“Have you attended Crosspoint long?” she asked.
“Awhile.” Paige smiled, but she looked at Ashley with an odd expression. “Something about you seems so familiar. What did you say your last name is?”
Ashley swallowed a new attack of nerves. “Harcourt. I’m not from this area.”
“Harcourt. Harcourt.” Paige tapped a fingernail on the table edge and stared. “You aren’t related to the man over in Chestnut Grove that used to run the adoption agency, are you?”
Ashley’s jitters turned to knee-knocking anxiety. Area newspapers had been filled with the story for months. “He was my grandfather.”
“We all read about that. Ashley and her folks had no idea what her grandfather was doing,” Chris said over a fork of baked beans.
“No, we didn’t. No one is sorrier than we are for all the problems he caused.”
Her grandfather Barnaby Harcourt had falsified birth records and basically bought and sold babies through the years. She shuddered to think his blood flowed through her veins. Some would call her a chip off the old block.
“I remember reading about that one girl, Kelly something I think,” Paige went on. “Fascinating story. She and her birth mother had been living in the same town all those years and neither of them knew it.”
Ashley wanted to change the subject, but her mind had frozen in fear.
“And then the mayor’s wife tried to kill her so no one would discover that the mayor himself had fathered the girl and paid Barnaby Harcourt to get rid of her.” Paige gave a happy shiver. “It was better than a soap opera. You remember reading it don’t you, Chris?” She cast baby blues at Chris—whose expression had darkened. “And then if that wasn’t enough, someone found an abandoned baby on the doorstep, and he turned out to belong to one of the Harcourts.”
The moment the words flew out of her mouth, Paige pretended to be surprised. She laid a manicured hand over her mouth and stared at Ashley. “That wasn’t you, was it?”
Ashley knew she’d been set up. Paige had known all along.
Shaking all over, she glanced at Chris. The shock on his face was all she needed to see. With as much grace as she could muster with her whole world crumbling, she said, “Excuse me. I need to change my son.”
“Ashley?” Chris shoved back from the table. “Wait.”
But she couldn’t. Grabbing Gabriel without explanation, she hurried out of the building and hailed a taxi.
The worst had happened. Christopher now knew her darkest shame. Worse, she had embarrassed him in front of his congregation. Shame was a tidal wave, sweeping her back to that frightening time when she’d made the worst mistake of her life. No excuse was ever enough to justify the sin she’d committed the day she’d left Gabriel on the doorstep of Tiny Blessings Adoption Agency. How could she expect Christopher to understand? She didn’t understand herself.
“Where to, Miss?” the cabbie asked.
Her summer of hope and love was over. She’d known all along she couldn’t have Chris. She’d even known better than to attend his church. Still, for that shining moment last night, she’d almost believed things would work out the way Chris promised.
But life didn’t work that way. Some things couldn’t be forgiven.
Might as well face the end and be done with it. Christopher didn’t need a woman like her in his life.
“Chestnut Grove,” she replied, gave her parents’ address, and, gripping her baby tightly, let the tears come.
* * *
At dusk, Ashley sat in the shady garden patio alongside her parents’ pool. After explaining what had transpired with Chris, she wanted to be alone. Mother had Gabriel inside while Ashley tried to pray but she was too depressed. Tomorrow was soon enough to make a decision about her internship.
The patio door slid open but she didn’t turn around. “I’ll take him now, Mother, if you’re tired.”
No answer. She twisted around in her chair and her heart dipped low.
She might have known he would come. Chris wasn’t a man to leave loose ends.
“I don’t want to talk.”
“Too bad. I do.” He scraped a chair over the cobblestones and parked it beside hers. “After you left, Paige told me the whole story. The one she read in the paper, anyway. I want to hear it from you.”
Shame suffused her. “Why?”
“Because I want to hear your side, what really happened.”
The scent of hamburgers wafted on the wind. Someone in the neighborhood must be grilling. “I abandoned my baby. Period.”
“There’s more to it than that. I know how much you love him.”
“That’s why. Because I loved him. Because I was confused and stupid and sick.”
“What kind of sick?”
“Mentally. Physically. Every way.” She picked at her fingernail, ashamed to look at the man she loved now that he knew what kind of person she really was. “Mother and Dad were out of the country because of the adoption scandals. They didn’t even know I was pregnant. We never talked anyway. I didn’t think they’d care or help.” Her voice fell to a whisper. “I was so scared, so very scared. And when the fever started…”
She shivered at the memory of the terrible sickness, a sickness so powerful she hadn’t been able to remember where Gabriel was, couldn’t remember if she’d fed him.
Chris’s hand covered hers. Even in the heat of the summer her skin was cold.
“I sneaked out of the clinic with Gabriel an hour after his birth to come home. I wanted to think things through, figure out what to do. But then I got so sick. I couldn’t take care of him. I couldn’t stop shaking. And the fever was so bad, I thought I might die. And if I died, so would he. All I could think of was getting Gabriel to some place safe.”
“So you took him to the agency.”
She nodded. “Stupid, I know. So stupid.”
“No. The natural instinct of a loving mother to protect her baby.”
“Don’t make excuses for me, Chris. I abandoned my son.”
“And you can’t forgive yourself.”
“Could you?”
Instead of a pat answer, Chris took his time and thought about it. She appreciated that. Platitudes wouldn’t cut it today. “I don’t know, Ash. But I do know this. God forgave you when you asked Him into your life.”
“But He remembers. I have to pay for what I’ve done.”
“If you think that, you’re aren’t reading the same Bible I do. Jesus paid for your sins and your mistakes, Ashley. All of them, even the ones you have trouble letting go of. Your past is washed away in a sea of God’s forgetfulness, as far as the east is from the west. God doesn’t hold your sin against you unless you keep on doing it.”
The smallest flame of hope flickered. “Is that true? Or are you trying to make me feel better?”
“Both. I knew you were struggling with something heavy. I just wish you would have told me a long time ago.”
“I’m sorry you had to find out this way, in front of everyone. I was so ashamed. Still am.”
In trying to protect him, she’d only hurt him more. Since giving birth she understood love in a new light. Love was giving. Love never did harm. By not telling him everything, she’d set Chris up for harm.
“Now you know why I can’t be with you. A fallen woman, a woman who would abandon her own child would be a detriment to a pastor. Just like today, no congregation would accept that. I’d ruin your career.”
She couldn’t do that to him. Not if she really loved him.
“You’re wrong about that.”
She shook her head, loose locks tumbling from the knot she’d twisted atop her head. “I don’t think so.”
“What if I left the ministry?”
“Absolutely not! You’re a wonderful pastor. The people love you.”
“After you left, I offered to resign.”
Horror filled her. This was worse than she’d thought. “Oh no, Chris. Oh, please say you didn’t.”
“The church wouldn’t let me. But we had a long, fruitful discussion. That’s why it took me a while to get here. For some time now, the church has been helping me pray for a wife. I told them I’d found her. But like every one of us, she isn’t perfect.” He tapped her on the nose and smiled. “But close enough to perfect for me. And if they didn’t have it in their hearts to follow the teachings of Jesus in such matters, then I couldn’t be their pastor.”
“I can’t believe you did that.”
“Believe it. Being a Christian means behaving like Christ. He taught love and compassion, not judgment and condemnation. Paige is a new Christian, too. She made a mistake today. She knows that now, and I hope you’ll forgive her.”
Forgive her? Ashley wanted to strangle her. Immediately, she squelched the thought. If she expected to be forgiven, she had to forgive. “Paige likes you.”
“I know. But I’m in love with you. God put us together, Ashley. Don’t tear us apart again.”
God put them together. She liked the sound of that.
Like chocolate in July, her resistance melted. “Oh Christopher, I love you. I’m sorry for—”
He placed his fingertips over her lips. “Shh. No more apologies. All is forgiven.”
Forgiven. The sweetest word ever spoken. At last, she understood the depth of God’s love and forgiveness. Understood and accepted.
And as her true love pulled her into his arms for the sweetest kiss, Ashley was finally able to leave the past behind and embrace the future, as a woman, as a mother and someday soon as a pastor’s wife.
* * * * *
ISBN: 9781408994993
Prince Incognito
© Harlequin Books S.A. 2012
First Published in Great Britain in 2012
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