Barefoot Brides (5 page)

“I was raised here. It is not possible for you to have gotten here before me.”

He stared at her for a moment then looked away and groaned. “You're the woman who was blocking the road.”

“I wasn't blocking anything. You could have gone around me. Other people went around me.”

“Other people?” He tipped his head as if he had to think about that a moment. “Had to go around you? Is that like a thing with you? You have issues sharing space with, oh, say, the rest of the people on the planet?”

Vince snickered.

Moxie tensed. Any other day if the man had asked any other question she'd have backed down. Moxie talked a big game in her head but, mostly, she backed down. That's why her bold and brassy new family's, well, boldness and brassiness had such an effect on her. She didn't have the wherewithal to stand up to them. To stand up for herself.

Stop playing it safe.
Jo's words came back to her.

Moxie had promised herself she would set boundaries and she didn't see any reason not to start with this stranger barging in on her home turf demanding she be the one to move aside.

He took a step.

She blocked him.

He stepped to the side away from where she had moved.

She followed suit. When this kind of thing happened accidentally in the narrow passages between these tables, someone—usually Billy J himself—would holler out, “Hey, no dancing on dining floor, we're a wholesome establishment, y'all!” Today, no one said a word.

But everybody watched.

They probably made quite a sight, too. Moxie with her cap and flip-flops looking like a fresh-faced surfer girl who wasn't afraid of the big waves or an overgrown bossy boy. Only this wasn't a
boy.

One look at him told anyone with eyes that the man who had jangled her down to her very last nerve was all man. Older than her, but not by much. Taller, too. Just a few inches, not enough to make it difficult for her to hold his gaze with hers.

His dark gaze. His deep gaze. His “sleepy-lidded, superconfident but just might break into a smile that would make his brown eyes sparkle” gaze.

Moxie wavered.

He started to step around her again.

She rallied back to reality and cut him off.

He sighed. “If you'll just step aside, I'd like to find a seat before my arteries close up from sheer proximity to this stuff.”

“I don't think so.” She meant she wasn't stepping aside, but if he took it as a staunch defense of her daddy's fine food fare, then so be it.

“Okay, I guess here is as good a place as any to get a jump start on my first heart attack.” He slid onto the bench directly across from Vince.

Directly over the boundary she had just tried to set. “Hey! No way. Uh-uh. Don't even try to sit there, buddy.”

“Too late. Not only have I tried it. I have succeeded.” He snapped his napkin and laid it across his knees.

“Oh, no. No.” She started to reach for the white paper resting on top of the faded denim of his jeans, then caught herself. “You can't stay here.”

“Who says I can't?”

“I do!” She put her hand on her chest. “
I
say you can't.”

“And you are?”

“The person about this close to calling the police to have you forcibly removed from this place.”

“Hmm.” He nodded at her then shook his head slightly, the way a dog shakes his head to get rid of slobber. Then he calmly fixed his gaze on Vince and offered another instinctive reaction without regard to who might be present to suffer the consequences. He tossed off that look that all males seem capable of when they think a female is doing something irrational, ridiculous or, well, typically female.

Vince recognized it right away. He must have, because he extended his hand in a show of instant kinship and said, “Vince Merchant. Feel free to sit and eat as much as you can in peace before the cops show up.”

“Don't fraternize with him, Vince. He's, like, the enemy. The…the…interloper. The…the…”

“New editor of the
Santa Sofia Sun Times.
” The man grasped Vince's hand and gave it a firm shake, but those dark eyes, dancing with amusement, focused solely on her as he said, “R. Hunt Diamante.”

“You…are?” Moxie sank down to sit on the bench again, a little stunned.

“Almost nobody actually calls me ‘R.'” He grinned.

A totally gorgeous, I-know-I-have-the-upper-hand kind of grin that, despite the sheer cockiness of it, still charmed her enough that she could hardly form a complete thought, much less sentence.

Her stalker, Road Rage Pharaoh, this adorable man with the mesmerizing eyes, they were all the same guy. R. Hunt Diamante. The new editor. The guy who called her Maxine! The man she was going to give her card and a piece of her mind.

Just that fast she snapped to her senses, pulled her shoulders up and stabbed her finger in his direction. “You are just the guy I am looking for.”

“M
ay not be much of a journalist, but you've got to respect his style.” Vince chuckled softly as he leaned against the doorway of her mostly empty office in the Urgent Care Clinic. He'd come by a little early to pick up Kate from her shift and had invited her to dinner.

Though she had closed her practice in Atlanta, signed the contracts and written the check to make herself a partner in the lone emergency medical facility in town, Kate had not started to work at the place full-time. With possible surgeries pending, it seemed best to only keep part-time hours for a while. So she just filled in now and then for Lionel or the residents from the hospital in nearby Waverly, earning a few extra bucks.

“You should have seen the look on Moxie's face.” Vince shook his head, still smiling. “I love your little sister like, well, a little sister, but when she gets worked up over something—or worked up over almost nothing at all, like today—she is her father's daughter. Billy J's daughter, I mean.”

Kate nodded.
Moxie. Sister. Billy J.
She pretended it all registered, when in fact she used the time he was talking to study the deep lines fanning out from the corners of Vince's compelling eyes.

She had seen the beginnings of those lines nearly twenty years ago when they had first fallen in love. She found it funny in a not-laugh-out-loud, not-quite-peculiar way to see the way time had treated the man without the benefit of experiencing all that time with him. It had the effect of a before-and-after photo, or maybe more like when a favorite old TV show from childhood gathered the “old gang” for a reunion show.

She hated those shows. She hated the idea of having lost out on so much time then being expected to pick up and care about those characters again as if they had always been there in TV Land going on with their lives. But she fell for it every time. Probably because it was the one thing she wanted most in her own life—a second chance to get it right.

“Kate?”

“Hmm.” She shook her head. Hearing her name snapped her back to the present. The conversation replayed quickly in her mind. Vince had told her a story about Moxie and the Bait Shack because…“We're not eating at the Bait Shack tonight, are we?”

“What gave you that idea? Oh!” He laughed again. “No. No, no Bait Shack tonight. Tonight we're having dinner someplace very special.”

“Oh?”
Dinner? Special?
A mental red flag went up. If this were one of those cheesy reunion shows, that would mean
something.
That would mean something in the very most meaningful of ways, she thought to herself in her old reliable Scat-Kat Katie way, careful to avoid even the hint of a mention of possible commitment and the prospect of making a future together. “That's nice.”

Pause. Remain poised. Don't read too much into this. She fussed with a stack of forms on her desk before looking up at him again and trying to sound totally devoid of any expectation as she said, “Where…”

Her uncharacteristically high-pitched voice broke. She blushed and cleared her throat, then tried again. “Where do you plan to take me for dinner?”

“Chez Merchant.”

She'd been absent from Santa Sofia for a long time but it was a small enough place that she had learned every eatery in it and in Waverly, a town forty miles away, in the two months since her return. She crinkled up her nose. “I don't know that.”

“My place?”

“Oh! Your…We're eating dinner at your place. Um, eating
in
at your place. Your house. Your home.”

Kate hadn't been to his house. He'd always come up to hers, which made sense, what with Kate's injured foot limiting her mobility and comfort levels. Besides, Vince's son Gentry and his family lived right across the street.

Vince's house. It felt like a big move forward in their relationship. A
good
move. Her stomach did a little flip-flop. She reined in her reaction and went back to shuffling those forms. “Yeah, okay, sounds great.”

“Glad you like it.”

Another shuffle through. Her whole body tingled with the urge to ask him why he wanted to take her to his home now. Why tonight? And what made it
special?
What she asked instead was, “What's to eat?”

“Uh…I hadn't…It's a…It's a surprise.”

“A surprise?” For her or him? He obviously didn't want to tell her so she tried another approach that might give her a clue about the evening. “What inspired this?”

He looked at her as though she had just walked into the conversation. “Your sister.”

Kate
felt
as though she'd just walked into the conversation. “Jo?”

“Moxie.”

“Moxie told you to have me over for dinner?”

“No, she spoiled my lunch.”

“What?”

“The story I just told you? About her showing up at the Bait Shack? Then this Hunt fellow horns in, too? Tells her if she doesn't like his story to write her own? If she wants to talk about it further to see him at his office because he's on lunch break? Any of this ringing a bell?”

“Most of it.” She didn't want to admit she'd only been half listening to what he was saying because she'd been too busy admiring the lines in his face, daydreaming about old TV shows and obsessing about whether or not he would ever propose to her again. “But I don't see what it has to do with eating at your place.”

“You left out two important words. Eating
in peace
at my place. This relationship between us is so…” He raised his hand.

It was a good hand. Calloused and tanned. Rugged and a little scarred, but with short, clean nails that showed his attention to detail. Kate liked those hands. She'd like them better if there was a wedding ring on the third finger of the left one.

Wait.

This relationship between us is so…

What?
She'd gotten so distracted looking at the man she had lost track of listening to him.

He tilted his raised hand back and forth rather than say more. So, before she could stop herself, she said more. “So
what?
Rocky? Unsteady? Iffy?”

The second the words came out she regretted them and slapped her hand over her mouth as if she could push them back inside and trap them there.

That only made Vince laugh again. Then he shook his head and said, “None of the above, but still, I don't want to leave it open to public scrutiny—and in a town this size, there isn't anywhere to go that's not ‘public' or anything better for people to
do
than scrutinize.”

She sat back in her seat. “And you think the two of us spending the evening at your house won't set people talking?”

He tapped the side of his head. “I've thought of a way to elevate it above all that.”

That piqued her curiosity. An engagement announcement, or that golden wedding band, would both be excellent ways to quell any idle talk. She folded her hands on top of her desk. Cool, collected and coy, she used all her communication skills to say, “Oh?”

His grin broke slowly but spread to include a glint in his eyes and to bring out those laugh lines in full force.

Kate could barely contain herself. The man might just throw his plans out the window and propose right here and now. She pivoted her chair around just in case he wanted to drop to his knee in front of her.

He pushed away from the door frame and took a step toward her, then said, “We'll have a chaperone.”

“A…what?” She almost fell forward at that and had to grab the edge of the desk to keep from swiveling herself around to face the back wall.

“A very short chaperone who goes to bed early, and doesn't know enough words to tell everyone in town our business yet.”

“Oh.” She eased out a long breath and scooted her chair back under the desk. “We're babysitting Fabiola.”

“Gentry is dropping her off at six-thirty. They have some kind of dinner with a relative of Esperanza's from Miami. Do you mind?”

An evening at home with Vince and the darling grandchild he adored. It wasn't what she had envisioned, but compared to all the evenings she had spent alone or on dates or business dinners when she couldn't wait to be alone again? “It sounds wonderful. I can't wait.”

So maybe she wouldn't have her proposal tonight. It would still be sweet to share an evening of domestic tranquility with Vince. Just the two of them…and his grandchild…and the great, unspoken, unsettled question that she didn't dare broach and he didn't seem ready to ask hovering in the air all around them.

Oh, yeah, tonight was going to be wonderful indeed.