The Soldier's Sweetheart

“What I’m giving him,” Samantha explained, thoroughly exasperated with both of them, “is space. And that’s what you two ought to be doing, too. He’s still grieving. Leave the poor man alone.” She knew as she said it that that wasn’t likely to happen.

Her friends would keep pushing and she’d balk, just like always. Whenever she’d start dating, her friends would be quick to call for further commitment, but it never happened that way. She’d find some reason or other to break things off.

She didn’t know why. As cliché as it might be, it wasn’t the men, it was her. She believed marriage was God uniting two hearts in an inexplicable way. And until she found that, she saw no point in pursuing anything with anybody. Especially not with Will, who wasn’t even a Christian.

“Samantha?” Will called from the front room. “Can you give me a hand? I’m having a bit of trouble with the register.”

It didn’t surprise her that Will couldn’t pick up on the rusty machine. The cash register was older than she was, the ancient iron punch-the-dollar-sign kind that had faded out with the advent of the first computer. It fit the country feel of the grocery, though, so Samantha had kept it. She’d been using it for so many years she didn’t think twice about it, but she could definitely see where Will might get confused.

“I’m going back in there to serve my customers,” Samantha whispered. “And you two are going to get out of here and leave us in peace. Please, please promise me that you won’t put Will on the spot.”

“Yes. No. Maybe so,” Alexis responded with a matchmaking gleam in her eye.

* * *

“So what do you do for fun around here?” Will asked as he swept dust out the front door and across the clapboard sidewalk. Samantha had just turned the sign from Open to Closed and they were cleaning up before leaving for the night. “Ride horses?”

He thought it seemed like a reasonable question. So far he’d seen a lot of trucks on the road, and at least an equal number of horses on the ranchland he passed as he walked every morning from the Howells’ bed-and-breakfast to the store, and then back again each evening.

Samantha stopped wiping the front window she’d just sprayed with glass cleaner and narrowed her eyes, one hand drifting to perch on her hip. “Why would you say that?”

“I don’t know. I guess because I noticed the old hitching post in front of Cup o’ Jo’s Café when I passed it this morning. Watering trough, too, I think. The thing looks like it’s been there for a hundred years.”

Samantha shrugged. “It probably has been. Folks do occasionally use it when they stop at Cup o’ Jo’s, if they’re out riding that way. It doesn’t happen very often, though. We’re not quite as backward here as you might imagine.”

He held up his hands. “Innocent observation. No offense meant.”

“None taken.” Samantha laughed. The sound was unmistakably feminine and it mixed Will’s insides all up. He cast around for something to say.

“Your friend Alexis reeked of horse when I met her.” As soon as he said the words he realized how awful they sounded. He was used to saying what he thought without sifting it through the filter of what was appropriate in mixed company. Being around Samantha really messed with his head.

She lifted her chin, regarding him closely, the hint of a smile playing on her lips. He turned his gaze back to the cracked wooden clapboard and swept harder. It made him uncomfortable when she looked at him that way. Tingly all over, like last year when he’d caught a bad case of the flu and had suffered a raging fever of over a hundred and two degrees.

He remembered the incident well. It had already been inconceivably hot in Afghanistan, even without his fever. Every inch of his skin had felt like it was on fire, just as it did now. His breath came shallow and ragged, and his chest hurt with every lungful of air.

Not that being with Samantha was anything like catching the flu. It was a poor analogy, but it was the best he was able to do at the moment.

He couldn’t pull the wool over his own eyes. He recognized the symptoms. The honest symptoms.

The bottom line was, Samantha was attractive in all the right ways.

“Sorry,” he apologized gruffly. “My bad.”

Again, Samantha chuckled. “No need. You’re just saying it like it is. I don’t think Alexis would be offended by your observation. She’s a rancher and spends most of her time in the saddle.”

“You’re not easily affronted, are you?”

Her blue eyes locked onto him, and every nerve ending in his body sparked to life. The emotions rushing through him engaged him in a way he couldn’t even label. “Why would I be? If you can refrain from any more insults about women and erratic behavior, we’re all good. Yes, No, Maybe So is more than a kid’s game—it’s a lady’s prerogative. And don’t you forget it.”

Will chuckled. The woman was really something. She kept him on his toes. To his surprise, he found that he enjoyed working with her far more than he’d ever believed he would when Seth had first approached him with the idea.

But then again, he hadn’t yet met Samantha.

“Why don’t you see if you can find something to do in the back room while I tally the register?” she said, moving back to the counter and tucking the window spray and her rag underneath.

“Yes, ma’am,” he answered, surprising himself with how upbeat he sounded. His heart felt lighter, too. Was he actually relaxing a little bit? Taking the edge off that gut-slicing sensation of guilt which usually burdened him?

As he entered the back room, his eyes scanned over the bins and boxes, looking for something to keep his hands and mind occupied.

There really wasn’t much to do. Samantha kept her store in tip-top condition. Even her desk was spotless. Neither a paper nor a pen was misplaced.

He’d seen how hard she worked, even when she didn’t have to. She was motivated by something beyond his comprehension, and everything she did, she did with a joyful heart. He’d never seen anything like it.

Will moved some of the boxes from the higher shelves onto the lower ones, making room for new product. Samantha was a tiny little pixie of a woman, five feet four at max. How had she possibly done all the heavy lifting all these years? Some of these boxes were heavier than she was, not to mention that the topmost shelves were completely out of her reach. The notion of her toting heavy boxes using only a footstool or ladder made his stomach twist in knots.

Whether she knew it or not, she would no longer be slinging heavy boxes around the back room. Not on his watch. He had just appointed himself Samantha’s own personal muscle.

He scoffed at himself and shook his head.

He was here to do a job, which was the important thing. This was what he and Seth had talked about—how Will could fix Samantha’s problems for her. That’s all this was.

Will sorted through the inventory, organizing the boxes by category, rotating them according to date and lining them squarely over each other. He placed the older inventory within easy reach and shelved the newer products up top. It was only when he was nearly finished that he noticed that a small box of chewing-gum packages had been wedged in the far back corner against the wall. He’d missed it on his first go-round, and since the candy aisle was looking a little thin, he reached for it, thinking he’d stock the shelf with the extra bundles of gum.

He wasn’t paying that much attention to what he was doing until he realized that moving the box forward revealed a file of papers wedged between the box and the wall. He couldn’t conceive of how they’d gotten there. It was almost as if they’d been placed there on purpose.

Samantha must have been doing paperwork and had set the file down on the shelving unit, where it had been accidentally lodged behind the box and subsequently forgotten. It was probably nothing she couldn’t live without, since obviously she wasn’t tearing up the store looking for it, but he thought he should probably place it on her desk for her to deal with at her convenience.

As he set the box of gum aside, he bumped the folder and several papers fell to the ground. They were letters written on upscale paper, the fancy masthead declaring some prestigious law firm based out of New York: Bastion and Bunyan and Turner, Esquire.

The name sounded pretentious to Will, but then, he didn’t care for lawyers. His only brush with them was after Haley had legally separated from him, and that had been bad news all around. In his opinion, lawyers tended to be seedy types more interested in making money than representing their clients with integrity and honesty.

But what did Samantha need with a bunch of New York lawyers?

Even with his curiosity piqued, Will had no intention of snooping, but his gaze unintentionally drifted over the first paragraph of the missive in his hands.

His breath hitched sharply as he realized what he was reading.

A threat against Sam’s Grocery, written in particularly nasty legalese, on behalf of the giant corporation Stay-n-Shop. Apparently they wanted to buy out her store and replace it with one of theirs, as they had with other small groceries in the area. But they weren’t asking—they were demanding. This was their third and final offer. And if she refused...

It was now a great deal more than curiosity that led him to flip through the rest of the correspondence. This was personal, engaging his warrior’s heart.

These letters were menacing coercions from an adversary. And they’d been intentionally hidden. Will was sure of it. Anger stiffened his joints.

Maybe it was none of his business, but he was working for the Howells, for Samantha, and he couldn’t imagine what they must be going through right now. Samantha must be frightened half out of her wits with this big corporation coming down on her the way it was.

What he did know for certain was that there was no way Samantha would allow herself to be coerced into selling. Not for any price. He hadn’t been around the Howells for very long, but it was long enough for him to know they were a close-knit family in a close-knit community—and he’d heard dozens of stories about what life was like growing up in Serendipity from Seth.

Sam’s Grocery was Samantha’s legacy. She’d even been named after the store—or rather, for it. No way was Stay-n-Shop going to take it away from her. Inconceivable.