Games of the Heart (Crimson Romance) Read Online Free Page B

it’s a crapshoot around here. Might be something you can add on to what you’re already doing. Hold on, Jane.”
    I could hear her cooing to someone standing in her office about, “You are so sweet,” and then she was on the line with, “Put on your big girl panties and make up your own mind. I gave up mind reading years ago when I quit traveling with the circus.”
    The line went dead and my appetite with it, which says a lot. Pastor Bob Normal, whom I had begun to secretly and in various muttering times call Ab, apparently was taking over my life in ways that are abnormally annoying even for him.
    It took me twenty-five minutes flat to jump into tan slacks and a blazing pink cotton T from the last Victoria’s Secret sale and drive to church, just two miles north of the condo. I like to think I’m hip but I’m unhip about mega churches. Give me a steeple and a cross? I’m good. That said, when I drove up to Desert Hills a few weeks ago, I thought I’d stumbled into the Silicon Valley. The building humongous, all windows and sand-colored brick, stretching greenbelts and a flagpole plunked in the middle of it all. The cross? Good question. I asked, too. There isn’t one outside, and that, I was told, goes along with the new trend to make the worship center more available to all people. Call me old-fashioned — wait, don’t you dare. Yet, it’s been my thinking that a church isn’t a church without looking like a church. Since I didn’t get a vote — and since I was only filling in for the youth pastor, I probably would never get one — on this issue I kept my lips sealed. I know that’s a shock.
    Faced with a crisis at home and one at church, I gingerly parked my scuffed SUV in the “staff” zone and slapped the sunscreen over the dashboard so that later, when I left for the day, I wouldn’t scorch my bountiful backside, and straightened my spine. Like a courteous little soldier, I marched up the marble walk to face my fate. I had barely plastered on a tooth-brightener smile when the pastor met me as I whooshed through the automatic doors into the Foyer of Heavenly Conditioned Air.
    “’Bout time you’re here. Memo’s on your desk. Questions? Vera’s got it,” said the senior minister, all this with the palm of his hand facing my face.
    There was this thing about him that brought out a feeling of grease in me, like the kind that forms on the top of simmering spaghetti sauce when you use cheap hamburger.
    He cocked his Elvis-impersonator head. “Yes?”
    I was grateful the man wasn’t psychic, but I refused to talk to the hand so I waited until he dropped it. “Good morning, Pastor. How are you today? Questions about what?”
    “Board decided. Youth group. You. VBS. Great opportunity.”
    “Excuse me?” I shivered. “Repeat that, please.”
    “No can do. Off to a fundraiser breakfast. Think again, Pastor Jane, if you have any notions that this place — ” He waved a hand around the cavern of the foyer and then swept it toward the marble floor. “ — Well, if you think for one second the church is financed by prayer. Money talks, not just here, but everywhere. Vegas is no different. Never kid yourself about that.”
    Taking yet another cleansing breath, I touched the sleeve of his blue silk suit jacket. “Vacation Bible School starts Monday. And where did you leave that reality check? Today is Friday. You’re saying that my youth group will handle it?”
    “What don’t you get, Pastor Jane?” It came out in a huff as he smoothed the sideburns that went out in the seventies.
    Trust me, the man was not into retro. He’d just forgotten we were in the twenty-first century, and possibly women didn’t always do what big old strong men ministers said to do.
    The gauge on my internal combustion steam-ometer was shouting, “Danger, danger, run for your life.” Alas, being low woman on the church totem pole didn’t give me any wiggle room. Even if you were on my side, and even if I’d