Free Wolf Creek Widow (Wolf Creek, Arkansas Book 4) by Penny Richards

sounds good,” she said with a weary smile. “We can warm up the breakfast coffee and have some of those leftover biscuits from breakfast with a little of that peach jam I made.”
    Nita nodded and smiled. “I do like a little something sweet in the afternoon.”
    * * *
    Ace felled a couple more trees and chopped off the limbs. Tomorrow he would bring Meg’s gray mare to snake the timbers out of the woods and then he could cut them into proper lengths and split what was too big to burn easily.
    He’d worked all afternoon with memories of Meg Thomerson filling his mind: the way the sunshine glistened in her freshly washed hair, the remarkable green of her eyes, the delicate wing of her eyebrows and the shape of her wide mouth. He also thought of the way it felt to have her arms around his neck. Knowing it was pure foolishness, he couldn’t help imagining coming home to her every evening and having her throw her arms around him in pure happiness that he was there.
    He must be getting daft in his old age. There was no way a pretty woman like Meg would have any interest in him. Not with his background. Why, she couldn’t be much more than twenty or so, and he was approaching his thirty-first birthday.
    It had been a rough thirty years. But for the grace of God, he’d have never come through it as well as he had. From the time he was young and had begun to wonder where he belonged in the world, he’d struggled to reconcile the quick, hot temper that often got him into trouble with an inborn sense of right and wrong. Even though he’d sown his share of wild oats as a young man, he’d always been tormented with a powerful guilt afterward.
    The two years he’d spent in prison for getting into a brawl and unintentionally killing a man had gone a long way toward improving his control over his temper and forcing him to take a good look at his life. Seeing how quickly and unexpectedly everything could be snatched from you, he’d started taking stock of where he was and where he could go from there.
    Looking for something to help ease his inner disquiet, he’d done a lot of Bible reading. To his surprise, he’d found peace in the pages of the worn leather Bible a visiting preacher had given him. He learned about forgiveness and the grace of God, and over time, he realized the only way a man could be truly happy was to live a life for Him.
    Faced with the reality that in one way or another, he’d been running from the differing cultures of his heritage, he spent the remainder of his time in jail mulling over the various aspects of his mixed birthright and considering the ways they had shaped him. This time, instead of dwelling on the discrepancies in his background, he began to appreciate and reflect on the similarities.
    While still in prison, the preacher who’d given him the Bible had baptized him in a nearby river while a small army of guards stood watching, just in case he tried to make a break for it. His act of obedience had been cause for a lot of jeering and laughter, but he hadn’t cared. He’d begun to treat things he’d once considered burdens as opportunities to change his thinking and to grow in faith and trust in God.
    More important, he began thanking God for the things that caused him grief and pain or disappointment. That was no easy thing to do, and he often failed miserably. Even so, his newly found faith made the long days of tending the prison garden, shoeing the guards’ horses and doing mountains of laundry bearable.
    When he was released, he’d chosen to go to the reservation in Oklahoma. He’d needed time to put things into perspective, to heal inside and out. After a few years, he’d decided to come back and help care for his mother.
    One of his deepest desires was to build a life that would make him acceptable to the people in Wolf Creek. It wasn’t that he was often mistreated or insulted, but neither was he welcomed into the small town’s social circle, which made finding a suitable