Her Minnesota Man (A Christian Romance Novel) (3 page)

"O
h, for crying out loud, Francine! How could you do this to me?"

Laney Ryland was perfectly aware that sensible people didn't talk to their cars. But Francine, the old black Chevy Impala she'd inherited from her mother, was practically family.

"You knew I was waiting for a tire sale!" Laney's voice rose in a wail of despair as she brought the car to a bumpy stop on the side of a deserted gravel road between two endless cornfields just outside of Owatonna, Minnesota.

As rain pelted Francine, Laney sighed and switched off her engine. She wouldn't be stuck out here if she hadn't offered a ride to the pregnant wife and two-year-old daughter of one of her former boyfriends, a large-animal vet who had informed Laney three years ago that he wasn't ready to settle down.

He'd been mistaken about that, because he'd married her friend Megan just three months later.

And what was Laney's reward for driving Luke's family home after their car conked out, leaving them stranded while Luke was busy doctoring a sick cow at a dairy farm twenty miles away?

A flat tire in the rain.

Laney wasn't jealous of Megan, even though Luke had somehow neglected to break up with Laney before he'd begun seeing her friend. Laney had cried when she'd discovered that treachery, but Megan was perfect for Luke, anyone could see that. Laney was just having a tiny bit of trouble being patient and awaiting her own turn to get married and start a family.

Oh, all right. She was having all kinds of trouble being patient. But she was already twenty-five, and a woman who planned on having five or six children needed to marry young.

She sighed again and activated Francine's hazard lights. It was hardly rush hour out here in the cornfields, but if she didn't turn on the flashers, some distracted farmer would be sure to happen along and bash into Francine. That was the way Laney's week had been going.

She briefly considered calling her friend Ollie Lincoln, who ran a garage in town. But she'd been brought up by a courageous single mother who had never backed away from a challenge, and wimping out was no way to honor the memory of Hannah Ryland.

"So it's just you and me, Francine." Laney fingered the hem of her best black wool skirt. "And I am seriously overdressed."

It had been an unusually warm day for the first week of October in southern Minnesota, but it was evening now, and with the approaching rain, the temperature had dipped below sixty degrees. Eager to avoid a cold drenching, Laney determined to wait a couple of minutes to see if the storm would blow over.

She had a blind date with her friend Sarah Jane Swenson's cousin Eric in just half an hour, but she decided against calling him. As long as the rain stopped in the next few minutes and she got the tire changed without any trouble, she'd make it home before he rang her doorbell. And if he arrived before she'd had time to freshen up, she'd simply explain everything and ask him to give her a few minutes.

She turned on the radio for some soothing classical music but found her favorite station engaged in one of those chatty pledge drives. Twisting the tuning knob, she skipped past the rural stations' offerings of crop reports, perky polka music, and fishermen droning that record numbers of perch were being pulled out
of nearby
Tetonka
Lake. She paused when she heard a rock ballad featuring a powerful baritone that sent a frisson of longing through her.

Jackson Bell was her best friend. At least that was what she told people, because she didn't know how else to describe their relationship.

He wasn't her boyfriend. She'd had several boyfriends, and she'd never experienced that giddy thrill with Jeb. Yet while there was no romantic component to her feelings for him, Jeb was as necessary to her life as food and water and air.

Just like Cathy and
Heathcliff
, a starry-eyed classmate of Laney's had sighed years ago, but that was true only to a point. Laney and Jeb
had
been extraordinarily close since childhood, but they weren't in love and they certainly didn't share the fictional couple's tendency toward mutual annihilation.

No, Laney mused bitterly, snapping off the radio in the middle of the song, Jeb was bent on
self
-destruction. Laney, he treated like hand-blown crystal.

"It's never going to stop, Francine." Staring glumly through the windshield, Laney accepted the inevitable and wriggled out of her wool cardigan so she'd have something warm and dry to put on after changing the tire. Then heaving a sigh that, if not for the pounding rain, might have been heard as far away as the Twin Cities, she opened her door and stepped out into the deluge.

She was rounding Francine's hood to inspect the right-front tire when the slender heel of one of her pumps sank into a patch of mud. The shoe stuck, but her foot kept going and she lost her balance.

She pitched forward and fell hard, crying out as tiny stones bit into her tender flesh and pain ripped through her left shoulder, which she had injured the previous night.

Fighting tears, she pushed up to her feet and gingerly brushed gravel from her scraped palms and her muddy, bloody knees. As frigid rain pummeled her, she recovered her shoe and limped resolutely to Francine's trunk.

In situations like this, Christians usually sought divine assistance. But Laney had been on the outs with God for a couple of months now, so she didn't feel right about asking Him for anything.

"I can handle this," she breathed through clenched teeth as she opened the trunk and located the tools she needed. Hadn't Jeb always insisted that she was clever and stubborn enough to achieve anything she set her mind to?

Jeb
.

He hadn't been home in more than a year, and it had been three months since his last phone call. Laney was hurt by his neglect, but she was also desperately worried.

The psychological wounds Jeb had suffered as a child had rendered him wary of making emotional connections with people. He had no family and Laney was his only real friend, so wherever he was and whatever he was doing right now, he was completely alone—and entirely at the mercy of his own savage spirit.

Squeezing her eyes shut, Laney pushed that awful thought aside. She had enough troubles without worrying herself sick over Jeb.

She positioned her flashlight on the ground, crouched beside the flat tire, and used the sharp end of her lug wrench to pry off the hubcap. Discovering that the lug nuts had been over-tightened by whichever hulking mechanic had put on Francine's last set of tires, she almost gave up. But she was already soaked to the skin, and annoyance fueled her determination to meet this challenge.

Grimly ignoring the pain in her shoulder, she used her whole body as leverage on the wrench and was finally able to loosen the nuts. She had a little trouble operating the jack and exchanging the heavy tires, but she finished the job.

A lightning bolt of pain shot through her shoulder as she heaved the flat tire over the lip of Francine's trunk.

At last she slithered back into the car. The sodden fabric of her skirt slapped and squished against the vinyl seat as she adjusted her position behind the wheel. She sighed over the ripped sleeve of her favorite silk blouse, and then she turned on the engine and the heater. The air that blasted her was not yet warm, so she shivered hard as she pushed dripping curls away from her face and put on the dry cardigan.

"Hot bath, here I come," she muttered, reaching for the gearshift.

Eric
.

She squinted at her watch in the dim light and emitted a shriek of dismay. "Thanks a lot, Francine. By now he's thinking I just blew him off."

Laney felt terrible about not being home at the agreed-upon time for their date, but apart from calling the man earlier, what could she have done differently?

She'd just started getting dressed when the very pregnant Megan had appeared on her doorstep with a cranky toddler who needed to go potty. Their car had broken down nearby, and Luke couldn't get there for at least an hour. Since Laney hadn't been expecting Eric—who, according to Sarah Jane, was an amazingly handsome widowed dentist—for another forty-five minutes, she'd driven Megan and her daughter home.

She'd thought there would be plenty of time. She hadn't counted on having to change a flat tire in a thundering downpour.

She fished her phone out of the enormous, baby-soft leather bag Jeb had given her two birthdays ago and called Eric to apologize and explain. Surely any reasonable person would understand.

"I don't understand," Eric said. "Why didn't you call me sooner?"

"I meant to, Eric, but then I got so rattled that it just slipped my mind. I'm awfully sorry."

"All right." There wasn't even a hint of forgiveness in his tone. Was he this hard on his patients when they forgot to floss? "Go home and throw on some dry clothes. I'll let the restaurant know we're running late, and I'll be back at your house in thirty minutes."

Thirty minutes? It would take the better part of an hour for Laney to get home, wash and dry her hair, bandage her cuts, "throw on" another nice outfit, and apply the barest minimum of makeup. Why were men so obtuse about these things?

"I'm sorry, Eric, but I'm too frazzled now. Let's just reschedule, okay?"

Silence. Even the rain had stopped.

"Eric?"

"Sure. No problem." His clipped speech made it clear he resented being thrown over for a long hot bath and a cozy cup of jasmine tea. "I'll call you."

No, he wouldn't, but that was fine. Laney apologized again and said goodbye, then dropped the phone into her bag.

She didn't need this aggravation. As far as she was concerned, Eric the amazingly handsome widowed dentist could just pick one of Minnesota's ten thousand lakes and go jump into it.

Trembling from stress and annoyance as well as because she was half frozen, Laney put Francine in gear and headed home. Her shoulder continued to throb, a painful reminder of the stupid thing she'd done the previous night.

She'd been awakened by the unmistakable sound of shattering glass. Looking out her bedroom window, she'd spotted
one
dark-clad figure attempting to boost another through a window of the unoccupied house next door, which happened to belong to Jeb. Too shocked to think straight, she'd grabbed her old softball bat and run outside in her flannel nightshirt and knee socks, flailing and squawking like an outraged Canada goose defending her territory.

Not surprisingly, she had ended up hurt.

She sighed and rubbed her aching shoulder. No doubt this spate of disasters, which had begun on Monday when her bank denied her application for another small-business loan, was God's attempt to get her attention and bring her back into fellowship with him. But she wasn't ready to yield. She was too depressed. And, yes, she was a little angry.

She had no idea how she was going to make it without the loan. The tearoom she'd helped her mother start nearly five years ago had bled her savings dry, but she couldn't close it because she employed her three elderly great-aunts. Besides, apart from presenting the occasional talk on bridal etiquette or table manners, a sideline she'd fallen into after some friends had noted her extensive knowledge of those social niceties and recommended her to others, what else was she qualified to do?

Once, she had dreamed of going away to college. But now she was stuck in Owatonna, Minnesota watching life pass her by.

Not that she didn't love her hometown, which was full of history and charm and good people. And not that she minded looking out for her great-aunts, a set of 79-year-old identical triplet spinsters everyone called the Three Graces. And she certainly didn't regret skipping college to support her mother through the ups and downs of leukemia treatments and remissions. It was just that she'd never had a chance to spread her wings.

The second time Hannah Ryland's leukemia had gone into remission, her blood and marrow cells had returned to normal and she'd surprised everyone by giving up her job as a high-school music teacher and opening a tearoom. Caught up in her mother's enthusiasm, Laney had quit her own job as a wedding planner's assistant to help get the fledgling business off the ground.

Two years passed before Laney felt able to peruse course catalogues from the University of Minnesota. But then the cancer returned and a few months later, her mother was gone.

Now Laney's college fund was gone, too. So was her mother's life insurance settlement, but at least the medical bills had been paid off. Laney was left with a heavily mortgaged house and a tearoom that was still struggling to break even.

Sometimes she fantasized about selling everything and going to college someplace sunny and far away, but of course she would never abandon her great-aunts. The Three Graces had plenty of friends, but Laney was their only relative, and family was everything.

Back in town, Laney turned onto Mulberry Street. Just short of her own driveway, she swung into Jeb's, pressing the remote-control device clipped to her sun visor to open the detached garage. She used Jeb's garage because she didn't have one and his would have stood empty, otherwise.

She was the caretaker of his house, a graceful three-story Queen Anne Victorian with a wraparound porch nobody ever sat on. She cut his grass, hired workmen when necessary, and supervised the cleaning crew that came every so often to freshen the inside of the showplace his mother had carefully restored and decorated some twenty years ago.