Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers Page A

that badly.
    Michael…
    I’ll stay celibate.
    Michael, beloved.
    He kept walking. God, why her? Tell me that. Why not a gently reared girl, untouched until her wedding night? Why not a God-fearing widow? Lord, send me a plain woman, kind and enduring, someone who would work at my side in the fields, plowing, planting, and harvesting! Someone who’ll get dirt beneath her fingernails but doesn’t have it already in her blood! Someone to give me children or someone with children already if it’s not in your plan for me to have my own. Why do you tell me to marry a harlot?
    This is the woman I have chosen for you.
    Michael stopped, furious. “I’m no prophet!” he shouted at the darkening sky. “I’m not one of your saints. I’m just an ordinary man!”
    Go back and get Angel.
    “It’s not going to work! You’re wrong this time.”
    Go back.
    “She’s good for sex, I’m sure. She’ll give me that much, but nothing else.
    You want me to go back for that? I’m never going to get more from her than one measly half hour of her time. I go up to that room with hope and come out defeated. Where’s your triumph in this? She wouldn’t care if she ever saw me again. She’s trying to pass me off to the others like a…a—No, Lord.
    No! I’m just another faceless man in a long line of faceless men in her life.
    This can’t be what you had in mind!” He raised his fist. “And it’s sure not what I asked for!”
    He raked his hands through his hair. “She’s made it plain enough. I can 79
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    have her anyway I want. From the neck down. Excluding the heart. I’m only a man, Lord! Do you know what she makes me feel?”
    It started to rain. A cold driving rain.
    Michael stood in the dark, muddy road a mile out of town, rain running down his face. He shut his eyes. “Thanks,” he said harshly. “Thanks a lot.”
    Hot, angry blood pumped fast through his veins. “If this is your way of cool-ing me off, it’s not working very well.”
    Do my will, beloved. I drew you up from the desolate pit, out of the
    miry bog, and set your feet upon a rock. Go back for Angel.
    But Michael held his anger close like a shield. “Nothing doing. The last thing I want or need is a woman who doesn’t feel a thing.” He started walking again, this time heading for the livery stable where his wagon and horses were.
    “It’s a poor time for traveling, mister,” the liveryman said. “A storm’s coming.”
    “It’s as good as any, and I’m pure sick of this place.”
    “You and a thousand others.”
    Michael had to pass the Palace to leave town. The drunken laughter and the piano music grated. He didn’t even look at her upstairs window as he drove by. Why should he? She was probably working. As soon as he got back to his valley and forgot about that hell-bound girl, he would feel better.
    And the next time he prayed for God to send him a woman to share his life, he would be a lot more specific about the kind he wanted.
    Angel was standing at her window when she saw Hosea go by. She knew it was him even with his shoulders hunched against the downpour. She waited for him to look up, but he didn’t. She watched him until he was out of sight.
    Well, she had finally succeeded in driving him away. It was what she’d wanted from the start.
    So why did she feel so bereft? Wasn’t she glad she was finally rid of him?
    He wouldn’t be sitting in her room again, talking and talking and talking until she thought she would go crazy.
    He had finally called her Angel. Angel! She raised a trembling hand and 80
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    put it against the glass. The cold seeped into her palm and up her arm. She pressed her forehead against the pane and listened to the drumming rain.
    The sound of it made her remember the shack by the docks and her mother smiling in death.
    Oh, God, I’m suffocating. I’m