the-nub soul he’d seen in so many of the homeless men he’d treated when they had stumbled into his emergency room.

      He winced. Any thoughts of his old life brought up the beginnings of a pain so black, it would drown him. Or, maybe it already had, he reasoned as he looked away from the man in the mirror and slung the battered bag over his shoulder.

      The stranger staring back at him didn’t resemble Dr. Heath Murdock, not in any way. He was no longer the vascular surgeon with a specialty in trauma medicine, who could handle any crisis, any unspeakable catastrophe with the calm steady confidence of a man born to save lives.

      What he couldn’t stand to think about were the lives he’d failed to save.

      So he headed out into the morning and welcomed the crisp bite to the early-spring air. The cheerful sun burned his eyes. Blinking hard, he ambled along the cracked sidewalk, uneven from the towering maples lining the parking lot, their roots exposed like old arthritic fingers digging into the dirt.

      Head down, he dropped the room key off at the front desk where a tired woman in brown polyester mumbled thanks without looking up at him. He saw a home dye job and graying roots. The deep creases in the woman’s face were testimony of too many decades of hard living and heartbreak.

      Yeah, he knew. He unlocked the passenger door of the old pickup. The truck used to be his granddad’s. Faint memories of sunny days riding around the Iowa farm with his grandpop washed through him.

      Good times. Times he could tolerate thinking about. He dropped the duffel on the passenger floor, where decades of boots had worn scuffs. Tiny bits of straw and dried grass seed remained dug deep into the grooves around the door. The distant voices of long ago echoed for one brief moment—Grandpop, when I grow up I’m gonna be just like you!… Lord I hope so, son, ’cuz there ain’t nothin’ better than bein’ a cowboy.

      The voices silenced as he slammed the door hard and breathed in the scented air.

      There was hay and alfalfa growing СКАЧАТЬ