Holly pushed it to the last fifteen seconds, but she was sitting in her place within the allotted three minutes. She reached for a sausage patty with her fingers, but Lily shook her head. “Grace first, and then you’ll use a fork.”

They bowed their heads, and Lily said a short prayer. “We’ll take turns saying the prayer before meals. If it’s okay with Mack, either he or I will say the breakfast prayer, and you two will alternate on supper.”

“I’m not prayin’,” Holly declared.

“Then you don’t eat.” Lily put two sausage patties on her own plate and handed the platter to Mack. Then she took three pancakes from the stack and sent them around the table.

“If I’d known that smokin’ a joint would cause this much trouble, I never would have done it. I might as well be a nun.” Holly slathered butter on four pancakes and topped them off with lots of maple syrup.

“I never knew a pot-smokin’ nun,” Braden said. “Are you going to start a brand-new church where all the people smoke pot on Sunday?”

“Sure, I am, and all your little friends will have to put their cigarettes and beer in a big box at the front door before they can come into my church,” Holly shot back at him.

Lily ignored the both of them, but she noticed that Mack was chuckling under his breath. It might be funny today, but wait until he had to put up with it for weeks on end. He’d be ready to load up his goats and leave Texas altogether.

Mack thought about Lily all the way to church that morning. He’d left half an hour early so he could get his Sunday-school room put in order and think about the week’s lesson. When he saw her get out of that car on Friday, something stirred in an area he thought for sure was stone-cold dead. Sure, he’d known her—kind of, sort of—in high school. In a town the size of Comfort, with only three thousand people, everyone knew everyone else. The big joke was that they read the local newspaper just to see who got caught because they already knew what had gone on in town all week.

Lily Miller—as she was back in those days—had been a sophomore when he was a senior, but he’d forgotten how pretty she was with that mane of blonde hair flowing down her back and those big, beautiful brown eyes. When she spoke to him in that husky voice, he’d definitely felt something, but he told himself that it was useless. Adam had stolen the love of his life—twice. It could happen again, if his brother thought he was interested in Lily.