Free The Blessed by Ann H. Gabhart Page B

the way to the church house, he’d climbed up the stairs to where she and Rachel slept in the little attic room. Some of the church folk had fixed up the space under the roof for Lacey when she first came to take care of Miss Mona. While there was barely room enough for the bed and no place for a grown person to stand up straight with the way the ceiling sloped down on both sides, Lacey had always felt as warm and safe in the little room as a downy chick under a mother hen’s wings.
    At least until Preacher Palmer climbed up the steep stairs and hunched over to come to the bed. Without the first word, he sat down on the edge of the bed and took off his shoes before he laid himself down next to her.
    Once Rachel went to sleep, didn’t much short of a booming thunderstorm ever wake her up, but any little noise made Lacey’s eyes pop open. She’d heard the first step of the preacher’s foot on the bottom stair and hardly dared to breathe as she prayed she was dreaming. She even reached up to touch her eyes in hopes she’d find them closed. But they were wide open, staring out at the grainy darkness, and her heart began to pound inside her chest. Not a good pounding. She felt as brittle as new-formed ice on a pond, and she wasn’t sure but what the way her heart was working overtime that it might not just cause her whole body to break into a thousand pieces.
    He lay there on the edge of the bed beside her for a long time—or what seemed like a long time to Lacey. She kept up the pretense of being asleep even though she figured her whole body was jumping with the force of her heart pounding in her chest.
    Finally when it was all she could do to keep from screaming, he reached over and laid his hand on her stomach. She felt a quiver in his fingers as he moved his hand back and forth across her nightgown in the kind of strokes a body might use to settle down a fractious horse before trying to put a harness on it. She couldn’t move away from him. Rachel was on the other side of her with the bed pushed up against the wall so the little girl couldn’t roll out.
    “You promised.” Even though she whispered the words, her voice sounded loud in the stillness of the dark room.
    His hand stopped moving. Any gentleness he had been intending drained away, and his hand felt hard on her stomach.
    She braced herself for the anger she felt gathering in that hand, but she said the next words anyway. “On Miss Mona’s grave, you promised.”
    That wasn’t exactly true, but Lacey needed some way to bring Miss Mona in front of his eyes. Even if it did make him mad as old Balaam was at his reluctant donkey in that Bible story before the Lord let the donkey do some talking. She’d take a blow from him before a caress.
    But he didn’t hit her. Instead he pulled away his hand, and even though he wasn’t touching her up close anymore, she could feel how stiff his body got to match her own. After a long moment, he sat up on the edge of the bed and picked up his shoes. He stood up and stared down at Lacey. It was dark, but she could see the shape of his head and knew his eyes must look how they did when he was in the pulpit talking about sinners. Hard. Condemning.
    He didn’t whisper when he spoke. He said the words right out loud. “I didn’t promise forever.” The words hung there in the air over her, even after he turned away from the bed and made his way to the top of the narrow stairs.
    There he stopped. She didn’t look toward him. She kept staring straight up at the ceiling, trying not to think about anything except how the dark air separated and made little circles the longer she stared at it without blinking. The truth was, bringing Miss Mona in front of his eyes had brought an unease to Lacey’s mind as well. She couldn’t imagine what Miss Mona would think about what was happening. She had loved the preacher. More than she ever loved Lacey. What if she was looking the same kind of condemnation down on Lacey as the