“Joining the rest of us around the table was not a request. Neither was church.” Lily pointed to the stairs. “If you aren’t sitting in your place in three minutes, I’ll be taking all of your makeup away for a week. Your choice on that matter. But you don’t have a choice about church. We will be going as a family every week. I’d hate for you to have to show up your first two times without a drop of lipstick or eye shadow on.”

Holly threw the towel at the bathroom door and stomped into her room.

“Towels go in the basket in the utility room, not on the floor,” Lily said as she started down the stairs.

“What happens if I don’t pick it up?” Holly called out. “Will you lock me in my room and give me nothing but bread and water?”

“Maybe water, but don’t push your luck about bread. You’ve got three minutes, starting right now.” Lily didn’t remember being so sassy at Holly’s age. She thought about Ophelia again and wondered if Henry ever got over that rebellious stage.

Holly pushed it to the last fifteen seconds, but she was sitting in her place within the allotted three minutes. She reached for a sausage patty with her fingers, but Lily shook her head. “Grace first, and then you’ll use a fork.”

They bowed their heads, and Lily said a short prayer. “We’ll take turns saying the prayer before meals. If it’s okay with Mack, either he or I will say the breakfast prayer, and you two will alternate on supper.”

“I’m not prayin’,” Holly declared.

“Then you don’t eat.” Lily put two sausage patties on her own plate and handed the platter to Mack. Then she took three pancakes from the stack and sent them around the table.

“If I’d known that smokin’ a joint would cause this much trouble, I never would have done it. I might as well be a nun.” Holly slathered butter on four pancakes and topped them off with lots of maple syrup.

“I never knew a pot-smokin’ nun,” Braden said. “Are you going to start a brand-new church where all the people smoke pot on Sunday?”

“Sure, I am, and all your little friends will have to put their cigarettes and beer in a big box at the front door before they can come into my church,” Holly shot back at him.

Lily ignored the both of them, but she noticed that Mack was chuckling under his breath. It might be funny today, but wait until he had to put up with it for weeks on end. He’d be ready to load up his goats and leave Texas altogether.

Mack thought about Lily all the way to church that morning. He’d left half an hour early so he could get his Sunday-school room put in order and think about the week’s lesson. When he saw her get out of that car on Friday, something stirred in an area he thought for sure was stone-cold dead. Sure, he’d known her—kind of, sort of—in high school. In a town the size of Comfort, with only three thousand people, everyone knew everyone else. The big joke was that they read the local newspaper just to see who got caught because they already knew what had gone on in town all week.

Lily Miller—as she was back in those days—had been a sophomore when he was a senior, but he’d forgotten how pretty she was with that mane of blonde hair flowing down her back and those big, beautiful brown eyes. When she spoke to him in that husky voice, he’d definitely felt something, but he told himself that it was useless. Adam had stolen the love of his life—twice. It could happen again, if his brother thought he was interested in Lily.

He set up the folding chairs in a circle and tried to put Lily’s full lips out of his mind and think about the Sunday-school lesson. Of all things, it dealt with loving your brother as yourself. It might be a lively discussion with Holly and Braden in the mix. They squabbled about anything and everything. He didn’t mind. Actually, he kind of enjoyed listening to them.

If he’d had misgivings about living with Lily and the kids, they had disappeared with that first look at her and the way the kids entertained him with their constant bickering. Lily was being very fair about the financial end of things, and if every day started off like that day when they had worked so well in the kitchen together, this arrangement would be great.

“Hey!” The preacher of the church, and one of his oldest and best friends, poked his head in the room. “There’s doughnuts in the nursery.”

“Thanks, but I had a big breakfast,” Mack said.

He and Drew Donovan had graduated from Comfort High School together more than twenty years ago now. They’d formed a friendship way back in elementary school because they were the two shy boys who didn’t fit in with the rest of the kids. Drew was tall and lanky, with a thick crop of black curly hair he had inherited from his black father, and green eyes from his white mother. Drew had known when he was in middle school that he would be a preacher someday, just like Mack had known from a young age that he wanted to be a vo-ag teacher.

“Walk with me to my office. We’ve got a little while before it’s time for Sunday school,” Drew said and led the way to his office.

“What’s on your mind?” Mack opened the door for him.

“I hear that Lily Miller has come back to Comfort and is living in her folks’ place with you. How do you feel about that?” Drew took a seat behind his desk.

“They just arrived yesterday, but so far, it’s fine,” Mack answered. “Only she’s Lily Anderson now, and she’s got a couple of kids. Braden is twelve, and Holly is fourteen.”

“Are they going to be in church?” Drew asked.

Mack nodded. “And Sunday school, pretty much against their wishes, but . . .” He went on to tell Drew the reason why Lily had taken them out of the city.

“Smart mother.” Drew finished off the last of his doughnut, stood up, and went to the small refrigerator in the corner. He took out a diet root beer and held it out to Mack.

Mack shook his head. “I should be getting on down to my classroom.”

Drew twisted the lid off the bottle and set it on his desk. “You’ll be a good influence on those two kids, Mack. I have faith in you.”

“Thanks.” Mack stood up.

“You get part of the credit for my boys being good men.” Drew placed a bookmark in his Bible to save his spot.

“I just kept them focused. You were the guiding light.” Mack waved at the door.