Teacher Heather, a fresh-faced, slender woman in her midtwenties who had a three-year-old son in Mia and Janey’s class, arrived at their row.
“Are you ready, Mia?” Teacher Heather said with a welcoming smile, holding out her hand. Her eyes alighted on Janey. “I see you have a friend with you today.”
Mia nodded as she moved by Sara and Owen, Janey in tow, without so much as a goodbye to Sara. “Uh-huh. We’re going to play with the dollies before we learn about Jesus.”
“I already know ’bout Jesus,” Janey said on her way by. No goodbye or tears or clinging from her, either. In fact, she didn’t even look at Owen. “I just want to see the dollies.”
And then they were gone, following in a single file line behind Teacher Heather to a door in the back of the sanctuary, along with all the other kids in the congregation.
Sara turned to Owen. He was sitting there, his gaze on the door Janey had disappeared through, his vaguely shadowed jaw completely slack, his shoulders slumped slightly. He looked a bit lost and a little bit upset.
Empathy welled in Sara. Given that she herself hadn’t known that kind of devotion or concern from her own dad, and hadn’t seen one shred of it in Josh, either, she didn’t think there was anything more appealing in a real man.
In fact, the one sitting next to her was turning out to be perfect in just about every way.
Trying to ignore the implications of her realization, she steadied herself and focused on the conversation at hand. “It’s hard to let them be independent, isn’t it?” she said, taking his hand before she could think better of it.
He froze, his grip rigid with what seemed like surprise. Then, after a long moment, just as she was going to pull her hand away and apologize for touching him, he slowly tightened his fingers around hers, engulfing her hand in a strength and warmth that she hadn’t felt from another person in a long time.
He made a rueful sound in the back of his throat. “Not very manly, is it?”
“I think it’s wonderful,” she replied truthfully. “You care passionately about your daughter. What’s better than that?”
He squeezed her hand even tighter and looked into her eyes, his deep blue gaze alight with tender gratefulness. “Thank you,” he said softly. “You always seem to know what to say to make me feel better.”
His words caused an odd combination of giddiness and warmth to settle like a ball of goo in her chest. She tried to keep herself from falling into the compelling pull of his gaze, tried to speak. But for that small beat of time, she couldn’t, and he didn’t look away, either.
The organ rang out with the grand beginning chords of the presermon hymn, and the notes bellowing forth from the pipes knocked some much-needed sense into Sara. She dragged her attention away from Owen, reminding herself this was not the time nor the place to get all googly-eyed over him. In fact, she ruthlessly hammered home, there was never a time or place for that reaction. Not anymore.
From the pulpit, Pastor Jacobson asked everybody to rise. Sara stood just as Owen did, and she forced her eyes front and center, trying to keep her focus on the service and off Owen. They were in church, not on a date.
But now that she’d seen more of the kind of dad and man he was proving himself to be, she knew without a doubt that keeping him in the just-friends-because-our-daughters-are-friends-and-anyway-he’s-leaving-town-soon category was going to be harder than she’d thought.
Yep. She definitely had her work cut out for her.
* * *
“I thought the service was really nice,” Sara said as she walked next to Owen down the freshly shoveled sidewalk in the center of town.
The girls had insisted on a trip to the Town Square to see the Christmas tree again, so he and Sara had decided to walk the few blocks from church since the snow had let up and patches of blue sky peeked out from among the clouds.
Janey tugged on Owen’s hand, and he let go so she could follow Mia and run ahead of him and Sara to look in the toy store window. “You like the music, don’t you?”
“I do.” Sara scrunched her nose up. “How did you know?”
“I could just tell by the way your face lit up whenever it started.” In fact, he’d barely been able to keep his eyes off her during the service. There was just something so compelling about the way she approached worship, so eagerly and openly, with her whole heart and attention.
Actually, he’d learned in the past few days that there were a lot of compelling things about her, not the least of which was the wonderful way she cared for Mia and Janey. And, of course, how she always seemed to make him feel better with her words of wisdom, as she’d done earlier when he’d had such a hard time letting Janey leave for Sunday school.
Sara turned a lovely smile his way that zinged him right in the gut. “Really? I didn’t know my love for the musical part of the worship was so obvious.”
Add that knockout smile to the list. “Well, it was.” He’d had to remind himself several times that he was here to worship the Lord, not stare at Sara or obsess over how his heart had felt as if it was going to flip right out of his chest when she’d taken a hold of his hand, and when they’d locked gazes. What was wrong with him, anyway? He’d have to get a handle on those reactions.
“Hm. Well, I do love to sing my praise,” she said, adjusting the fluffy cream-colored scarf around her neck. “There’s something about voices raised together while the organ plays its majestic tones that really touches me and somehow strengthens my bond with God.”
“Your faith is strong, isn’t it?” he said. One more thing to admire.
“Yes, it is,” she replied. “God helped me get through a lot.”
“Your divorce?” he ventured after a moment. “Must’ve been rough.”
“Yeah.” She looked down for a moment, her jaw visibly tight, then began to fiddle with the long strands of dark hair tumbling around her shoulders from beneath the cream-colored chunky knit hat she wore. “My ex-husband decided that he didn’t want to be a dad when I was a week away from delivering Mia.”
Owen’s gut rolled and his hands clenched inside his leather gloves. “I won’t even tell you what word comes to mind when I hear stuff like that.”
She gave him a sideways look. “Why don’t you want to tell me?”
“Because the man, for all of his sins, is still Mia’s father, and it’s not my place to badmouth him,” he said from between clenched teeth.
“Really?” she asked.
He jerked his chin to the left and then the right, trying to relax his tight neck muscles. “Really.” Guess he better hope to never meet the selfish idiot who’d left Sara and Mia behind.
She stopped in her tracks, blinking.
“What?” he said.
“You sound so...protective.”
“I tend to get riled up when women, children or animals are treated poorly.”
Her face softened. “So I guess it’s good that Josh is remarried to a woman from Germany and never plans to come back?”
“Real good,” Owen said, tugging on her hand to get her moving again. After a moment, his curiosity got the better of him. “So you moved back to town after your husband...um, walked out?”
Her mouth tightened as she looked at the ground for a second. “Yes. I grew up here but went to college in California for the good weather, of all things. I met Josh my senior year, we were married a year later, and Mia came along a year after that.” She sucked in a shaky breath. “But Josh decided fatherhood wasn’t his thing. After he took off, I lived on a small nest egg for about six months, and then, when I inherited the bed-and-breakfast from my aunt, I moved back here to run the business and raise Mia.”
“So you’ve been back for about two and a half years?”
“Yes, that’d be about right.”
He drew his brows together. �
��I’m surprised we haven’t run into each other more.”
“What with being a single mom, and running the B and B, I don’t get out much.” She gave him a small smile. “And we’ve already determined we go to different church services.”
“True, and I don’t get out much, either,” he said. Truth was, he’d deliberately kept to himself as he’d dealt with his grief, feeling the need to protect his heart at all costs.
They caught up with the girls at Toys and Trinkets.
Janey turned radiant eyes toward him. “Look, Daddy,” she said, pointing in the window. “Animals!”
Sure enough, one wall of the place was packed to the gills with stuffed animals of every kind. “Pretty cool.” Smiling, he looked at Sara. “We already have a whole zoo’s worth of stuffed animals at home.”
“You can never have enough,” she replied with a mock seriousness he found, well, completely captivating.
Of course, the girls insisted on going inside, and they spent quite a while in the store admiring just about every stuffed animal ever created.
Owen watched as Sara crouched down to look at each animal Janey and Mia held out, coming up with funny a comment and compliment for each one, even the neon yellow dinosaur with purple buggy eyes and red scales that Owen thought was just plain ugly.
He stood, transfixed, as she put her arm around Janey to discuss what, apparently, was a particularly beautiful horse with a long flowing gold mane and tail. Sara pointed at something on the horse and then bent in and whispered something in Janey’s ear that elicited a giggle from his daughter. She nodded and whispered back in Sara’s ear. A heartbeat later, Sara laughed and hugged his daughter tight.
Janey looked at him over Sara’s shoulder, her eyes alight with pure happiness and contentment and sense of rightness he’d never seen before. And no matter how much he knew he shouldn’t assume too much from the touching scene unfolding in front of him, he simply couldn’t look away, couldn’t help but think that he’d found something very special in Sara Kincaid, something he needed to pay attention to.
But he was leaving town soon. Everything was set up, planned and taken care of. He couldn’t change course now.
Even so, going back to where he’d stood just a few weeks ago, before he’d met Sara, was going to be one of the most challenging things he’d ever done.
* * *
“Mama, look!” Mia pointed to the window of The Snowglobe Gift Shoppe. “Puppies!”
Sara looked in the window and saw a large brown dog with floppy ears and big black eyes nursing her four chubby puppies. They were tiny, probably under a week old. “Aren’t they just adorable?”
“Cute!” Janey said, pressing her face to the window. “Can we pet them?”
“Yeah! I wanna hold one,” Mia said.
“They’re too young,” Owen said. “They need to get older before they’ll be ready for touching.”
“Oh,” both girls said in unison.
Sara stood there with the girls and Owen, commenting on the puppies. Mia liked the brown one, and Janey preferred the black one with spots on its back. Both Mia and Janey just about went nuts when one of the puppies crawled a few feet and fell asleep on its back with all four paws in the air.
After a good five minutes of puppy viewing and exclamations of awe at their cuteness, several people came up behind Sara’s little group. “Girls,” she said. “Let’s go in and let someone else have a chance to see the puppies.”
“Okay,” Mia replied, waving. “Bye puppies.”
Janey mimicked her. “Yeah. Bye-bye dog babies.”
Owen opened the door to the shop, and Sara followed Janey and Mia in. Sara glanced around, and right off, one particular snowglobe sitting on a shelf in the corner jumped out at Sara as if it was lit from within.
Her breath caught. Could it be...?
Before she went over to see if the snowglobe was as personally significant as she thought it might be, she said to Mia and Janey, “Now, remember girls, hands behind your backs so you can lean in and see better.” Sara clasped her own hands behind her and, to demonstrate, leaned down and looked pointedly at a giant Christmas-themed snowglobe sitting front and center in the store. “See?”
Eyes wide, Mia and Janey both imitated her.
“Good job,” Sara said. “Keep them there, please, my little darlings.”
Owen slanted a glance at her, his brows raised in question.
“My mom always used to have me do this to make sure I didn’t touch anything fragile,” she said by way of an explanation.
“Ah, I see,” he said, adopting the same pose. “Very smart.”
“A mom’s gotta be smart while she’s in a place full of fragile stuff,” Sara said. “Especially with two curious three-year-olds in tow.”
Owen nodded as he took off his gloves and shoved them into his coat pocket. “Good point.”
With a look to the girls to be sure they weren’t touching anything, Sara hurried over to see the snowglobe she had her eye on, holding her breath just a teensy bit in anticipation of what she would find.
As she drew closer to the display in the corner, she saw that, sure enough, inside the glass globe was a dazzling prancing black horse with a gold bridle and saddle and a long flowing black mane studded with tiny gold jewels. The base was made of intricately carved dark wood, also studded in gold, and if she were correct, the snowglobe would play the song “The Impossible Dream.”
Shaking just a bit, she reached for the snowglobe, then lowered her hands for a second to steady them—the last thing she wanted to do was drop something so special. She took the snowglobe off the shelf and felt underneath for the small metal winder. With a twist of her fingers, she wound the music box up and then turned the snowglobe upright.
Familiar music played, soft and melodious, as snow fell down around the black horse, making it look as if the horse was galloping through fluffy snowdrifts. Instantly, precious memories of her mom surrounded her, and her eyes burned. She dipped her head and let the music flow over her, let the memories swirl through her mind, soft and comforting, even as a sadness, muted by time but never gone, wrapped around her heart.
Oh, I miss you so much, Mom...
Someone squeezed her arm. She turned to see Owen standing next to her, his warm gaze etched with concern.
She looked around. “The girls?”
“Dana Caldwell, the owner, is feeding them cider and cookies up front.”
“Great. Leaving them unattended in here probably wouldn’t be a good idea,” she said, wiping her damp cheeks, feeling a bit funny about being caught acting so maudlin.
“You okay?” he asked, his fingers gently encircling her arm.
She held up the snowglobe as her eyes watered even more. “My mom had one just like this when I was a girl.”
His eyes softened even more. “Brings back a lot of memories, then, doesn’t it?”
“It does. She collected things with carousel horses, and this one was her favorite.” She sighed. “I used to look at it way up on the mantel and admire it from afar. I’d beg my mom to take it down so I could see the horse run through the snow while the music played.”
“What happened to it?”
Sara swallowed. “She knew how much I loved it, so she gave it to me when Josh and I got married.” She ran a hand over the carvings on the base. “When I moved back here, I packed everything up myself, and it broke in transit.”
“Oh, wow.” He looked at the snowglobe, then held out his hands. “May I?”
She handed it to him, and he gingerly turned it over and made the snow fly around the horse. He gazed at it for a long moment. “So this is pretty special to you.”
“Very.” She blinked tears away. “Mom died in a car accident right before I got pregnant with Mia.”
“I’
m so sorry.” He reached out and squeezed her arm, his eyes glowing with empathy. “Have you ever thought about replacing it?”
“I have. But unfortunately, it’s part of a limited collection, so it’s way out of my price range right now.” Actually, the way business at the bed-and-breakfast was going, owning another snowglobe like this one would be out of her price range forever.
“Mama, Mama, come look!” Mia called from the front of the store.
Sara gazed longingly at the snowglobe for a few moments and then ran a finger over the glass, trying to imprint the image of the beautiful black horse running in the glittering snow on her memory, and hence, forever remember her mom and the things that were important to her. It was all Sara had left of the woman who, as a single mom, had worked two jobs and sacrificed so much for Sara when she’d been growing up.
“You go,” Owen said. “I’ll put it back.”
Nodding, Sara turned to head up front, feeling the loss of her mother as if it had just happened yesterday instead of three years ago.
And it hit Sara then and there that having no family to speak of except Mia was a lonely, isolated state indeed. Was she prepared to deal with that for the rest of her life? And perhaps more importantly, why did the status quo suddenly seem so unbearable, so depressing? So not what she wanted?
She shook her head to clear her mind. Why in the world was she so full of big questions today?
She looked upward. God, I’m going to need some help in the coming days.
With a turn of her head, she slid a glance back at Owen. Her chest did a cartwheel, and just like that she knew that her dose of self-inquiry was because of a man who had dark blue eyes, broad, capable shoulders, a father’s caring heart and a mile wide considerate streak that never failed to knock her out at the knees.
All while making her heart melt away as quickly as her once-strong fears of letting herself love a man again faded away.
Actually, lots of help, Lord.
Chapter Six
“They both conked out on Mia’s bed while I was reading them a story,” Sara said from the kitchen doorway an hour after they’d all returned to Sara’s house for a late lunch. “Guess the adventures of The Little Drummer Boy will have to wait until another day.”
A Snowglobe Christmas Page 14
