The Parting Gift(35)

“Ow!” A sudden pain shot down her back and spread around her stomach.

“Told you—”

“Blaine, if you say I told you so, so help me… I’m going to—Ow!”

“We should call the doctor to meet us at the hospital.”

Suddenly the pain intensified until it was overwhelming. Nodding, she followed him. He tossed her suitcase into the back of the pickup and carefully helped her into the cab.

The pain grew increasingly worse as they drove to the hospital. She could feel every pebble in the road, which Blaine seemed to be aiming for on purpose.

“It will be okay,” Blaine soothed. “I’m sure Pop is thrilled right now.”

A tear escaped Mara’s eye. “We’re going to have a baby on the anniversary of his death….it’s almost like his gifts never stop coming.” She smiled.

“Have you decided what you want to name him?”

“Him?”

“Well, it has to be a boy, right?”

Mara laughed through gritted teeth. “There is another possibility, you know.”

“All right, all right,” Blaine winked. “I suppose a girl would do. What name have you picked out?”

“That’s my present to you, and…someone else.”

Blaine squeezed her hand.

“Emily for a girl. And David for a boy.”

Her husband appeared too choked up to say anything. Warmth engulfed her heart as she closed her eyes in thankfulness.

The perfect gift – a final parting gift from their father.





About Rachel Van Dyken





Rachel Van Dyken is a Graduate of Northwest Nazarene University, with a degree in Social Sciences with an emphasis in industrial psychology and a minor in Spanish. She is also a Post Graduate of California Coast University receiving a MBA with an emphasis in Human Resource Management. She resides in Nampa, Idaho and counsels children. Starbucks is a daily must, spiders make her scream, and she loves chocolate but is allergic, of course. Nate, her husband makes her laugh so hard she cries and they share their home with a very loud snoring boxer named Sir Winston Churchill.





About Leah Sanders





Leah Sanders is the middle child in a family of seven children. As a true middle child she went from high school in Alaska to college in Florida, where she earned a Bachelor's degree in secondary education from Southeastern University. She also holds a Master's degree in educational technology from Boise State University.

She makes her home in Idaho with her husband and three children. She has no pets but will sometimes allow her children to keep rocks and name them, as long as they keep them outside, so they don't feel like they are missing out on anything. She finds joy in making the world a better place by helping middle school students locate their English assignments on a daily basis, and even sweet romance novels make her blush.





Also by Rachel Van Dyken





The English Countryside



Miss Sara Ames had no desire whatsoever to extend a greeting to her Aunt Tilda. Greetings were natural assumptions of welcome, and Sara did not want her aunt to get the wrong impression. She was most certainly not welcome.

Soon enough she would be encouraged to extend said welcome to her aunt, but naturally, she was in no mood to rush the first step into the inferno, as she so delicately thought of the situation. No. She would greet her soon, but not too soon. Not until the time was forced upon her—much like the current situation had been thrust upon her.

At least she could spend these last few hours in solitary lamentation, mourning the life she once dreamed for herself. A life filled with nights sitting by the fireside reading novels. After all, she wasn’t pretty enough for a debut, a fact of which she was reminded daily by her sisters and her mother.

Debuts were reserved for comely, dewy-skinned girls; not ugly girls, as her father had often so delicately put it. She hadn’t even been provided with a dowry. And according to her father, the main reason for that being, “No man in his right mind would take you, even if I offered him the blunt of the ton.” He’d repeated such sentiments to neighbors on many occasions as well, the first time on Sara’s sixteenth birthday, when during the middle of her party he drunkenly announced to all her friends she was worthless.

At least novels provided the escape she desperately needed, a diversion into a world where she felt loved, cherished, and desired—the most scandalous of all the emotions, or so she thought.

Men would never desire her; even her own father despised her for how she looked.

For one thing, she was straight where all the other women had curves. Her skin was dark olive, but that was to be expected when one spent hours contemplating books in the fields. Her lips were too large, her eyes too big, and her nose—well, she didn’t know much about noses, but she figured something had to be wrong with it, too. It always seemed too invisible next to her lush mouth, which her father had often called sinful.

How was it that her sisters were both gifted with angelic faces and soft bodies, while she was cursed with a hard-muscled body and a long mop of black hair? She was nearly convinced her mother had taken a lover of some sort, or at least had an affair while her father was away on business. It was the only explanation for her looks; certainly, her own father must have thought as much as well, because she received the most despised spankings as a child, and allotted the most horrid of all chores.