Just Like Heaven (11 page)

Did high-speed Internet connections have their own patron saint? If not, they should. His e-mail was downloaded and ready seconds after he walked through the door.

 
Friendship between a man and a woman could be a tricky thing in the best of times. He had never lied to Maggy, even with half-truths, but he wasn’t sure how much of this afternoon with Kate he was willing to reveal.

A few e-mail newsletters. The requisite spam. A half-dozen notes from clergy friends, congratulating him on rejoining the fold after his prolonged sabbatical.

But nothing from Kate French.

He had no business being disappointed. The woman was only a few hours out of the hospital. She had other things to do besides write e-mails to an Episcopal priest between assignments. They had nothing in common. Just because God had brought them together at a critical moment didn’t mean they were going to become pen pals. She didn’t have to do it, but she had asked him to lunch. Wasn’t that enough? What was he expecting, menu approval?

Still, he had really thought she would write to him. Something had happened between them this afternoon, something worth noting.

He’d start with the easy stuff.

 
He was hopeless. He couldn’t even come up with a workable subject header, much less a coherent message. She had him tied up in knots, knocked completely off center. The sweet fresh smell of her skin, the way she had looked in the sunlight, the full-bodied sound of her laughter. Stronger men had been felled by weaker arsenals.

And that kiss . . . what was that all about? He hadn’t planned it, and from the look on her face neither had she, but it had happened just the same. He had spent his career trying to explain the coexistence of predestination and free will, but he hadn’t expected to experience it on a Saturday afternoon in Coburn, New Jersey. The choice was his but he had the feeling the outcome was out of his hands.

Seven

“Dinner tomorrow,” Paul said as she walked him to the door. “I’ll call The Old Grist Mill and make reservations for seven.”

“Dinner?” His words caught her by surprise. “We’re going to dinner tomorrow?”

“I asked you on the way home and you said yes. Remember?”

Clearly she didn’t or she wouldn’t be standing there wishing she could come up with a way to back out of it without hurting his feelings any more than she already had.

“It’s been a long day. Everything’s all jumbled up.” She forced a laugh. “I’m not sure I remember my own name.”

He nodded and tried to put a good face on it, but she could see the embarrassment in his eyes and she felt terrible. From the moment she walked through the front door and into Mark Kerry’s arms, everything else had fallen away.

She didn’t have the heart to tell Paul that after all these years he was five days too late.

“What’s wrong with Uncle Paul?” Gwynn asked when Kate went back to the house. “He didn’t seem very happy.”

“He isn’t,” Maeve said. “He saw what happened here and he’s jealous.”

Gwynn’s eyes widened. “Uncle Paul?” She looked over at Kate, who was wishing she had bypassed the kitchen and gone straight to her room and stayed there. “Since when are you two—?”

“Since never,” Kate said, pouring herself a glass of orange juice from the fridge. “My hospital stay seems to have made more than a few people around here crazy.” She glanced over at her mother. “Paul thinks he’s in love with me.”

Maeve was silent for a long moment. “I was afraid this would happen.”

“So was I,” Kate said. “I told him it’s a by-product of my heart attack, but he thinks it’s the real thing.”

“Are you going to dinner with him tomorrow?” Maeve asked.

“How do you know about that?” Even Kate had managed to forget the invitation.

“He told me while you were out there saying good night to Mark.”

“There was no polite way out of it,” Kate said. “Besides, he’s my best friend. He’ll snap out of it.”

“Tread softly,” Maeve warned. “Our boy’s heart is a lot softer than he wants anyone to think.”

Was it? Paul’s heart had seemed pretty resilient to Kate. He hadn’t spent a Saturday night alone since his divorce.

“Did you really invite Father McDreamy to lunch?” Gwynn asked over her shoulder as she poked around the fridge for anything fattening and now forbidden. “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.”

“You weren’t even in the room.”

“I was in the hallway.” She flashed Kate the same grin she’d flashed as a seven-year-old learning to ride a two-wheeler. “Eavesdropping.”

That smile, those twinkling eyes, that impish grin. Where did the time go? A rush of love swelled up inside Kate’s chest, and for the tenth time in the last few hours she burst into tears which, of course, tipped her highly emotional daughter into tears and ultimately dragged her mother along for the ride.

“I hate this,” Kate said, wiping her eyes with a paper towel. “If this is what I’ve been missing, I could do without it.”

“This is good for you,” Maeve said, ripping off two pieces of paper towel for herself and for Gwynn. “You’ve always been so bottled up, so self-contained. It’s good to let your emotions flow through you. It’s healthy for body and soul.”

“It doesn’t feel good,” Kate said as a new torrent of tears rolled down her cheeks. “I feel like I’m totally out of control.”

Maeve and Gwynn exchanged looks.

“I saw that,” Kate said, reaching for another square of paper towel. “And I saw the last three looks too.” She blew her nose and tossed the towel into the trash. “You’re wrong.”

Gwynn looked as innocent as a five-year-old. “I didn’t say anything.”

“We don’t have to say anything,” Maeve pointed out, “because she knows it’s true.”

Kate rinsed her juice glass and set it in the dish drainer to dry. “We’re not having this discussion.”

“Maybe you aren’t,” Maeve said, “but we’ve been having it since that gorgeous holy man showed up on the doorstep this afternoon. I have never seen chemistry like that between two people in my life.”

“Gran is right,” Gwynn said. “I thought the two of you looked smokin’ hot out there.”

Kate tried to think of something suitably funny and sarcastic to say in response, but unfortunately “Do you really think so?” was what came out.

She could hear their delighted laughter all the way upstairs in her second-floor bedroom, where she had fled in horror. If Maeve and Gwynn had seen the sparks flying between her and the priest, then there were sparks. Maeve made a living analyzing, encouraging, and celebrating sexual attraction. And Gwynn was a born romantic, hopelessly enamored of anything that even hinted at a possible love story. Kate was the one who was tone deaf when it came to the music of love and always had been.

But not this time. She had heard a symphony when their lips touched, complete with a choir of angels and Pavarotti in his prime. An entire opera of emotion was playing itself out inside her and all she could do was let it happen.

She probably shouldn’t have invited him to lunch the way she did. She had put him on the spot in front of her family and Paul. What could he say but yes? Driving up to Coburn to have lunch with a woman he’d found facedown in a puddle of pickled ginger had to be the last thing he wanted to do on any given Tuesday. If she really wanted to thank him for saving her life, she would make a donation to the Episcopal Church and offer him an escape hatch.

The more she thought about it, the more convinced she was that this was the way to go. Nothing good could come of seeing him again. He was a man of the cloth and she hadn’t been near a church in a few decades. For all she knew he was a married man with a devoted wife and five kids and a golden retriever, and those sparks they had generated were a big fat occasion of sin they would both do well to avoid.

Then again maybe Catholics were the only ones who viewed the world in terms of sinning possibilities. Most of her information about Episcopalians came from reading the Mitford books, and her priest didn’t look anything like Father Timothy. Since leaving St. Aloysius after high school she had kept religion, organized and otherwise, at a respectful distance.

This was the kind of research job the computer was made for, but where to begin? She could start with an overview of the religion, its basic tenets, its liturgical calendar, or she could do what every red-blooded American woman in her position would do: Google Father McDreamy and find out if he was married.

“Mark Kerry” was a popular name. There were thirty-two thousand six hundred twenty-one websites with mentions of Mark Kerry. She narrowed it down to Episcopalian Mark Kerrys with New Jersey ties and found three, two of whom were dead. The third was seventy-three.

Okay. So maybe this wasn’t such a great idea. She had his telephone number. She could always call him and give him the opportunity to gracefully bow out of their Tuesday lunch.

Then again, maybe he already had.

She clicked over to Outlook Express and waited for the screen to populate.

She hadn’t logged on since Monday morning, just before her life turned itself inside out.

 
She skimmed the list of messages in her inbox but there was nothing from Mark Kerry. Not that she was expecting anything, but that didn’t stop her from sobbing like she had just lost her dog, her best friend, and her 401(k).

“This is the twenty-first century,” she said to the screen as she wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “You’re a grown woman. If you have something to say to him, say it.”

She reached for the piece of paper with his contact information taped to her mirror, then propped it up near her keyboard.

 
Too defensive. It made her sound like one of those wishy-washy types she hated.