Page 133 of The Holiday Heartbreaker

This land, this stalwart land where she’d grown up, found peace, comfort and tranquility for all of her life, had changed more than she had in the past few years.

She had always found peace out here.

Her father was the pastor of the oldest church in Mapleton—both in terms of the age of the building and the average age of the congregation. And while she sat in church every Sunday to hear her father’s gentle word, the wilderness had always been her true church.

She took a deep breath, of the pine, the earth, the way the sun baked them both and mixed them together.

Out here she felt wild, when in truth, her staid floral dresses were turning her into wallpaper.

She could feel herself fading into the peeling paint of the Mapleton Episcopal Church. And she didn’t much care for it.

She also didn’t know how to change.

She didn’t really think she was allowed to. She was Shayna Clarke, pastor’s daughter, and everyone in the church loved her. And also reminded her often that she was a good girl. It never felt like a compliment, but more of a warning in many ways.

Her father had done such a nice thing adopting her, he deserved the good girl she was.

She was his reward for his good deeds.

The expectation that she be a reflection of his parenting, his teachings, and also an emblem for why charity was so important, weighed on her.

It always had.

She knew how to dream. In her mind, she was as wild everywhere as she was here on the mountain. In her fantasies, she knew exactly what she wanted. How to find the sort of man who set her body and soul on fire. How to touch him. How to ask him to touch her.

In reality, she was so entrenched in her role in this small town she felt nearly trapped by it. If she hated it, it would be easy. She could simply break out of the mold and leave all the shattered pieces behind.

But she didn’t hate it.

She loved so many things about her life.

She didn’t know how to be the Shayna she was in her head—the Shayna who read erotic romance and wanted a man who did the things she had found in those books—with the Shayna she was during the day.

A church secretary who loved the work she did in the community.

Her father had adopted her when he’d been fifty. Never married, with no children, he’d taken her in when he’d found out about a congregant whose great granddaughter had needed someone to take her baby.

Shayna loved her father. And she loved the quiet life she lived with him. Or at least, she had.

Until she’d begun to feel like the quiet was stifling her. Smothering her.

She could pinpoint the moment it had hit.

She’d been in the grocery store, buying a fiber drink for her father, and she had run into ten geriatric members of the church and she’d had lovely conversations with them.

Shayna had also seen two people closer in age to her from a distance, and one of them had been a man, a reasonably attractive man named Michael who she knew from high school, and who she’d had nothing to say to.

Nothing at all.

It was realizing that her life was so out of step that had sent her into a spiral. Well, that and her looming twenty-fifth birthday. Because twenty had slid into twenty-five with her barely noticing, and she had realized that twenty-five would slide into thirty with no actual changes.

Unless she made them.

She knew how to make a quilt, and a loaf of bread, and some very good cookies.

She didn’t know how to make changes.

She knew how to dream about freedom. She didn’t know how to take it.

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