Page 45 of Love in the Storm

A door closed outside the bedroom, and she stood to take Asa’s phone back to him. It dinged in her hand, and she instinctively looked at the screen.

Jacob: Love you, Dad. Good night.

She clutched the phone to her chest. Everything inside her said Asa was a good man, and as desperately as she wanted the safety and care he could give her, she didn’t deserve it. She’d already given him plenty of reasons not to trust her, whether he remembered or not.

Clutching the phone, she made her way back to the living area. Asa was in the kitchen closing up the snacks from their s’mores dessert.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

“Yeah. My neighbor is running low on food, so I told her to help herself to my pantry.”

“Your pipes are treated, right?”

“Yeah, my landlord stays on top of stuff like that.” She handed him the phone. “Thanks for letting me make a call. You got a text a minute ago.”

Asa looked at it and quickly responded. “Jacob. He worries a lot.”

“He must have gotten that from his mom. You seem like the cool, calm, and collected type.”

Asa huffed. “Not always. You should have seen how not cool, calm, and collected I was when she was going through cancer treatment and it wasn’t working.”

Lyric started tidying up the kitchen area. “I can’t imagine how hard that would be.”

“The worst part was feeling useless. There was literally nothing I could do to help her, and for someone who likes to be in control of all situations, it was like having my arms tied behind my back while she suffered.”

A fire burned in the back of her throat. She didn’t have anyone in her life she loved like that, except Kendra. It was difficult to even imagine what Asa had been through.

Lyric closed the space between them and wrapped her arms around Asa. Resting her head on his chest, she listened to the steady beat of his heart as the tension in his shoulders melted away.

“It’s in the past. It took a long time to get over it, but I had to trust it was all the Lord’s plan. Once I figured that out, I stopped looking at it like something had been taken from me and started looking at my life and reminding myself about the good I still have.”

Lyric raised her head. “Will you tell me about him?”

“Jacob?”

“Yeah.”

Asa liked talking about his son, and Lyric wanted to soak up anything and everything about the man who had taken up all the space in her thoughts since they’d been stuck in the cabin together.

Well, she didn’t feel stuck, since she was enjoying herself, but Asa would probably rather be with his family, with good reason.

Asa told her story after story about Jacob and the things he loved and had done over the years while they cleaned up the kitchen together. They worked seamlessly in the same spaces until everything was in its rightful place.

The dryer beeped in the laundry room just as Asa put away the last clean bowl in the cabinet. “Right on time.”

Lyric gathered the dirty rags and followed Asa. He pulled his shirt out of the dryer and slipped it on.

“Shoot. Looks like the show is over,” Lyric said.

Asa rolled his eyes. “I’m not the walk around with my shirt off kinda guy.”

She tossed the rags into the washing machine. “It’s a shame.”

With a smirk, he slid his arms around her waist and nuzzled his face against her neck, kissing the sensitive skin. “Should I expect you to spill breakfast on my shirt in the morning?”

A shiver raced down her spine, spreading all the way into her toes. “Um, maybe.”

Lifting his head, he chuckled low and pushed a lock of her hair behind her ear. “Do you need to get anything out of your car?”

---