Falling for the Innkeeper

by Meghann Whistler

  Jonathan hadn’t expected to like Pastor Nate. In fact, ever since the man had singled him out to shake his hand at the beginning of the service, Jonathan had been bracing himself for an onslaught of prayer and preaching.

  But here in the church hall, eating doughnuts and drinking coffee, Nate hadn’t been interested in talking about religion at all. He was way more interested in talking sports—specifically the Red Sox, the Patriots and the Bruins.

  “Bruins game against the Leafs is coming up on Wednesday. Some of the guys are coming over to my place to watch,” Nate said. “You in?”

  Jonathan did a quick mental calculation and decided it was unlikely that he’d get everything for The Sea Glass Inn deal wrapped up by Wednesday. “I’ll be there.”

  “Good deal.” Brett punched him companionably on the arm.

  “Well, it was great to meet you, Jonathan.” Nate clasped his hand in farewell. “See you again soon.”

  Nate walked off to mingle with other parishioners, holding men’s shoulders, kissing women’s cheeks and smiling reassuringly at one and all. Jonathan squinted after him, an uneasy feeling in his gut.

  Had he just been hoodwinked? Come watch a hockey game, then come to Jesus? Jonathan was a lawyer—he knew better than anyone that most things in life were about the quid pro quo. “Did he just do some spiritual brainwashing on me?” he wondered aloud.

  Brett laughed. “What?”

  “You know, is this how you guys recruit people? Invite them to some social event and then lure them back to church?”

  Brett laughed again. “Dude, either you’ve got a very low opinion of preachers or a very low opinion of yourself. I promise you, nobody here’s in the business of recruitment. All Nate was doing was trying to be friendly.”

  Jonathan took a swig of his coffee, which was lukewarm now and definitely not a gourmet blend. “That’s pretty friendly, inviting someone you’ve just met over to your place.”

  “It’s a playoffs party, man, not some master plan to initiate you into a cult.”

  “Still.”

  Brett shrugged. “I’d be happy to see you there, introduce you around.”

  When was the last time anyone had said they’d be happy to see him? He thought about his colleagues at the law firm, with whom he’d sometimes socialize after work—but that was more about proximity than any real camaraderie. He thought about the women he’d dated, who had been more interested in his wallet and career prospects than his companionship. He thought about his mother and his sister, neither of whom he’d made any effort to see in months and months.

  What was wrong with him? Why were the only truly intimate relationships in his life the ones he went out of his way to avoid? And why did a small gesture of friendship set off all kinds of internal alarms? Since when had he become so cynical?

  “I’d like to watch the game with you guys,” he said quietly to Brett. “Sorry if I was being a jerk.”

  Brett hitched a shoulder. “I get it. You don’t want to get roped into anything.”

  “Exactly,” Jonathan said, feeling relieved that Brett understood.

  Brett’s gaze flicked to where Chloe and Laura were standing. “If you don’t want to get roped into anything, it’s probably best not to spend so much time with a certain single mom.”

  Jonathan felt his jaw tighten. “She’s not like that.”

  Brett held up his hands. “Oh, I know she’s not,” he said quickly. “But I’ve seen guys who look at women the way you look at her, and if you’re not planning to stick around, I’m worried it’s going to end badly for you.”

  Jonathan’s eyes flew to Laura. Was it really that obvious how much he liked her? Did he wear his heart on his sleeve?

  “Do you think she’d ever move to Boston?”

  Brett clapped a hand on his shoulder. “Brother, if you’re already asking that question, you might be in deeper than you think.”

  Chapter Ten

  Brett and Jonathan invited Emma to come to the ball hockey practice after lunch, so Laura found herself watching her daughter get fitted for a helmet, stick, shin guards and hockey gloves. Emma was definitely the youngest player, although all the kids were twelve and under, and there were a couple of boys who couldn’t have been more than six years old. Jonathan spent a lot of time showing Emma how to hold her stick and hit her ball.

  They did a bunch of drills: running with the ball, push passes, shooting on an empty net. At the very end of the practice, they scrimmaged for a few minutes, Brett serving as the captain of one team and Jonathan as the captain of the other.

  Emma was sweaty and exhilarated when her team—Jonathan’s team—won. The kids all knocked gloves with each other before taking off their gear.

  “You did it, man.” Brett gave Jonathan a fist bump as the last of the kids dispersed. “You spent an afternoon in ministry and you didn’t run for the hills.”

  Jonathan laughed and turned to Emma. “What do you say, Tiny? Does this call for a celebration?”

  Emma threw her arms in the air. “Ice cream, ice cream, you’re our man! We will eat you if we can!”

  Jonathan looked at Laura with a yikes kind of smile on his face and mouthed, “Where does she get this stuff?”

  Laura gave an exaggerated shrug, mouthing back, “I have no idea.”

  “Ice cream, ice cream, you’re our guy! If I don’t eat you, I will cry!”

  Jonathan scooped Emma into his arms. “We can’t have that, Tiny! No tears when you win the big game!”

  “So we get ice cream?”

  He looked to Laura for permission. She gave him a thumbs-up. “We get ice cream,” he confirmed.

  “Yay!”

  They walked over to The Sundae School, housed in a cedar-shingled store that was designed to look like an old-fashioned ice cream parlor, with an old-school soda fountain and colorful ice-cream signs from the ’50s and ’60s—five-cent cones and thirty-cent sundaes—lining the walls.

  Jonathan ordered a hot-fudge sundae for Emma, a scoop of mocha crunch for Laura and, for himself, he chose a waffle cone with a double scoop of a gourmet rocky road, complete with roasted almonds, chocolate chunks and swirls of fudge. When he took his first taste, he groaned. “I’m going to pack on twenty pounds if I stay here much longer.”

  “Just named one of the best ice cream spots on the whole Cape,” Laura said.

  He groaned again. “I believe it.”

  Emma already had whipped cream on her nose. “I love ice cream,” she said happily. Jonathan reached over with a napkin and wiped her face.

  “You girls want to go mini golfing after this?”

  “Yeah!” Emma cheered.

  Laura cocked her head to the side. “I thought you had to work.”

  He shrugged. “It’s Sunday. It can wait.”

  They walked back to church and picked up Laura’s car, then drove the few minutes to the mini golf course, Davy Jones’s Locker. “I haven’t been mini golfing since high school,” Jonathan said, looking around.

  The course was well-done, full of fake pirate ships, plastic sharks and rusty anchors. In a small pond under a waterfall, they could even see the scaly green back of the Loch Ness Monster.

  “Laura Lessoway. As I live and breathe!” the middle-aged woman behind the counter greeted them. She was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a golf ball set atop a golf tee and the saying Tee Shirt written across her chest.

  “Hi, Darlene,” Laura said.

  “And little Emma! Hello, sweetheart.”

  “Hi, Mrs. Darween.”

  “How are you doing without your dear grandmother?” the woman asked.

  “You know,” Laura replied. “Hanging in.”

  “Well, we just opened last weekend. This game’s on the house.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to do that,” Laura protested. Darlene was a me
mber of the congregation at WCC. When Gram had passed, she’d dropped off a casserole at the inn.

  “Don’t worry about it, honey. You and your young man enjoy your game,” Darlene said, winking at Jonathan.

  “Oh, he’s not—”

  The older woman cut her off by handing them their putters and balls. She was almost as bad as Chloe. “See you in church next weekend.”

  “See you there.”

  They walked to the first tee and watched Emma whack her ball like it was a hockey puck. “Not so hard, honey,” Laura called after her.

  “You weren’t kidding about this being a tight-knit community,” Jonathan said. It looked like he was fighting back a smile.

  Laura sighed. He’d caught Darlene’s not-so-subtle attempt at matchmaking. “Sorry about that.”

  After Emma sank her ball, he lined up his putt. “She’s looking out for you,” he teased. “I think it’s sweet.” His ball hugged the rim of the hole, then lipped out.

  “Mr. Jonafin! You almost got a hole in one!”

  “There’s no almost in golf, Tiny. It’s either in or it’s out.” But Emma wasn’t listening; she’d already moved on to the next hole.

  Laura shot and bounced her ball off an obstacle on the course. “What did you think of the service this morning?”

  He twirled his putter. “A little different from the church I grew up in.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Ours was more traditional,” he said. “You know, organ player, old-school hymns.”

  “Right.”

  He lined up his next shot. “I see why you like it, though. There’s a lot of energy. And the people seem nice.”

  Now it was her turn to tease. “So, if you don’t go to church and you don’t play mini golf, what do you do in your spare time?”

  He laughed. “What spare time?”

  “Oh, come on,” she said. “Nothing?”

  “I go to a lot of networking events. I run the occasional 10K. Other than that, I work.”

  “I used to run, too,” she said, “before Emma. But no organized races.”

  “Why not?”

  She hit her ball. “That makes it about the competition, not the joy.”

  He looked at her, and there was something in his eyes—something almost reverent—that made her swallow hard.

  She liked him. She did. He was easy to talk to, he was smart, he was good-looking. And, boy, if the way he was with Emma was any indication, he’d make a fantastic father someday.

  But he was also ambitious and career driven, and he would run her over in his pursuit to make partner if he had to. He’d spent twenty years on the path to partnership, he’d told her last night, sacrificed nights and vacations and holidays. Maybe he hadn’t sacrificed a marriage, like Conrad had, but who knew what he would do in time?

  He retrieved his ball from the hole and they walked to the next one. “Nate invited me over to watch a hockey game on Wednesday night.”

  “Another fanboy for their sports club, huh?”

  “You don’t like hockey?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “Never really watched it.”

  “We should go to a game sometime. It’s fun.”

  “Hockey. Meh,” she said. “But if you want to go see the Red Sox...” What was she doing? After her conversation with Chloe at church, she was supremely aware that she was flirting, and based on the way Jonathan’s eyes were glued to her, she was pretty sure she was doing a more than adequate job.

  Why, though? She wasn’t the kind of woman who played games with men. And if Jonathan was even half as committed to his job as her father was to his, she wasn’t interested, even if he did treat Emma like the daughter he’d never had.

  Or was she?

  She bit her lip again. He didn’t take himself too seriously, unlike the other corporate men she’d known. He was real, too, and very considerate. She hadn’t missed the fact that, after Darlene comped their game, Jonathan had stuffed a twenty-dollar bill into the tip jar on the counter.

  He pulled out his phone. “On it. I’m checking for tickets right now.”

  She laughed. “Oh, no, don’t do that. I can’t take the time away from the inn. Not with the summer season starting up.” She didn’t want to lead him on, not when she knew for a fact that they’d never be the right fit.

  “Of course.” He put his phone away and lined up his next putt. He missed by a mile. “Some other time.”

  She nodded. “Some other time.” She made her shot and sank it—a hole in one.

  “Nice!” He held out his hand for a high five. She slapped it. Then he pointed his putter down the street like a divining rod. “Next stop, fried clams.”

  * * *

  On the ride home after dinner at the clam shack, Laura told Jonathan she was going out.

  “Hot date?” He tried to keep his voice casual, but it was hard. After she’d turned him down on the Red Sox game, it was definitely hard.

  Given the fact that she had Tiny to watch out for, he understood why she’d said no, although it left him feeling curiously disappointed. There was something about her that made him want to be the man she could trust with anything, with everything—her daughter, her feelings, her heart.

  Was it fair, though, if he was leaving? Was it fair when he was so dedicated to his job? Surely they could try to do things long-distance, couldn’t they? And after the sale of The Sea Glass Inn went through, maybe he could convince her to move to Boston to be closer to him.

  All he knew was that he couldn’t let the details cloud the fact that he hadn’t felt this way about anyone ever, and that if she was going out with some other man tonight, it would feel like a stake shoved straight through his heart.

  She shook her head, a smile quirking her lips. “Brett’s got his youth ministry. I’ve got mine.”

  “Okay, now I’m curious,” he said as they pulled up in front of the inn.

  “I was just going to drop you off before heading out, but if you want to come, we can always use more male volunteers...”

  “Uh-oh. What am I getting myself into?”

  “You know how those little kids at ball hockey loved you?” she asked. He nodded. “Be prepared for the absolute opposite with our surly teens.”

  They got to WCC and dropped Emma off at the babysitting room in the main church before walking over to the church annex. Outside, the crickets were out in force, as were the peeper frogs, their calls like mini alarms. Unlike in Boston, there was no background whir of cars and trucks and subway trains to drown out the indigenous sounds. Just the peeps and the chirps and their footfalls on the ground.

  “Have you heard of Celebrate Recovery before?” Laura asked.

  “You mentioned it the other night, didn’t you?” he said, opening the door to the church annex for her.

  “It’s pretty cool. It’s a recovery program for everyone, for whatever issue they’re struggling with—alcohol, drugs, codependency, divorce, you name it.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Is that how you got involved? After your divorce?”

  “Actually, no. It was when I was a teenager, here for the summer after my parents took off. It’s why I’ve got such a heart for the teen ministry. Because I get it, what it feels like to struggle at that age.”

  “Your parents?” he asked gently.

  She bit her lip, nodded. “I guess they thought I was too old to come to Hong Kong, or I’d do better here, or something. I don’t know. But I felt bad about it for a long time. Like, what’s wrong with me that they’d leave me behind?”

  “What’s wrong with you?” he scoffed.

  “Yeah,” she said. “That’s why I value the church community so much. They’re the ones who helped me see that if I’m right with God, nothing else matters. No one can make me feel inferior or invisible. No one can make me feel like I’m not enoug
h. My identity isn’t wrapped up in where I’m from or who raised me or what I’ve achieved. I’m a child of God, and that’s a pretty awesome thing to be.”

  Jonathan looked at her intently. “You’re amazing,” he said, and he meant it. She was incredible, this beautiful woman. No wonder she’d said, that first night they’d met, that the word nice didn’t even begin to describe her faith. Transformative was more like it. He wondered what it would be like to be so secure in the knowledge of God’s grace.

  She shook her head. “It’s not me. You’ll see. Come to these meetings long enough and you start to see that God can work a miracle in anyone’s life.”

  They were at the door to the meeting room, a handful of kids clustered on an old brown couch, a handful playing foosball at a beat-up table in the back.

  “Hey, everyone,” Laura said. The kids looked up, waved or said hello. “This is my friend Jonathan. He’s going to help out tonight.” There were a few “heys” and head nods directed at him. “Let’s get started. Who wants to pray?”

  Pretty soon, Laura was walking the kids through a lesson on powerlessness—how God doesn’t have space to work his healing power until a person stops denying his pain, and stops trying to control his own life and emotions.

  “So, you guys know Matthew 6:24, right? Where Jesus says no one can serve two masters?

  “Jesus was talking about money here, but the verse really applies to anything you place before God in your life—even your pain, your addictions or your bad habits, right? Like, for me, it was resentment toward my parents. For a while, putting the blame on them made me feel better about myself. But pretty soon that resentment got out of control. It was all I could see, and then I was depressed and unhappy all the time. The thing I thought I had control over started to control me.”

  The kids nodded, and then split up into a group of boys and a group of girls for the “open share” portion of the evening. Jonathan joined another male volunteer in listening to the boys. One of them was upset that his girlfriend had broken up with him. Another talked about how much he hated his acne. And then there was the boy whose mother was a drug addict, who lived with his aunt and whose older brother had just gotten arrested for using a fake ID to try to buy alcohol.