The Wonder of You (37 page)

“Soccer.” But her heart tharrumphed. An orphanage?

“Only to you Americans.” He pulled the tie off. Folded it and stuck it in his jacket pocket. Then he worked off his jacket, turned the lining to the outside, folded it, and handed it to the flight attendant. She tucked it in the overhead bin as he began to unbutton his shirt cuffs.

“Roark, you’re killing me.”

He laughed, and the sound of it could make her sing. “Maybe you’ve heard of it
 
—Hope Children’s Village?”

She couldn’t suppress a smile. “Really?”

He rolled up one sleeve, then the other, over tanned, strong forearms. “Indeed.”

Finally he turned to her, his expression soft. “Do you mind terribly that I’m following you across the world again? Because I can’t seem to stop. You have eclipsed my world with the wonder of you, and I can’t seem to break free.”

The wonder of her. The warmth of his words ran through her. “It is becoming quite a habit,” she said, still trying to embrace the idea of Roark in Uganda with her. Roark, returning to surprise her, flesh and blood, sitting beside her. “You moved me to first class.”

“Of course I did,” he said.

“You should know I’m paying my own way. I have my own resources.”

“I know,” he said. Then he reached out, took her hand. Opened it. “But you will indulge me sometimes, right? Perhaps a trinket here or there?” He pressed a black velvet bag into her hand.

Her breath caught as she opened it. Then wasn’t sure if she should be relieved or not.

A silver bracelet and on it, charms. The Eiffel Tower, Týn Church. A pine tree. A camera.

“It’s beautiful.”

“It has room for more,” he said. He picked it up, unlatched it, and she held out her wrist. “The question is, do you have room for me? Would you let me join you as we follow God wherever He takes us?”

She looked up, and tenderness for this amazing, brave, gentle man swept over her at the vulnerability on his handsome face, the question in his eyes.

“You do have a way of invading my world,” she said, her eyes filling. “Yes, Roark. Wherever. And together.” She lifted her face,
and he slipped his hand around her neck. Kissed her, this time lingering, his touch hinting at every vista that awaited them.

His eyes shone as he backed away. “Good. Then you should also have this.” He pulled a velvet box from his pants pocket. Opened it.

Oh. My. A silver diamond solitaire, probably too large for her finger but . . .

“Marry me? I don’t care where, but please, let it be soon because I can’t go another day fearing you will trundle off on some adventure without me.”

She ran a finger over the diamond, then met his eyes. “I don’t think I could escape you.”

He touched his forehead to hers. “Is that a yes?”

“Quite right,” she said.

He laughed. “Smashing.” He worked out the ring and put it on her finger. “The first of many souvenirs.”

As the airplane doors closed, he took her hand and wove his fingers through hers, holding tight.

As if he planned on never letting her go.

N
O ONE DIED TONIGHT,
not if she could help it.

Except Scotty McFlynn could feel tragedy in her bones, just like she could feel the shift in the wind. Instincts
 
—like those that directed her to a crab-filled pot o’ gold on the bed of the Bering Sea. Or the kind that told her a storm hedged against the darkening horizon, the sky bruised and bloody as the sun surrendered to the gloomy, fractious night.

Yes, she could taste the doom hovering on the sharp edge of the flurries that hammered the deck of the F/V
Wilhelmina
, now crashing through the rising swells. Freezing waves soaked the 108-foot vessel, glazing the deck into a rink of black ice.

She couldn’t shake it, the fist in her gut that said tonight someone was going overboard.

Sleet pinged off her face as the boat turned windward. She’d long ago lost the ability to close her fist under her rubberized gloves
 
—the claw, fishermen called it
 
—and her feet clunked along like granite in her boots. But they had four more pots to drag from the sea, empty, sort, and reset before she could grab a minute of shut-eye, then relieve her father at the helm for the evening watch.

Old Red’s last run, and she intended to make it his best. Forty-eight hours until their delivery deadline, and for the first time since his heart attack, they just might meet their quota.

“Where’s my bait, greenie?” deck boss Juke Hansen bellowed over the thunder of the waves breaking against the keel and the clanging of the crab pot against the hydraulic lift.

The eighteen-year-old greenhorn hauling bait from the chopper
 
—she’d forgotten his real name
 
—dragged the herring bag and two fat cod on a line over to the open pot, climbed inside, and hooked the bait to the middle.

Once he climbed out, two more deckhands
 
—Carpie and Owen
 
—closed the trap door, and the lift levered the pot up and over the edge, dropping it into the sea with an epic splash.

Juke threw in the shot line, the rope uncoiling into the frothy darkness as the trap descended six hundred feet to the seabed.

Carpie followed with a toss of the buoy, marking the pot set.

They sank back, hiding against the wheelhouse, holding on as Red motored the boat into a trough and up the next wave, toward the next buoy along this seven-mile line of pots.

Scotty shot a glance at Owen, the other greenie, although he’d run “opies,” opilio snow crab, with her father back in January, while she’d been stuck in Homer. He stood at the rail, ready to catch the next pot they reeled in, his bearded face hard against the brutal spray.

If she had a say, she might have kicked him off the boat on day one, when he’d assumed Scotty was their cook.

A crab boat’s no place for a girl.

Yeah, she’d walked into that comment dropped by Mr. Eye Patch to Carpie, the ship’s engineer, while they repaired pots on the loading dock.

“First mate, relief skipper, or ‘yes, sir,’ will do,” she’d snapped at him.

She’d caught the tail end of Carpie’s explanation as she stalked toward the wheelhouse. Part owner. Captain’s daughter. Tough as nails.

You betcha.

But after three weeks working side by side, watching Owen clean the deck every morning, going at the accumulated ice with a sledge to clear the ropes, the frozen pots, the crusted railings, she decided maybe he could stick around.

He worked like a man with something to prove.

And prove himself he had. He looked every inch the crusty crabber with his thick beard, rich with russet highlights to match his curly golden locks that hung nearly to his shoulders, usually tamed by a hand-knit stocking cap.

Despite the eye patch that earned him an occasional “aye, aye, matey,” she could admit he didn’t exactly send her running when he peeled off his cold-weather gear down to sweatpants, suspenders. And a T-shirt that did just fine outlining all the hard work he put in hauling eight-hundred-pound pots.

However, hiding behind his yes-sir attitude and that reserved sort of chuckle that held him a step back from the rest of the crew, she recognized a lingering darkness.

She’d bet her badge that he had a story to tell. Something that included fast reflexes and the ability to think on his feet. He’d more than once saved the young greenie from getting a buoy in the face, and the eye patch surely hinted at something sinister.

Maybe a guy on the lam.

Which, of course, could set all Scotty’s detective instincts firing. But she had no desire to put on her badge again, at least not
quite yet. She’d live and let live, as long as he didn’t stir up any trouble.

Like the kind that ignited, deep inside, when she caught his gaze trailing her. Trouble, yes, because in all her years working the crab seasons with her father, never once had she found herself wishing she didn’t garb herself as one of the guys. Wearing orange bib overalls and a stained Homer PD gimme cap, no makeup, her dark hair pulled back and unwashed for days, she could pass for a wiry but tough teenage boy.

Oh, how she longed for a decent shower, maybe even a soak in the bathtub of her one-bedroom cabin overlooking Kachemak Bay. Let the warmth urge her bones and muscles back to life.

But she’d never been anything but a guy, one of the crew, and frankly, Red wouldn’t allow it any other way. Which meant that as one of the guys, she couldn’t in the least smile back at Owen, linger in the galley as he read one of her father’s worn novels, or even play a game of rummy as the boat pitched around them, weathering a gale.

And in forty-eight hours, Owen would walk off the pier, thirty grand in his pocket, and out of her life.

Not that Scotty cared.

Caring only meant she’d eventually get hurt.

I’
M NOT SURE
what is harder to recover from: failing ourselves or failing God.

When we fail God, we are brought back to verses like Lamentations 3:23, which says God’s mercies are new every morning. Or Romans 8:1: “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Rich, almost-unbelievable truths that saturate our broken hearts and remind us we are loved.

But when we fail ourselves, there is no love waiting to forgive us. To tell us that we are okay, that we can start over. Because, well, we are often our hardest judges, our worst critics, and short of having a second voice inside us to speak truth, we are stuck with the dark voice of our failures resounding over and over in our heads.

The worst part about truly failing ourselves is the self-doubt that lingers. When we fail ourselves, it rocks us to our foundation because we realize we aren’t the people we thought we were. Maybe we’ve been lying to ourselves all this time.

It’s this kind of failure that stops us from reaching for dreams, traps us in disastrous habits and relationships, and keeps us from ever finding our true destiny.

This is the failure that stalks both Amelia and Roark in
The Wonder of You
. I wanted to explore the different sides of self-failure
 
—first, the kind that surprises us, teaches us about ourselves, makes us reevaluate who we are. This is the best kind of failure because if we can get back up, it makes us truer, more passionate people. It shows us who we can be when we hang on to God. This is Amelia’s failure, and the choice between Seth and Roark epitomizes the two options for her future: should she stay safe or launch again?

The other side of failure is more insidious, coming from a deep-seated belief that we don’t deserve happiness, that whatever we do is doomed, and should we be called to do something great, it will only end in destruction. This failure paralyzes. This failure keeps us running.

This is Roark’s failure. He carries the certainty that because of his childhood choices, he will never truly live in victory. And should he let God down again, there will be no redemption for him. In short, Roark believes he is flawed, broken, and not worth saving
 
—and we too often believe this as well.

Oh, we treat ourselves with such little grace! Such meager mercy. Left to our own devices, we would punish ourselves, retreating from the flame of God’s love because we believe we don’t deserve it.

Thankfully, God does not let us alone. He sees our wretched state and sends a Pursuer to wrestle us away from our lies. To help us glimpse His great love for us, saving us out of every single failure, bringing us over and over to healing, to joy. Because that is the nature of God
 
—He is not content to watch the ones He loves hide from all He has for them. His glory is most revealed when we drink it all in and are changed.

When we experience the wonder of His love.

See, our worth, our victory has nothing to do with us. With our failures or our efforts. It has only to do with the fact that we belong to the Father. And thus, we are forgiven. Empowered. Loved.

It’s time to forgive yourself. To turn to the God who wants to save you. To be set free.

To wonder at the love of your heavenly Father and let it give you victory.

Thank you for reading the Christiansen Family series. I hope you’ll stick around for Owen’s story. Can a prodigal ever really come home? We’ll see!

In His grace,

Susan May Warren