Barefoot Brides Read online

  A door somewhere in the back of the building slammed shut. Heavy footsteps falling in long, running strides drowned out the last jingle of the phone.

  A muffled, “Yeah, what is it?”

  Moxie tipped her head, more trying to confirm the identity of the speaker than to listen in on the content of the conversation.

  “I can’t answer that…No. No. I can’t…I don’t know…Look, I’m sorry, lady, but I gotta go…Yeah. Yeah. You do that…Okay. All right…Thanks…Goodbye.”

  A moment of silence followed by a mild but descriptive curse word.

  “Hunt?” As she called his name, she stretched up on her tiptoes as if that would give her voice the extra oomph it needed to reach the man and let him know she was there. “Is something wrong? Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “I’ve never been so happy to hear anyone’s voice in my life!”

  Moxie couldn’t help but smile. It wasn’t a profession of love, or even like, which was the most appropriate level of affection either of them should feel toward the other given the short amount of time they had known one another and the circumstances of their, well, circumstances.

  He was happy to hear her voice. That was enough for now.

  “I’m just so glad you came back, Peg.” He came to a stop, looked around, then laced his arms defensively over his puffed-up chest. “You’re not Peg.”

  “I’m not Maxine, either, though you have called me that.” Her smile went from high beam to fog lights to completely off in the length of time it took her to complete that sentence.

  “They did it.” He strode to the door, opened it, looked to the north, then to the south, then directly across the street. “They actually did it.”

  “Who did what?” she asked, following his line of vision.

  He frowned. Then, still totally distracted, he turned and headed for the door that led to the back offices.

  Moxie didn’t know what else to do but follow. “Whatever is going on here, I’d like to help.”

  He came to a halt beside the receptionist’s office and finally fixed his gaze fully on her face. His harried expression softened slightly. “I believe that, Moxie.”

  “Good.” She took a deep breath. A connection, at last.

  He spun on his heel and marched into the small cubicle where Peg usually sat greeting people and directing phone calls.

  Again, Moxie followed. “But I can’t help with anything if I don’t know what’s going on.”

  He frowned at Peg’s desk.

  She moved in front of him, glanced at the desk and found it so clear of paper that she didn’t think it would hurt for her to hop up and sit on it.

  Hunt didn’t so much as blink at her seating choice.

  That he accepted the fact that she felt so comfortable in his new domain made her feel good. She folded her hands with a clap in her lap, crossed her legs at the ankle, then let them swing just a little. “Okay, so tell me. Who are they and just what did they actually do?”

  “The newspaper staff.”

  “Randall, Joyce, Mel and—”

  “And Peg. Yeah.” He laid his finger on the patch of beard along his chin.

  The gesture, along with the deepening lines in his forehead, made him look lost in thought. A man weighing his options, considering his next move.

  She studied his somber, dark eyes made darker by the circles beneath them. He hadn’t been sleeping well. The pallor of his usually rich olive skin told her he probably hadn’t eaten well, either. It didn’t hurt that conclusion that she’d seen the greasy junk he had piled on his plate at the Bait Shack.

  This was not a man who acted on impulse. Not a man ruled by emotions. When he had gotten out of the car or offered to take her father to the hospital, that had come from who he was, not how he felt about her or her father or the situation. He saw what needed to be done and responded. Now he was trying to formulate the proper response to this new predicament. It obviously had no clear-cut right answer.

  “Hunt?”

  “Hmm?”

  “What did they do?” She repeated the question without a trace of impatience.

  His whole face pinched; he rubbed his temple and shook his head. “They walked out on me.”

  Moxie let out a long, low whistle.

  He chuckled at that, then added quietly, “Thanks.”

  “For what?”

  “Not immediately asking me ‘what did you do to deserve that?’”

  Moxie smiled. “Every story has more than one side. Surely you’ve learned that as a journalist.”

  He nodded in appreciation. “And I guess you’ve learned it by having your life story butchered by a so-called journalist?”

  “Hmm. I hadn’t thought about that. I’d have said I learned it in my work in property management.”

  “Ah!”

  “And from living my life’s story. Not the version in the Sun Times, by the way. Each member of my family has his or her take on what happened to this point and has their own opinions about what should happen next.”

  “Don’t get me started on family.” He turned then sat on the edge of the desk and rubbed his hands over his face.

  “Started? I don’t even know how to start talking about family. Up until I reconnected with the Cromwells the only family I had to cope with was my dad and a foster mother who didn’t really want to be any kind of mother.”

  “Tough going.”

  “I guess. It made me who I am, though, so there’s that.”

  He gave a short, empathetic snort. “That’s one way of dealing with a…um…unique family dynamic.”

  “Unique? Kidnapped baby raised by kindly strangers within miles of birth family’s vacation home? That’s so common Hallmark has its own section in the Mother’s Day cards for it.”

  He laughed outright. “I meant my unique family.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No, not ‘oh’ as in ‘oh, I get it.’ ‘Oh’ followed by a big, fat question mark.” She drew the punctuation in the air to, well, punctuate her comment. “Or, as my decidedly more Southern-sounding sisters and birth mother might say, ‘do tell!’”

  Another laugh, accompanied by a shake of his head. “I have enough to deal with, what with my whole staff walking out. I don’t have the time or the energy to go into some sad old song and dance about the black sheep struggling to prove himself to…well, you know.”

  She didn’t know and she wanted to, but clearly he didn’t feel like going into details. Moxie sighed and pushed herself up and off the desk. “Okay, I get it. You’re preoccupied. Too preoccupied to do a little business?”

  “Business?”

  “I promised to run an ad in the next issue of the Sun Times, remember?”

  He placed the heels of his hands on the edge of the desk and braced his arms straight on either side of his body. He didn’t budge from the spot where he was leaning back to rest. “Much as I appreciate you keeping your promise, I can’t do the same with my staff gone. I can’t promise I’ll even get an issue out this week.”

  “Oh, surely they’ll come back.”

  “I don’t know. They were awfully mad.”

  Moxie bit her lower lip.

  He narrowed his eyes at her. “You want to ask, don’t you?”

  She squirmed.

  He started to smile, reined it in, then let it ease over his lips.

  He sure was awfully cute when he smiled.

  “Okay.” He shut his eyes and chuckled softly. “Ask.”

  How could she phrase this delicately? She scooted close enough to press her shoulder to his, then leaned forward to look at him square in the eye. “What did you do to make them mad enough to walk out?”

  He drew in a deep breath. His eyes darted to one side for only a second before his gaze locked on hers. The weight of his problems showed in his posture, his expression, even his deep, weary tone, and he exhaled slowly then shook his head. “I told them the truth.”

  Chapter Fiftee
n

  “Ad revenues? That’s what this is all about?”

  “Not all about. It’s not that simple.” He stood and strode across the room and into the hallway. He looked down it first one way and then the next, gesturing with both hands as he said, “Cost of paper is up. Cost of production. Electricity. Water. Gas for delivery.”

  “All things the Sun Times newspaper staff would totally understand.” She pushed up off the desk and followed him as far as the doorway. There she stopped, folded her arms and cocked her head and challenged him. “I can’t believe they’d walk out over hearing a few cold, hard facts.”

  He scrunched up his face like a kid caught trying to get away with not having told the whole story. “Yeah, well, maybe it wasn’t just the facts that were cold and hard.”

  “You have my attention.”

  “I just…I didn’t intend to say it. Not the way it came out.” He pretended to pick at something on the paneled hallway wall, then leaned against it, his arm straight and his palm flat. “But the longer we sat in the staff meeting troubleshooting—”

  “Troubleshooting?” Moxie held her hand up to stop him right there. “You mean problem solving?”

  He let his arm go lax, just a tiny bit. That put his face closer to hers, not in a threatening way but in a way that implied he did not like being corrected and he didn’t plan to back off his original phrasing. “Troubleshooting. Problem solving. Same thing.”

  “I beg to differ, Mr. Editor in chief.”

  He dropped his hand from the wall and stood with his shoulders back and his expression skeptical but not closed off. “I’m listening.”

  “Troubleshooting means you are looking for trouble, usually with a double-barreled rifle loaded with buckshot approach.”

  He tipped his head momentarily to the right. It wasn’t a nod of agreement, but it let her know he was on board with her theory and willing to hear more.

  “Problem solving, on the other hand, means you know what the issues are and you are looking for resolutions, looking for a way to get out of trouble.”

  “I never thought of it that way.” Then he rubbed the bent knuckle of his index finger over his narrow beard and chuckled, his eyes narrowed onto her face. “You always this smart?”

  “No.” Moxie didn’t know why she immediately denied it. There was nothing wrong with a girl being smart and Moxie was. Then again, if she kept to the absolute truth, she wasn’t always smart. And frankly, this man could come up with recent and very vivid examples of her, um, lack of intellect. “But I have run my own businesses since I was sixteen years old. I picked up a thing or two along the way.”

  “Sixteen. Wow. When I was sixteen…” He stared off into space, shook his head then asked, “So where were your parents then? Were you supporting yourself?”

  “My foster mom had just left. Billy J was a wreck—yes, even more so than he is now.” She answered the obvious question before he could even pose it.

  He laughed, then added, “I don’t know him well, but from what I do know, I like the man.”

  “Me, too,” she said softly. “Of course, I love him, but I also like him. You know what I mean?”

  More staring off into the distance, his dark eyebrows furrowed. “Not everyone can say that about their family. They love them but they also like them.”

  She considered delving into the wistfulness behind that statement then decided a man not swayed by emotion who had already told her more than she suspected he planned to might find that kind of question too intrusive.

  “To answer your question—” she directed the conversation away from his issues “—I had a great home and the whole town of Santa Sofia looking out for me. And the Bait Shack provided more than enough financial security.”

  “I noticed that with all the economic downturn around here, it still seems pretty busy.”

  “People have to eat,” she said. “They come from all over, and tourists still think it’s worth their while to get off the highway to eat at the Bait Shack. It’s a sort of landmark. My dad’s success helps the whole town.”

  “And a newspaper, for example, should be different because…?”

  “Because it can be,” she told him.

  “And the business you’ve been in since you were a kid?”

  “I help people put a roof over their heads, make a home. Those that have problems realizing that dream, I work with. I serve the community as much as I can, because I can.”

  “And therefore you should.”

  “Don’t give me that tone, not from a guy who played the—” she pulled her shoulders up, put on a somber scowl and pretended to stroke an imaginary Pharaoh-like beard “‘—I am taking you to the hospital because it’s the right thing to do not because you’re taking out an ad’ card.”

  “All right. All right.” He laughed and held up both hands. “Guilty. You’re all about the altruism and I’m a die-hard capitalist.”

  “Look, Hunt, I am just a good person trying to live my faith.”

  He did not flinch. “I understand.”

  “Really?”

  “I may not qualify as a poster boy for the churchgoing crowd but I am a man of faith, Moxie.”

  She got the feeling he did not say that out loud often. Not out of shame but because he was the kind who didn’t think you should have to proclaim it for people to know it.

  “I’m hardly a shining example all the time myself.” That made Moxie want to come clean. “And as for my business being all about altruism? I went into business for myself because I’d figured out that summer that no matter how much money or how many kind folks you have in your life, basically, a person has to learn to rely on themselves. So I wasn’t supporting myself so much as I was taking care of myself.”

  “That’s a pretty harsh lesson for a sixteen-year-old to take.”

  “I guess you’re never too old to learn something new. I’m trying to do that, especially where my new family is concerned.”

  He studied her in silence.

  She squirmed, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. “What?”

  “Nothing. Just thinking that I want to be like you when I grow up.”

  “You look like a man fully growed to me,” she teased, then felt her cheeks burning. She hadn’t meant that as flirtatious as it had come out. “I mean, you’re clearly adult, mature, responsible.”

  He laughed. “Yeah. Tell that to my family.”

  “Family.” She shook her head.

  “Yeah. It’s because of them, because of my family, I said what I did. It’s their philosophy. Not mine. Well, maybe it’s mine. I thought it was, now I just don’t know.”

  “Well, I certainly don’t know. Maybe it would help if you’d tell me what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m talking about what I said to the staff. What I told them that made them walk out.”

  Moxie held her hand out to coax him to spill it.

  His shoulders rose and fell. He shook his head then exhaled and straightened his back as he faced her and said, “I told them that all media is first and foremost a business.”

  “Really? Not even a passing reference to the nobility of the fourth estate? To the duty of the free press to inform the public, shine a light on injustice and wrongdoing?”

  “Some people would say that the only form of media that does that anymore is the hero of a graphic novel.”

  “I think there are plenty of people who would disagree with that, from Miz Nancy who runs the Christian bookstore down the road to the local talk radio station to your very own newspaper staff.”

  He huffed at the mention of his wayward workforce.

  Moxie went on, undeterred. “I’d say they all could cite examples of how different forms of media have helped people, changed lives even.”

  “Look, I was just trying to tell it to them straight,” he huffed. “I don’t know for sure how things work in Santa Sofia, but I’m guessing the banks around here won’t let you write a check on the satisfaction o
f having championed a noble cause.”

  She hesitated then conceded his point with a halfhearted shrug and a nod.

  “No matter the goal, none of it can happen if the media doesn’t make a profit, right?”

  Another nod.

  “For a newspaper, that profit comes from ad revenues first and to some degree sales and subscriptions. I told my staff that.”

  “Which they obviously knew all along, so—”

  “And then I added the proverbial last straw. Something that might as well be my family’s motto.” He looked away from her. “Media accomplishes more by gaining affluence than by giving insight.”

  “Wow.” Moxie tried to process all that and found herself torn between disagreeing with that premise with all her might and with asking him, “That’s your family philosophy? Media exists to make a profit, not to serve the community?”

  “Everything exists to make a profit. If it doesn’t…” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder in the classic sign for throwing a player out of the ball game.

  “And the Sun Times isn’t making enough of a profit, so according to your upbringing…?” She repeated his gesture.

  He didn’t confirm anything, just said matter-of-factly, “Something has to give. Rates have to go up.”

  “You’d have the whole town on your doorstep complaining.”

  “Complaints I could take. The landslide of canceled subscriptions, that would make the few advertisers we have left walk? That I can’t accept.”

  “What about cutbacks?”

  “As of this hour, staff’s down to just me.” He held both hands out, his arms wide to showcase his singularity. “That might help.”

  “They’ll come back after they cool down.”

  “Then what do I do? Ask them all to take a pay cut or to decide among themselves which one I fire?”

  She saw his point. “What if you just get more advertisers?”

  “I’ve been all over town. Everybody says they’ll take an ad next week, next month, next…editor.” He looked like a lost pup as he said that.

  “Aww.” Moxie stuck her lower lip out in a show of sympathy. “You think it’s personal?”

  “Don’t you?”

  She thought about it a moment then shook her head. “I think it’s regional.”