Family Lessons by Allie Pleiter

Author:Allie Pleiter
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Romance
ISBN: 9780373829606
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2013-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

Holly stood in the doorway, unable to move, barely able to breathe. Mason’s disregard had always stung, but his scorn...his utter contempt of her nearly knocked her to the ground. She’d made a terrible, terrible error in giving him that book, in thinking she ever could even come close to bringing him past his pain. Instead, he’d drawn her right into misery with him.

The tears—great, wrenching waves of them—held back just long enough for her to close her front door and stumble into a chair. She opened the book to the ripped page, imagining him tearing it out and flinging it across the room in disgust. She’d put her heart on that page. She’d taken this herculean risk of telling him exactly how she felt and how she believed God loved him, and it had come to worse than nothing; it had come to humiliation. Not the public kind, but the deepest rejection she could fathom.

It hurt so much less when he ignored me, her heart moaned. Holly pushed the book away, lay her head down on the table and sobbed. Unable to hide it, Holly laid her deepest pain before God. She knew that as a child of the Father, she should grieve how she’d managed to push Mason further from faith. That hurt, but there was a deeper wound: there had been a moment Saturday night when Mason stared at her in a way no man had ever done. The longing in his eyes made her believe, for one wondrous moment, that she was beautiful. Not just beautiful, but desirable. She’d always, always felt such things beyond her reach. She’d convinced herself no man would ever look at her like that. And until last night, she’d come to a sad sort of peace with it.

With one breathtaking kiss, Mason had banished that peace and ignited a fierce longing in its place. He’d torn open the hunger to be loved she’d so carefully tamped down. He’d unleashed Holly’s soul-deep yearning to be someone’s truest affection.

And then he’d crushed it. His words just now made her feel as if she were so worthless he’d do anything to avoid her. It was worse than rejection; it was a condemnation.

When Holly finally raised her head from the table, the small and mousy girl had returned. Holly felt no courage, no peace, no purpose. Every decision seemed beyond her capabilities, and the conviction to place all the children loomed too great a task. It seemed an astonishment that any of them had been placed at all. She was just a plain country teacher trying to do things she should never have tried. Letting pride and vanity lure her into to being someone she wasn’t.

The children. Her mind and heart kept going back to the children. They knew what blatant rejection felt like, didn’t they? They’d been called worse names than she, had been branded bad seeds for no reason other than for lacking parents. She remembered the way the adults on the train had looked at Heidi’s scars, and felt a deep, new affinity for the girl’s pain.

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