Page 83 of The Number of Love
She gasped again and dashed a sleeve across her eyes with the look of someone who detested the tears she wiped away. “I don’tknow.”
There was meaning there beyond the words. “What don’t you know?”
“What to do. What’s right. What’s wise. I don’t know whether to turn this way or that, whether to go or stay, whether to ... to kiss you or to run away.”
“Do I get a vote?”
She sent him an exasperated look. But it eased her. Just a bit. “Drake.”
He caught her fingers in his. “You don’thaveto know.”
“Don’t I?” She shook her head. “You want to change things. But I don’t know what changes are good and what are bad right now. I can’t ... I can’t tell the right way to go.”
“Then don’t go anywhere.” He gave her fingers a squeeze and her eyes a small smile. “I’m not changing anything, mi alma. All I did was say the words I’d already been thinking. Kiss you like I’d been dreaming of doing. It was already there. Latent energy or whatever it’s called. Already factored into the equation.”
She almost, maybe smiled. Then turned her face away. “But it’s not just you. I’m not certain about anything anymore. He’s gone silent.”
“Who has? The Lord?”
She nodded, sniffed. But didn’t look at him again. “I could always hear Him. Ever since I was a child.”
He shifted a bit, settled in. “Like when He asked you to pray for me?”
She lifted a shoulder, tilted her head. “Like that, but not just that. Numbers would appear. Directing me. Beautiful proofs for encouragement, unsolvable equations to dissuade. But He’s gone silent.”
“Has He?”
Her gaze dropped to their hands. “Or I’ve gone deaf. Either way, it’s ... too quiet. Lonely. How am I to know what to do? Whether I’m making a wreck of everything?”
He let the night wrap its arms around them for a minute, content to study her in the moonlight. It was cold, and he’d not grabbed his coat as he chased her from the flat. But he could warm up later. “The way the rest of us do, I suppose. You choose what seems best and trust.”
“But that’sstupid.” Now she looked at him, eyes ablaze. “Life isn’t just guesswork.”
“And faith isn’t just feeling. We have toknowHe’s still there, unchanged, even when we can’t feel Him. When the grief’s too loud to let us hear His voice.”
Her scowl was fierce and quick. “It was neverfeeling.”
“Of course it was.” He countered her scowl with a grin. “It’s just that you feel in numbers.”
“I...” She halted, pursed her lips.
Which of course made him want to kiss her again, but he didn’t need a lightning bolt from heaven to tell that now wasn’t the time. So he settled for a chuckle. “Are you going to argue with me?”
Her answer was a sigh that had her gaze sinking again.
“Margot.” He lifted her hand and chafed her fingers between his equally cold ones. “God understands how you’re feeling—that you’re mourning, that you’re angry, that you can’t accept the way this has happened. But He’s still there. His hand is still sheltering you. He’ll wait for you.”
Serious eyes looked up again. Accepting. Challenging. “Hewill. I know.”But what about you?
She might as well have shouted the question, it came throughso clearly. Because it wasn’t just that her dreams hadn’t accounted for this. It was that her heart was still broken from the loss of her mother.
Drake lifted her fingers a few inches more and pressed a kiss to her ink-stained fingertips. “As long as it takes, mi alma. I’ll wait on you.”
She didn’t believe him. He read it in the pull of her fingers and the flicker of her eyes. “You’re not a man who can sit and do nothing, Drake.”
“Who said waiting was inactive?” He stood. And held out the hand she’d just pulled her fingers free of.
He’d chosen his words carefully, so that he’d remember his own intentions. He wasn’t waitingforher. He was waitingonher. That kind of waiting wasn’t impatient, didn’t sit there tapping its foot. That kind of waiting was service. Selfless. Unflagging.
