It was Kristy, however, who spotted the Holiday Inn not far from the outskirts of the Cumberland Falls Resort State Park.

They'd barely set their suitcases down before she tackled him, and he fell backward onto the king-sized mattress. She looked so eager, so excited, so thoroughly pleased with herself, that he laughed.

"Gotcha!" she said.

While he tried to catch his breath, she tore at the buttons on his shirt, then lunged for his belt buckle.

He gazed up into the beautiful, intent eyes of his virgin bride. "Let me know if I'm scaring you."

"Shut up and take off your pants."

That cracked them both up. But they didn't laugh for long; their mouths were too busy with hot, wet kisses. And since neither of them had the patience for slow disrobing, they were naked and groping each other within seconds.

"You're beautiful," she sighed as she stroked him. "Just the way I'd imagined."

He cupped the spill of her breasts and tried to find his voice. "You're even more than I imagined."

"Oh, Eth… That feels so good."

"You're telling me."

"I want you to do that a lot."

"Remind me if I forget."

She made a throaty moan as he ran his thumbs over her nipples.

"Do that again. Oh, yes…"

"Lie back, baby, and let me play with you."

She did as he asked. His caresses grew more intimate, and she sobbed in her passion. "Oh, Eth, I want to do everything." She moaned. "Yes. That. And I want… I want to say everything. Dirty words. I want to say dirty words. And dirty little phrases."

"Go ahead."

"I-I can't think of any."

He whispered a really good one in her ear.

Her eyes widened, and she climaxed beneath his hand.

Even though he was so hard he ached, he laughed because he was the only person in the world who knew her secret.

Kristy Brown Bonner was easy.

She calmed, but he was ready to explode. He longed to bury himself inside her, but, at the very last moment, he remembered something he'd forgotten to discuss in their hurried session of premarital counseling. He stroked her hair and noticed his hand was shaking from the effort it took to restrain himself. "Are we worried about getting you pregnant?"

"I don't think so." She regarded him searchingly. "Are we?"

He settled his weight between her thighs, kissed her, and thought of the babies they'd have. "No, we're definitely not."

She was tight and new and wet. He tried to take his time entering her, but she would have none of it. "Now, Eth… Please stop messing around. Oh, please… I want to remember this forever."

He drove home, and, as he fully possessed her, he gazed down into her eyes. They were filled with tears of love.

His own vision blurred, and the depth of his love for this woman brought the ancient words of that first couple to his mind. "Flesh of my flesh," he whispered. "Bone of my bone."

She caressed his hips with her palms and whispered back, "Flesh of my flesh. Bone of my bone."

They smiled. Their tears mingled. And when they came together, both of them knew that only God could have designed something so perfect.

22

"Don't get too close, Chip."

"What are you doin'?"

Gabe gritted his teeth. "I'm tearing off the porch so I can build a deck here."

It was Saturday afternoon, and Gabe was supposed to be watching Chip. It was the first time Rachel had left him alone with the kid, but he knew she wouldn't have done it if she hadn't needed to run some mysterious errand in town. Gabe suspected that she was glad to find an excuse to get away from him. Ever since she'd made her announcement that she was leaving, she'd done her best to keep her distance.

He rammed the crowbar underneath one of the old rotted boards and shoved down on it. He was furious with her. Just because she couldn't have everything the way she wanted, she was deserting him. Deserting them! He'd thought she was tough, but she wasn't tough enough for this. Instead of sticking it out and trying to solve their problems, she was running.

"What's a deck?"

He regarded the child impatiently. Just as he'd gotten into the physically satisfying work of tearing off the back porch, Chip had abandoned the hole he was digging in the garden and come over to bother him.

"It'll be like the place where we ate outside when we went to Rosie's house last Saturday. Now step back so you don't get hurt."

"Why are you doing it?"

"Because I want to." He wasn't going to tell the kid he'd started the project because there wasn't much left to do at the drive-in these days, and he had to keep himself from going crazy.

Just walking into that ticket booth last night had dragged him down. It was only his second weekend in business, and he already hated every minute of it. He could have killed some time with Ethan if his brother hadn't taken off yesterday for a conference in Knoxville, and Cal was all wrapped up with his family, so Gabe had decided to keep himself busy by building this deck.

He told himself it would be a nice place for his parents and brothers to gather for summer cookouts. Legally, it was his mother's cottage, but since she and his father were still in South America doing their missionary work, he couldn't talk to her about his plan. She wouldn't mind, though. Nobody minded what he did, except for Rachel. She was the only one who ever criticized him.

She was going to leave after this weekend. He didn't know exactly when. He hadn't asked.

What the hell did she want from him? He'd done everything he could to help her. He'd even offered to marry her! Didn't she understand how hard that had been for him?

"Can I help?"

The boy still seemed to think that if he pretended to be Gabe's best friend, his mother would change her mind, but nothing was going to get her to do that. She was too stubborn, too damned pigheaded, and she thought everything was so simple, that he could just return to being a vet because she wanted him to. But it didn't work that way. That was the past, and he couldn't go back to it.

"You can help later, maybe." He shoved down on the crowbar. The old wood split and pieces flew. Chip jumped back, but not before a chunk nearly hit him.

Gabe threw down the crowbar. "I told you not to get so close!"

The boy made that futile reaching gesture for his rabbit. "You're scaring Tweety Bird."

It wasn't Tweety Bird who was scared, and both of them knew it. Gabe felt sick. He forced himself to speak calmly. "There's a couple of pieces of wood over there. Why don't you see if you can build something with them?"

"I don't got a hammer."

"Pretend."

"You got a real hammer. You don't pretend."

"That's because… Look in my toolbox. There's another hammer in there." He returned to work.

"I don't got any nails."

Gabe gave a vicious shove to the crowbar. The wood screamed as he pried up another floorboard. "You're not ready to use nails yet. Just pretend."

"You don't pretend."

Gabe fought to hold onto his temper. "I'm a grownup."

"You don't pretend you like me." The boy banged the hammer against a short length of two-by-four Gabe had used earlier as a lever. "Mommy says we still got to go to Flor'da."

"I can't do anything about that," Gabe snapped, ignoring the child's first comment.

Chip began banging the wood with the hammer, hitting it again and again, not to accomplish anything, merely to make noise. "You can too do something. You're a grownup."

"Yeah, well, just because I'm a grown-up doesn't mean I get to have things the way I want." The banging was getting on his nerves. "Take that wood over by the garden."

"I want to stay here."

"You're too close. It's dangerous."

"No, it's not."

"You heard me." Anger built inside him. Anger over everything he couldn't control. The death of his family. Rachel's desertion. The drive-in he hated. And this boy. This gentle little boy who stood like a roadblock in the path of the only peace Gabe had been able to find since he'd lost his wife and child. "Stop that damned pounding!"

"You said damn!" The boy slammed down the hammer. It caught the edge of the two-by-four. The board flew.

Gabe saw it coming, but he couldn't 'move quickly enough, and it hit him in the knee. "God damn it!" He lunged forward, grabbed Chip by the arm, and pulled him to his feet. "I told you to stop that!"

Instead of cowering, the boy defied him. "You want us to go to Flor'da! You didn't pretend! You said you would, but you didn't! You're a big damn butthead!"

Gabe drew back his arm and slapped the fiat of his hand against the boy's rump.

For a few seconds neither of them moved.

Gradually, Gabe grew aware of the sting in his palm. He looked down at his hand as if it no longer belonged to him. "Jesus…" He dropped the boy's arm. His chest knotted.

You're so gentle, Gabe. The gentlest man I know.

Chip's face crumpled. His small chest shook, and he pulled back as if he were folding into himself.

Gabe fell down on one knee. "Oh, God… Chip… I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

The child rubbed his elbow, even though it wasn't his elbow that hurt. He tilted his head to one side and caught his bottom lip between his teeth. It quivered. He didn't look at Gabe. He didn't look at anything. He just tried not to cry.

And in that moment Gabe finally saw the child as himself, instead of as a reflection of Jamie. He saw a brave little boy with flyaway brown hair, knobby elbows, and a small, quivering mouth. A gentle little boy who loved books and building things. A child who found contentment not in expensive toys or the latest video games, but in watching a baby sparrow grow stronger, in collecting pinecones and living with his mother on Heartache Mountain, in being carried around on a man's shoulders and pretending, if only for a moment, that he had a father.