What's Cooking (17 page)

She swallowed hard. “Were you going to ask me if I wanted a husband, too?”

He smiled, but his face held no humor.

“Yes, I guess I was.”

She stared blankly at the plush ram in her hands, then raised her head to look across the space between them and studied Mitchell.

He was no longer the neat and tidy package he had been in the afternoon. The jacket of the tuxedo was crinkled. His carnation was squashed and missing half its petals. He'd spilled something on his shirt, the bow tie was crooked, and his hair gel had given up its hold long ago. And contrary to the claims of Mitchell's hairstylist, she could still see some orange and blue at the roots.

Mitchell never put on airs, nor did he pretend to be something he was not. Mitchell was, just as his father said, simply the person he was. Regardless of his age, his job, his visions for the future, or anything else—or maybe it was the combination of them all—Mitchell was the man she was madly in love with and always would be.

When it came down to the bottom line, Mitchell was a man of faith and character.

Suddenly, Carolyn had to force herself to breathe. Of all the Bible reading she'd done since she'd met Mitchell, one verse, Isaiah 32:8, sprang to mind. “But the noble man makes noble plans, and by noble deeds he stands.”

For all his plans and reasoning behind them, whether it had been his strategy to prepare the food for the wedding, to his ideas for fun places to take her—in spite of her best efforts to avoid him—to his intentions to court her or the times they had simply prayed together, he'd always done the right and noble thing.

She'd never met a man nobler than the fine Christian man in the disorderly tuxedo in front of her.

She had been praying for the wrong things, but God had sent her the right man anyway.

Knowing that he had planned tonight to ask her to marry him, her eyes clouded, but she blinked back the tears. Before she spoke, she plucked the little yellow note off the ram, reached past the space between the seats, and pressed it onto the center of his chest. “Then the answer is yes.”

Mitchell reached up to brush his fingers across the “husband attached” sticker in the middle of his chest, stared down at it, then raised his head, meeting her gaze. His voice came out gravelly and low, like he was having trouble comprehending what she'd just agreed to. “That's great. I feel all choked up. I don't know what to say.”

Carolyn had no intention of becoming tangled in a big kiss in the bucket seats of a car in the middle of his church's parking lot. Instead, she leaned over the stick shift and rested her palm on the note stuck to the center of his chest. Beneath her touch, his heart pounded.

“Just say, Baa–aa–aa.”

About the Author

GAIL SATTLER lives in Vancouver, BC (where you don't have to shovel rain) with her husband, three sons, two dogs, five lizards, and countless fish, many of whom have names. She writes Inspirational Romance because she loves happily-ever-afters and believes God has a place in that happy ending. Visit Gail's Web site at www.gailsattler.com.

Dedication

Dedicated to Sandie, my friend and critique bud extraordinaire.

A note from the Author:

I love to hear from my readers! You may correspond with me by writing:

Gail Sattler

Author Relations

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