Page 12 of My Vows Are Sealed

Nathan held up his little platypus again, and Naomi smiled at him.

“Cute! Does it have a name?” she asked.

“Brendan said the tag says ‘Patty,’ but I don’t like that name,” he grumbled.

“Well, why don’t we come up with another name for it?”

I turned to look at Darla while Naomi and Nathan started chatting about possible names for that little three-inch purple platypus that was probably going to end up under his bed, never to be seen again, by tomorrow. She was beaming at my brother, and it made me melt a little seeing it. I knew she didn’t have a fake or insincere bone in her body, so I knew that the affection in her gaze right now was genuine. She loved him almost as much as I did.

Damn it. Thinking about how much I loved watching Darla interact with Nathan wasn’t going to help me reign in the feelings that had been threatening to drown me since the moment I’d acknowledged them.

“Is he really the first kid here?” I asked, desperate to distract myself.

“Yep,” she sighed, looking at me. “I’ll probably save this craft for next week if it just ends up being him and the twins. I can just color with them tonight.”

“And waste all those pipe cleaners and beads?” I teased.

“Good thing they won’t go bad.”

“What were they going to turn into?”

She grabbed a cross made out of pipe cleaners and blue, green, and teal pony beads out of her purse, then produced a spool of yarn. “Peter was going to teach about John 3:16 tonight, so I was going to have them make cross necklaces.”

“He would have loved that. He’s always saying he wants a necklace like mine, but there’s no way we’re letting him anywhere near nails,” I chuckled.

“Nails?” she asked.

I pulled the leather strap out of my shirt collar, showing her the cross necklace made out of steel nails wrapped together with silver wire that my Aunt Claire had made for me. My Uncle Paul worked in construction, so she’d taken some nails, dulled them down, and wrapped wire around them to make crosses, then put them on leather straps for all the men in the family last Christmas.

“That’s so cool!” Darla gushed. “Now I want to make something like that. Not that I’d do it with the kids. Pretty sure the parents wouldn’t like me giving their children access to pointy objects.”

“I can’t take credit for it. My Aunt Claire gave this to me a few Christmases ago,” I said as I let it fall back against my chest. “I’m nowhere near that crafty.”

“I am,” she chuckled. “I love working with wire. That’s why I like doing pipe cleaner projects with the kids so much.”

“Wire? Really?” I asked, curious what in the world she’d make out of wire.

“Yeah.” She held up her arm, which was sporting a bracelet that looked like silver wire wrapped around real turquoise beads. “This is just wire and turquoise. I’ve made tons of stuff like this.”

Before I could say anything about how talented she was – because, no joke, my mom would have paid good money for jewelry that looked like that – the door opened, interrupting our moment, and Ethan Smith walked into the room. I groaned under my breath.

Jesus, give me strength, I prayed.

“Surprised they’re still letting you around the kids, Darla,” he taunted. “Or don’t their parents know that you spend all your time withgays?”

Oh,hellno. Not here. Not in church, in front of my four-year-old brother.

I rose from my chair so quickly that I knocked it over and stalked over to him, clearing the distance in four strides and backing him against the wall. He stared me down like it was a contest, wearing a smug smirk. How in the hell did his parents tolerate this kind of behavior? Or did they really not know how he acted when they weren’t watching him?

“You’re going to want to watch that smart mouth of yours,” I growled quietly. “I thought I made that clear. Or do you have a hearing problem?”

“What? Upset I called your little girlfriend out on her un-Christian behavior?” he goaded.

My blood started to simmer in my veins and it took every ounce of self-control I possessed not to punch that self-righteous smirk right off his face. But even if I were the type of person to get physical – which I wasn’t – this wasn’t the time or place for it, and I knew that.

“A, Darla’s myfriend, not my girlfriend,” I snapped. “B, the only un-Christian behavior I see in this room isyours,because you seem to have forgotten the part where we’re not supposed to judge. And C, my four-year-old brother is in the room. Maybe this is completely acceptable behavior in your house, but you’re at church, in case you’ve forgotten. In thechildren’s service, no less, and I’mpositivethe parents would object to you behaving like this around their kids.”

The sound of the door opening again pulled my attention away from the confrontation, and Peter and Marie’s eight-year-old identical twins, Daniel and Dawson, ambled into the room, followed by their parents. I took a deep breath and stepped back from Ethan, and Peter looked back and forth between us, raising an eyebrow.

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