Love Inspired November 2014 #2 (14 page)

“What, exactly, would have been the point of telling you? The only thing it would have done was made things awkward. As it was, things were pretty great.” He ran one hand down his face. “Well, to tell the truth, I don't know what things are right now.” His phone vibrated loudly in his pocket. “I thought we had something going on at dinner the other night, and I thought we had fun at the talent show, but how it got all serious and complicated all of a sudden is beyond me.” His phone continued to go off and he grumbled while he fished it out.

This whole thing was a mess. “Jesse...”

Jesse practically threw the device on the table as the firehouse sirens began to wail through the night air. Charlotte realized it wasn't his phone at all, but the firehouse beeper. “You're on duty?”

“I'm on call,” he growled. “And now I have to go in.” He muttered a few unkind words under his breath as he slid out of the booth and tossed a pair of twenty-dollar bills on the table. “We're going to have to finish this—whatever this is—another time.”

Charlotte stared at her food, the delectable burger having lost all its appeal. Jesse couldn't have picked a worse moment to be called into the firehouse. She tried to summon a prayer of sympathy for whoever's home or business was facing the threat of fire, but self-pity overpowered her better nature. Right now, she selfishly despised the siren.

Here, in a single moment, was every reason why she and Jesse wouldn't work. They didn't consider the same things important. He should have told her the minute they'd sat down that he was on call. He should have told her he'd been eyeing the cottage before she bought it.

He should have told her he wanted her to stay in Gordon Falls.

I got it all wrong, Mima. This isn't what you would have wanted. You were looking to give me adventure and I turned it into foolishness. If I had only waited, thought some more about what I was doing, I wouldn't be in this mess.

She fought the urge to do something, to move or talk or do anything to stem the discomfort now crawling under her skin as if her emotional state had taken on physical symptoms.
Sit and think, don't react,
she told herself, but it didn't help. She was a whole ball of reaction.

Charlotte ate two more bites of her burger before giving up. She flagged the server and asked to have both meals boxed up, grateful most of the Dellio's staff was familiar with the firehouse and used to people dashing out midmeal. She added a few more bills to cover the tip and left the restaurant, knowing she'd hold the sight of that half-empty booth with two meals in her head for a long, long time. One person with two plates of food—how she knew and detested that view.

She made sure her route home didn't take her past the firehouse. When she pulled into her driveway, the glow through the curtainless front windows looked forlorn instead of expectant. The house that had always spoken of possibilities struck her tonight as a giant pile of things undone. The feeling she'd fought off since she'd signed the sale papers rose up huge and undeniable. It was clear now that she'd bitten off far more than she could chew.

I need to think this through.

She knew, as strongly as she recognized the truth, that she needed time and space away from Jesse and Gordon Falls in order to do that.

Charlotte stood in the hallway, half paralyzed with indecision, half desperate to do something. She tried to pray but she had no idea what to pray for.
I need something to do, Lord. I can't just stand here.

With no visible path, Charlotte simply kept doing the next thing that came to mind. First, she turned the oven on low and tucked the food in to keep it warm until her hunger returned. Then she put the kettle on to make a cup of tea. While she drank the tea, she opened up her laptop and booked the flight to Vermont. Then, in what felt like the first clear thought of the night, she packed her bag to head back to the Chicago apartment. It'd be easier to catch a cab to the airport from there, and she needed to be gone when Jesse got off duty.

She picked up the cat carrier Melba had brought for Mo and opened the door. “If we leave now, we'll be in Chicago a little before ten. We'll figure out tomorrow when tomorrow comes.” Astonishingly, the cat walked right in as if he thought that was a smart idea. What more encouragement did she need? She was packed and turning onto the highway before an hour had passed.

Chapter Fifteen

J
esse winced as the emergency room doctor wrapped the plastic splint around his swollen ankle. “Is it a bad break?” He'd seen the X-ray and could guess, but he wanted confirmation.

“I've seen worse. If you stay off it—and I mean really off it, no weight on that ankle for three days until the swelling goes down enough to put a hard cast on it—you'll be back in action in six weeks.”

“Six weeks?” Jesse moaned and let his head fall back against the examining bed, listening to its paper cover crinkle in sanitary sympathy.

The doctor peered over the top of his glasses. “You could be off crutches and into a walking cast in three or four weeks if it heals well. But if you push it and try to go faster, you could end up needing surgery. You may need surgery anyway.” He peered again at the bandage on Jesse's leg. It covered a nasty gash just above the break. “Come back tomorrow to get the dressing changed. We'll see how the swelling has gone down by then. Ice every twenty minutes, ibuprofen for the pain, keep it elevated, you know the drill.”

Chief Bradens pulled aside the curtain, looking weary. “Another down. What the flu started, that porch railing finished. I'm going to have to call another department to send a few guys to hold us over until some of the others are back on their feet.”

“Sorry.” Jesse knew injuries were part of the job, and no one could have foreseen that the porch railing wouldn't hold when he tripped and fell into it. Some small part of him—the part that keenly remembered Charlotte's prayer for his safety not hours before—knew he was fortunate not to have been more badly hurt. Still, a larger and angrier part of him was ticked off at all the trouble this break would cause.

“Come on, Sykes, it's not your fault. I'm just glad you'll be okay to come back eventually.”

“Sure, in mid-August.”

“More like September, actually,” the doctor cut in. “You'll need another two weeks of physical therapy after getting the cast off to get back into enough shape to go out on call.”

“And let's not even talk about my time off the job,” Jesse moaned. Mondale wouldn't take kindly to having to call someone else in to finish his jobs. Someone else working on Charlotte's cottage? And the loss of income? Even with insurance, it would set his plan for the launch of Sykes Homes back a month if not more. Tonight was turning out to be a lousy evening on every front.

“Let's worry about that tomorrow and get you home.” Chief Bradens began the paperwork while Jesse hoisted himself up with the pair of crutches that would be his constant companions for the next few weeks. “Have you got someone who can help you out tonight?”

His mom would be here in minutes if he called. Even Randy, busy as he was, might find a way to stay overnight if asked. Only Jesse didn't want any of those people. He wanted Charlotte. Despite everything that was getting tangled further between them, the urge to do his recuperating in that overstuffed old plaid chair in the corner of Charlotte's living room came over him like a craving. He'd even put up with Mo to spend his days sitting on that chair watching her putter around the house with that elated, decor-planning look on her face. Go figure.

That option, however, was off the table for now if not forever.

“I'm set,” he hedged, knowing the chief himself would find someone to stay with him if he wasn't convinced Jesse had it covered. Right now he really wanted to be alone with his frustration. “Just get me home and I'll deal with the rest.” His car was still at the firehouse, and he didn't think he could drive it, anyway. One of the guys could bring it over later.

He and Bradens hobbled out to the chief's red truck, the radio still chattering in the dash with all the usual post-incident communication. It had been a small fire, a holiday fish fry spilling over onto a back deck, more smoke and mess than any real damage. Only the deck was old and rickety, as Jesse and his left tibia had soon learned. Those mishaps—the ones that were so infuriatingly avoidable—made Jesse angry even if he didn't end up hurt. If people would just bother to repair things like stairs when they broke, or—better yet—call in someone who knew what they were doing instead of trusting structures to a lethal combination of lumber store supplies and an internet tutorial. As every paramedic in the department knew too well, sometimes “do-it-yourself” turned into “hurt yourself” or “hurt someone else,” as tonight well showed.

“It's late.” Chief Bradens sighed, looking at the digits on the dashboard clock.

“It's so late it's early,” Jesse managed to joke, pointing to the “12:25 a.m.” with a strangled smile.

“I hope we get a quiet night from here on in,” Chief Bradens said, breaking his own rule. It was a standing joke at the firehouse that hoping aloud for “a quiet night” nearly always guaranteed the opposite. The holiday incidents and short-staffing had really wiped the chief out.

“I hope we get a quiet weekend,” Jesse added. “We need a break.” He caught his own unintentional joke and laughed, glad to see a weary smile come to the chief's face, as well. “Well, a different kind of break, that is.”

They drove to Jesse's apartment in tired silence, listening to the back and forth of the radio chatter slowly die down as the department settled in. The guys on duty would be up for another hour cleaning and restocking before they got to go home to their families. Nights like this were hard under the best of circumstances, much less when they were short of staff, as the GFVFD currently was.

They pulled into the driveway of Jesse's duplex. “I guess it's a good thing you have the first floor.” Chief Bradens nodded to the pile of Jesse's turnout gear in the truck's backseat. “I'll take your stuff back to the firehouse for you.”

Jesse opened the door and put his good foot—now sporting a paper hospital bootie, since he'd gone in wearing fire boots—on the sidewalk. He angled the crutches out of the truck and stood up. Everything hurt.

Chief came around the car. “You're sure you'll be okay?”

“Fine.” He'd keep his cell phone nearby and call Mom if he needed anything other than the ten hours of sleep he currently craved.

He was fishing in his pocket for his house keys when the beeper went off and they both noticed the radio in the truck spouting a crackle of commands. “Not again,” Bradens groaned.

If the chief didn't look so drained and his own body didn't hurt so much, Jesse would have made some crack about Bradens jinxing the night with his hope for quiet. Mostly he just shook his head as the chief hoisted himself onto the passenger seat to grab the radio handset.

“Gotta go. Smoke at 85 Post Avenue.”

“Go,” Jesse said, turning toward his house. “I'll be fine once I...” He halted, frozen by the facts his tired brain had just this moment absorbed. Then Jesse spun around as fast as his crutches would let him, only to see Bradens's truck speed away, lights blaring as the firehouse siren sent up its second wail of the night.

85 Post Avenue was Charlotte's cottage.

Chapter Sixteen

I
t no longer felt like home.

That was the single, constant impression Charlotte's Chicago apartment left her with as she rattled around the dull white box of a dwelling. A month ago she'd found the urban apartment dripping with character, but now it felt sadly ordinary. Impersonal, even, despite the fact that it still contained many of her personal belongings. Even the addition of Mo didn't seem to liven up the place. How could a stuffed full apartment feel more vacant than a half-empty cottage?

When she'd pulled out of the driveway in Gordon Falls, she'd doubted the wisdom of that purchase. Now, back in Chicago, she recognized it for what it had become: her home. Sitting in her favorite chair in her Chicago apartment, she still felt uncomfortable and out of place. She wanted to be in Gordon Falls. She wanted to
live
in Gordon Falls for more than just weekends and vacations.

It didn't seem possible—at least not any way that she could see right now.
I want to be there, but there isn't a job for me there. Is there one that I've missed? Lord, why are you opening a door so far away when You've knit my heart to Gordon Falls? Is it because I need to be away from Jesse? We're not good for each other, even I can see that, but my heart...

Charlotte curled up under a lush afghan, welcomed Mo onto her lap and began to make two lists. One list held ideas for jobs she could do in Gordon Falls or one of the neighboring towns—“make do” jobs like marketing for the local hospital or some other company, office work or finding online work she could do from home. None of these felt at all exciting or motivating. The second list held all the arrangements—like finding a moving company or renting a storage facility—that would be necessary if she went to Vermont. Both lists left a sour taste in her mouth, and she abandoned the task in favor of knitting with Mo purring beside her until she dozed off.

The loud ring of the apartment's landline phone woke her, clanging from the single receiver in the kitchen. She bumbled her way to the phone, the alarm of a middle-of-the-night call fighting with the fatigue of her difficult day. Mo tangled around her feet and she almost tripped twice. Her answering machine was kicking in by the time she lifted the receiver. “Hello?”

“Charlotte, what on earth are you doing in Chicago?”

“Melba?” How had her friend even known to call her here? She hadn't told anyone she was leaving. She'd planned to call Melba in the morning, but she knew if she talked to Melba before she left, her friend would have talked her into staying over. She needed to be farther away from the cottage than the Bradenses' house. “I decided to come to my apartment. What's wrong?”

Charlotte heard Maria crying in the background. “I only tried this number because you didn't answer your cell phone. Charlotte, it's the cottage. One of your neighbors smelled the smoke and called the fire department.”

Charlotte fumbled for her handbag, knocking a tote bag to the ground and sending Mo scurrying back out of the kitchen. “The cottage is on fire?” Panic strangled her breath and sent her thoughts scattering. “The cottage?” she repeated, as if that would help the news sink in.

“I don't know any details yet. No one knew where you were.”

She found her cell phone and saw three missed calls—two from Jesse and one from Melba, not to mention multiple texts from both of them. All within the past ten minutes. She'd set the phone to Vibrate during dinner with Jesse and hadn't turned the ringtone back on. “I drove here earlier tonight.” Charlotte sat down on one of the tall stools that fronted her kitchen counter. “My house is on fire?” Tears tightened her throat. She couldn't stand to lose something else. She just couldn't.

“Not fully, and the guys have it under control. Clark said it was mostly just smoke but he called me when they didn't find you in the house.” Her voice jostled as if she were bouncing Maria to try and soothe the crying child. Charlotte squinted at the cell phone screen to see that it was nearly 1:00 a.m. “I'm so glad you're okay. I've been praying like crazy since I couldn't reach you on your cell phone.”

“My house is on fire.” She couldn't think of another thing to say. “My house. My cottage.” She began stuffing everything back into the tote bag she'd knocked off the counter. “It'll take me hours to get there. Oh, God...” It was a moan of a prayer, a plea for clarity where none existed.

“What if you took the train? Maybe you shouldn't drive.”

She couldn't wait for a train. And she surely wouldn't sleep anymore tonight. No, the only thing for it was to head back to Gordon Falls and pray along the way for safe travel. “No, I don't think there's one for hours anyway. I'll call if I need help to stay calm, and I promise I'll pull over if I need to rest.”
My house is on fire.
Her brain kept shouting it at her, making it hard to think. She was supposed to be the calm head in a crisis, the problem solver, but none of that felt possible now. “I'll be on my way in ten minutes.” She reached into the fridge and stuffed the last three cans of diet cola—a faster caffeine source than waiting for the coffeemaker to brew—into the tote bag. Mo, in a move she knew no other cat owner would probably ever believe, calmly walked into his carrier as if he knew they were getting back into the car. “Call my cell if you learn anything more, okay?”

“I will. Stay safe, Charlotte. The cottage is important, but you're more important than all of that. Don't speed, and call me if you need me. I'll talk to you the whole way in if you need me.”

The cell phone buzzed on the counter. Jesse's information lit up the screen.

“Where are you?” his voice shouted over a lot of background noise, including sirens.

“I'm in Chicago. I just talked to Melba.”

“Chicago? What are you doing there? I went nuts when they couldn't find you in the house.”

There was so much noise behind him. The thought of Jesse standing outside the cottage watching flames eat her house made it harder to fight off the tears. She sat down on the stool. “How bad is it?”

“Not as bad as it could have been. If you had been inside...” Someone barked questions to him and she heard him pull the phone away from his ear and answer, “No, no, I've got her on the phone right now. She's in Chicago. Yeah, I know.”

“I'm coming.” She was desperate to see the cottage, to know how badly it had been damaged. The 160 or so miles between Chicago and Gordon Falls felt like a thousand right now.

“I would.” His voice was unreadable over all that noise. Did he say that because he would have made the same choice? Or was it so bad that she needed to be out there as soon as possible?

“Whoa, Sykes! Ouch! How'd that happen?” She recognized the voice as one of the firemen but couldn't begin to say which one.

“Hey, not now, okay?” came Jesse's quick reply. His voice came close to the phone again. “You be careful driving. Things are under control here, just try and remember that.”

What did he say just now? “Jesse, are you okay?”

“I'm fine. Just rattled, that's all. The cottage and everything. Call me when you get to the highway exit.” He paused before adding, “I'm glad you're okay. Really glad.”

She heard emotion tighten his words and felt her own chest cinch with the awareness. “I should be there sometime before four.” She took a minute to breathe before she asked, “Jesse, what aren't you telling me? Is the cottage gone? Just tell me now—I need to know.”

“The cottage isn't gone. Looks like mostly smoke and water damage. I didn't get close enough to know anything more than that.”

Not close enough? Jesse had been brought in on duty tonight. Why wasn't he in the crew that went to her house? “But I'd have thought you—”

He cut her off. “Just get here. The longer we talk now, the longer it takes for you to get on the road. I promise, I'll be here when you pull in and I'll answer all your questions then.”

“But what—”

“Look, I've got to go. Please promise me you'll drive safely, and you'll pull off if you get sleepy.”

She had a gallon of adrenaline running in her veins. “No chance of that. I've got a bunch of Diet Cokes besides.” She had to ask. “It's going to be okay, isn't it?”

“Yes.”

She wanted him to turn on the charm, to launch into that irresistible persuasion that was his gift, to sweep her up in that bold confidence he had, but really, how could he? A phone conversation in the middle of what might be a disaster couldn't do that. The only thing she knew that could do such a thing was prayer.

“Jesse?”

“Yeah?”

“Pray for me? I know it's not really your thing, but God will hear you anyway, and I'll feel better knowing you're asking Him to keep me safe until I get there.” It was a drastic thing to ask, but if this wasn't a time for drastic measures, what was?

“I'll give it a shot.”

That was all the foothold she needed. “Okay. Mo and I are on the way.”

“Wait...you have the cat with you?” He sounded surprised.

“Evidently he likes car rides.”

He pushed out a breath. “I had the guys scouring the neighborhood for the beast. I thought he was a goner, or at the very least ran away.” He actually sounded relieved. “Glad to hear he'll live to torment me another day.”

Even on the phone, even faced with disaster, he'd managed to pull a smile from her—one just large enough to get her on her way. “See you soon.”

* * *

Every single bone in his body ached. His leg injury was down to a dull fire thanks to the pain medicine, but Jesse felt the sorry combination of wide awake and exhausted pound through his muscles and thud in his brain.

He should go home. It was feat enough that he'd hobbled all the way here on his crutches—it wasn't that long a walk but still, that had to have been damaging. He should take himself back to his apartment and at least make an effort to get some sleep.

Only he couldn't. He sat on the curb, his splinted leg sticking out in the deserted street atop his crutches in a makeshift attempt at “keeping it elevated,” staring at the cottage. He was trying to make the place feel like his cottage, striving to muster up the sense of ownership he'd privately claimed before Charlotte came along. It wouldn't come. This was Charlotte's place, and two things were currently driving him crazy.

One, that he needed to make it Charlotte's perfect place—wonderfully, uniquely hers.

Two, that no matter what he told himself, no matter how “unserious” he claimed to be about that woman, he couldn't stand the thought of her gone.

What had swept through his body when he realized Chief Bradens's radio was crackling out orders for Charlotte's cottage was sharper than fear. It was the bone-deep shock of loss. A loss that wasn't about bricks and shingles, but the woman who'd come to invade his life. He'd told himself it was better to keep things cool, to play their mutual attraction the way the old Jesse would have done. Only he couldn't. She'd done something to him. He'd told himself that his balking over her rental suggestion was just the legendary Sykes ego, a refusal to live in the house over some sore-loser impulse. That would have been a good guess for his personality a month ago. That wasn't it, though—he'd bristled because he hated the idea of the house without Charlotte inside, even temporarily. Somehow he knew—had known since the beginning in a way he couldn't comfortably explain—that she belonged there. Living there instead of her seemed just plain wrong.

Sitting there, feeling something way beyond sidelined, Jesse added two more items to the list of things that were bugging him:

Three, that he couldn't help with the cottage. Normally, Jesse wasn't the kind to rush in toward a fire. There were guys like that, firemen who were nearly obsessively drawn to a crisis, driven by an inner urge to save the day that made ordinary men heroes. He'd never felt that pull—until tonight. It buzzed through him like a ferocious itch that he could only watch from the sidelines. It gave him nothing to do.

Which brought up number four: Charlotte's request that he pray. He could no more help her get here from Chicago than he could march into that cottage, and the sense of helplessness crippled him worse than his leg. The prayer she'd requested was the only thing he could do for her...but he wasn't sure how. He was not a praying man. He wasn't opposed to the idea—he took some comfort in the prayers Chief Bradens or Chad Owens or any of the other firefighters had been known to offer, and he found himself drawn to Charlotte's prayers of grace over their dinners. Still, none of those people had ever directly asked for prayer from him. It was like being told to use a complicated new tool without being given the owner's manual.

Only, was it complicated? Charlotte never made it look like anything more difficult than breathing. Prayer seemed to come to her like singing came to him—something that just flowed out of a person.

Singing.

Jesse searched his memory for a gospel song. He owned nearly every recording Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin and Bobby Darin ever made, not to mention Ray Charles and Smokey Robinson. One of them had to have a gospel song in there somewhere.

He couldn't remember the title of the song, but his mind recalled Sam Cooke's mournful voice singing, some song about Jesus and consolation. That's what Charlotte needed. And so, after a guilty look around to see if there was anyone who could hear, Jesse began singing the couplets he remembered. Charlotte needed consolation to return to the assurance she'd first proclaimed to him:
God is never late and He's never early; He's always right on time.

He kept on singing, letting the words soak into his own tangled spirit as he remembered more and more of the lyrics, letting the song undo the knots in his shoulders and the grip in his chest that wouldn't let him breathe. Letting him know that it might not be a bad thing that he felt so bonded to her, and her alone. Slowly, he felt his own words form—not out loud, but like a sigh inside his head, a breath waiting to be exhaled.