Life was perfect, but then again so was she. Abby Gardner gave herself one last look in the mirror and just had to grin. Twenty-five years old and already queen of her own kingdom. A new mother, a husband smart enough to be on the path to being an Episcopal priest just like her father, a house and people willing to bend to her beck and call. A good, pious woman she was, not about to admit she was a saint but at least she was working on it. It was up to the rest of the world to catch up to her.
That had been the message of the sermon her Andy had given the day before as well as her Sunday School lesson to the children. Abby would make a most wonderful priest's wife. She'd been such a perfect preacher's kid, it was just a continuation, no doubt. She continued to admire the woman in the mirror, preferring to hold that thought for eternity. Her smile was suddenly broken by the knock at the door. Abby felt her heart skip a beat. He had come after all.
It had been four years, she didn't really expect him to be honest. It wasn't like they'd stayed in touch. People are just being nice when they say they'd stop by to see the baby. Life was perfect. She was a saint. A second knock and her feet stayed glued to the floor. She never thought he would come by, not now. Not ever. She was the queen. She had her kingdom and it was somebody else who walked across the room and slowly opened the front door.
Four years and he hadn't changed a bit, that gray haired, blue eyed devil of a man. Abby's heart skipped a beat again, it wasn't supposed to happen like this. If they ever saw each other again, it was supposed to be just in passing, a few words and both moving on down the street. It would make it so very easy to pretend none of it ever happened. So much easier to be so incredibly perfect. To totally convince herself she never was a woman so magnificently in love.
He'd been so incredibly beautiful, the noble angel of a man whose house she'd come to live in while she went to college. The caregiver to a disabled wife, the personable, good-looking hunk of maleness who actually listened to her babblings. A gentle, caring, kind soul who could be such an imp as well. Twenty-two years older but there was no generation gap. They'd been friends, family and all that, since Abby had been just a embryo teenager. It was just natural for her to live there when she went to school. It was just natural she'd fallen in love.
Not that Abby knew what love was, not then at least. She'd never been on a date, let alone figured out what all those racy magazines she'd glanced at really meant. A priest's daughter had to be a model of deportment, at least until she got away from the house and discovered there was life out there somewhere. Discovered how this falling in love thing worked. She hadn't meant to, especially with a married man. She hadn't meant to let him teach her how to kiss either.
"Hi."
Abby stared at him, her words frozen somewhere in her throat. There were a million things to be said and she couldn't even say hello. She opened the door and watched him give her that smile that always made her melt as he walked in. She cursed herself, shut the door behind them and let the memory come back.
It had been at that park, him loving flora and fauna even more than she did, but it wasn't deer she'd wanted to experience that summer's evening. She'd been so damn clumsy in the months before, a college girl's attempt at flirtation about as discrete as an elephant storming down Main Street. He'd been such a gentleman, playing it off for so long. Trying to avoid the situation. That situation she wasn't going to be denied. A first kiss that wasn't going to be enough.
Not that she'd thrown herself and all her innocence at him. She was a priest's daughter, a woman of values and morals. A woman in love. Totally, completely in love with him, with all the curiosity an innocent should have, living for those two days a week he took the wife to visit her daughter one hundred miles away. Waiting for him to come back to the house by himself and let her learn more than just kissing.
