Shifting into neutral, Ginger jumped out. “We did it.”
But no one told Clyde his mission was complete. With an easy gait, he trotted on, the engine sputtering.
“Hey, horse, wait—” The back wheel-well grazed Ginger’s leg, shoving her to the ground, face first into a very cold puddle.
“Ginger, are you all right?” Tom, trying not to laugh, extended his hand.
“Do I look all right?” She clasped her hand in his, rising from the mud, watching as Clyde picked up his pace, gaining the feel for old Matilda, and galloped toward the plantation house, the open car door swinging from side to side, Clyde’s reins slapping the Bug’s interior.
“Ginger, why didn’t you grab the reins?”
“B-because . . . y-you didn’t tell me to grab the reins. Why didn’t you grab them?” She flipped her hand at him, ignoring the flutter in her middle inspired by Tom’s sparkling grin. She scooped the mud from her shirt and jeans. “Look at me . . . I’m covered.” With a grumble, she adjusted her scarf and started walking, cold, muddy water slinking over the top of her ankle boots.
“Want some company?” Tom skipped alongside her.
“Only if you can keep quiet.” The breeze nipped at her, and the golden warmth of the sun peeking over the edge of dawn seemed galaxies away.
She needed to think, deal with the big issue, the dark hole in the pit of her stomach. A hole formed long before she learned that her mama had liaised with a pastor, before Tom Wells Jr. ever entered her life.
This particular hole existed despite her résumé of a big-city career, successful years with Tracie Blue, or ownership of Ginger Snips in the center of Main Street.
She, Ginger Lee Winters, was stuck. In life. In her heart. In what she believed about God, herself, and Tom. Cold tears threatening, Ginger quickened her pace, avoiding the heat of Tom’s gaze.
“You okay?” The tenor of Tom’s voice sweetened her mood.
Ginger squinted up at him.
“Why are you being so nice to me?”
Tom evened his stride to match hers. “Maybe because I like you.”
Ginger laughed, loud, plodding on through the long grass, combating the swirling, swooning sensation of Tom’s confession. Like her? No man liked her. Not in the way his tone indicated.
After a moment she stopped. He was a man of God—maybe he knew the answer to her nagging question. “Does God care?”
“Yes.” Sure. Without hesitation. Catching her off guard. She expected him to pause, ponder, hem-and-haw. Because how could a man really know if God cared?
“Yes? Just like that?” She snapped her fingers in the icy air.
“Yes, just like that.” He didn’t move his eyes from her face. And she flamed on the inside.
Ginger walked on. “Okay, yeah, I guess it’s too early in the morning for a serious conversation.”
“I am serious. Any time you want to talk, let me know.”
She glanced over at him, saying nothing, feeling more conflicted and twisted up than before she asked the question.
If God cared, where was He when she was trapped in the fire? Where was He in the years following? She liked being mad at Him, thinking He owed her something.
But at the moment, what bothered her more than the news about Mama or that God left her in a fire, was the fact that Tom Wells Jr. looked every bit like she imagined Jesus might if she met Him in person. Warm, kind, without accusation, but with a blue-eyed intensity.
However, on this cold wedding morning, she was not ready to trust any overtures of kindness, of love. Not from Tom Wells. And especially not from God.
The atmosphere in the third-floor atrium was electric. Gone were the cold, embedded fragments of her morning in the mud with Tom and Clyde, who, by the way, nudged Ginger’s shoulder after Tom unhitched him from the car as if to say, “You’re welcome.” She felt a rush of joy at the tenderness of the gentle giant.
However, digging out of the mud, communing with horses, cracking open her heart, even the tiniest bit, to Tom Wells, and musing over her past and the existence of God was completely out of Ginger’s element.
But in a room full of women, doing hair? This was Ginger Winters’s wheelhouse. And she intended to never leave. Gone were her insecurities and trepidations.
Once she and Tom arrived at the barn, where Clyde had taken the VW, Ginger accepted Tom’s help to unload and haul in her crates and cases. They did so in a contemplative silence that was not quite comfortable but not at all awkward.
He bid her a quick good-bye when they were done, holding onto her gaze for a second longer than her beating heart could stand, then jogged down the hallway.
Ginger slapped her hand over her heart, willing every beating corpuscle to forget the handsome visage of one Tom Wells Jr.
Ducking into the bathroom, she’d rinsed off in a hot shower, soaping away the chill of the dawn, cleaning off the mud and sending any lingering thoughts of him down the drain.