by Deb Kastner
With a choked squeak, he dropped the sawhorses with a clatter and dashed toward Caden, who was pumping his arms, clumps of sand in both tiny fists.
Seth snatched Caden from the sandbox and brushed the sand from his fists.
“No, Caden. We don’t eat sand.” His voice sounded hoarse and frantic.
Zooey giggled. “I don’t think he was going to eat it. Throw it at me, maybe. I’ve been trying to teach him not to do that. But don’t worry. I’ve been keeping a close eye on him. He hasn’t put any sand in his mouth.”
Blowing out a breath in relief, Seth shifted Caden to one arm and picked off his ball cap, then scrubbed his fingers through his dark hair, leaving the tips in jagged peaks. He groaned in exasperation, seemingly more at himself than at Caden or Zooey.
“No, I know. You have a lot more experience with toddlers than I do, Zooey. Sorry. I shouldn’t have freaked out on you. It was a gut reaction. And not a very good one.”
“He’ll get more sand in his shoes than in his mouth, I assure you,” Rachel teased, amused by the look of sheer horror that crossed Seth’s face.
“I’m kidding.” She set the circular saw down in a safe corner next to the playhouse and away from the sandbox and laid a reassuring hand on his arm. “Well, I’m half kidding, anyway. I highly suggest you make a habit of removing his shoes or boots over a trash can whenever you leave a sandpit.”
She chuckled. “I learned the hard way the first time I took Zooey’s shoes off after a jaunt on the playground. She was lying across my bed. I had to wash the comforter twice to get all the sand out of it.”
“Right. Empty his shoes over the trash can. Don’t get sand on the bed. Got it.” He sounded as if he was adding her latest words of guidance to an already-enormous mental list. “Any other sage advice you want to give me?”
“Only one thing.”
“And what is that?” His brow furrowed in concentration. She knew a grown man wouldn’t want to be thought of as adorable, but that was exactly the adjective that flashed across Rachel’s mind at his determined expression.
“Relax. Take a breath. You’re going to be okay. Caden is going to be okay. Of course, there will be bumps and bruises along the road. Trips and falls. No one is a perfect parent, Seth, so don’t beat yourself up when things don’t go quite as you anticipated. You’ll make mistakes. Caden will take a spill and scrape his knees, and you’ll be there to pick him up, clean him off, put a bandage on his owie and kiss it better. And then life will go on.”
“But what if—” He put his ball cap back on his head, with the brim facing backward this time. He released a breath and groaned. “This is hard.”
Rachel nodded. She wanted to chuckle but resisted, knowing how serious Seth was at this moment.
“Yes, it is. Parenting is the toughest job ever, but it is one of the most rewarding things you’ll ever do. Zooey is the light of my life.”
She spoke loud enough for Zooey to hear the compliment, but her daughter suddenly appeared more interested in bulldozing sand toward Caden’s dump truck. Rachel hoped Zooey knew she meant what she said.
Rachel envied Seth the toddler years. Toddlers, she could handle. Zooey had never gone through the terrible-twos stage. Rachel might have had to struggle to make ends meet, but she’d never had any issues with Zooey acting up. As she’d told Seth, Zooey was her biggest blessing. Motherhood was hard, but even as a baby, Zooey had been an endless source of joy that made all the work so very worth it.
Teenage years, on the other hand—she was so out of her depth there.
But it was Seth’s relationship with Caden they were discussing.
“One more thing.”
“Yeah? What’s that?” He was busy brushing granules of sand from the spaces between Caden’s fingers and didn’t glance up at her.
“Don’t worry if a little sand makes it into Caden’s mouth from time to time. He’ll learn fairly quickly that it doesn’t taste good. Right now he’s just exploring his world with all of his senses.”
Which was much less complicated than watching a vulnerable teenager who thought she already knew everything explore hers. If only sand in the mouth was Rachel’s largest concern.
“Right,” Seth agreed, plunking Caden back down in the sandbox. “Don’t worry so much. Got it.”
He trusted her judgment. That meant a lot.
He bent down to retrieve the sawhorses he’d dropped earlier and set them up, then surveyed the old play set with a practiced eye.
“Why don’t you start removing all the plastic pieces—the slides and climbing ladders,” he suggested. “I’ll work on the wood. We may be able to salvage some of this stuff to share with others for their woodstoves. It’s not cold now, of course, but once the chill of winter sets in, folks will be glad to have a little extra wood on their piles. I don’t know exactly what would be the best way to distribute it, but I’m sure we can come up with something.”
She flashed him a warm smile. There was nothing more attractive in a man than a heart for serving others—friends and neighbors, and especially the baby that had been given into his care.
Warning sirens were blaring; lights were flashing in vivid colors.
Warning. Warning. Attraction alert.
She scrambled back to the subject at hand.
“What a great idea. I suggest we stack the scrap pieces just outside of the church for people to take as they have need for them.”
His gaze widened. “I hadn’t thought of the church. It makes sense, though, since nearly everyone in town attends Sunday services. And we can have Jo put the word out about where to find the wood for those that don’t regularly visit the chapel.”
Good idea, particularly because she knew that Seth had been one of those Christmas and Easter Christians who rarely darkened the door of the little community church for the past several years. Now, after losing his friends, faith might be even more of a struggle for him. She prayed God would work on Seth’s heart through everything he’d experienced and not have him turn away based on what he’d seen and gone through.
She couldn’t even begin to imagine having to deal with everything that had happened to him. All she knew was that God’s light had found her during her darkest moments, and He could do the same for Seth.
In the meantime, she would strive to be a living witness of God’s love for him.
“You know, Rachel,” Seth said, breaking into her thoughts, “there’s one thing you said to me this morning that’s still eating at me.”
“What’s that?”
She tensed. His tone made it sound as if she’d said something wrong. She hoped she hadn’t said anything that would lead him off the path of grace.
“You said you felt like an old lady.” He frowned and shook his head. “As if.”
“Believe me, I do.”
Ancient.
Prehistoric, even.
Seth gave her a slow and thorough once-over, head to toe and then back again—a very masculine and appreciative examination. His midnight-blue eyes blazed into hers and a half smile curved slowly up one side of his lips.
A shiver ran down her spine, and while it felt unfamiliar to her, it was not altogether unpleasant. Those warning sirens in her head weren’t sounding loud enough to stop these feelings or even slow them down.
She was in trouble.
“Trust me,” he said, his voice dipping to a lower octave. “You are so not over the hill. Not that you really could be at—what?—twenty-nine?”
“I thought we’d already covered this ground. It is rude to ask a woman’s age or even to guess at it.”
He barked out a laugh. “I’m not asking. Just sayin’. From my viewpoint, you’ve got a good long way before you reach old anything.”
She didn’t know how to respond to the glittering look in S
eth’s eyes, never mind the admiration he’d verbally heaped on her.
This—the slightest hint of this—wasn’t supposed to be happening. She shouldn’t be thinking about Seth as a...well, as a man...much less reacting to him as a woman. Years earlier, after a few disastrous attempts to try dating as a single mom, she’d made the decision to focus on her daughter, her work and her church. Those were her priorities, and dating had no place in them. Zooey and Lizzie had put silly ideas into her head and now she was imagining all kinds of things that didn’t exist, thoughts that shouldn’t be so much as flashing through her mind, never mind lodging there.
Get ahold of yourself, Rachel, she mentally coached herself. Get off this slippery slope before someone gets hurt. Before you get hurt.
She could make a mile-long list of the reasons she shouldn’t be attracted to Seth and why she was all wrong for him even if there was a certain physical and emotional chemistry between them.
They were opposites in every conceivable way. He swung from the trees and somersaulted over benches. She was lucky if she could make it through a round of push-ups and sit-ups while she worked out with her in-home DVDs. A couple of flights of stairs winded her. Seth could probably climb Mount Everest.
His life was all about health and fitness, whereas hers...wasn’t.
He’d seen the horrors of war in the worst way, with his best friend being shot down right in front of him, and yet he made it a habit to build his world on the positive, the cup half-full. She had to be careful not to get down on herself and view the world under a gray and miserable thundercloud.
Seth sometimes acted immature for his age. Rachel acted too old for hers. The six-year gap between them might as well be a chasm without a bridge, one that was impossible to cross.
Most important, Seth had recently inherited both a baby and a ranch. It was all he could do just to adapt to his new roles, though he was nothing if not determined.
She couldn’t help thinking of the way he panicked when he thought Caden might be in danger of eating sand and somehow hurting himself with it. How he proudly rode his soon-to-be-officially-adopted son around on his horse. The picture of him cradling Caden in his strong arms with such tenderness that even now, at the mere thought of it, tears pricked in Rachel’s eyes.
Seth’s plate was full to overflowing, and that was the biggest hurdle of all that separated them—one that, if it had not already been intact, Rachel would have mentally placed between them for her own sanity.
Because really, was there anything in this world quite as attractive as a cowboy daddy?
* * *
It took all day Saturday to disassemble the play set and saw the wood into pieces small enough to fit into woodstoves.
Seth felt great about the fact that he was doing double duty with his charity—working off the auction bid for the senior center and providing folks with wood to heat their homes through the winter cold—although right now, near the beginning of June, he was working up a good sweat under the sun’s hot rays.
Seth had thought the project would take only a couple of weekends once the materials were delivered, but Rachel didn’t want to work Sundays, and he respected that. And if he was being honest with himself, he wasn’t exactly in a hurry to rush the job. He enjoyed hanging around Rachel, and Zooey and Caden really seemed to have hit it off, almost like an older sister with her baby brother. She had even offered to babysit while Seth and Rachel took the wood over to the community church for distribution.
As the sun started to disappear over the horizon, Seth and Rachel had finally loaded all the wood in the back of Seth’s truck and had taken it to the church, where Pastor Shawn gave them a cheerful welcome.
“Good to see you, Seth,” the pastor said, shaking Seth’s hand before filling his arms with wood pieces. “Let’s stack the wood on the south side and I’ll put a tarp over it to keep it clean and dry until people need it.”
While the three of them unloaded and piled the wood, Shawn and Rachel conversed easily with each other, catching up on the week’s events and talking about who was ill, who’d been promoted and how excited Shawn was for the Vacation Bible School program this year.
Seth knew they didn’t purposefully exclude him from the conversation, but that didn’t stop him from feeling like the odd man out.
The third wheel.
He didn’t know a lot about the pastor, since Shawn, who wasn’t originally from Serendipity, had been received into the community church after Seth had enlisted in the army.
Shawn had officiated at Tracy’s funeral, but Seth had been too full of grief, and too overwhelmed by his new role as Caden’s guardian, to really pay much attention to him then.
It had never bothered Seth before that he usually skipped Sunday services. He knew his parents were probably disappointed that he didn’t attend more often. They had diligently raised him and his sister, Samantha, in the Christian faith, and they rarely missed a Sunday themselves.
But he just wasn’t ready.
Anyway, he had a full life and a busy schedule to keep—especially now that he was learning parenthood and ranching all at once. He didn’t like feeling cooped up by four walls while he listened to a preacher drone on for half an hour.
God was everywhere, wasn’t He? Seth didn’t need to be caught up in a stained-glass-windowed establishment, sitting on a hard pew and using kneelers every Sunday morning, to pray and stuff.
Did he?
As Shawn and Rachel talked about various parishioners, Seth began to see what he was missing. It felt a little bit like what he heard when he visited Cup O’ Jo’s Café, which was the best place in town to catch up on all the latest goings-on.
Everybody knew everybody here, and Jo Spencer, the queen bee of the gossip hive from her prime position as proprietor and waitress in the café named after her, had the lowdown on everyone and loved to share it. She considered herself most folks’ second mother, Seth included, and she always made people feel like they were at home.
He knew all the people Shawn and Rachel were discussing—Serendipity was a small town with one Main Street and a single three-way stoplight.
This felt different, though.
Not gossip. Not news.
Something deeper.
It wasn’t just what was happening and to whom, but who was going through current trials and how they could help people get back on their feet. He listened as they planned to provide meals to the sick or transportation for the housebound. Visit shut-ins and those laid up in the hospital.
Practical, useful stuff.
Though it had originally been his idea to give away the planks from the playhouse to use as firewood, Rachel’s suggestion to donate the lot to the chapel to help parishioners stay warm seemed to fit right into the church’s mission. It was summer now, but it wouldn’t be long before the nights became cooler and fall approached, and it was good to plan ahead for how to help.
This was community.
And Seth, who’d been born and raised here, suddenly felt like somehow he was missing out.
Which made him even more uncomfortable. The sooner they got the wood unloaded and got out of there, the better.
Just as Seth was grabbing the last of the wood and stacking it against the side of the church, the pastor clapped him on the shoulder.
“This is a good thing you’re doing here,” he said, opening a tarp he’d brought out to cover the pile.
“Bringing the wood in, you mean?”
“Helping Rachel.”
Seth barked out a laugh. “She bought me at the Bachelors and Baskets Auction. I’m working off my time by building a new play set for her day care.”
“That’s not the way I heard it.”
Shawn chuckled. “No?”
“It sounds like there’s been a lot of upheaval in your life recently. Tr
acy’s death. Accepting Caden’s guardianship. It says a lot about a man that he fulfills his obligations even under duress.”
“I wouldn’t call it duress.” Seth frowned. He wasn’t caring for Caden under any kind of compulsion. Caden wasn’t just his responsibility—he was his family now.
He shrugged but didn’t elaborate. Was this going to be the beginning of a sermon? He hoped not. That was the last thing he needed right now.
“Rachel said she tried to absolve you of your obligation to her, but you refused.”
Again, Seth shrugged. “I’m not the kind of man to renege on a promise. Besides, I like to build things. It’s kind of a hobby for me.”
Shawn nodded, his gaze full of respect. “So you’re building something as intricate as a play set, even though you’ve suddenly found yourself the adoptive father of a baby and have a ranch to run. That can’t be easy.”
“The gossip hive must be buzzing overtime,” Seth muttered irritably, stooping to rearrange the woodpile rather than continuing to make eye contact with the pastor.
“People are concerned about you and Caden, and they want to help,” Rachel said, laying a reassuring hand on his arm. He hadn’t heard her come up beside him and her touch was like a zap of electricity bolting through him.
“No one needs to worry about me. I’m handling it.”
He didn’t know why he’d said that, especially with a resentful tone to his voice that even he could discern.
For one thing, Rachel knew exactly how well he was not handling it. And for another, even he could see that he was letting his pride and male ego get in his way.
For Caden’s sake, he needed to take all the help he could get and be grateful for it. But it wouldn’t be easy. He wasn’t good at being humble. He didn’t like accepting things when he’d rather be giving them.
And he especially wasn’t thrilled about the idea of all of the people in church watching him and finding him wanting in any way.
Were they concerned that he wouldn’t be good enough for Caden? Did they think the baby deserved better?
