The Secret Life of Sarah Hollenbeck

by Bethany Turner

  “Can I ask you a question?” I asked Piper, knowing that I could. “This is going to sound stupid, and please don’t judge me—”

  She smiled and rolled her eyes as if to say, “Aren’t we past that point?”

  “So . . . Christians don’t have sex outside of marriage, right?”

  That felt like something I should have known, but I wanted to be sure. Even with my limited biblical knowledge, I knew about “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” And the other one, about coveting thy neighbor’s wife. It just seemed a tad unrealistic to me, despite the fact that my own sexual history wasn’t grandiose. There were just a couple of guys that aren’t even worth mentioning.

  And then I met this irresistibly handsome guy from the wrong side of the tracks.

  He maintained a solid C average, made me open my own door, and didn’t have a dime to his name. The pain that fact caused my mother just made him more irresistible to me. Really, my mother’s disapproval and his looks were the only things he had going for him for about the first three months we were dating. But one day he handed me a notebook, kissed me on the cheek, and walked away. I opened to the first page, and I fell in love. He was an artist. He drew beautiful sketches of flowers and animals and landscapes, and I’d had no idea.

  About twenty pages in was a portrait of a beautiful girl. I mean, she was breathtaking. He’d captured hidden innocence in her eyes and obstinate determination in her chin. With just pencil he’d drawn hair so soft it begged to be touched, and a soul that begged to be loved.

  “Sarah,” the work was named.

  From that moment on, Patrick and I were inseparable in every way. By the time Mr. McDermott made his first million two years later and McDermott Real Estate was rebranded McDermott & Son Inc., it was too late to walk away, no matter how much I would have preferred not to give my mother the satisfaction. I hated that she was so happy—her entire opinion of Patrick having shifted somewhere around the half-a-million-dollar mark—but I wanted to spend my life with him.

  My romantic and sexual histories were completely intertwined, and I had nothing else to compare my own experiences to. Looking back on my past through salvation-colored glasses, I couldn’t help but wonder if Patrick and I would have survived the two years of dating and three years of being engaged if we hadn’t been sleeping together.

  Might your marriage have survived if that had been the case? a still small voice from deep inside seemed to ask.

  “Well,” Piper began, “believing you shouldn’t have sex outside of marriage and actually not having sex outside of marriage don’t necessarily always go hand in hand. I can’t speak for everyone, of course, but I believe that God makes it pretty clear that sex was created for marriage, and we’re supposed to save it for marriage. But people make mistakes. People misinterpret. People give in to temptation.”

  She didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know, I suppose, but my goodness! I couldn’t help but chuckle a bit.

  “What’s so funny?” Piper asked with a quizzical expression on her face.

  “Nothing really. I’m just realizing for the first time that Maria had the right idea when she ran back to the abbey, rather than have to face Captain von Trapp. I get it now. I totally get it.”

  “Really?” She laughed as we signed our debit card receipts for lunch and stood to go. “You think it was all about her attraction to him? She was worried she wouldn’t be able to keep her hands off of him?”

  I stared at her as if it were obvious. “Um . . . it was Christopher Plummer.”

  “Yeah, okay. Good point.”

  And it was Ben Delaney.

  “I’m okay with not having sex, Piper. Really I am. I mean, it’s not like I’ve been having sex recently, and now I have to go cold turkey.” It suddenly occurred to me to be grateful in a way I hadn’t previously been that the few dates I had been on since my divorce had been with guys who were easy to resist. No, I hadn’t known the Lord then, but at least I knew better than to be seduced by, “Nice neighborhood you live in. I’ve always wanted to see the inside of one of these houses.” “But I think I always thought . . . you know . . . someday it’ll happen—in the scope of being in love with someone. Someday I’d maybe even get married again.”

  “And why has that changed?” she asked.

  Truthfully, I didn’t know how to explain it. Even to myself. My thoughts had just run away with me, I guess. A few minutes in the presence of Ben Delaney had been enough to take away “someone” and “someday” and replace them with “him” and “now.” In a matter of a couple hours I’d gone from not even thinking about having a love life, to imagining a future with Ben, to wondering how I would ever shake the memory of how I felt when he smiled at me.

  I was a Christ-follower ever-so-slightly obsessed with my married pastor.

  And the day had begun with such promise.

  Raine de Bourgh’s life resumed on Monday, and though I was determined to try and do the right things in my career and life moving forward, I honestly couldn’t imagine how that was possibly going to work. I toyed with the idea of just calling it quits. I certainly wouldn’t have hurt for money at that point.

  And it wasn’t like I had anyone else in my life to financially support.

  Get it together, Sarah, I would have to lecture myself every time those thoughts entered my head. So what if I was destined to be alone forever, mourning the loss of the potential love of my life?

  What? Occasionally I had to lecture myself to snap out of my previous lecture. How could I possibly think, for even a moment, that a man I’d just met was the love of my life? Patrick McDermott had been the love of my life, right? And just because he was too much of a treacherous, egocentric fool to see that, or to return my love with the power with which it was offered, that didn’t make my former love for him any less real and eternal.

  And then, almost without fail, when I would just about have myself convinced of that, I would see Ben’s eyes and hear his laugh. And I’d think about the brief moment when I’d begun to believe that maybe Patrick wasn’t the only guy I would ever love after all.

  And then I would quickly remind myself that I was losing my mind.

  I needed to write. That much I knew. I needed to once again escape to my literary world, where I was in control and men didn’t cheat on their wives and women didn’t fall in love with pastors who remained devoted to their wives, even though they could only see them during visitation hours at the asylum. But the only stories I knew how to write—or at least write well—were full of things that were no longer acceptable to me.

  “What if you write a clean version of the Desire books?” Piper asked at Monday morning coffee after I expressed to her my moral dilemma.

  I just stared at her, not understanding.

  “You know . . . keep the story but take out the smut. The heart without the heat. The—”

  “The book without 85 percent of the words?” I laughed. “It’s a good thought, but it’s just not realistic. If I took away the sex, my audience would quickly realize that these characters have no depth whatsoever. There is no substance. And no foundation for their relationship. If you take away the steamy stuff—”

  “Now, wait a minute,” Piper cut me off. “Who said you have to take away the steamy stuff?”

  “I don’t follow. I thought the steamy stuff was the bad stuff.”

  “The steamy stuff is the bad stuff,” she said. “But it doesn’t have to be.”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose, thoroughly confused. “Piper, honey, speak English.”

  She leaned in. “Okay, look, when Andrew and Angela were baking bread, or whatever they did—”

  I laughed. “Alex and Annie.”

  “Whatever. Those scenes between the two of them where they’re just baking together or whatever . . . a lot of people think those scenes are steamy by the way they’re written, right?”

  “Yes . . .”

  “Okay. And what about when Ben leaned in and told you he’d make sur
e you saw each other again. Steamy?” She sat back in her chair to watch my reaction.

  My reaction, of course, was to blush at a memory I’d been trying very hard not to think about and analyze every moment of the day. “No,” I scoffed, my cheeks growing warmer. I crossed my arms as I put a lot of effort into playing it cool—and failed miserably. “Pastor,” I muttered without purpose. “And, you know . . . Margaret.”

  “Sarah, seriously.” She smiled. “I’m not talking about all of the potential life ramifications right now, and all of the reasons you can’t be with Ben. I’m just talking about the moment. And I’m pretty sure if you really think about it, you’ll realize that moment was steamier than anything you ever wrote for Albert and Agnes.”

  She lifted her coffee mug and got back to drinking, my stunned silence assuring her that her point had hit its target.

  “I want to go in a different direction,” I said to my agent on the phone later that day, after Piper had rushed off to work, leaving me to completely question pretty much every detail of my life.

  “Sure, hon. What are you thinking? Want to go with more of an indie director for the film? I was thinking that might be best, actually. Somebody new and fresh.”

  Joe Welch is about twenty years older than I am, and when he signed me I was his only client. He’d worked for decades representing athletes—I called him my own personal Jerry Maguire—before realizing he hated sports. All sports. He dreaded draft day and March Madness, and if his client wasn’t playing, he intentionally left the country during the Super Bowl each year, just so he didn’t have to hear about it. He’d finally had enough and decided he was willing to leave the money and the celebrity clients in exchange for some peace and happiness. He retired but quickly realized how bored he was, so he turned to something he actually loved. He turned to books.

  I signed with him because I liked him. He made me laugh and I made him slightly uncomfortable with my casual approach to business, something he certainly hadn’t experienced with his athletes. And then, ultimately, we were making each other richer. The success of Stollen Desire and Raine de Bourgh made him a new brand of legend in the agent world, almost overnight. He’d taken on a few more clients since, but he could afford to be picky. First and foremost, he was loyal to me, and I to him.

  I had a feeling that loyalty was about to be tested.

  “No, Joe. I mean a really different direction. Away from the Desire books.” I took a deep breath. “Speaking of that, how difficult would it be to get me out of this European thing?”

  He laughed. “This European thing? You mean this huge promotional tour to celebrate the fact that Stollen Desire was last year’s top-selling book in the UK and France? That European thing?”

  I grimaced. “That’s the one.”

  “Not a chance, Sarah. There’s a parade, for goodness’ sake!”

  “They’re throwing a parade for me?” I asked, a little bit flattered, but mostly horrified.

  “No. But you’re in it. Riding on a float or something.”

  “What’s the worst that could happen? I mean, if I cancelled.”

  He sighed. “Well, first of all, you’d lose a ton of money, not just on the trip but in future sales, I imagine.”

  “I’m okay on money, Joe—”

  “And it wouldn’t exactly be great for your reputation.”

  Ha! My reputation. Because my reputation was such a thing of dignity and virtue as it was?

  “Sarah,” he continued, “this is big, and you know it. Not only that, you wanted this. What’s going on with you?”

  And then I laughed, but nervously. It was time to test the waters of Christianity in Raine’s world. I didn’t figure it could possibly end well.

  “I, um . . . I accepted Jesus as my Savior, Joe. I’m born again, I guess you would say. And, I know this sounds crazy, but—”

  “Look, hon,” he interrupted. “I don’t care if you worship God or Buddha or the snail god—”

  “Snail god?”

  He was flustered. “You know, the thing in Hungary. Or is it Belgium?”

  I couldn’t help but smile. “I’m pretty sure that’s not a thing.”

  He chuckled, just a bit, and then took a deep breath. “I know you’re searching, Sarah. And if you think you’ve found something that you can believe in, then I’m happy for you. Really. And when you get back from Europe, we can sit down and look at what you’ve got coming up, and see if—”

  “It’s not just the promotional stuff, Joe. It’s all of it. What if you just keep taking care of the business and everything for the Desire books, and I move on from them?”

  There was a long pause before he finally spoke. “Well, sure, if you want to take a break.” There was another long pause and then he added, “How long do you think this break might last?”

  I was making it up as I went along. All I knew for sure was that my conscience would no longer allow me to be the world’s favorite author of lust-fueled fantasies.

  “I don’t want a break, exactly. I was just thinking maybe I could try a completely different genre.”

  Due to my proven astronomic success, I had already been paid a ridiculous amount of money for a book I hadn’t even conceived yet. There were no restrictions, no guidelines. It didn’t have to be in the same genre as the other books, though the publishers may have assumed that would be the case. But my contract didn’t state that it had to be. I just had to have a completed manuscript to them by the deadline. It seemed to me that there was unlimited potential.

  “Sure, sure. You bet,” Joe said, clearly already hating the idea and fearing the answer to the question he was preparing to ask. “So, um, what are you kicking around? What kind of book?”

  I took a deep breath. “Well, actually, I was thinking Christian romance.”

  The five minutes of laughter that followed on the other end of the call gave me the impression that my agent wasn’t completely gung ho about the idea.

  I just sat there and let him laugh. After all, that was pretty much the reaction I had been expecting. When he finally regained his composure, I waited for him to speak, but he didn’t. I don’t know if it was the fact that I wasn’t laughing that clued him in that I wasn’t kidding, but he somehow got it all of a sudden.

  “You have got to be kidding me!” he shouted. “There is no possible way for you to make a successful transition to Christian romance. You’re just not the ‘virginal schoolteacher on the plains of Oklahoma’ type of author. Unless her first time with the renegade cowboy, after they’re married, of course, involves chains and lots of leather.” I didn’t find him nearly as funny as he found himself, so he concluded resolutely, “I’m sorry, but it can’t be done.”

  I thought all day about what he had said—not the part when he said it couldn’t be done, but the virginal schoolteacher part. I was certain that Joe hadn’t read a Christian romance in his entire life and therefore had no idea what he was talking about. But, perhaps not surprisingly, I realized that I hadn’t either. I’d never read any Christian fiction at all, in fact. That seemed like a good place to start.

  I begrudgingly went on my European tour, comforted by two consolations that I knew to be true. First, I knew that this promotional tour would be my last for these books. Of course I wished the end was already in my rearview mirror, but at least it was just around the next corner. Secondly, the week away offered the consolation of being unavailable to go to church with Piper to face my forbidden crush.

  I spent every free moment of the trip reading Christian romance on my Kindle. A lot of it was good. There were heroines who inspired me, and love stories that swept me away. But I couldn’t quite see myself in those novels. I couldn’t quite find a story that felt like me.

  You know, the one in which the heroine becomes a Christian, turns away from her life of producing scandalous material for the masses, and then almost immediately falls in love with her married pastor. Where was that book?

  The books I read didn’t feel realist
ic. At least, they weren’t my reality. Then again, my reality was messed up, so maybe I wasn’t the best judge.

  Still, I couldn’t relate to how easy it was for the women in some of those books to avoid sex outside of marriage . . . simply because they knew they should avoid sex outside of marriage. And some of them didn’t even seem to face any temptation or know what it was like to feel a desire that they weren’t sure they should be feeling. Was it really that easy? If so, I think a page had been left out of my Christianity initiation packet, because it didn’t seem so cut and dried to me. Were those women also impervious to the power of Godiva chocolate and Manolo Blahnik pumps? Who were these superwomen? I’d made the decision to abstain from sex just days before I realized how difficult it might be to honor that commitment to God. Days!

  While I knew with absolute certainty that Alex Stollen and Annie Simnel weren’t to be our sexual role models, I was also pretty sure that there were women like me, searching for a love story, unable to relate to the idea of a life without desire and temptation.

  There had to be some middle ground.

  7.

  What Nice Boys Do

  “Exactly!” Piper concurred as we sat down at our favorite coffee place Saturday evening, the day after I got back to Chicago. “That’s what I was saying. Why can’t Christian romance be just a little bit sexy? You know . . . in appropriate ways.”

  “Yes!”

  By the time I got around to throwing my idea past Piper, I was already convinced that I knew exactly what Christian women wanted to read—they just hadn’t been able to put a finger on it. At the very least, I knew what I wanted to read, but from what I could tell, that book wasn’t available. So I would have to write it.