by Deb Kastner
“Did you hear what we’ve got going today?” Cole laid a supportive hand on Tessa’s shoulder, showing her—and Bart—where he stood in this obvious game of wills. He half expected Tessa to tense under his touch, maybe even pull away, but instead she leaned into him, absorbing his strength.
“That’s what we were just talking about,” Tessa replied, looking as if she’d eaten something that disagreed with her. “I was just telling him how hard our teens have worked to put on their performance today.”
“And I was telling her that she’s wasting her time on these kids. No musical number is going to turn juvenile delinquents into law-abiding citizens.”
“There’s a lot more to it than that,” Cole said. “Tessa—”
Tessa cut him off with a sharp jerk of her chin.
“Tessa,” Cole insisted, “makes a difference in these teenagers’ lives. Many of them have never experienced real love—God’s love and human love. Tessa points them to God and showers them with His love. And hers. I can’t think of many other careers you can say that about.”
He stared Bart down, daring him to disagree. Bart glanced at Tessa and opened his mouth as if to argue, but when his gaze returned to Cole, he clamped his jaw shut.
Tessa quivered and Cole stepped closer to her, enveloping her with his arm. She fit perfectly under his shoulder. He didn’t remember that from his youth. He supposed maybe he’d grown some since then, physically as well as emotionally, and for Tessa’s sake, he was glad that was true.
She was a strong woman, but she was also extremely sensitive. Not to mention the fact that it was her father getting down on her. Fathers and children were a special dynamic, and in this case not a good one. Didn’t Bart realize he was hurting her by his careless words and actions?
“It’s almost time for us to get the teens together,” Cole said. “If you don’t mind, Bart, Tessa and I have a few items to go over before the performance begins.” Though he didn’t feel it, he smiled at Bart. “Keep an open mind, sir. I think you’ll be impressed by Tessa’s hard work with these kids. I know I am.”
He didn’t wait for Bart to formulate a comeback. Instead, he guided Tessa gently but firmly in the opposite direction.
Tessa waited until they were well away from her father before she whirled on him. “Do you want to tell me what that was all about?”
He cocked a brow and kicked up one side of his lips. “What? No, ‘Thank you, Cole’?”
Her gaze widened, and for a moment he lost himself in the emerald of her eyes. He waited for her to unload on him—how she didn’t need rescuing. How she was doing just fine on her own. How he ought to mind his own business. And probably a lot of other things about him that she’d think but never say aloud.
“Thank you, Cole.” It was little more than a whisper, and her gaze dropped to the floor. “I don’t know why my dad gets that way sometimes. You’d think after all these years he’d get over the fact that I changed majors and am doing a job I really love. But occasionally he just gets—”
“Stubborn,” Cole finished for her. “Prideful—and unreasonable. Traits males all seem to have in common. Getting our backs bent all out of whack when we should be listening and trying to understand stuff.”
“Stuff?” she repeated, her gaze rising and her eyes clouding with confusion. “Are we still talking about my father here?”
Cole shook his head. “No. No, we’re not. See, you figured that out because you were listening.”
She chuckled. “They don’t call it women’s intuition for nothing.”
“Great. Then it’s settled. We don’t need to have this conversation, after all.”
“This conversation? Why do I feel like you have an agenda here?”
“I do. We do. Walk with me?” He gestured to the outskirts of the community green, which was surrounded by a gravel pathway marked with several iron benches.
“Where’s Grayson?”
“In Jo’s capable hands. We won’t be interrupted, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Grayson would never be an interruption.”
Cole laughed. “I meant Jo.” He placed his hand on the small of Tessa’s back to guide her away from the ever-growing crowd.
“This day isn’t going to be easy for either of us, is it?” she murmured, but it was a thoughtful comment and not an accusatory one.
“The first Saturday in June has always been a problem for me. I expect it may be the same for you, especially since you’ve been living in Serendipity for a while.”
She nodded. “I usually make an excuse to avoid the whole thing. This year I don’t have that choice—and I suspect that’s exactly the way Alexis and Jo wanted it.”
“You always have a choice, Tessa. You do now, and you did back then. I’ll admit I was an overconfident kid at the time and I didn’t even realize it. It didn’t even occur to me that you might reject my marriage proposal or I certainly wouldn’t have made it into a public display.”
“I know you went to a lot of trouble for me. I appreciate that now, looking back on it. You brought in my favorite singing group. Planned out every detail of what you thought was going to be the perfect proposal.”
Cole chuckled drily. “Well, it obviously wasn’t the perfect proposal, seeing as you turned me down and bolted from the scene.”
“I regret my actions that day.”
“Rejecting me or bolting from the scene?”
“Both. I had to turn you down, Cole. I had to. But I wish we had been able to talk about it before you left for the navy.”
“Yeah, I guess I did my fair share of bolting as well, didn’t I?”
“I honestly believed you’d come after me that day. That we’d be able to work through our problems.”
“Is that what you were waiting for?” Cole’s spine stiffened. “Were you playing some kind of game with me?”
“What? No. No! I would never do that.”
He let out the breath he’d been holding. “Then explain it to me. I wasn’t ready to hear your reasoning back then, but I am now. Why did you reject me? We’d been talking about getting married and having a future together.”
“That’s just it. We spoke of the future, but you never mentioned enlisting in the navy. Not until after the fact.”
“I didn’t?”
“Well, maybe in general terms—wanting to see the world, thinking there must be more excitement outside of our little community. Call me naïve, but I thought those were just the aimless ramblings of a restless teenage boy. I believed if we were going to get married and have a family, it would be here in Serendipity.”
Cole scoffed. “In a way, my words were aimless ramblings, or at least youthful ones. Adulthood isn’t quite what you expect it to be when you’re looking at it from the teenage end of things, is it? Where there were no restrictions or limitations to your thinking and nothing to hold you back from your dreams?”
They reached a park bench. Cole gestured for her to sit and then slid beside her with his arm resting across the top of the bench.
“I still don’t understand why you didn’t talk to me before you enlisted,” she said. “If you really believed we were going to marry each other, I would have thought we’d discuss something that important as a couple. If I had accepted your proposal, your joining the navy would have affected me as much as it did you. Maybe more, in some ways.”
“You’d think I would have considered that, wouldn’t you?” He pursed his lips, only now truly seeing his actions through her eyes. All these years he’d placed the blame squarely on her shoulders for leading him on and then tossing him away. Now he realized it wasn’t quite that simple.
“I couldn’t do it.” Tessa shifted her gaze to somewhere over his left shoulder.
“Do what? Marry me?”
“Marry a m
ilitary man. Not after watching my parents’ marriage disintegrate over the stress of my mother’s multiple deployments. Not after having to move from base to base and school to school without ever really being able to put down roots. Not after grieving for a mother who was killed in the line of duty.”
Cole’s gut clenched as if he’d been punched. He hadn’t seen it—any of it. He’d been an immature and self-absorbed kid with his head in the clouds and his feet not even remotely close to being solidly planted on earth. And he’d thought he would be a good husband and father?
“I couldn’t have proposed to you in any worse way, could I? Starting off by announcing my enlistment to you and the whole town and then pulling out a ring and expecting you to act surprised and pleased by it.”
“Oh, I was surprised, all right. Just not in the way you imagined.”
“I should say not.”
Their conversation lapsed into an uneasy silence as they each explored their own memories and emotions. The expression on Tessa’s face, so raw and painful, tore at Cole’s heart. He reached out and gently smoothed away the worry lines on her face with the pad of his thumb.
“We thought we were ready. We weren’t,” Tessa said, sniffling. Her eyes were glassy, but no tears fell.
“No,” Cole agreed. “We weren’t. We were just a couple of immature teenagers, not much different than the kids we’re mentoring now.”
Tessa’s gaze widened, but then she nodded. “No, I suppose we weren’t.”
“I did love you, you know.” He almost slipped and said do—in the present tense, and not the past.
Where had that come from?
“Yeah,” she replied, sighing deeply. “Me, too.”
“If we’d married, you probably wouldn’t have gone to college and discovered your gift for counseling teenagers.”
“And had we been more circumspect, you might not have joined the navy, might never have seen the world. Might never have had Grayson.”
Cole cringed. If only she knew Grayson was conceived in the first place precisely because he’d been mourning the loss of their relationship. Only an idiot, a weak man, lost control the way he had, drinking himself into oblivion.
But the alternative, marrying Tessa right out of high school, seemed equally unreasonable to him. He would have been holding her back from becoming the woman she was now, helping any number of teenagers to move on to better their lives.
“Even if we’d made different choices at the time, it never could have worked at all, could it?” he asked.
A single tear trailed down Tessa’s cheek, but she swiftly and silently brushed it away. She looked down and shook her head. “No, I don’t suppose so. You’re right. We never would have worked out.”
Chapter Eight
Tessa couldn’t get away from Cole fast enough, but unfortunately, she was obligated to spend at least part of the afternoon with him. The sooner she could get the teenagers on stage, the sooner she could make her excuses and get far, far away from the disaster that was the June BBQ. It occurred to her that maybe she was running away again, but how could she stand to be here after all Cole had revealed about his heart?
Even if we’d made different choices at the time, it never could have worked at all.
His words were true enough, but that didn’t make them any less painful, like a sharp knife to her already aching heart.
With Cole back in town and their collaboration on the teens’ musical number, she’d known the barbecue was going to be emotional for her, even before they’d had their heart-to-heart conversation. She’d had no idea how topsy-turvy it would be. Her stomach was churning as if she’d just exited a roller coaster—one that had gone upside down and backward.
She’d known there was no hope of a relationship between her and Cole. This wasn’t news to her. And until today, she would have denied the thought had even crossed her mind that she might want to try again.
But in one shocking moment as she’d sat across from Cole with their gazes locked and their hearts open, she’d realized that was not completely true. She did still harbor feelings for him. Maybe they had never left her. Granted, it was a different kind of feeling, one that encompassed where they had been, where they were now and where they were going.
Too bad she’d experienced that emotional epiphany at the very moment Cole was denying such a love could ever or would ever work out between them. Talk about the irony to end all ironies.
Cole might be right about some of the things he’d said. Their relationship could very well have been an unmitigated disaster if they’d said their I do’s as a young couple. In a town as small and close-knit as Serendipity, many folks married young and had long and prosperous relationships and happy families despite, or maybe even because of, the challenges they faced.
Would she and Cole have been different if they’d married? Would their lives have taken other roads? Tessa couldn’t honestly imagine her life without the therapy work she did at Redemption Ranch.
And yet—a life with Cole would have been something special. Loving him. Bearing his children. Growing old with him. She couldn’t help but wonder what that life might have been like. She already knew he was a wonderful father and had no doubt he would be a good and faithful husband to the woman blessed to become his wife.
Even now, only minutes after their heartbreaking conversation had ended, Cole already had Grayson in his arms and was proudly showing him off to the community. He beamed whenever he looked at his son. His luminous blue eyes would simply alight with joy. Those long nights pacing the hallway with a colicky baby had only drawn him closer to the infant.
She shook her head and scoffed at herself. As Cole had just said, she wasn’t a starry-eyed teenager anymore, and yet here she was, mooning over the rugged cowboy like a lovesick calf.
She pulled her emotions back, burying them deep inside her. Speaking of teenagers—she had a job to do. She was grateful to have something productive to take her mind off her conversation with Cole. She could mourn the loss of that love later, in private.
Right now she had teenagers to rustle together and a musical performance to direct. As she found the teens and guided them toward the stage on the green, Cole handed Grayson off to his father so he could set up the mics and test them for sound quality.
It wasn’t long before she could hear the teens’ nervous chatter over the milling of the crowd. She waved to get their attention and made a slicing motion across her throat with her index finger, mouthing the words live microphones.
The teens were banded in a tight group on stage. Without any prompting on Tessa’s part, Cole split them up into the couples they’d been practicing with over the past week and then gave Tessa a thumbs-up to begin the performance. After a few last-minute, hastily whispered directions, the teens were ready to do their thing. Cole scrambled off the stage and moved to stand beside her.
He brushed her elbow with his arm, and she felt as if he’d shocked her. She was excruciatingly aware of his every movement. His presence was tangible even when he was standing perfectly still beside her.
“Ready?” he asked, his finger hovering over the play button on a sound system that was nothing more than a hastily hacked rig of their portable CD player and someone’s home theater surround-sound system.
Taking a deep breath to calm her shaky nerves, she raised her hand like a conductor and waited until she was certain she had all of the teenagers’ attention. The crowd on the green had stopped talking and was eagerly awaiting the performance. Even Matt, who was usually the one goofing around when he was supposed to be serious, stopped fidgeting and stood perfectly still, his hands resting lightly on Whitley’s waist, ready to perform the minimal choreography they’d managed to work out over the week’s worth of rehearsals.
“And...go,” Cole whispered, punching the button.
The i
ntro to the music began, and the girls successfully launched into the first verse, growing stronger and more confident with each line. The boys had just joined in for the chorus when she felt Cole’s hands gently kneading her shoulders.
“Your shoulders are as stiff as mine feel,” he murmured with a low chuckle. “I’ve got to admit I was worried about how this thing was going to go off. I’m a bundle of nerves. You’d think I was the one up there performing. But the kids are doing great.”
Tessa nodded, feeling as if all the oxygen had faded from the atmosphere—and not because she’d been worried about how the kids were going to do in their performance. There was that, of course, but it was Cole’s warm breath fanning her cheek that had her struggling to catch a breath.
“These kids can really sing,” Cole said. “Not like me. Remember? My first time singing on the stage was a last-minute Hail Mary. My voice was so shaky that night. I’m surprised anyone could understand a word I sang.”
She remembered, all right, but he was wrong about his voice. It had been perfect. Mesmerizing, at least for her.
“Here we go for round two,” he said. “Let’s get ’em, guys.”
The boys jumped into the second verse with a cheerful abandon that surprised even Tessa. She’d figured they’d probably perform better with the entire town watching them, and she’d been right. They acted as if they were really into it—and into the girls who were their partners.
Even Matt. Maybe especially Matt, as he whirled Whitley out and then back again before she stepped up to the microphone to sing her solo.
Her pure soprano had more than one audience member oohing and ahhing, and Tessa smiled.
Personal issues aside, this day was a win.
“Yes!” Cole exclaimed, pumping his fist in the air as the teenagers finished the song in a harmony that was...actual harmony. In tune and everything.
The teens joined hands and stepped forward to take a bow. All of them were smiling at the response of the roaring crowd. Nothing like a good audience to make a performer feel like a million bucks, and all of her kids were worth at least that much. Matt gently insisted that Whitley step forward to take a bow on her own and enjoy a round of applause for her solo. Then the teens joined hands once again to take a final bow. Cole whistled and cheered louder than anyone else on the green.
