Love Inspired March 2015 - Box Set 1 of 2: A Wife for Jacob\The Forest Ranger's Rescue\Alaskan Homecoming (42 page)

“Oh.” A simple question. Good. “I grew up here. I graduated from Aurora High, then moved to San Francisco to dance.”

Backpack girl piped up again. Posy got the impression she was the group's unofficial leader. “Did you know Pastor Liam?”

Pastor
Liam.

Posy held back an eye roll. “Yes. We went to school together.”

“Did you ever date?” This was followed by a collective eruption of giggles.

Posy squirmed in her chair/makeshift barre. She'd been back in town for two days and a ballet teacher for a grand total of ten minutes, and already she was being questioned about her romantic history with Liam by kids she didn't even know. “That's not important.”

The girls exchanged bemused glances.

“That means
yes
,” one of them said.

“No.” Posy shook her head. “It doesn't. It means it's not important. My friendship with Pastor Liam has nothing to do with ballet, which is why we're here.”

Her
friendship
with Liam? That was a stretch.

All of a sudden a profound sadness wrapped itself around her. They'd once been everything to each other. And now it felt like a lie to even call him her friend.

Her face felt hot. It was probably twenty-five degrees outside, and she was sweating.
Please, God. No more questions.

“What happened to your foot?”

That again.
She wished her injury could be invisible, even for just a day. Twenty-four hours without that dreadful cast taking center stage would have been pure bliss. “I fell onstage and broke a bone in my foot.”

“Does it hurt?”

More than I can possibly say.
“Not too much.”

Once more, they all started speaking at the same time, peppering her with questions.

“How long until it gets better?”

“When can you dance again?”

“Will you be able to do all the same things you could do before? Leaps and turns and stuff?”

It was like having a chorus sing her every unspoken fear aloud. She had to resist the urge to cover her ears.

“I'm going to be fine. Soon.”
I hope.
“Okay, it's my turn to ask the questions now. Let's start with your names.”

The tiny outspoken one with the enormous backpack was called Melody, and the others were Ava, Rachel, Hannah, Emily, Madison and Darcy.

With the notable exception of Melody, who probably had a future in television or politics, the girls were much more soft-spoken when answering questions than when doling them out. Posy had to strain to hear a few of their names.

She began to breathe a little easier. “How many of you have taken ballet lessons before?”

The girls exchanged glances. Not a single hand went up.

“None of you?” Posy made a valiant effort not to let her disappointment show.

By the time she'd reached her teens, Posy had worn out more ballet shoes than she could count. Granted, she'd had Madame Sylvie. These girls had no one.

A lump lodged in her throat. Aurora was a town without a ballet school. Girls who grew up here never had the opportunity to stand on tiptoe in front of a mirrored wall and dream about leaping and turning across a stage in a fluffy tutu and glittering tiara. They never dressed in black leotards and candy-pink tights or knew the secret thrill of watching their arabesques grow higher year after year.

Posy found this even more difficult to digest than the fact that Liam was a pastor.

She'd taken the loss of Madame Sylvie so personally that she'd never thought about what it had meant for her hometown. What it had meant for all the little girls who blew out candles on birthday cakes decorated with little plastic ballerina cake toppers. There would be no
The Nutcracker
at Christmastime, no spring recital. No rites of passage such as the first fluffy tutu, the first pair of shiny satin pointe shoes or dancing a pas de deux with a partner for the first time.

No pointed toes, no pink tights, no ballerina buns. No pliés, no relevés, no piqué turns. Not one girl in this room, this town would ever curtsy on a stage laden with long-stemmed roses.

Aurora had become a place that ballet had forgotten.

You're here now. You can remind them. At least for a while.

She stood and planted her hands on her hips, much like the way Madame Sylvie had always done. “Stand up, girls. It's time to get to work.”

Chapter Seven

M
idway through practice, the boys were so covered with snow that Liam could hardly tell them apart. This was somewhat disconcerting, considering the object of the sport was to avoid getting hit. On the other hand, he supposed their general state of disarray also meant they were getting good at hitting their intended targets.

At present, the practice session had become a head-to-head battle between Ronnie and another of the boys, Caleb White. According to the official rules of competitive snowballing, once a team member was hit three times, he was out. Unless the team member was a female, in which case the number of hits went up to five. Seeing as Liam's attempts at recruiting the girls had been such a spectacular failure, that particular fact was irrelevant.

“You're going down, Ronnie!” Caleb's head popped out from behind the barrier he'd been crouching behind. In real games—such as the one on the schedule for Saturday—against real teams, large orange plastic barriers scattered the playing field. Liam, of course, didn't have official barriers, but he had trash cans. They did the trick just fine, so long as Sundog didn't knock them over first.

After a few fake-outs, Caleb flung a snowball in Ronnie's direction. It whizzed right past the intended target's head. Ronnie let out a laugh and returned fire with a snowball of his own, which slammed against the trash can with a wet thud.

Liam's dog sat at his feet, ears pricked forward, head swiveling back and forth as he followed the trajectory of the flying snowballs. It had taken only an hour or so for Liam to stop him from chasing each and every one. He really needed to get a handle on the training situation. Wearing him out wasn't working, because Sundog outlasted Liam each and every time.

Caleb's head peeked out from behind the trash can for a split second. So quickly that Liam wasn't altogether sure he hadn't imagined it.

He glanced at the stopwatch in his hand. “Remember, you can only stay behind the barrier for twenty seconds at a time. The referee will keep track.”

Caleb dashed from one trash can to the next, narrowly dodging a flurry of frantically tossed snowballs.

“Ronnie, slow down and aim. You only have a limited number of snowballs.” One thousand per team, to be exact. Seventy percent of which they'd used within the first ten minutes of practice. That didn't even include the 10 percent that had been devoured by the dog.

Liam harbored little hope for a victory. Not that it mattered. The boys were having a blast. At the end of every practice, they went home happily exhausted, with huge grins on their snow-covered faces. But it would be nice to show up on Saturday and not get completely annihilated within the first few minutes of the game.

“Your time behind that trash can is running out again, Caleb.” Liam looked back down at his stopwatch. “Three...two...one...”

A yell came from the ranks of the boys watching from the sidelines. “Wait! You can't go out there.”

Liam looked up from the stopwatch to find that the number of people out on the field had suddenly gone from two to three. One member of the trio was marching in his direction. On crutches.

Posy.

Woof.
Sundog rose to his feet.

“Settle down,” Liam muttered. He couldn't blame the dog, really. He felt rather like letting out a defensive bark himself at the sight of her charging toward him like that.

He sighed. “Posy, you shouldn't be out here.”

“We need to talk,” she shouted from midfield.

Liam shook his head. “Not now. And most definitely not here.”

Caleb and Ronnie took a few shots at each other. Liam winced as the snowballs zipped past Posy. She trod on, oblivious, jamming her crutches in the newly fallen powder.

“Please stop, Posy. Please. Just turn around.” Liam held out a hand in the universal sign for
stop
, which she promptly ignored. Naturally.

The boys were taking full advantage of the distraction, flinging snowballs fast and furiously. One of them skimmed the top of Posy's head, frosting her ballerina bun.

This was going to end badly. Liam could feel it.

Sure enough, she took another step, and one of her crutches hit an icy patch and nearly slid out from under her. She squealed, righted herself and kept on coming.

Liam's gut twisted. He was going to end up with an ulcer the size of Alaska by the time Posy left town. Had she always had this maddening effect on him?

No. Maybe. Yes.

Once upon a time, you liked it.

If that was true, then he'd been the mad one. Certifiable.

“Posy. Stop. Right now,” he said through gritted teeth.

She responded by hastening her wobbly steps.

Super.
He was going to have to go after her. She'd given him no choice. He threw the stopwatch on the ground and marched across the field, torn between hoping he reached her before she went down and wanting her to fall spectacularly on her stubborn backside. Sundog scurried after him in a flurry of snow and wooly paws.

“Pastor?” Ronnie said, a note of bewilderment in his tone, as Liam walked by.

“Finally you take your eye off the ball.” Caleb aimed right for Ronnie's head.

“Think again, bro.” Ronnie laughed and dodged behind Posy.

Liam became even more aware of his ulcer-in-waiting. He stopped in front of Posy and pretended to ignore the fact that she was noticeably out of breath. From going twenty feet or so on crutches in the snow. He couldn't remember ever seeing Posy out of breath before, even after one of her dance recitals. She could skate laps around him at the pond, pirouetting and twirling around him as if he'd been standing still. She'd never broken a sweat. Her body was a machine.

“What do you think you're doing? In case you haven't noticed, we're in the middle of practice.” He threw his arms up just as his point was further emphasized by a pair of snowballs crisscrossing in the air between them.

“You didn't tell me.” She glared at him so hard that he wondered if he should be more concerned about getting hit by one of her crutches than snowball shrapnel.

“Didn't tell you what?” He knew what, and he supposed he should have expected her angry reaction. But he'd tried to tell her. He really had. She just hadn't wanted to listen.

“They're teenagers, Liam.” She waved a crutch toward the girls chatting animatedly as they exited the building and began gathering on the sidelines alongside the boys who'd been eliminated earlier in the match.

At the sudden appearance of Melody on the scene, Ronnie's movements on the field became more exaggerated, his taunts to Caleb even louder. Liam tried to remember why he'd ever thought becoming a youth pastor had been a good idea. “Yes, I know they're teenagers. And you would have known that, too, if you'd paid attention to my advice.”

“Is this about the song?” A snowball whooshed toward Posy's face. Liam winced, certain of impact, but she ducked in the nick of time.
Nice reflexes.
“You always hated that song.
Always.
”

It wasn't the song he'd hated. Just as he hadn't hated the pointe shoes that had always been nestled in the bottom of her bag or the black leotards that she'd always worn beneath her sweaters. The trappings had never truly bothered him.

It had been dance itself. The way she lit up when she talked about it. The way the utterance of those two syllables—
bal-let
—would drip from her tongue sweeter than the sugar cubes they'd liked to feed to the reindeer on Gus Henderson's farm.

Even ballet he couldn't bring himself to hate entirely. He'd thought he did, until he'd seen her dance for the first time. It hadn't been a real performance, or even rehearsal. She'd simply been practicing. Alone, in a mirrored room at her dance studio while she waited for him to pick her up and take her to one of his baseball games. He'd walked through the door and stopped dead in his tracks. Captivated. Entranced. Utterly spellbound by the way she'd moved.

Balanced on her toes, so fragile yet at the same time so strong. Every sinewy muscle in her lithe legs had been stretched taut. And there'd been unspeakable grace in the tension.

He'd never seen anything, anyone, so beautiful. On and on she'd danced, oblivious to his presence, her pink-slippered feet turning so fast they were a blur. Tiptoe twirls punctuated with sudden leaps. The languid placement of an arm, the butterfly flutter of fingertips. Her every movement had been a blushing kiss upon the air.

She hadn't been moving in response to the music. She'd been having a conversation with it. A conversation beyond all words. A conversation in which Liam had been nothing more than an accidental observer. An eavesdropper.

Yet how could he hate it—the exquisite gift she'd been given? He couldn't. Not then. Not even now. Posy Sutton had been born to dance.

“I never hated the song,” he said.
“Peter and the Wolf.”

She rolled her eyes. “Sure you didn't.”

It wasn't so much a song as a compilation of noises. A story told with instruments, with occasional bursts of melody. The collection of string instruments that represented Peter got a little old after a while. As did the high-pitched flute of the birds.

Liam sighed. “Okay, maybe it wasn't my favorite, but that didn't have anything to do with this morning. I tried to tell you to choose something else.”

“But you didn't tell me why. You just let me assume I'd been hired to teach little girls.”

He narrowed his gaze at her. “Let's talk about that for a minute, shall we? You traveled all the way here from San Francisco to teach ballet, and it never occurred to you to ask Pastor McNeil...
Lou
...the ages of the girls in the program?”

Her glare lost a bit of its defiance. “It didn't exactly come up in conversation.”

A snowball arched high above their heads. Posy's gaze followed its movement, but Liam's eyes never left hers. There was something different about those eyes. They'd always been stormy. The eyes of a girl who wanted more. But that agitated hunger looked as though it had been tempered somehow, replaced with what could only be described as melancholy.

It didn't sit well with Liam. “Posy, just what was going on back in California that made you anxious to leave?”

“What? Nothing. Everything is fine back in San Francisco. More than fine, actually.”

Then why did you just say back in
San Francisco
instead of back
home
?

It wasn't his business. It wasn't his business, nor did he want it to be. “If you say so.”

“I do say so. Once my foot heals, I'm getting promoted to principal.”

“Yes, you mentioned that.” What she hadn't mentioned was a boyfriend, or any friends, for that matter. No social life at all. Only ballet. Always ballet.

“Stop changing the subject.” She blew a stray tendril of copper from her eyes. Liam fought the nonsensical urge to tuck it behind her ear. “You knew I expected little girls. You should have said something. You're the youth pastor.”

As if he needed reminding.

Caleb sidestepped a snowball and returned fire, tossing one after another as quickly as his arms could move. Ronnie darted in circles, slipping and sliding in the snow, but somehow successfully avoiding getting hit. Liam would have complimented him on his agility had he not been standing in the middle of what was beginning to look like Caleb's last stand. Ronnie wasn't about to surrender victory while Melody was watching.

Snowballs whizzed past. Sundog barked and snapped, trying to catch them in his formidable jaws. Posy shied away. What was it with her and the dog? He was harmless. He wanted to eat some snow, not devour ballerinas.

“Uh-oh. Look out!” someone yelled. Caleb? Ronnie? One of the other boys?

It didn't matter. It was too little, too late. Posy took another step backward, away from Sundog, and ended up getting pelted on the left ear by a snowball.

“Ouch!” She screamed and reached to brush the snow away from her face, and in a moment of slow-motion action-movie terror, Liam watched her crutches fall out from under her.

Her arms windmilled in the air, and he reached out to catch her before she fell. But quicker than his hands could find her, a snowball hit him in the dead center of his chest, knocking the wind out of him.

He bent over and tried to catch his breath as Posy collapsed in a pile. “Boys, we need to take five, okay?” he wheezed.

But his voice was barely audible, and the snowballs continued to fly. What little sound Liam could make was drowned out by Sundog's frenzied barks as he launched himself at every snowball that came his way.

Liam coughed and gulped at the air. He needed to breathe. Pronto. Posy hadn't moved a muscle since she'd gone down, as far as he could tell. She was bent over herself, sitting on the ground, facing the opposite direction. All he could see was her back and her disassembled ballerina bun, her auburn hair loose in the snow. Fire and ice.

He cleared his throat, coughed again and managed to take in his first deep inhalation. “Posy, are you okay?” Nothing. “Posy?”

He took a tentative step toward her.

She stirred ever so slightly. And then, quicker than he could process what was happening, she turned and aimed a perfectly packed snowball right at his head.

* * *

Posy knew it was a cheap shot. Even good old-fashioned snowball fights, the sort of impromptu battles fought on schoolyard playgrounds rather than official playing fields, had a certain etiquette. Intentionally aiming at someone's face surely breached some sort of unwritten rule. But it felt so good to throw that snowball at Liam's head.

So very good.

And it felt even better when the kids started whooping and hollering. The girls seemed to find it hilarious, but the boys were a different story. All action on the field ceased. Even Liam's lunatic dog had gone still. The two teens that just moments ago had seemed intent on annihilating one another were now standing with their mouths agape, shaking their heads.