Free Amish Redemption (Erotic Romance) (Amish Heart Trilogy) by Miranda Rush Page B

into Rachel: reading to her, cooking for her, going to the park when the weather permitted to feed the ducks, but Rebekah had grown listless.  Nothing existed to distract her from the fact that Nick was not there.  She had given all of Nick’s clothes away before the move, knowing it was morbid to hold onto them, but kept pictures of Nick around the apartment.  She told herself it was for Rachel to remember her Daddy by.
    She would open her scriptures, not to read, but to lightly touch the stray curly hair she had found on Nick’s pillow and the brittle petals, now brown with age, of the first rose he had ever given her over three years ago on the day of their first kiss.  She remembered that sweet kiss with painful vividness and a beautiful sadness lay heavily upon her.  She also kept in the Bible a picture of the two of them together and she would often kiss his face.  She tried to tell herself she was being overly-maudlin, but couldn’t help it.   Somehow, if she did not constantly remind herself of the times they had touched, she might forget him.
    As the weeks wore on, she found herself regretting every moment that she had ever been cross or self-absorbedly inattentive to his needs.  Times she could have said, ‘I love you’ and hadn’t done so loomed remorsefully within her.  How could she have thought that she would have forever?  How could she have taken him so for granted?
    After she began working, she became aware of how blessed she had been before, being able to spend all day every day with her daughter.  She became jealous of the time Rachel spent with her sitter, even though Rebekah felt safe leaving her there.  She quickly found her small paycheck scantly covered their needs and none of their wants.  She resisted getting a second job as this would mean even less time with Rachel, but resented not being able to get Rachel things that she would like.  She found herself feeling abandoned by Nick and it made her sad, bitter, and guilty. 
    The massiveness of her heartache overwhelmed her.  She was only twenty one years old and had only two years with her man.  She was already a widow.  She ached for home and there was no home to go back to.  It all had been destroyed along with Nick. 

Chapter Ten
     

It was the day after Christmas.  Rebekah had worked the day before so she and Rachel were having their quiet holiday today.  It is all for Rachel , she thought as she watched her child gleefully unwrap the few presents that Santa had brought her.  Rebekah didn’t feel much like celebrating.  A hole had been left in her heart that she had tried unsuccessfully to fill with mothering Rachel.  She knew what had created the hole, but had no idea what could be done to fix it. 
    In all the sappy movies she had seen—and bawled through while clutching a Kleenex box—the heroine’s loss was only remedied by getting a new love.  Rebekah didn’t want a new love.  She wanted Nick or no one.  Yet the movies made Rebekah question what such a love might be like.  She knew it would happen sooner or later, she was only twenty one and couldn’t spend the rest of her life alone . . . could she?  Would it even be good for Rachel to be raised without a father figure?  Rebekah balked, however, at trying to imagine the man she might eventually fall in love with.  He wouldn’t be like Nick.  Nobody could measure up to him. 
    She was concluding, as she had done time and again since Nick’s death, that having anyone in her life would be grossly unfair to the new suitor because she could never love him as she had loved Nick when a knock at the door disturbed her reverie.  She hadn’t been expecting anyone but suspected it might be a neighbor man who had been annoyingly hanging around lately, asking her out.  Coldly, time after time she had put him off.  It was easy to justify.  He had no job and she saw him outside the apartment late at night when she would return from work, drinking beer and