Redemption by Karen Kingsbury Page B

one. “Well, I’d better go.” She was suddenly in a hurry to get off the phone. She wound up the conversation and punched in the numbers Mrs. Mosby had given her. Then she closed her eyes and waited.

    Ryan Taylor lived in a well-appointed two-bedroom cabin on a ten-acre ranch. The place was minutes from the country club, less than a mile from the boat docks at Lake Monroe, and only three miles down the road from the house where Kari grew up, the house where the senior Baxters still lived. His career in professional football had paid off financially. He had a savings account he could never deplete and owed nothing on any of his material goods, including the ranch and his loaded silver Chevy truck. Someday he planned to build his dream house near the front of his land, but so far he’d had no reason to break ground.
    The cabin suited him perfectly. He had never planned on having the privilege of playing professional football, but now that those days were behind him, he knew there was only one thing that could fill the decades ahead.
    That thing was coaching.
    When the assistant position at Clear Creek High School became available at the beginning of summer, he knew it was the opportunity he’d been looking for. The opportunity to come back home.
    Things weren’t exactly the same, of course. Back when he’d grown up in Clear Creek, he was just one of the gang, a favorite son who was welcomed everywhere he went. Now, after his eight years with the Cowboys, people treated him like a celebrity. They stared at him in supermarkets, asked for his autograph at the movie theater, and wouldn’t let him have a public meal in peace.
    Sometimes he even wondered whether he might have made a mistake in thinking he could settle down in Clear Creek. But then it was still his favorite place on earth, the place where he’d grown up, where his mother and his sister and her family still lived. All his life he’d imagined settling down here.
    He just hadn’t imagined doing it without Kari Baxter.
    He’d had plenty of opportunities to date when he returned from his stint with Dallas. Everyone had a daughter, a friend, a sister who wanted to meet the area’s newest eligible bachelor. A time or two Ryan had actually followed through and asked one of them out. But he always stopped after a few dates when he found himself comparing each woman to Kari.
    It wasn’t that the women he saw weren’t wonderful in their own right. They were mostly beautiful and bright and would have made great wives, no doubt. But they hadn’t sat cross-legged next to him on a summer’s night the year he turned fourteen and told him the secrets of their hearts the way Kari had. They hadn’t stayed beside him all day fishing on the shores of Lake Monroe the summer he was seventeen or run for cover with him the afternoon the tornado siren sounded across the county.
    The other women he met hadn’t shared with him a first kiss or a first dance or that first taste of love. And they hadn’t shown him for the first time what it meant to love God. To really love God and want to please him.
    Ryan understood very well that Kari was married; clearly she was not the woman for him. He simply wasn’t in a hurry to find one who was.
    “I don’t know, Ryan, you’re getting awfully old,” his mother would say to him every other Sunday when they got together for dinner. “At this rate, I’ll be toothless in a rocker before you get me some grandbabies.”
    Ryan would laugh and pat his mother on her shoulder. “You’re stubborn enough to live a hundred years, Mom. At fifty-three you’re young enough for anything. You’ll probably outlive us all.”

    Practice had finished up early that day, and for some reason Ryan felt lonelier than usual, as if a piece of his heart weren’t fitting quite right. He slipped on his work boots. A few hours outside in the yard would help clear his head.
    He tackled the bushes in front of his cabin first and was inside getting water