Barefoot Brides

by Annie Jones

He turned his head and smiled sweetly, his voice husky from both his sickness and sentiment as he said, “We have had a lot of fun together, haven’t we, girl?”

  “We sure have, Dad.”

  “And nothing in the world is going to change that, right?” he asked.

  “Change?” Just that quickly, Moxie realized she wasn’t the only one feeling more than a little displaced by the recent Cromwell invasion. “No, Daddy, nothing in the world will ever change how I feel about you.”

  “How we feel about each other,” he corrected.

  She kissed his cheek again, then made sure he was buckled in before she closed the back door. She gave a wave to the cluster of people each trying to get an eyeful of her exit from behind the glass door of the clinic.

  Moxie practically hopped into the front passenger seat, only to find the Santa Sofia Sun Times’s new editor behind the steering wheel, staring at her.

  “What?” she asked as she ran her curved fingers through her thick, blond hair.

  “Nothing.” R. Hunt Diamante shook his head. His dark eyes—strike that, she gave herself a mental directive—his warm brown eyes glinted in ill-disguised delight. Charmed, no doubt, by the endearing father-daughter interaction. Or was it something more?

  He probably regretted the shoddy way he’d written about her, about all of them in his haphazard article.

  Moxie was a great believer in confession being good for the soul. Far be it from her then to deny the poor guy a shot at clearing his conscience and grabbing the small but satisfying slice of inner peace that would come with it.

  “Aw, c’mon. It’s not nothing,” she prodded. “I can tell, you’ve got something on your mind. You don’t have to be afraid to share it with me.”

  “Afraid?” The warmth in his eyes cooled considerably.

  Moxie had obviously hit a nerve.

  He reached for the key and started to turn it in the ignition. “Only thing I’m afraid of, sister—”

  “I am not your sister.” She had hit a nerve in him and he had hit one right back in her. “I’m not sure I want to be anybody’s sister, buddy.”

  She glanced up. Her entire family stood with their noses practically pressed against the glass door like puppies in a pet-store window.

  “I just wanted to make the point that—”

  “Can you make your point and drive at the same time?” She slumped down in her seat and motioned toward the road. “In case you’re forgotten, my father is very ill and you agreed to take him to the hospital.”

  “Agreed?” Billy J practically yelped the word, then fell into a short bout of shallow coughing before he managed to rage on. “That’s a pile of big, fat—”

  “Daddy.”

  “Parrot feathers,” he concluded. “You bargained for this service at the exorbitant rate of a full-page ad in his struggling weekly paper. I just hope he runs that paper better than he honors his commitment to drive me to the hospital.”

  “Is that what you’re waiting for?” She motioned to the road again. “You want payment in full up front before you’ll budge an inch?”

  “I wouldn’t be moved a fraction of a sliver of a centimeter for all the money in the world.”

  “Is that right?”

  “That’s right. I’m doing this because it’s the right thing to do.” He backed up that claim by pulling out of the parking spot at last, handling the steering wheel with deftness and power. When he stopped to shift gears, Hunt narrowed his eyes on her. “Which, by the way, was the same reason I got out of my car to see if you needed help when I found you seemingly stranded at that stop sign the other day.”

  She drew a breath, ready to give as good as she got. “What are you talking about?”

  “That day, I got out to help you and you drove off, then when we crossed paths later, you treated me like some kind of…” He searched for the right word.

  “Road Rage Pharaoh?” she suggested timidly.

  “What?”

  She touched her finger to her chin on the spot that correlated to the place on his face where he sported facial hair. “The second I saw you I thought you looked like the picture of Pharaoh from Sunday school.”

  “Yeah?” Hunt smiled slightly at that.

  She nodded.

  His smile started to broaden, then froze. “Was Pharaoh a good guy or a bad guy?”

  “Wel-l-l-l…” For a second she felt torn between giving him a quick Bible lesson and asking him outright why he didn’t know. The truth was, she wanted him to know. His little speech about taking them to the hospital because it was the right thing to do was all good and well but if he wasn’t a man of faith, she couldn’t imagine how he would fit into her world.

  “What are you two going on about?” Billy J slapped his hand on the back of the seat. “Pharaoh? Don’t you know your Bible, boy?”

  “I, um, I haven’t been in a Bible study in a few years.” He gave one of those looks that said he knew he should know more about the Bible and get to church more often. “I just wanted a little clarification.”

  “Only clarification you need is clarifying to me and my daughter whether or not you are ever going to get this car heading to the hospital.”

  “I am,” Hunt assured him, gunning the motor. “And if you don’t really want that ad—”

  “We don’t!” Billy J sputtered through another round of coughing.

  “The ad stays.” Moxie said it as much for her dad as she did for Hunt.

  “It won’t make a bit of difference.” Hunt looked only at her. “I’ll still drive you.”

  “I know,” she said quietly.

  He took off. When she had first asked him to take them, he had assured her he knew exactly where they were going. He proved it now by heading for the highway leading west out of Santa Sofia.

  Moxie eased her shoulders back against the black leather seat. The very act of leaving Santa Sofia, even under these shaky circumstances, seemed to lift a weight off her shoulders.

  The sleepy town, once a tourist haven, had been the only home she had known. It held all her happiest memories, and her most painful ones. Now it seemed only to hold problems. And her new family.

  They were one and the same.

  She put her head in her hands. “Why does everything always come back to them?”

  “Excuse me?” Hunt glanced her way.

  She shook her head. The man did not care enough about her family to get the details of their story right. He certainly didn’t want to spend the whole time he was doing her a favor hearing her go on and on about them.

  In fact, he’d heard quite enough out of her. She thought of their confrontation at the Bait Shack. Heat rose in her cheeks. It didn’t matter whether the ancient pharaohs were good or bad, this guy was definitely the good variety. She sighed, laid her head back then rolled it to the side to look at him. “Thanks.”

  “S’all right. I know you’re worried about your dad. I’ll get you to the hospital, no problem.”

  “Thanks for that, too.”

  “Too?”

  “The first thanks was for stopping to help me in my truck.”

  “Thanks for…the thanks.” He laughed.

  She liked it when he laughed. “And I promise, we will take out that full-page ad. Right, Daddy?”

  Z-zno-o-o-orp.

  A great, shuddering snore came from the backseat.

  “He fell asleep.” She looked at the man behind the wheel.

  “He’s sick.”

  “He must be awfully sick.” Once Lionel had released her dad and the old guy had acted his normal ornery self, she had put out of her mind how delicate her father’s condition might be. “He didn’t even hang in the argument long enough to give up and tell me the Weatherby family motto.”

  “Motto?”

  She swallowed hard to try to keep her tears at bay. “When the going gets tough, the Weatherbys go fishing.”

  He smiled. “I think I like your dad.”

  “Then do me a favor and get him to
the hospital as fast as you can.”

  Chapter Twelve

  “Where ya going?” Travis got out of his car and headed up the drive of the cottage on Dream Away Bay Court.

  “I thought we weren’t going to ask that question again until I faced my past and dealt with my old problems.” Jo did not break stride. She moved away from the house, one foot in front of the other, her head high and her eyes on her goal.

  “We agreed not to ask where our relationship was going.” He met her by the back bumper of her car, folded his arms and cocked his head. His tanned face tensed. “But I think ‘where ya going?’ is a perfectly valid question to be asking when I drop by and find you leaving your house with a suitcase in each hand.”

  She lifted the smaller piece of luggage and fit it into the trunk. “All my unfinished business is in Atlanta, Travis.”

  “Not all of it,” he reminded her, moving closer. He reached out to brush a lock of hair from her cheek. As his finger dragged along the sensitive skin, the soft blond curl wrapped around his knuckle.

  Jo inhaled sharp and quick at his touch. When he did not move his hand away, she lowered her lashes and murmured, “I thought as a minister you were on the side of helping people avoid temptation.”

  His gorgeous eyes sparkled. “Temptation?”

  “You standing here looking adorable, hinting that there’s something more between us and that I should stay and tend to it?” She gave his chest a light push as though shoving off from him, then bent at the knees to reach for the large suitcase still sitting in the drive.

  “I don’t know about adorable.” He smiled. “But I do know this.”

  She froze, knees bent, hand open above the luggage handle. “What? What do you know, Travis?”

  He leaned in again, whispering against her temple so that her blond hair trembled in front of her eyes. “That was no hint.”

  “No?” She turned her head only slightly, but that was enough to put her eyes just inches from his. “Then what was it?”

  “That was a promise.”

  Her heart pounded so hard she felt it in her knees, her throat, her fingertips and even her lips as she asked, “A promise of what?”

  “That there is something between us, Jo.” He did not move nearer but somehow his very words brought him so close she could feel the warmth of his breath. “Don’t forget you have unfinished business here, too.”

  Suddenly, warm breath or not, her skin tightened into a thousand tiny chill bumps. She grabbed the handle of her suitcase, gritted her teeth then hoisted it up. She wrestled it into the trunk, practically snorting from the mix of exertion and disenchantment. “Business.”

  His feet never moved. He angled his shoulder back and opened his arms in resignation. “Bad word choice.”

  “But exactly the right word for what stands between us and, well, finding the right words, as it were.” She readjusted the cases until they fit so snugly against each other that the drive wouldn’t budge them. “You were right about that. I have so much business to attend to, personal issues and professional, that I can’t do anything else until I’ve taken care of that.”

  He nodded. “When are you leaving?”

  “First thing in the morning.” She gave the back of her car a quick check to make sure she had everything. “I want to make sure Billy J is all right and not just run out on my mom and sisters.”

  “How long will you be gone?”

  “As long as it takes.” Jo reached for the trunk lid.

  Travis beat her to it.

  Their fingers brushed and his hand fit over hers.

  Jo looked up and met his steady, open gaze. She could not say for certain what she hoped to find. Pride in her decision? Encouragement? A silent plea for her not to go?

  No, none of those rightly captured the simple need in her.

  She wanted…

  He shut the trunk.

  She wanted him not to just look at her, but to see her. She wanted him to acknowledge how much it had taken for her to make this first step. How far she had come already toward becoming the person she could be.

  He studied her a moment.

  “Any other questions?” she asked, secretly hoping the next thing out of his mouth would tell her everything that she wanted to know.

  “Yes.”

  Ask me if I’ll miss you. Ask me if I will come back to you. Ask me if I love you.

  “Why are you doing this now?”

  Jo stood there, stunned.

  He might as well have asked, “Who on earth are you?”

  “Are you doing this because I told you to? Because you see it as a condition of you and I pursuing a relationship? Or are you—”

  “If you must know, I’m doing it now because…”

  Because she could not recognize herself in the picture of her family in the paper. Because while she had talked a big plan of helping local women, she didn’t have the emotional, financial or street credibility to do so with her life in shreds. Because she made footprints in the sand that vanished at the first gentle wash of an incoming wave.

  “I’m doing it now because today when Moxie got mad about everyone closing in on her at the Urgent Care Clinic, I realized that I was the one person who had no reason to actually be there. Nobody expected it of me, nobody needed anything from me.”

  “Jo, you have to realize how important a part you play in everyone’s—”

  “You don’t have to try to make me feel better about that, Travis.”

  “I don’t?” He didn’t even try to hide his relief or show any embarrassment over the fact that she’d caught him outright trying to mollify her.

  “No. Not anymore.” She looked at the cottage then at the car where she had just placed her suitcases, then at him. “As I stood there fighting off my inclination to feel sorry for myself I couldn’t help comparing my situation to others around me and realizing how blessed I am.”

  “Blessed?”

  “For all the times I have struggled with jealousy of my older and—in one form or another—of my baby sister, right now I have the one thing Kate has always wanted and Moxie is now demanding.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he admitted.

  “Freedom,” she said.

  “Freedom?” he asked, still openly confused by it all.

  “The choice about what I do with my life is in my own hands.” She held them out.

  He looked down at her open palms as though he almost expected to find the answers to his questions there.

  “Don’t you see, Travis? Right now, with Kate in no position to ditch Mom and finally promising not to pull the Scat-Kat Katie routine again and me without any commitments here, now is the time to do what I should have done months ago but was too self-involved to try.”

  “Go back to Atlanta?”

  “Atlanta is only the first step,” she told him, feeling more sure of herself than she had in a very long time. Sure enough to speak aloud the thing she planned, the thing she hoped for, the thing that would finally make her her own woman, capable of finally following her dreams instead of hiding behind her fears. “I’m going to stand on my own two feet.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Kate fell, exhausted, onto the comfy old overstuffed couch in the front room of the cottage and shut her eyes. Rest, not sleep, was what she was after.

  Rest from the prickly thread of tension that had run through her lifetime between herself and Jo and their mother. Rest from the new, even more prickly tension winding its way between all of them and Moxie. Rest from her worries about her commitment to stay in Santa Sofia and start a new business. Rest from the back-and-forth of her emotions about Vince and their future.

  Will he ask me, won’t he ask me? She felt that a ten-year-old with her first crush, plucking petals from a daisy, had a better chance of discerning a useful answer than she did. Maybe if she asked him delicately? Wheedled him? Manipulated him ever so slightly and in the sweetest, most well-intentioned way? Or out-and-out issued
him an ultimatum?

  No. She knew better than that. She had a model for what it meant to love one another. Opening her eyes, she reached for her mother’s Bible, which she kept on the table to read from each evening. The well-worn book fell open to the New Testament and Kate only had to flip a few pages to find 1 Corinthians, Chapter 13.

  “Love is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It is not proud. It is not rude. It is not self-seeking.” That pretty much gave Kate her answer about trying to maneuver a proposal from Vince.

  She read on. “It is not easily angered. It keeps no record of wrongs.”

  No record of wrongs. How much stronger, deeper, much more meaningful would all her relationships be if she applied that tenet to them? She thought of how she had punished herself since childhood for feeling she had not done enough to rescue Molly Christina. Of how Jo could never let go of her anger and her sense of being wronged and unloved because their father had left her behind and their mother and Kate had not needed her enough.

  “Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.” Kate looked up. Protects, trusts, hopes, perseveres. Were those words anyone would use to describe good ol’ Scat-Kat Kate over the years? Hardly.

  She read on silently until she came to the conclusion of the chapter. “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

  Even as she took comfort in the message, her thoughts tumbled over one another. So much had happened since they moved down here, yet so little had changed.

  She glanced around the room that remained much as it had all those years ago when they came here for vacation. The pattern on the floral couch where she now sat had faded and worn almost threadbare in spots. The coffee table had a few more nicks in the edge and one of the legs wobbled if you put too much weight on that side. The coarse plaid upholstery, earth tones circa 1974, of the couch across the coffee table showed little sign of age. That, in and of itself, dated the thing. The fabric must have been made from some industrial strength synthetic not unlike the polyester pants suits her mom kept hanging in the closet, “just in case they come back in style some day.”