A Love Inspired Christmas Bundle: In the Spirit of...Christmas / The Christmas Groom / One Golden Christmas

“No, but you create joy, and that’s worth so much more.”

Jade, who’d been listening, rubbed her hand across the needles of a nearby pine and spoke in a wistful voice. “I wish I could have a Christmas tree.”

“What a grand idea!” Lindsey clapped her hands. The sound startled several blackbirds into flight. “Let’s pick one right now. You and your daddy can decorate it tonight.”

Beside her, Jesse stiffened. A warning sounded in Lindsey’s head, but she pushed it away, intent upon this latest happy project.

“Come on.” She gestured toward the smaller trees. “You can choose your very own tree. Any one you want.”

Jade held back, her face a contrast of longing and reluctance.

The warning sound grew louder. “What’s wrong, sweetie? Don’t you want a tree?”

Small shoulders slumping with the weight, Jade wagged her head, dejected. “Daddy won’t let me.”

“Sure he will.”

But one look at Jesse told her she was wrong.

“Jesse?” With a sinking feeling, she searched his face. What she found there unnerved her.

“Leave it alone, Lindsey,” he growled, jaw clenching and unclenching.

“Daddy hates Christmas.” Tears shimmered in Jade’s green eyes. “Mommy—”

“Jade!” Jesse’s tortured voice stopped her from saying more. He stared at his daughter, broken and forlorn.

Jade’s eyes grew round and moist. Biting her lower lip, she flung her arms around Jesse’s knees.

Expression bereft, Jesse stroked his daughter’s hair, holding her close to him.

Heart pounding in consternation, Lindsey prayed for wisdom. Whatever had happened was still hurting Jesse and this precious little girl. And avoiding the issue would not make the pain go away.

She touched him, lightly, tentatively. “Let me help, Jesse. Talk to me. Tell me what’s wrong.”

“Talking doesn’t change anything.” His face was as hard as stone, but his eyes begged for release.

She hesitated, not wanting to toss around platitudes, but knowing the real answer to Jesse’s need. “I don’t know if you want to hear this, but there’s nothing too big for the Lord. Jesus will heal all our sorrows if we let him.”

“I wish I could believe that. I wish…” With a weary sigh, he lifted Jade into his arms and went to the little bench along the edge of the grove and sat down. With a deep, shivering sigh, he stared over Jade’s shoulder into the distance, seeing something there that no one else could.

Unsure how to proceed, but knowing she had to help this man who’d come to mean too much to her, Lindsey settled on the bench beside him and waited, praying hard that God would give her the words.

Something terrible had broken Jesse’s heart and her own heart broke from observing his pain.

After an interminable length of silence disrupted only by the whisper of wind through pine boughs, Jade climbed down from her daddy’s lap.

Her dark brows knit together. “Daddy?”

“I’m okay, Butterbean.” He clearly was not. “Go play. I want to talk to Lindsey.”

“About Mommy?”

Jesse dragged a hand over his mouth. “Yeah.”

Lindsey saw the child hesitate as though she felt responsible for her father’s sorrow. Finally, she drifted away, going to the parked wagon where she sat anxiously watching the adults.

When Jesse finally began to speak, the words came out with a soft ache, choppy and disconnected.

“Erin looked a lot like Jade. Black hair and green eyes. Pale skin. She was a good woman, a Christian like you.” He hunched down into his jacket, though the afternoon air wasn’t cold. “I tried to be one, too, when she was alive.”

So that explained how Jade had learned to pray and why she knew bits and pieces about Jesus. Jesse and his wife had known the Lord, but something had driven him away from his faith.

“Christmas was a very big deal to her. She loved to shop, especially for Jade and me. We didn’t have a lot of money.” He kicked at a dirt clod, disintegrating the clump into loose soil. “My fault, but Erin made the best of it. We always had a good Christmas because of her. She could make a ten-dollar gift seem worth a million.”

Something deep inside told Lindsey to be quiet and let him talk. Letting the pain out was the first step to healing, and the cleansing would give the Lord an opportunity to move in. Granny had taught her that when she’d wanted to curl into a ball and disappear from the pain of Sean’s betrayal.

“Two years ago—” He stopped, sat up straight and tilted his head backward, looking into the sky.

“What happened?” she urged gently.

“Christmas Eve. Erin had a few last-minute gifts to buy. One present she’d had in layaway for a while, though I didn’t know it at the time. She’d been waiting to have enough money to pick up that one gift.” He swallowed hard and scrubbed a hand across his eyes. “Jade and I stayed at the house, watching Christmas cartoons and munching popcorn balls. We were waiting for Erin to get home before we hung the stockings. We never hung them because Erin never came home.”

Biting at her lower lip, Lindsey closed her eyes and prayed for guidance.

“Oh, Jesse,” she whispered, not knowing what else to say. “I’m so sorry.”

He shifted around to look at her. “I’m not telling you this for sympathy.”

But sympathy wasn’t the only emotion rushing through her veins.

She was starting to care about Jesse. Not only the way a Christian should care about all people, but on a personal level too. Every day she looked forward to the minute the blue-and-silver truck rumbled into her yard, and he swung down from the cab and ambled in that cowboy gait of his up to the front porch. She relished their working side by side. She enjoyed looking into his silvery eyes and listening to the low rumble of his manly voice. She appreciated his strength and his kindness.

She cared, and the admission unsettled her. He was too wounded, too broken, and too much in love with a dead wife for her to chance caring too much. She could be a friend and a shoulder to cry on, but that was all she could let herself be.

Jesse gripped the edge of the bench, needing Lindsey’s compassion and afraid of flying apart if he accepted it. Now that he’d begun the awful telling, there was no way he could stop. Like blood from a gaping wound, the words flowed out.

“Three blocks from our house a drunk driver hit her, head-on.”

He’d been sitting in his recliner, Jade curled against him watching Rudolph when the sirens had broken the silent night. He’d never forget the fleeting bit of sympathy he’d felt for any poor soul who needed an ambulance on Christmas Eve. Safe and warm in his living room, he had no way of knowing the holiday had chosen him—again—for heartache.

“A neighbor came, pounding on the door and yelling. She’d seen the wreck, knew it was Erin’s car. I ran.” He didn’t know why he’d done that. A perfectly good truck sat in the driveway, but he hadn’t even thought of driving to the scene. “Like a fool, I ran those three blocks, thinking I could stop anything bad from happening to my family.”

He relived that helpless moment when he’d pushed past policemen, screaming that Erin was his wife. He recalled the feel of their hands on him, trying to stop him, not wanting him to see.

“She was gone.” Stomach sick from the memory, he shoved up from the bench, unable to share the rest. Lindsey was perceptive. She’d understand that he’d witnessed a sight no man should have to see. His beautiful wife crushed and mangled, the Christmas gifts she’d given her life for scattered along the highway, a testament to the violence of the impact.

Back turned, he clenched his fists and told the part that haunted him still.