Tomorrow's Promise (The Hawks Mountain Series) (9 page)

Faith smiled. “Anytime. You’re always welcome.” Just having Granny sitting in her living room eased the stiffness from Faith’s tangled nerves. She reminded her of her grandmother, the one person in her life who had made Faith feel worthwhile and loved. She shifted a squirming Lizzie to the floor. “So how was your day with my little hellion?”

Granny didn’t answer. Instead, she studied Faith with those wise, knowing eyes of hers. “Suppose you tell me how your first day at your job went.”

Granny’s word brought back all the animosity she’d felt about Cole’s deceit. A tight fist formed in Faith’s chest. She really didn’t want to talk about her day, but Granny’s gentle hand on hers coaxed the words from her. “I quit.”

Granny sat up straight. “Well, that’s a bit of a surprise. May I ask why?”

For a long moment, Faith refrained from explaining. How could she admit she’d been taken in again by a man, even to this compassionate woman? Some of the anger she’d felt when she’d discovered Cole’s lie rose up in her throat like sour bile. She swallowed it down. “He lied to me, Granny Jo.” She told Granny everything from the time she’d walked into Cole’s house until she’d slammed out of his car.

“Darlin’,” Granny said softly, “men lie. It’s in their DNA. Poor dears can’t help it. Lord knows my Earl told his share of them. They think if they concoct some outlandish tale that it’s better than the truth, and it’ll get them out of trouble.” She laughed. “Most times, it just digs their hole deeper. From what you’ve told me, it appears that Cole might have been lying for a good reason.” She patted Faith’s hand. “My advice is, you should let him explain. You might be surprised at what he tells you.”

Granny stood, and, after kissing Lizzie goodbye, walked toward the door. With her hand on the knob, she paused and turned back to Faith. “From all I’ve heard, Cole is a good man. You may want to keep that in mind. Just because the good didn’t take in some men, God didn’t shut down the factory.”

Faith stared at the closed door for several minutes after Granny Jo left. Could she be right? Had Faith misjudged Cole’s motives?

Lizzie let out a wail. Faith roused herself from her thoughts. Poor Lizzie. Faith had gotten so engrossed in her own troubles that she forgot the poor baby was probably hungry. “Momma’s making supper, sweet thing.” She hurried off to the kitchen to add the pasta to the rapidly boiling water. Then she went back in the living room and picked up her daughter. “Momma’s sorry. Supper will be ready in just a bit.”

The sound of a car in the driveway drew her attention from Lizzie. Cole? Apprehension riding heavy on her shoulders, she carried Lizzie to the living room and peeked around the curtain. What she saw took her breath away.

Just what she needed to cap off an already crappy day.

Chapter 9

FAITH GRITTED HER teeth and opened her front door for her impromptu visitor. She stared into a face that she knew so well and had hoped she’d not have to see until she steeled herself for the meeting.

“Hello, Mother.”

“Faith.” Celia Chambers looked from Faith to Lizzie. The uncompromising line of the woman’s mouth clearly exhibited her condemnation of the child.

Lizzie seemed to sense her grandmother’s censure and cuddled closer to Faith. Fuzzy was clutched so tightly against the child that his head was bent backwards.

Celia turned her attention away from the cowering child and back to Faith. When she spoke, her tone was cold and unrelenting. “Since you seem to have forgotten your manners and never came to call on your daddy and me, I decided that I’d come to you. However, you could have come to your home and said hello.”

Disbelief washed over Faith. Not for a moment did she think that her mother missed her, or her reason for showing up here unannounced was as simple as a social call on her “wayward daughter.” Faith almost said that she’d planned to stop by, but it was a lie, and her mother was an expert at telling when her only daughter was lying.

Instead, Faith said, “
This
is my home, Mother.”

Her mother looked around the small, but neat living room. She raised one eyebrow. “Hmm, such as it is.” She turned back to Faith. “Are you going to ask me in, or have you forgotten everything I taught you?”

Forgotten? Not likely. Faith remembered every excruciating moment of her childhood. It still had the power to make her want to scream that God never intended for people to be like her mother. He wanted children to be happy and to live lives that didn’t include being reprimanded for breathing the wrong way “because they’d go to hell.” And her father should have stood up for his daughter, not hovered silently in the shadows while she endured her mother’s unrelenting rules and reprimands.

Faith stepped aside and prayed that this visit would be brief. “Come in, Mother. Have a seat.”

Celia walked to the sofa, looked at it for a moment, and then sat on the very edge, as if getting ready to run if some warrior germ should launch an attack on her. Faith had forgotten her mother’s aversion to dirt, among a long list of other things that had caused her to turn up her nose. Dirt and germs wouldn’t have dared cross the threshold of the Chambers’ home. Faith refused to make Lizzie grow up in the same antiseptic surroundings that she had. She wanted the house to be clean but comfortable.

While her mother arranged the dark brown skirt of her dress just so, Faith took stock of the woman who had raised her. Celia rarely smiled, so no laugh lines creased the skin around her mouth. Contrarily, the frown lines across her forehead had dug deep furrows in the skin. Blue eyes, the color of a frozen lake, held no emotion. More gray peppered her dark brown hair than Faith recalled being there before. All in all, if Celia had ever been attractive, her unbending outlook on people and life in general had stolen her looks long ago.

Faith took a seat across from her mother in a large, comfy armchair that had seen better days. “Why are you here, Mother? Just to tell me what a bad housekeeper I am and what a sinful life I’ve led?”

“There’s no need to get snippy with me, young lady.” Her mother frowned. “Do I need a reason to visit my only daughter and . . . her daughter?”

The woman couldn’t even acknowledge her own granddaughter. Frothing anger bubble up inside Faith. Her mother could think as little of Faith as she wanted, but she was
not
going to label Lizzie. She glared at the woman who had given birth to her. “Lizzie is your granddaughter. Is that so hard for you to say?”

“Yes, it is. I can’t turn a blind eye to sin.” Her mother huffed and folded her hands primly in her lap. “You have no one to blame but yourself for how I feel, Faith, and how miserably your life has turned out. You chose to move to that godless city and live in sin. And if that wasn’t bad enough, you compounded your sin by giving birth to a child out of wedlock.”

Enough!
Faith suddenly felt like the teenager who had done something un-Christian in the eyes of her judgmental mother and was about to be reprimanded for it. Incredibly, Celia had momentarily transformed Faith back to the young girl who’d cringed under her mother’s sharp tongue. In the old days, she would have taken the tongue lashing and skulked off to her room.

Not anymore.

Faith vaulted to her feet. “What do you want, Mother?” She was certain that her mother had not suddenly showed up on her daughter’s doorstep for a coffee klatch.

Celia stood and faced Faith with an icy stare. “Well, if you’re going to be like that, I might as well say it. I want my mother’s locket.”

The request shocked Faith. Her grandmother had not gotten along with her daughter. However, Faith and Gramma Harrison had been very close. She’d been on her deathbed when she’d given Faith the locket. Celia had never shown any interest in the piece of jewelry before. The plain gold locket had a rose and an imitation ruby on the front. Hardly an expensive piece of jewelry. Celia had never been interested in it before. Why now?

“Grandma Harrison gave that to me on her deathbed.”

Celia’s expression took on an almost evil look. “Your grandmother and I never saw eye-to-eye, but whatever else she was, she was a God-fearing woman. If she had known how you would turn out, despite my efforts to prevent it, she would not want a . . . a—”

“Go ahead. Say it, Mother. A harlot. A sinner.”

Celia started, obviously surprised that her venom had been met with venom. But she didn’t back down. “Yes. A sinner. That’s what you became the day you moved in with that man and slept with him without the bonds of matrimony.”

Lizzie’s lower lip protruded, a sure sign that the raised voices were scaring her, and she would burst into tears at any moment.

Faith cuddled her daughter closer and lowered her voice. “Well, you’re not getting it. It’s mine.”

Celia Chambers stalked to the door and yanked it open. Then she turned back to her daughter, hot anger shooting from her eyes. “I will get it. Count on it.” She slammed the door behind her hard enough to make the glass in the windows rattle.

WITH SUPPER DONE and Lizzie bedded down for the night, Faith collapsed on the sofa and breathed a deep sigh. What a day it had been. She fingered the gold locket hanging from the chain around her neck.

Though a bit on the eccentric side, Gramma Harrison had been the light of Faith’s young life, the one loving presence throughout most of her early childhood. Memories assailed her, and a chuckle escaped Faith. After a bank foreclosed on her and Grampa’s house, Gramma had not trusted banks. She swore she’d never entrust a cent to one again. As a solution, when their lumber business became one of the biggest in the county, she’d taken to hiding money all over her house: in couch pillows, in the freezer of her fridge, in the cellar in her canning jars, and any other number of places. Each hiding place contained anywhere from a handful of coins to several hundred dollars. When Faith’s parents had cleaned out the old woman’s house, they’d found enough money to buy her mother a good used car. Celia had always been sure they’d missed some of the hidden cash.

Because Faith was so young, the money had never interested her. When Gramma Harrison died, nine-year-old Faith was inconsolable, unable to understand why this God that her mother had said loved her would take the most important person in her life away from her. She’d drowned her sorrows in the fur of the teddy bear, a gift from her grandmother, that years later Lizzie would call Fuzzy and adopt as her constant companion. Faith had kept it, determined to give it to her child, and it delighted her that Lizzie loved the stuffed toy as much as her mother had.

As if it were yesterday, Faith remembered what her grandmother’s constant promise to her. “I will always take care of you, sweet girl, even from heaven.”

She looked at the ceiling. “I could sure use some of that help right now, Gramma.”

Faith’s visit to the past was suddenly interrupted by her cell phone’s strident ringing. Quickly, she grabbed it off the coffee table. Only Cole and Granny Jo had her number. She glanced at the caller ID. Cole.

Faith searched for the anger she’d felt for him not long ago, but it had drained away. Replacing it was an unreasonable need to see him again. She needed his strength and caring hand holding hers. She rested the phone against her ear. “Hello.”

“Hi.” Cole’s deep voice rumbled through the phone and tripped over every one of her nerve endings. “I’m almost to your house. If I pull into your driveway, are you gonna shoot at me?” Cautious humor colored his outrageous question.

Suddenly, her troubles of the day melted away. Why was it that just the sound of his voice erased all the stress from her life? She laughed. “Yep. But because I kind of like you, you get a choice between my Super Soaker or my paintball gun.”

He laughed. “I’ll leave that up to you. Whichever one you think I deserve for my stupidity.”

Faith hung up as a car pulled into her driveway. Feeling anxious, she went to the door and swung it open. The rain had stopped and the sun was out. Cole was just getting out of his squad car and walking toward her. Her breath caught as she watched him approach looking like a muscular panther stalking his prey. Undeniable strength transmitted itself in the way his broad shoulders strained against the black material of his uniform shirt. His powerful thighs filled out the legs of his gray pants. Since he’d left his hat in the squad car, the sun glinted off his dark black hair, leaving bluish highlights to shine through. She couldn’t deny that he was one of the handsomest men she’d ever seen.

While fighting the smile that wanted to curve her mouth, she gave him a curt nod and stepped aside for him to enter the house. “Good evening, Sheriff.”

Cole grinned at her and inclined his head. “Evenin’, ma’am.”

That she wasn’t still mad at him, or at least didn’t appear to be, surprised him. When she’d slammed the car door that afternoon and stomped off into her house, he was sure she had enough mad in her to last for a good long time. “I’m assuming I’m forgiven.” She opened her mouth to reply, but he held up his hand. “I still owe you an explanation.”

“Since we’re about to have a serious talk, I’d rather do it over coffee.” She walked ahead of him into the kitchen.

He looked around. “Where’s Lizzie?” He hadn’t seen the toddler in a while and was hoping she’d be around now.

“Hopefully asleep.” Faith filled the glass carafe with water and then poured it into the well of the coffeemaker.

The aroma of ground coffee drifted to Cole. Oddly, it made him feel like he’d come home after a long day. For a long time, he just watched Faith as she finished preparing the coffee, the sway of her hips, her lithe, almost fragile body, the way her blond hair caressed her shoulders. Then he remembered something she’d said on the phone. “So you
kind of
like me, huh?”

She glanced over her shoulder and grinned. “Kind of.”

Lord help him, there were so many things about Faith he was discovering, things that could really grow on him . . . and were. She had a dynamite body, a quick sense of humor and an easy smile. Didn’t hold onto a grudge the way Diane had. Loved her beautiful little daughter above all else. As an added bonus, he’d watched her with Lizzie and come to the conclusion that she had an inner beauty that matched her physical beauty.