by Annie Jones
“What?”
She smiled, quite pleased with herself that she had, at that instant, done a little problem solving of her own and had a solution in mind that just might turn things around. “It’s a Southern thing.”
“Are you saying they won’t take ads out with me because I’m a Yankee?”
Moxie laughed. “To quote someone I have recently come to admire, it’s not that simple.”
“You admire me?”
“Better than that,” she replied. “I see potential in you.”
“To do what?”
“Grow up to be like me.” She gave him a pat on the arm and turned to head toward the lobby. “If you ever hope to accomplish that and problem solve about how to be the kind of paper your staff and this town needs, not to mention put yourself in good stead with the local advertisers, you have to start where I did.”
“The Cromwells?” He took a tentative step behind her.
“No, silly.” She gave him a look over her shoulder, reached for the door and swung it open for him to pass through. “Billy J’s Bait Shack Seafood Buffet. Where you are going to get a lesson in service that will serve you well for the rest of your life.”
Chapter Sixteen
Jo stepped through the door of Mike Powers Realty, shut her eyes and sighed. It felt like slipping into a pair of custom-fit ridiculously high-priced Italian pumps. It pinched a little and had almost no practical application in her real life, but, man, she looked great doing it.
“Jo!”
“You’re back!”
“Love your hair short like that!”
“Florida living looks good on you, girl!”
Jo acknowledged every greeting and comment but she did not let them deter her from her objective. She had come here to clean up the mess she’d made of her finances in the name of ambition. There was no way to do that without directly confronting…
“Jo Cromwell, Super Realtor!”
“Mike?” She jerked to a halt.
“The prodigal has returned.”
Prodigal? Jo hugged her handbag close, her shoulders high. She took a step back. Is that what Mike thought of her? That she had run off to Florida to squander money and misbehave, leaving him and everyone here to take up the slack at work? That was so far from the truth she didn’t know what to say, except, “I’m hardly a prodigal.”
“Oh? You are all churchy, though. Prodigal, that’s from the Bible, right?”
“Yes, but…”
“I knew it. I’ve sat through a few Sunday-school classes in my life. After taking off and living it up for a while, when the prodigal came back, everybody celebrated!”
“Well, not everybody celebrated,” she corrected him, thinking of the son who had held a grudge against his returning brother. Is that how Mike felt? Did he really believe she had gone off to “live it up”? She opened her mouth to ask him directly, but he had stopped listening to anything but the bark of his own orders.
“Kelley, order pizza!” He stabbed a finger in the direction of his administrative assistant. Then twisted around to the row of desks in the large main office. “Brittney S.? Brittney B.?”
“Yes, sir!” Two almost indistinguishable twenty-somethings jumped up from their seats. Their eager eyes fixed on the charismatic businessman who signed their paychecks. They didn’t even try to hide the fact that they thought Mike “hung the moon”—as Dodie would say to describe that level of blatant adoration.
“Call Beakman’s Bakery and order a great big chocolate…” He turned and looked at Jo questioningly.
Jo tried to show him she had no idea what he was actually asking her by raising her hands and shaking her head.
“Right! Too messy.” He turned to the girls again. “Yellow cake, white icing. A big one.” He spread his hands apart to indicate the proper size. “Sheet cake.”
The girls nodded.
One paused and turned to look at him with her purse raised.
“Please don’t spend a dime for my sake,” Jo urged Mike, even though her message was aimed at the girl. Don’t let this slick-talking man push you into putting the cost of this totally unwarranted celebration on your credit card with the promise of reimbursement at a later date. “I’d feel terrible knowing anyone had used her expense account on my account.”
Mike paused. His cool expression seemed to hide a thought process that Jo could not quite discern.
Had he caught on that she was projecting her own issues about how he had manipulated her into financing their supposedly “joint” business venture onto the young women? Or maybe he was calculating how much it would cost compared to how much he expected to gain from whatever scheme he had brewing behind that smooth, flawless smile of his.
“Get some money out of petty cash.” He pointed to his administrative assistant’s impressive desk, which sat just outside his office door.
Brittney S. followed through on Mike’s directive and reported to his assistant with her hand out.
“Don’t skimp,” he told the woman looking to him for confirmation that he genuinely meant for her to dole out cold, hard cash. “Oh, and Brittney?”
“Yes?” Both girls looked up.
“Make sure they write on top of it in great big swirly letters.” He raised his hands, fingers spread wide and wriggling to emphasize just how expansive and just how swirly he wanted the printing on the cake. “Welcome Home, Jo!”
“Home?” Jo whispered. She had lived in Atlanta since she graduated from college but she did not think she had ever thought of it as home. She certainly would never describe this office with that term. Mike, of all people, knew that.
Jo put her hands on her hips. “Why are you doing this?”
“Because we missed you.” He smiled, his arms still extended. “Can’t an old friend do a little something special to show how much he missed you and, uh, to say ‘good to see you, no hard feelings’?”
Jo shook her head. She wanted to tell him that standing there like that with his perfect brown hair and pearly white teeth and power-red tie he looked more like a smarmy game-show host than a sincere old friend. Instead, she stood her ground and insisted, “If you really want to show me how much you missed me, cake is not the way to do it.”
“It’s not?”
“You know it’s not.”
The Brittneys came hurrying back toward him, cash in hand. They looked so pleased and so eager to please the charismatic and commanding Mike Powers.
Jo remembered how that felt. Felt. Past tense. Standing here now, she no longer had even an inkling of those old feelings. “If you really want to make amends with me, you can start by putting your intentions in something more permanent than icing.”
“Jo, I don’t…I hope you don’t think…There’s no need for that kind of…” He made a series of indefinite gestures to accompany his incomplete thoughts. Then he paused, plastered his practically patented Mike Powers supersalesman grin on his face and cocked his head.
Jo did not budge.
Still smiling, he called out to the girls without taking his eyes off Jo. “Have them put the company logo on that cake, okay?”
“Instead of Welcome Home, Jo?”
“With Welcome Home, Jo.” His gaze never left Jo’s face but some of the falseness fell away from his expression as he said, “Might as well have something we can write off as a business expense. If I like the way this looks, I can use one like it at my next open house. Just some handy knife work and Welcome Home, Jo becomes just plain Welcome Home.”
That was more like the Mike she knew. “I’m not coming home, Mike. Atlanta is no longer my home. I just came back to deal with some unfinished business here.”
“Oh?”
“So this whole cake idea—”
“I like that. A cake that says Welcome Home at every open house.” Mike snapped his fingers at the employee nearest to the door and shouted, “Go after them! Don’t have Jo put on the cake. Have the logo the full size of the cake but keep Welcome Home in swirled scri
pt.”
“Mike, this isn’t necessary.”
“No, but it’s a nice touch for an open house, don’t you think? Especially a big one like we have coming up Sunday afternoon.” He motioned toward her, then pointed to himself, then her again.
“We? I’ve been out of state for the past two…” She jerked her head up. “What house are you showing Sunday afternoon?”
“Oh, I’m not showing a house. You are.”
“You can’t have scheduled me to show a house this Sunday. Until I called an hour ago and said I was coming in, you thought I was in Florida!”
“Actually I had planned to let the Brittneys take it, but now that you’re back, I think you should do the honors, don’t you?”
“Honors?” Jo could hardly think of a word less suited to this situation. “There is nothing honorable about all this, Mike. I come back to town to try to get my life in order and minutes after I walk through the door you expect me to start working for you again?”
He tipped his hand to acknowledge her skepticism. “You’re not working just for me. You stand to benefit from this open house, too, in theory. Not that anyone even comes by for a lookie-loo on that place anymore…”
“What place, Mike? Which house are you talking about?”
“Ours, of course.”
“Ours?”
“Yeah, you know, the one we bought as partners?”
“I know which house you’re talking about.” She should—it had practically brought her to the brink of bankruptcy and now it threatened the future she was trying to forge in Santa Sofia. “It’s the partnership angle I’m a little hazy on.”
“That was always our deal, right from the git-go.”
“Our deal done on my money,” she reminded him, giving him her most withering glare.
“Like I said, partners.” He gave her a pat and turned away. “Let me know when the cake gets here.”
“Mike!” Jo had a very bad feeling about all of this. She hadn’t even been by the house yet. She had no idea what kind of shape it was in. “I don’t want cake!”
“Why not?”
Because she wanted answers. “Well, for starters I thought you just said you wanted it for Sunday when I’m apparently showing my house.”
“Our house.”
Jo gritted her teeth. Her whole life people had looked past her and done end runs around her as though she did not even matter. She had let that dominate her decisions until she had backed herself into a corner. She had come back here to bust out of that corner and that old way of thinking. She might as well start now. “My house, Mike.”
“Jo, let’s be reasonable about this.”
“Reasonable? You want reason when you’re the one holding an open house for a property that isn’t even yours to sell for potential buyers that don’t even seem to exist?”
“Well, now, a little dose of reality here, Jo. You did go off and leave the place in a pretty rough state.”
Actually the place had left her in a pretty rough state.
“If you’ve really come here to see about unfinished business, maybe you should start by putting the finishing touches on that house.”
She started to protest then caught herself. All this time she had fretted and stewed about all the money she still owed, but she hadn’t given much thought to the money she already had invested—or the money she might recoup if she actually could sell that place. Maybe Mike had done her a favor by allowing the Brittneys to practice holding open houses with her property. The marketing part was done, all she had to do was…everything else.
“Maybe I’d better get over there as soon as possible. I have a whole lot of work to do before Sunday afternoon.”
“That’s the spirit.” He gave her a friendly punch in the arm. “When life gives you lemons, make hay while the sun shines.”
He got her to laugh, which she knew was his goal all along. Jo always went all gushy for a guy who made her laugh. The image of Travis flashed through her mind, all sun-kissed and…kissable.
She wondered what he was doing right now and if he missed her. Probably not. He was a busy man.
“Anyway, like you said, lot of work to do before Sunday.” Mike’s voice intruded on her thoughts. “There’s a term for it. C’mon, you know. Use the day? It’s in the Bible.”
“Use the day? In the Bible?”
Mike had never shown any interest in her faith before and now he’d brought it up a couple of times. While she wanted to ask him about that, her mind had already rushed ahead trying to piece together what he meant by “use the day.” “I think the verse you’re thinking of is—”
“Carpe diem.”
“Mike, that’s not in the Bible.”
“Seize the day!” He appeared so proud of himself. Too proud to let a little thing like being wrong deter him.
“That’s Latin.”
“Yeah, yeah. Like the Bible.”
“No. Latin like…” Jo jerked her head up. If she had been in a comic strip, a lightbulb would have appeared over her head. “Like something else you liked to quote whenever I questioned your methods of selling house. Caveat emptor.”
“Caveat? Naw.” He tugged on her elbow to direct her into his spacious office. “If I said that, I’m sure I meant it as a joke, Jo.”
“It’s not an expression intended as a joke, Mike. It’s intended as a warning.” She reluctantly went along with his gentle urging to move into a private space.
How could she have worked for this man? How could she have gone into deal after deal with him, buying and reselling houses? How could she have had a crush on a man like Mike, then think a man like Travis could love her?
He shut the office door. “It’s intended as a reminder, Jo. That each man—or woman—is responsible for his or her own choices.”
She froze, unable to argue with that assessment.
“You think I’m too harsh?” he asked.
“No.” She turned to face him. “I think I should have listened to your…reminder before I stretched my finances to the limit on my last house.”
“Jo…how can I help?”
“What?”
He moved to his desk, pulled open a drawer and took out his company checkbook. “How ’bout I make this month’s mortgage payment?”
The moment the offer left his lips Jo felt lighter. The tightness in her chest eased. She dropped into the chair opposite the desk and sighed. It wasn’t a long-term solution but it would buy her enough time and reduce her stress enough to allow her to do as Travis had advised—to take responsibility for her own actions.
“You…you’d do that?”
Not Kate, not her mother, not even Travis had offered Jo anything so concrete, so pragmatic so…helpful.
She looked up at the man in the white shirt and red tie sitting across from her with a black-and-gold pen poised over a blank check.
“But why, Mike?”
“Because I missed you?” he asked, a little too smoothly.
A few months ago that would have been enough for Jo. Today she shook her head. “You’ve watched me struggle with this house through nightmarish renovations, plummeting market values and personal crisis. Until this moment, you never offered to help before. Why now?”
He folded his hands on the open checkbook and looked her right in the eyes. “Because you always seemed to have a handle on everything, Jo. You made everything look so effortless, so…”
“Perfect,” she whispered.
“Yeah. Perfect.”
She clenched her teeth. She had spent so much of her life striving for just that. To do all the right things. To look just the right way. To be somebody worthy of being loved.
“Jo, until this very moment, as you put it, I never worried about you. I never thought I had to, you know, give you a second thought.”
“Nobody does.” Except…maybe…Travis.
“I never did because I always had so much confidence in you. I always knew you’d be all right because…you’re you.”
“Thank you, Mike. You don’t know what that means to me,” she said softly. “If you can help with that payment, I’ll put all my energy into getting that house sold. You won’t be disappointed in me.”
“I know I won’t, Jo. I know I won’t.”
Chapter Seventeen
Kate flipped up the collar of her crisp pink-and-blue print shirt then ruffled her hand through her shaggy bangs to give them a carefree tousled look. She stepped back to check out her image in the full-length mirror inside the door of the closet under the stairs. She pursed her lips, frowned then smoothed down both her collar and her thick, sun-streaked brown hair.
“Goodness, child, you act as nervous as a teenager going out on her first babysitting job.” Dodie settled into the plaid couch in the front room of the cottage and propped her stockinged feet up on the beat-up old coffee table. “Want Mama to sit by the phone in case you need to call for backup?”
Dodie was just having a little fun, of course. Still, it did give Kate some measure of comfort knowing that while Jo was in Atlanta, Moxie was working at the Bait Shack and Gentry and Pera were in Miami, there would be a trusted voice of experience nearby she could call on if she got overwhelmed. Not overwhelmed by caring for Fabbie, but by her own feelings for Vince.
Vince. Just standing here trying to decide what to wear to spend the evening with him reduced her to a tangle of twitchy nerves and iffy emotions. She fussed with her collar again, frustrated by the way it seemed to mimic her erratic emotions. Up. Down. Out of control.
She heaved a sigh and went back to working with the stiff fabric. “I so want this to go well, Mom. It will be the first time Vince and I have done anything even remotely domestic since the days when Gentry was a kid and we took him on outings.”
“You’ll do fine. Now scoot.”
“If only I knew—”
“Uh-uh! No, ma’am. No ‘if onlys’ allowed in this household!” Dodie held one finger up to cut Kate off sternly. “Nobody ever built a solid bond or a solid future on ‘if only.’ You want to nurture a relationship with Vince Merchant, those are two words you have to strike from your vocabulary right now, Scat-Kat Katie.”