Barefoot Brides

by Annie Jones

  “Not at all.” Jo glanced up at Travis. “In fact, I find it very touching and a little sad.”

  “Relying on prayer, sad?” the man asked, his hackles up.

  “No, no!” Jo held her hands out to quell his uneasiness. “The way Mike has tried to manipulate you into making a decision on this house based on trickery and tweaks.”

  “Whatery and what?” Travis looked down at her.

  “I’ll explain it all later,” she whispered to him, then turned to the couple, her hand extended. “I’m Jo Cromwell. I am the majority owner and agent of record on this property.”

  “You are very good at what you do,” Travis said an hour later as he helped her go through the house, turning off lights and making notes of what furnishings they needed to collect and return before they headed back to Santa Sofia tomorrow.

  “Thank you for excusing yourself while we dealt with the money issues, class act all the way.” She handed him the box they would need to lock up when they finished up. “Even when the man realized you looked familiar and decided you must have gone to high school with his older brother!”

  “Happens more often than you might think.” He picked up her satchel in his free hand. “I’ve been out of the sportscasting public eye for long enough that people assume we have some kind of mundane personal connection when they can’t quite place my face.”

  “I’d like you to place your face—” she went all coy and flirty as she gave her shoulders a waggle and tapped her index finger to her cheek “—right here.”

  “Actually, I was hoping for a less mundane kind of personal connection,” he teased.

  She turned to scold him and he leaned in and gave her a kiss on the lips. Nothing steamy enough to make him drop the lock or the satchel, but nice all the same.

  “Thank you,” she murmured.

  “For a kiss? It was nothing. Feel free to ask me for one anytime.” He grinned.

  He had such a terrific grin. It complemented his sun-streaked hair and tanned face, giving him the hint of perpetual boyish charm, but in no way took away from the quiet strength of his masculine appeal.

  “Not for the kiss, for the kick in the seat that got me back here.”

  “Kick in the seat? I think I’d have remembered if I’d done that.”

  “Speaking metaphorically.” She laughed and took one look around. They had agreed to wait until Mike showed up with the last bits of the cake—planned to make the interested buyers think the open house had been well attended—but now, she thought maybe it would be better if they just let it go. “You gave me the motivation I needed to come back here and deal with all this. I guess that’s just part of what you do as a man of the cloth?”

  “It can be. Only I didn’t do it as a man of the cloth.”

  “No?”

  “I did it as a man.” He set the satchel down and the lock on top of it, then stood up straight, his gaze on her face the whole time. “A man who very much wanted the woman he loved to be happy.”

  “I am hap—Did you say the woman he loved?”

  He smiled.

  She went to him. If she had put her shoes back on instead of leaving them lying in the middle of the front room, she’d have been tall enough to place her hands on his shoulders and look into his eyes. Instead, she flattened her palms on his chest and looked up at him. “Say it again.”

  “I love you, Jo.”

  Her heart thudded in her ears. She could barely breathe. “You do?”

  “That’s why I came here.”

  “It is?”

  “Your mom and sisters may tell you at some point that it was because they put the idea in my head or that I came to tell you some good news that they obviously could have given you over the phone.”

  “Mom? What?” She tried to make sense of that last bit.

  “Never mind. I’ll tell you about that over dinner. It can wait, but this can’t.” He dropped to one knee before her.

  Suddenly she was very glad to have discarded her shoes. If she had had them on, she’d have surely fallen off them right then and probably sprained both her ankles in the process.

  “Travis! You don’t mean…I thought you’d want some kind of proof that I had dealt with all my issues and—”

  He put his finger to her lips. “The fact that you came here. The fact that you confronted your past, that you did it even though I knew you didn’t want to, told me everything I needed to know. You say I always saw you, Jo. The truth is you always showed me who you were, from the first day we met when you greeted me with humor despite the pain of your sprained ankle. When your heart went out to the people who came in and out of the Wayside Chapel.” He smiled up at her. “When you took charge of that deal just now and didn’t care about hanging around to rub Mike Powers’s nose in having caught him trying to skim whatever extra money he could off the sale of this place.”

  “Oh, Travis.” She ran her fingers along his collar.

  He reached into his pocket and produced a simple but elegant diamond ring. “Jo, will you be my wife?”

  Tears flooded her eyes. “Really?”

  He laughed. “Yes, really.”

  “Then…yes. Really.” She threw her arms around his neck. “I’ll be your wife, Travis. And your helpmate and—”

  He kissed her before she went down the whole list and when he looked into her eyes again, he slid the ring on her finger.

  She took a second to admire it. “It’s perfect.”

  “You’re perfect,” he murmured into her hair.

  “Far from it, and don’t you forget it,” she warned.

  He laughed and opened his mouth to say something but another man’s voice intruded.

  “What’s going on here? Jo? Who is this? Where are—”

  “The buyers have already gone, Mike.” Jo stepped away from Travis, bent at the knees and took up her satchel and lock. “You’ll have the contract for the house on your desk in the morning.”

  “Contract? Buyers? I don’t…”

  Jo could have launched into a long tirade telling the man just what she thought of him and his sneaky tactics. But she had just gotten engaged to the most wonderful man she knew and she didn’t want to waste another fraction of her energy on Mike Powers ever again.

  She headed for the door and when she got to it, and Mike, standing there with his partially eaten cake in hand, she paused. For a split second she thought about pushing the mess of icing and crumbs into his expensive blue suit but she couldn’t do it.

  “Here’s the lock. Please make sure it’s on the door when you leave. Remember if anything is missing or damaged Powers Realty will still be responsible.” She pressed the black box into his hand and walked past.

  “Nice to meet you.” Travis walked out of the door behind her.

  It wasn’t until her bare feet hit the concrete that she remembered her shoes and she turned to rush back to get them. “Mike, be careful walking with that sheet cake, there’s—”

  Too late. He found the shoes, tripped over them and probably trying to keep the cake from ruining his suit, raised it up and caused it to go sliding down on top of his expertly coiffed head.

  She tried to help him get cleaned up but he ordered her out of the house.

  “I actually feel kind of bad about that,” Jo told her husband-to-be—husband-to-be, what a wonderful phrase—as they walked to their cars.

  “I don’t know. Maybe the guy had it coming.”

  “What?” As she strode along she tried to match his gait, her shoes dangling from her fingers. “You’re a minister, I thought you’d be more forgiving than that.”

  “Forgiving, sure. But the guy was a major creep and a cheat. So he ended up with a little cake on his head.”

  “Don’t go there.” She stopped and held up her hand to try to prevent him from making the awful pun.

  “Guess you could say he got his just deserts.”

  “You went there. I can’t believe it.”

  “Hey.” He bent down and gave h
er a kiss on the nose. “Nobody’s perfect. Now let’s go out to dinner and celebrate. I have some news to tell you before you can call your mom and sisters.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The bell over the door of the Sun Times hadn’t stopped jangling before Peg called out, “Hey, Moxie! Heard the big news about your sister!”

  “Which one?”

  “The one who just got engaged.”

  “Again, I have to ask—which sister who just got engaged?”

  “Are you saying that Jo…?”

  “The only other sister that I have—that I know of!”

  “And Travis?”

  “Yep.”

  “When?”

  “Same day. Different city.”

  “Jo and Travis are moving to Atlanta?”

  “No, she was there on business and when Mom and I asked him to go up there to tell her about Kate and Vince, well…”

  “Ahh. Young love.” Peg looked off into the far unseen and sighed.

  Moxie laughed at her overplayed reaction. “I’m so glad you’re back at work, Peg.”

  “Thanks, not just for saying that but for helping facilitate it.”

  Hunt had welcomed the whole staff back to their positions even though he really needed to cut jobs to give the budget a jump start. When two part-timers chose not to return in favor of finding work elsewhere, he had promised them if the paper ever had more work than they could handle, he’d ask them first if they wanted to pick up a few spare dollars. “It’s all Hunt.”

  Peg shook her head. “The guy had potential. I’ll grant you that but you know what they say—behind every great man there’s a woman.”

  “Well, if you see the woman behind Hunt,” Moxie said in her own pointed way of distancing herself from Peg’s implication that Moxie was that woman, “tell her to give him a shove in my direction. I need to talk to him.”

  “Uh-huh.” Peg’s incredulity showed in the quirk of her lips, the lift of her eyebrow and the sharp, sure snorting quality of her harrumph. “You had to come through the newspaper office to talk to the man?”

  “About newspaper business, I do.” She dug into the backpack she’d hauled in with her and withdrew a yellow legal pad. “I’ve come by to run a For Rent ad on the house on Dream Away Bay Court now that Gentry and Pera have decided to head to Miami.”

  “He took the job then?” Santa Sofia had no secrets, it seemed. “How’s Vince taking the moving plans?”

  “Better than he’s taking having to cope with wedding plans.” Moxie laughed. “He’s campaigning for an elopement.”

  “No way!”

  “I know! They wait more than twenty years and he thinks Kate will settle for anything less than the fancy white dress and all the guests? I don’t think so.”

  Peg rolled her eyes in a way that conveyed the general sentiment women feel when they give a weary exhale and say, “Men!”

  “About that ad.” Moxie dived back into her backpack to try to find a pen.

  “You don’t have to see Hunt for that, you know. I can take the info and turn it in for you. We have forms up here and everything.”

  Moxie couldn’t decide if Peg sounded coy or smug or amused. Maybe some combination of the three? It didn’t matter, too much. In a town with no secrets, little things like people making conjectures about your love life could have some effect on your personal life, or lack of one. She glanced at the sign Never Assume and sighed. Apparently that only applied to hard news stories, not to the feasibly juicy personal-interest kind.

  “I am well aware of the procedure for running an ad,” she reminded Peg in her best businesswoman’s voice. “This is what I want to see Hunt about.”

  She flashed the yellow legal pad filled with her handwriting.

  “A manifesto for saving the Sun Times?”

  “Sorry, no.” Moxie’s shoulders slumped a bit. She really hadn’t come up with any substantive suggestions on that front, other than working to make Hunt a bigger part of the Santa Sofia community. “But this won’t hurt. It’s an exclusive.”

  “Wow. An exclusive! On what?”

  “Only the inside story with all the details announcing a very much anticipated pair of engagements.”

  “Whoa, that is hot stuff.” Peg gave a giggle and a wink. “The only thing I can imagine would make it more of a story would be if all three sisters had such an announcement.”

  “Stop it, Peg, I’ve only known the man a short time.”

  “Sure. Too soon for rings and things.” She plucked a form from the basket on the counter by the opening in the wall. “But not too soon to know you want the rings and the things.”

  “Peg! That’s not the kind of thing you should go around saying.”

  She held her hands out to emphasize her stationary position at the receptionist area. “I’m not going around anywhere.”

  “You don’t have to. Everyone in town eventually comes around to you.” Moxie took the form and tucked it in her bag to fill out later. “Hunt and I are just—”

  “Perfect for each other.”

  “Peg!”

  “Oh, Moxie, don’t let’s be childish. You’re over thirty…”

  “Just thirty,” Moxie corrected.

  “You’ve had a cake with thirty candles?”

  “Um, yes.”

  “Like I was saying, you’re over thirty. Old enough to know what you want. And what you don’t want. You dated Lionel for how long?”

  “Too long.”

  “Exactly. But y’all never made that leap because you both knew.”

  “He proposed plenty.”

  “A man only keeps proposing when he keeps getting turned down because he knows he will be turned down.”

  That sure sounded like Lionel. Moxie conceded that with a tilt of her head.

  “Now you’ve met this man and something in you knows.”

  “Knows what?” Hunt came strolling up behind Peg, seemingly unaware of Moxie standing on the other side of the wall opening.

  “I’m glad you’re here, Mr. Editor,” Peg chirped as she scooted herself to one side to give him a glimpse out the receptionist’s window. “Have we got a scoop for you.”

  Hunt ducked down to look. When he saw Moxie, his whole face lit up. “Hey!”

  You just know.

  Moxie couldn’t contain her own smile, or her racing pulse or the heat rising in her cheeks. She gave him a finger-wriggling wave. “Hi.”

  “What’s the big scoop? Don’t tell me…let me guess.” He held his hands up to stop her then used them to pan the breadth of an invisible headline unfurling before him. “World Energy Crisis Resolved By Discovery of Limitless Oil Reserves Found in Kitchen of Billy J’s Bait Shack Seafood Buffet.”

  Moxie giggled. “This is bigger than that!”

  “Bigger than a world crisis?”

  “The world will always be struggling, Hunt. Haven’t you read your Bible? That’s hardly news.” She shook her head then lifted up the pad filled with the information she’d meticulously copied from her sisters. “But love triumphing over adversity and human shortcomings? Now that’s news that sells papers.”

  “Well, come on back and tell me about it. We need to sell all the papers we can.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “Two weddings?” Hunt asked.

  “Two engagements. There’s a difference.”

  “Technically, yes, I suppose, but you expect them both to end in weddings, right?”

  “No, I expect them to culminate in the beginnings of two wonderful marriages,” Moxie said with a smile.

  “Right.”

  “But this story is just to announce the engagements,” she explained. “After the weddings, you can run a separate story.”

  He nodded. “Are these expected to be long engagements?”

  His reference made her realize he didn’t want to commit to a story for a newspaper with an uncertain fate.

  “Things not going any better for the Sun Times?”

  “
Despite your best efforts to help me integrate into the community, which resulted in my broadening my résumé in ways I’d never anticipated, including bingo calling at the Senior Citizens’ Center, judging a sand castle building contest for middle schoolers and drinking so much sweet tea I dream of surfing on the stuff—”

  “People just don’t understand how much you suffer for your work,” she teased.

  “Despite all that, no, things are not much better for the Sun Times. Subscriptions are up slightly and we’ve had some new advertisers, but we’ve lost some, too.”

  “I’ve been busy with Dad being sick, but now that he’s on the mend, I can put in a good word with those potential accounts if you think it will help.”

  “Thanks, but I can do my own sales. I want to do my own sales.”

  “Good.” She liked knowing he wanted to get out and circulate among the people of the town she loved. This hands-on approach to running the newspaper could go a long way toward the big plan to keep it solvent. “That’s a positive public-relations move for you.”

  “You mean for the Sun Times,” he corrected.

  “When will you get it through your head that in a town this small, businesses and endeavors are so intertwined with the people who run them that they cannot be separated or compartmentalized?” She quirked a brow. “My dad is the Bait Shack. Travis is the Wayside Chapel. Lionel and his dad before him are the Urgent Care Clinic.”

  “So you’re saying that making associations…friendships, really, are what keeps small towns afloat?”

  “One of the things, yes.”

  He shook his head. “That’s not the Reinhardt Media way.”

  “Are you Reinhardt Media?”

  His gaze connected with hers.

  “The way my dad is what he does? The way Travis is? If you stopped working for your family business, operating the Reinhardt way, would the corporate machine throw a cog?”

  She could practically see his mental process as he turned that thought over once, then again.