Her Perfect Man. Jillian Hart

eating pizza and not soybeans or something.”

      He caught the amused sparkle in her eyes. “I’m not a total health nut. I used to be, but I missed the pizza. And Popsicle treats. Maybe I should have stuck with the health food and I would have more stamina. Those kids have worn me out.”

      “Marin should have warned you. You’ll get used to it. You look like you’re enjoying your first day here.”

      “I’m having a blast, but I’m feeling my age.”

      That made her chuckle. “You can’t be any older than I am.”

      “Sure, but those kids are putting me to shame. I’m twenty-four, by the way.”

      “You’re a year older than I am.”

      Here it came. He might as well say it before she—who had completed a master’s program—did. “You’re doing the math, aren’t you, and wondering why I’m still working for my bachelor’s.”

      “Maybe a little.”

      “I was a slow starter.”

      “I doubt that. I saw you playing basketball with the kids. You moved pretty fast.”

      She saw that? Cool. He took that as a sign. “Sure, when it comes to b-ball. But other things have taken me a little longer to get right.”

      “I know how that is.” She smiled again, and the sweetness just beamed around her like sunlight. She leaned a little closer to him, as if interested in his answer. “Did you have a hard time deciding what to do with your life, too?”

      “For a long time.” Now would be the right time to be totally honest, to just come clean. He opened his mouth to tell the truth, but the words lodged somewhere deep in his chest, near his heart.

      If she knew what he’d done and who he used to be, what would she think? Would she scoot away from him? Try to avoid him the next time she saw him? Would the friendliness in her luminous eyes fade forever, because she saw him differently?

      He couldn’t say the words. He didn’t know if he was afraid to, or if they were just stuck between his ribs and wouldn’t budge.

      “What’s so hard,” she said quietly, “is when you think you know where you’re going, but life throws you a serious roadblock.”

      “Been there.” Again, he thought about his life before he’d been saved. About the path he’d been on. Thank God for roadblocks. He took a bite of pizza. “I used to have things all figured out. When I was fifteen, thought I knew it all and believe me, that wasn’t a good thing. I was making tons of poor choices.”

      “Who doesn’t when we’re teenagers?” She took another sip of lemonade and put the cup down thoughtfully.

      “You? Make mistakes? I don’t believe it.”

      “Now you’re being too kind.” She couldn’t look at him, but glanced at the table of twelve-year-old girls chattering together or talking on their phones. “I’ve made so many mistakes, mostly because I couldn’t see with my own eyes what was wrong. Even when I was warned.”

      Chad wondered about what Ephraim said this morning, about Rebecca’s former boyfriend. Sympathy tugged at his heart. “That was my problem, too. I had friends telling me that what I was doing was going to catch up with me. That I was hanging with some other kids I didn’t think were so bad. I didn’t listen.”

      “I understand. I’ve been there. I just couldn’t see.” She shrugged, jostling her long locks of hair, looking sad.

      So sad. He couldn’t help but be affected. He wished he knew her well enough to know what to do to comfort her. It wasn’t right that she’d been hurt by a bad relationship, although he knew, too, what that was like. “Been there. I was seeing this girl, I thought she was fun and different from the kind of sheltered life I led.”

      “It was a bad relationship for you?” Her hand stilled, her piece of cheese pizza an inch above the plate. “Did you know it at the time?”

      “Maybe there was that little voice inside me—you know the one—it was telling me to listen. It’s tough to admit, but I just didn’t want to.”

      “Did she break your heart?”

      “No, she bruised it pretty bad, though. It was my life she broke.” Again, there was the truth right there, but it wouldn’t roll off his tongue. Maybe talking about the past just hurt too much. “Nothing was the same after that, and not in a good way.”

      “I’m sorry you had to go through that.” Empathy made her more beautiful. It was easy to see that Rebecca McKaslin had a good heart. She set her half-finished piece of pizza back on her plate. “After you two had broken up, did you take time off from dating for a while?”

      “You might say that. It was a long time until I had my life in order before I even tried dating again. That didn’t go well.”

      “I’m sorry to hear that. See, it was different for me. I didn’t know the Chris everyone else did.” If only she was able to forget the year she’d met him. They’d been high school sweethearts. She’d gotten numb about a lot of things concerning the breakup, but it hurt to remember. It hurt to look back.

      She’d made too many mistakes. Mistakes she regretted. “I was seventeen when the coolest guy in high school asked me to accompany him to one of his church functions. He went to a church across town, and when I learned he was a Christian, too, I was so thrilled. He was the captain of both the football and the baseball teams. He went to state three times.”

      “Sounds like a guy who had everything going for him.”

      She nodded. Chris had been just everything wonderful in her eyes. “He was fun and funny and he just seemed to take over my quiet life. It was like the sun came out one day when it had never shone before.”

      Chad watched her, nodding slowly, as if he were starting to see.

      Why she went on, she couldn’t say. She was a private person. She didn’t even talk about this stuff with her sisters. Maybe it was Chad’s dependable goodness. Maybe it was because she’d kept this bottled up for so long. “Sure, Chris had problems, but who doesn’t? Nobody’s perfect. He swept me off my feet and fell in love with me, and that was an answered prayer. It was all I ever dreamed of.”

      “Sounds like you still care about this guy.”

      “No. Yes. Not in the way that you think. Things didn’t go…well in the end. And that pretty much ended it for me. But that doesn’t mean that it’s easy. The hurt is all tangled up with the good stuff and the bad stuff.” She squeezed her eyes shut, as if looking in instead of out. “Love is complicated. When it ends, it’s even more so.”

      She was a soft touch with a marshmallow center. He could just see how she must have felt. It would be easy to judge, easy to measure out what had happened in black-and-white. But he’d learned the hard way that life wasn’t like that, that she was right. Everyone had problems, most people did their best, and when relationships didn’t work out, the ending of them hurt like nothing else.

      He could see how affable she was. Hers was a goodness that he would guess didn’t come and go, but remained even when the going got tough. She was no holiday Christian, and she was no fair-weather friend, either. It was his guess that she had a big, forgiving heart.

      When she opened her eyes, she gave another shoulder shrug. “My sisters tell me that’s part of healing and moving on. But this love thing is painful when it ends.”

      “It can be. I think that depends on the two people involved.”

      She nodded, as if thinking that over. “I guess.”

      “So this guy, he’s the one you were hoping to marry.” When she nodded once, he could see more of what she wasn’t saying. She had been deeply in love with him. She had wanted a future with him. That had to really have hurt her,