Nothing Sacred

About the time she’d found her former pastor in the arms of a married parishioner?

David knew why Martha Moore was one of his hardest souls to reach. She and her boss, Keith Nielson, were the two who’d walked into Pastor Edwards’s office and seen his hands fondling the naked breasts of the mother of teenage sons. The wife of a prominent Shelter Valley businessman.

Martha and Keith had taken the pastor at face value when he’d said it would never happen again. When he’d told them he’d confess to his wife, begged them to let him salvage a marriage that he valued.

They were the two hardest hit when Edwards was discovered with the same woman a second time—in an even more compromising situation—and forced out of a job he’d held for decades.

Edwards had lied to her. To the whole town.

And, in his own way, David Cole Marks was guilty of the same thing.

CHAPTER TWO

THE DISTURBING near silence that had permeated Martha’s living room as her children, one by one, heard what their father had called to tell them grew even more intense when Timothy took his turn on the phone.

Martha had known that would happen.

She desperately wanted the do-gooding man who was currently filling the job of preacher to have left her home before then.

She needed to be alone with her children, to be able to tend to the shock and hurt on her daughters’ faces.

But Preacher Marks was still standing in the room, mentioning something about a new choral production for the next Christmas season, when Tim took the phone. Her son didn’t say much more than his sisters had while his father was on the line.

There were some things that didn’t change, and Tim’s fearful respect for his father’s authority was one of them.

It lasted, as Martha had known it would, right up until Tim slammed down the phone.

“That’s disgusting!”

She would’ve liked to remind him to take better care of their things.

“Tim.” Martha turned to him, to all four of them, needing to help them with something that couldn’t be helped, but determined to try, anyway.

And needing to be alone with them. And with herself.

“It’s gross!” Tim blurted at her, his brown eyes glaring. The girls were all staring up at her, as though expecting her to make some incisive comment that would put everything into place.

She wished she could have accommodated them.

Everyone except her seemed to have forgotten the preacher standing behind her.

“Calm down for a second,” she said evenly, scrambling for a way to hold life together long enough to get rid of Marks. This was Moore business. Shelter Valley business. Not Marks business. “Why don’t you go start the car, Ellen, and we’ll go into town for some ice cream.”

It had worked when they were little.

And they’d all been glad when she’d brought home sundaes the week before.

“He’s a big fat jerk,” Tim said, standing there with his arms folded across a chest that was just beginning to take on masculine form. His glance, traveling among his sisters, landed on Ellen. “Having a baby at his age, with a girl who’s practically your age, is just plain sick!”

The words cut Martha to the quick.

Her daughters, with moist eyes and unsmiling mouths, looked lost. Broken.

Four years ago, Todd had left them high and dry—except for the checks he sent—for a girl just a couple of years older than Ellen. One of his students. At Martha’s request, he’d gone with her to see Pastor Edwards. They hadn’t even had one full visit before Todd had stated that he had no interest in patching things up with his wife. He wanted out.

Away from her.

From their kids.

Looking up, Martha caught the empathy aimed at her from the eyes of the stranger who’d come, grudgingly invited, into their midst.

For one brief second, she wanted to die.

“YOU’LL HAVE TO FORGIVE my mom,” Ellen Moore said, walking the preacher out to his car shortly after Tim’s outburst on Sunday afternoon. “She’s not usually so…unfriendly.”

Ellen couldn’t bring herself to call her mother rude. She loved her too much. And she understood.

As much as a twenty-year-old kid could understand a mother’s heartache.

“Don’t worry about it,” David Marks said. “I can see she’s an impressive woman. She’s carrying around a ton of emotional responsibility and doesn’t seem to be dropping any of it.”

The look in his eyes gave Ellen an odd sensation. One she barely recognized. It made her feel safe. Protected.

She hadn’t felt that way since her father left.

“It’s just that Mom and Dad went to Pastor Edwards for counseling. He was Mom’s last hope after she found out Dad was having an affair with one of his students.”

Ellen glanced quickly back at the house as she said the words, knowing that her mother couldn’t hear, but feeling guilty anyway. As though she were betraying her somehow.

“And then she was the one who found Pastor Edwards doing the very same thing Dad had done. She took it really hard.”

Ellen wanted the new pastor to understand. To not hate her mother. Or judge her. There wasn’t a woman in Shelter Valley who was a better person than Ellen’s mother. There wasn’t another woman more deserving of the help Pastor Marks was offering them.

And Ellen knew they needed it. Even if her mother was too hurt to figure that out.

“It’s okay,” David Marks said again, smiling at her. Ellen smiled back, kind of surprised that she could after what they’d just heard. “If you’re worried I’m going to give up on her, you needn’t be. I don’t give up. I just get more determined.”

“Okay.” Ellen nodded.

“And, Ellen,” he said in a low voice. “I meant everything I told you in there. What your father did has nothing to do with you or the other kids. Or your mother. It’s not reflection on any of you. It’s the result of his own selfishness or insecurity, not some inadequacy on your part. Okay?”

The permanent knot that had taken up residence in Ellen’s stomach unwound a little further. She felt like an idiot but couldn’t stop grinning at him as she stood there, watching him open his car door.

“Anyway,” she said as he hesitated with one leg inside the car, raising his brows as he watched her, “I know you were only trying to help us. And you did. Help me, I mean. I never know what to do with all the bad feelings about my dad, and the stuff you said gave me some things to think about. The idea that it’s about him and not about me—I like that. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” the pastor said, giving her another smile. “I’m here anytime any of you need me. Just call. Okay?”

Embarrassed, and happy, too, she nodded. And then turned and ran back to the house.