asked me to be a pallbearer. Would you go with me?” He looked absolutely miserable.
She moved closer to him and slipped her arms around his neck. “I’m sorry, Tucker, but I’m glad that you made peace with him before he died. That will mean a lot as time goes on. Of course I’ll go with you. I’m just sorry that I didn’t make things right with my mother before she died. The last words between us were said in anger. I told her for the gazillionth time that I wasn’t ever coming back to see her if she didn’t get her life in order. She told me to get out and go to hell.”
“We’re a sorry pair, aren’t we?” he sighed.
“Maybe, but we make a damn fine whole person when you put us together.” She kissed him on the cheek.
“Think so?” His big, strong arms went around her, and he rested his face in her hair.
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “We make a great team.”
“I had my doubts at first about us working together, but . . .”
“But what?”
“I was wrong.” He stood up and held out his hand. Her eyes locked with his when she clasped his hand. He pulled her against his chest and looked down into her face. Slowly his eyes fluttered shut, and his mouth closed over hers. Then she was floating as he scooped her up like a bride and carried her toward his room. He started to the bed with her, but she put her hand on the wall and shook her head.
“Sassy is sleepin’ on your bed. Let’s take this to my room,” she whispered.
He stopped just inside her bedroom door. “Are you sure about this, Jolene? Is our relationship ready for this step?”
She put a finger over his lips. “Can I trust you with my heart?”
“Yes, darlin’, you can.” He kicked the door shut with the heel of his boot.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Church services on Sunday morning. A funeral planned for the afternoon. That was a lot in one day, but Jolene would do both. The first because Aunt Sugar wanted them to go to church in Jefferson with her. The second because she wanted to support Tucker.
But churches and funerals reminded her of when her dad died. The service had been in a huge church. She’d sat flanked by Aunt Sugar and Uncle Jasper. Her mother had been on the same pew, but it was Aunt Sugar who comforted her through the whole ordeal.
When Elaine passed away, there hadn’t been a service of any kind. Aunt Sugar had offered to pay for a memorial or a full-fledged funeral if Jolene wanted, but it had seemed more than a little hypocritical on Jolene’s part to do something like that. Especially since she and her mother had been at cross-purposes for years. So when the funeral home called her to claim the ashes, she’d done so and mixed them with those of her father.
She loved the congregational singing that morning. Tucker had a fine voice, and the ladies would most likely be after him to join the choir if he came to services regularly. But when the preacher read some verses from Psalm 37 about not fretting, she quickly tuned him out. Living with her mother, she’d learned early on to focus on something other than what was being said, so that morning she turned her thoughts to everything that had happened in one short month.
Dotty poked her in the ribs and whispered, “Ever had sex on a church pew?”
Jolene blushed. “Shhh . . . God will aim lightning bolts at us for even thinkin’ that word in church.”
“What word?” Tucker asked from the other side.
Jolene mouthed, “Later.”
She was thinking about sex with Tucker on a church pew, her pulse and heart both racing when she glanced over to find him staring right at her. He laced his fingers with hers and leaned over to whisper, “You look gorgeous this morning.”
“Thank you,” she mouthed.
She was thinking about the night before and what Dotty said about sex on a church pew when the preacher jerked her back to the present by asking Jasper to give the benediction. Not one to ever use fifty words when two would do, his prayer was short and to the point. Everyone said amen with him at the end and didn’t waste any time making their way to the doors to shake the preacher’s hand. Then they’d hurry on home or to a favorite restaurant for Sunday dinner.
Jolene remembered a side door