Her heart fluttering, Becca dropped her gaze. “It was a long time ago.”
Lola came, then, and they ordered. Before the food arrived, they discussed a variety of topics: the town, books, her job. Davis easily carried the conversation, his manner intent but relaxed, and he seemed to understand what she didn’t say, as well as what little she did. But Becca hadn’t realized how at ease she’d felt around him until they bowed their heads over the meal. Usually she felt terribly conspicuous praying in a restaurant, but it somehow seemed completely natural today. Everything seemed natural and easy—until he asked a question that stung.
“Forgive me for asking, but how old are you, Becca?”
“I’m thirty-three,” she said. “And you?”
“Twenty-eight.”
Five years. She was five years too old. Half a decade. Becca felt the crushing blow of disappointment. Then she chided herself. Had she really thought there might be a chance that the two of them would…?
The unfinished thought hung like a pall over the remainder of the meal, clouding everything. They were back at the church before she realized that he hadn’t broached the subject of the pianist’s position. Of course, she would have to decline. She hated to perform, and her grandmother would not gladly part with her company more than she already did.
“A-about the position,” she began.
“Mmm, still praying about it,” he said, handing her up into her van. “Shall we meet next Saturday to discuss it in detail? Your grandmother can spare you for another hour, can’t she?”
Becca opened her mouth to tell him no, but what came out was, “If it’s early enough.”
“How’s eight?”
After a long moment while she tried to make herself do otherwise, Becca nodded.
“It’s a date, then. Goodbye, Becca.” He closed the door.
“Goodbye, Pastor.”
“Davis,” he corrected through the window. “My name is Davis. Please, use it?”
They both laughed, and that’s when she knew just how much trouble she was in.
THREE
He had made Becca Inman his business over the past week, confirming her painful shyness and devotion to her grandmother, whom Becca had cared for since high school and through college, driving the fifty-plus miles each way every day to the college in Lawton in order to remain at her grandmother’s side as much as possible. The Becca he had come to know would never accept the position of pianist. Yet the Becca he had come to know privately—the gentle, talented, sweetly pretty, caring woman—simply filled every one of his needs. His interest in her went beyond the professional or even the pastoral level. From the moment he’d met her, his interest had been highly personal, and so he would press the position upon her, if only to provide himself access to her. He was a selfish, selfish man.
His twin sisters, Caylie and Carlie, each with dark glossy hair cascading to her slender shoulders, split a look between them.
“Not at all,” Carlie assured him, slouching over his kitchen table as she dispensed perfect twenty-one-year-old logic. “You’re doing her a favor.”
“God wouldn’t have given her such astounding musical talents if He didn’t mean for her to use them,” Caylie insisted, sitting primly, her back ramrod straight.
Davis knew that was true, but he also knew that he had ulterior motives. Despite hours of prayer during which he had surrendered himself repeatedly to God’s will, he knew that ultimately he would use the pianist’s position to keep Becca close to him in hopes of working his way past her timidity and into her good graces.
The sound of a car door jump-started his heart and recalled him to the skillet warming atop the stove.
“She’s here. Make yourselves useful.”
* * *
After a moment of indecision, Becca drove her minivan across the church parking lot to the parsonage and parked it beside the pastor’s shiny black coupe, intending to meet him in his private residence. He had said that his office was there, and it really would take no time to refuse him and be on her way.
After last Sunday’s fiasco in church when she had butchered the offertory hymn, she knew without a shred of doubt that she could not accept the position of pianist at Davis’s church.
Filling in as the pianist for her sister last Sunday had been her worst nightmare realized. Her mistake had been glancing out across the congregation to check how the collection was progressing. At that point, she had realized that all eyes were upon her, and suddenly her mind had blanked and her fingers had frozen. Unable to find her place in the music again, she had been forced to start over. All the while she’d wanted to crawl under the piano and hide.