Beneath the Broom Tree by Jill Penrod

Author:Jill Penrod
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: small town romance, Christian romance
Publisher: Jill Penrod
Published: 2017-03-27T00:00:00+00:00

IONE TOSSED AND TURNED all night. Nightmares plagued her, memories of her last assignment. Funny, but images of smiling faces were almost as painful as the images of the final fate of the village. The innocence of the children haunted as much as anything—they had no idea how dark the world could be, and then they’d learned in the worst way, seconds before coming to an end.

She woke up in a sweat long before morning, and she sat up and looked around the dark room. She opened the drapes, hoping to see the stars, but the sky was overcast, and the world was black around her, darkness as far as the eye could see.

On the distant island she thought she saw lights, but in a moment they winked out, and again the world was plunged into a lonely darkness. She felt like she was the only soul in the world, gazing into the night, shivering against the chill of a nearly-Antarctic summer night.

She curled back up in the blankets and thought about this trip. Was she accomplishing anything? Was God working in her? Was she even listening? Again she feared she was just finding distractions. This wasn’t meant to be a vacation. Was it? Did she need to vacation and unwind?

“God, I don’t know,” she whispered. She shivered and pulled another blanket over herself, remembering the shocking cold of the ocean yesterday. And then Callen’s strong arms, the safety she felt when he touched her. He’d hurt himself rescuing them, re-injured wounded places in his spirit, but she was still grateful.

Maybe he was the biggest distraction of all, she thought. But he needed her. Maybe she needed him. She had no doubt God had something planned for them as a team, but it might just be healing. To think of it as more, to be thinking romance when God wanted her focused elsewhere—she didn’t know what to think about any of it.

In the morning she and Callen would again read over breakfast. Recently they kept coming back to the same ideas, reading Psalms and lingering on the idea of a refuge, a fortress. Being valued. Both of them seemed to long for those things, safety and the reassurance that they mattered, that they were loved.

But they still didn’t agree on the word remember. Callen desperately wanted to forget a few things. Ione had to admit she did, too. But that wasn’t what the word meant to her. It wasn’t about the bad memories. Why couldn’t she convince Callen to remember good in his life? She didn’t understand it, and it bothered her. She knew in a few weeks she and he would part ways and never speak again, and God would continue to talk to her without Callen, and yet she had this crazy idea that as long as they were here together, God would speak to them together.

She thought about the writing she’d done for Bryson, and she decided tomorrow she’d put that in her bag and give it to him.

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