My Stubborn Heart Read Online Free PDF Page B

all older than they used to be.
    She let her head sink into the jumbled quilts and lay staring blindly at the ceiling. It was un-P.C., but she wanted—had always wanted—to be married and to have children. Maybe because her grandparents on both sides and her parents had such great marriages. To this day her mom and dad did everything together—grocery shopping, tennis, movies, trips. They still held hands, they still whispered secrets. They were partners and best friends. They were the fairy tale.
    There had been lots of times when Kate, as a knobby-kneed kid and then as an awkward teenager, had watched them together and felt left out of their little circle of two. All those times she’d thought, Someday. I want that for me someday.
    As a girl she’d forced her younger sister to play Ken and Barbie with her, inventing elaborate stories of their devotion to each other, their happy house, their numerous children. As a young teen, she’d read dozens of those skinny romance novels in the juvenile fiction section. As an older teen she’d made trips to the video store to rent and re-rent movie love stories.
    Fall in love. Marry. Be blissful. Have babies. That had always been her plan. The fact that she was thirty-one and single left her feeling in weak moments like this one as if she’d somehow missed the train going where she’d wanted to go in life.
    Part of the problem? She had the most disastrous penchant for liking the wrong guys. Why couldn’t she just fall head over heels for someone from the singles group at church? What was wrong with her that she couldn’t go for someone open and wholesome—someone who was attending seminary or who carried their Bible to church in the little leather case with the handles? Why?! Was she self-destructive and didn’t know it? Horribly shallow?
    She’d always been the responsible eldest child. Outgoing, yes. But never one to swerve from the Road of Right Priorities. No booze, no drugs, no promiscuity.
    Yet in this one area of her life, the arena of men, she didn’t understand herself. In the two years since she and Trevor had broken up, she couldn’t figure out why her heart remained unswayed by guys who were obviously the right, smart, practical choice. She desperately wanted to fall in love with a good guy. But try as she might, her stubborn heart resisted every candidate. And as long as this trend continued, she knew very well that she was going to stay single.
    Loneliness, her old enemy and companion, slithered around her middle and squeezed.
    Kate sat up, frustrated with herself. She’d learned today that Matt had lost his wife, and she was still managing to throw herself a pity party. She shoved her feet into her pink UGG slippers and made her way downstairs. She let herself out the back door and walked across the grass in the moonlight, taking deep breaths of the woodsmoke-scented night air. In the distance, the chapel gleamed. Her ancestor, the one who’d built Chapel Bluff, had taken care to put that little building with the cross on top right at the heart of their property. It reminded her that this family had been founded on what was important. Every generation had carefully instilled their faith in the next, right on down to her. She’d been raised in the church, and her relationship with God was long-standing, close, and easy. He should be enough for her. She knew He was enough. She was only sorry and guilty that at times like this He didn’t feel like enough.
    She crossed her arms, slowly drinking in her surroundings. The stone bulk of the house. The building doggedly known as the “barn,” though it contained parking spaces for several cars but not a single animal. The black hills in the distance. The starry sky. And again, the white-washed chapel in the center of it all.
    She began to walk, enjoying the crunch of the driveway and then grass under her slippers. She could feel God in the