Barefoot Brides Read online

  “Not to mention gorgeous.” Moxie feigned a big ol’ goofy, doe-eyed sigh. “Except, of course, to me. He’s too…” She crinkled up her nose. “Too beachy for me.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Jo snapped.

  “You know, sun-kissed hair, cloudproof outlook.” Moxie waved her hands around as she spoke. “Too tan, too relaxed—”

  “So you’d prefer someone pale and tense?” Jo blurted out in a tone that was neither sweet nor sisterly and entirely too defensive of a man who had yet to make his intentions toward her clear. “Is that what you see in Dr. Lionel Lloyd? You have a marked preference for pasty nervous types?”

  “Tan or pale, that doesn’t matter.” Moxie took it all in stride. “I’ve had enough of that ‘when the going gets tough the tanned go fishing’ beach-attitude growing up with my dad, thank you very much.”

  “I thought the quote was ‘when the going gets tough the Weatherbys go fishing.’” Jo cocked her head.

  “That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” Moxie agreed. “Travis Brandt is just a cuter, cooler, Christian-ier version of my dad.”

  Jo opened her mouth to protest, not because she knew it to be a misrepresentation but because she wanted it to be with all her heart—especially when a vision popped in her head of Travis with a gut, a hat and a parrot feather.

  Moxie forged on before Jo could get out a word. “Tense, I can do without, but I don’t know, more intense? I could give that a whirl, I suppose.”

  “Intense? Not a term I’d use for Lionel.” Jo frowned then whispered, “Fits Travis, though.”

  Accomplished. Focused. Substantial. Beachy but intense. Jo wanted to know what she had been thinking when she believed she could be more like him.

  That was a notion she had best give up—go back to her original thought. Sweetness. Sisterly-ness. Being who her mother wanted her to be. Right?

  She wished she could talk to either of her sisters about her feelings, lay out her fears and reservations, be truly and fully honest for once in her life, but…

  “Hmm. How to describe Lionel.” Moxie tapped her chin with one finger.

  But…when everything you attempt ends in embarrassment, indifference or big, fat failure, you always keep your guard up and you never ever really feel safe.

  “Safe.” Jo Cromwell couldn’t even begin to imagine what that felt like.

  “Yes! Safe,” Moxie agreed. “Now there’s the perfect word for Lionel.”

  Jo blinked, trying to make sense of the comment, but she couldn’t seem to let go of the subject of her own insecurities. How she questioned each and every single choice she made. Walked away from an encounter only to go over it in her head again and again. She tried her best. She gave her all. Yet that twisting, hot-cheeked angst always came back no matter how much of herself she put into anything, because coming from her it would be nearly worthless.

  Not to feel those things pressing in on you day in and day out must be one of the best kinds of freedom in the world, she thought. Like…

  She closed her eyes and lifted her face to draw in the smells of Florida’s Emerald Coast—the salty surf, sun-warmed skin and SPF 30. Yes, even in mid-November the scent of the protective lotion still lingered in the beach air.

  A gull cried out.

  Foamy water bathed her bare feet then retreated.

  Being safe must feel like being a wave.

  Or the wind.

  Or a bird.

  Or anything but a thirty-five-year-old failed perfectionist, buried in business debt, trying to keep the peace in a family where she had always been the kid nobody wanted.

  “Jo? Jo? Where are you, girl?” Moxie put her hand on her sister’s shoulder.

  “Where I am doesn’t seem nearly as important as where I am going.”

  Moxie stepped in close. “Where are you going? Wasn’t there something you wanted from me, something to do with forming this group of yours? What do you want to do?”

  Just once, she thought in a prayer she secretly suspected even God would dismiss, I want to do something…

  She gazed at the ocean so vast and blue that if you squinted at the horizon you couldn’t tell for sure where it left off and the sky began. She thought of pirates and maidens and missionaries both of long ago and of the very modern variety.

  She thought of her sisters and their mother, and how much healing they still had to do before they could truly be a family again.

  Jo twisted around to look back at the Traveler’s Wayside Chapel.

  She thought of Travis and how, at the height of his career as a nationally recognized sports announcer, he had walked away from the trappings of fame and money to become a minister at a broken-down chapel in the nearly forgotten former tourist town of Santa Sofia, Florida.

  And Jo?

  Just once, Lord, I would like to do something right. Something good. Something that makes a difference. Jo held her breath for a moment wondering if she had it in her to say aloud what she longed for more than anything, including her desperate need not to be taken for a fool.

  “I am going…” She looked at Moxie then at the sand where her own footprints had once been.

  It all became clear in that instant.

  Her life so far was not working. It was not serving the Lord. To do that she would have to step out in faith.

  She would never be able to make a difference until she started doing something different.

  “I am going to the chapel to help clean up after the free meals.”

  “Okay, I can do that with you.” Moxie took a step, leaving her mark on the beach behind her.

  “No.” Jo put her hand on her sister’s arm. “I’m sorry I got you out here today, but I just realized I need to do this alone.”

  Jo looked at the chapel, the sea, the sand, her sister and made that step she felt sure would lead her in a new direction, a path she would follow for the rest of her life. And all she had to do was trust God and…

  “Do what?” Moxie asked, a ball cap hiding any emotion in her eyes. “What do you have to do alone, Jo?”

  “I have to stop playing it safe.”

  Chapter Three

  Stop playing it safe.

  Driving away from the beach, Moxie could not get Jo’s words out of her mind.

  Not because Moxie needed the same advice.

  Far from it!

  Moxie wouldn’t even know where to begin to play things safe. She’d been practically on her own since the summer when she was sixteen and her foster mother ran off and Billy J began the practice of going fishing whenever things got rough for him.

  Moxie gripped the steering wheel of her vintage pickup truck, not sure of which way to turn on the upcoming street. She’d already wasted the morning meeting everyone for breakfast at the cottage so they could share the big newspaper article. Then taken time off from her work schedule to meet Jo only to be sent packing with her Bible in her book bag and her proverbial tail between her legs.

  If Moxie merely “worked in property management,” as R. Hunt Diamante reported, rather than actually buying, restoring and renting out her own properties, she’d probably have lost her job by now.

  She certainly felt as though she was on the verge of losing her patience, if not something more precious. Herself.

  Who was she, anyway? Moxie Weatherby or Molly Christina Cromwell? Or some combination of the two? Molly Moxie Christina Cromwell Weatherby? And maybe someday…maybe, just maybe she’d add Lloyd to the mess?

  “Um, mix.” She scolded herself for the errant thought. “Add to the mix.”

  No. Mess was probably a more apt description, if not of who she was, then of who she felt herself slowly becoming. A big, overcrowded mess of expectations and obligations. The truth was that Moxie didn’t know who she was or where she belonged or what her future held.

  Nothing about her life was, or ever had been, written in stone or inked on legal documents or even scribbled on a wall in permanent marker.

  Impermanence.r />
  She had always thought it was the thing that made her independent, which made her successful and, in a way, made her a better Christian.

  Now she felt it put to the test. Not whether she had faith or not, but how that faith would manifest in all these new relationships and situations. How could she go from being just Moxie to being a daughter and sister and, in time, a wife?

  She shut her eyes to block out at least one of the choices that lay before her—which way to turn.

  She didn’t recall ever having felt this lost and anxious before. Her foster parents’ choices had forced her early in life to become the self-sufficient worker bee that everyone counted on. Now her newly re-formed family was pressing in on her so close she wondered that she didn’t break out in hives.

  If she were the kind to play things safe, she’d turn off her cell phone and go someplace and hide.

  “Hey, Mox!” A car pulled up beside her truck, the passenger calling out of the open window at her. “Saw your picture in the paper! Who is that Maxine they mentioned? Another long-lost sister?”

  Not that there was any place in Santa Sofia Moxie could hide.

  “Very funny,” Moxie called back, offering a weak smile.

  No, she’d never find a place to hide now, not since that story had hit the paper. Everywhere she’d go someone would want to comment on it or ask for her comments about it, for sure.

  “You should go introduce yourself to that new editor, make him print your name right,” the off-duty waitress called as the car pulled out and turned left, toward town.

  “Ri-i-i-i-ght. I may just do that.” When pigs fly. She gave a cheery wave and flipped on her right turn blinker.

  Maybe she’d go out to the Bait Shack. After all, it was nearing lunchtime and her dad would ask her to pitch in and wait tables. Or walk around with a pitcher and give refills of sweet tea. Or worst of all, tag along with him and Dodie while they took the fishing boat out for the afternoon. The pair, who had become fast friends, would fill the hours talking about the thing that had made them bond so quickly—her.

  She flipped her blinker off and put her forehead against the wheel.

  She could go see the so-called love of her life. So called by everyone, including the good doctor himself, but Moxie. Did she really love Lionel Lloyd? She thought she did. She liked him.

  But not enough to want to go have lunch with him on what was shaping up to be a really rotten day.

  Love was too hard a concept to tackle right now. Love in all its forms seemed to be at the root of most of her frustrations. Not just for Lionel but for her sisters and her mother…her mothers, plural.

  Yes, her foster mother had deserted her, leaving behind a lot of pain, confusion and an entirely inadequate note: “Isn’t there something better than this?” But that didn’t make her any less the woman who had taken Moxie in as a young girl and helped raise her to her teens.

  Was getting involved with Dodie and her daughters some kind of betrayal to the mother who had done all that for her? Or was trusting anyone to play the role of mom a betrayal to the woman Moxie felt she had formed of herself all on her own?

  Moxie looked left, then right.

  What to do? Where to go?

  She loved the once-bustling tourist town of little Santa Sofia, Florida. She loved that she could spend her mornings at the beach and her nights under a covering of stars so thick they seemed more plentiful than wildflowers in a meadow. She loved the life she had made for herself here in no small part because of the lives her work allowed her to touch. Because she had a hand in fixing up and preserving so many of the houses and buildings all around town, she wasn’t just a “part” of the community, her contributions wove through it, block by block, home by home, person by person.

  Now she didn’t know where to turn. Not in her life, not in her relationships, not on the very roads of the town she loved.

  She raised her eyes and immediately saw the slender stack of business cards she kept secured by a rubber band to the sun visor of her truck.

  Weatherby Property Management, Inc.

  M. Weatherby

  My house is your home.

  Moxie meant that. Despite the reckless dismissal of her contributions—and not even getting her name right—in print by the R. Hunt Diamante fellow, what Moxie did mattered to her. She made a difference in people’s lives. Because of that, she felt she made Santa Sofia a better place to live.

  Another car roared up behind her.

  She put her head down again and groaned, bracing herself for the inevitable calling out from the passing driver about the article.

  She clenched her teeth.

  For someone physically alone in her own truck, raised to feel that in the whole wide world she could only count on herself, Moxie felt crowded into a place so small she could hardly think. But the one thought she could manage was that if she wanted all this new family–old life business to work, she was going to have to do as Jo had advised, stop playing it safe.

  That meant setting boundaries.

  “Boundaries,” she whispered, liking even the sound of the word.

  She’d start with her dad.

  She raised her head slightly. “No more working for free each and every time I walk into the Bait Shack.”

  Then Dodie.

  Her eyes peered over the dash to the parting of the road ahead. No more expecting Moxie to call her Mom or behave like the little long-lost Molly Christina of Dodie’s expectations.

  Then Jo and Kate.

  She poked her nose over the rim of the steering wheel. “They’ll take it best of all.” Of course, they really didn’t need anything more than a gentle reminder that Moxie needed time to get used to her new it’s-a-sisterhood-not-a-competition status.

  Then…

  She lifted her chin, pushed her shoulders back. “Then I just might head down to that newspaper office and make sure that new editor never gets my name wrong again.”

  And then…

  And then the honking began.

  Moxie just about leaped out of her seat.

  “Who in Santa Sofia honks?” That was the kind of behavior they occasionally got during the peak of tourist season but not in November. “And at me?”

  Everyone knew her truck and they knew if it wasn’t moving, it had either broken down or she had! That is, she had had a breakdown in communications most likely with her dad, but maybe with a client or contractor. Everyone in town knew this meant she was stuck on her cell phone and might be sitting there awhile. So people had gotten used to just rolling on around her.

  Moxie checked her rearview mirror. Sure enough, she recognized neither the white muscle-car convertible with the tan leather interior—a car like that she could have remembered—nor the man sitting behind the wheel. Correction, the man seething behind the wheel.

  He honked again and said something that she couldn’t quite make out, for which she suspected she should be grateful.

  His black hair was clipped so short she wondered if he’d recently shaved it all off and this was a couple weeks’ growth. His complexion wasn’t pale by any means but definitely not tanned. Someone who spent far more time indoors than your average Floridian, she decided on the spot. He had on sunglasses that wrapped around his face like some superhero’s mask, only the black frames and lenses made it impossible to see his eyes. And a patch of beard that she supposed was meant to make him look hip or cool or whatever word people not stuck in a small town like her would use to describe themselves.

  But she couldn’t help thinking it made him look like the paper cutout of the Pharaoh they stuck on the felt board to act out the story of Moses in Sunday school.

  That Pharaoh was one bad dude. A loner type. Someone unaccustomed to things not going his way. A guy who didn’t play well with others.

  Moxie’s stomach tightened. She thought of rolling down the window and yelling for him to go around her.

  Before she could, the man got out of his car.

  She gasped.
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  Santa Sofians did not get out of their cars to express dissatisfaction with another driver’s behavior. They drove up and hollered about it like civilized people. This did not feel right.

  She put her hand on the door handle. She’d just pop it open and assuage this stranger with the old Southern custom of slopping sugar. That meant she’d apologize and fret, and flirt and compliment relentlessly until the man either surrendered to her charm or got sick of it all and did what he should have done in the first place. Skedaddled on past her.

  That’s when she noticed his hand clenching and unclenching; there were black smudges on his long fingers and fresh cuts across his knuckles.

  All thoughts of charm and sugar deserted her then and all she could think was that Santa Sofia was about to experience its very first case of road rage. And when they wrote the story of her untimely demise in the Sun Times, that doofus of a new editor probably still wouldn’t get her name right.

  No way was she sitting still for that. The road rage, not the name thing.

  She promised herself then and there not to let little things like mistakes in their tiny town paper get to her ever again, if she could only get out of this unscathed.

  She revved the engine.

  The guy stopped in the road.

  The truck lurched forward and she prayed it wouldn’t stall as she flipped on her left blinker and then spun the wheel hard to the right. She hightailed it toward Billy J’s Bait Shack Seafood Buffet.

  As she drove she frowned and glanced at the Bible in the bag beside her and then at her business cards. All right, she did have a little of Jo in her. She had a little of the desire to please others. And given the choice between leading a strange man to someplace where there might not be anyone around to protect her and a public place where there would probably already be a couple local cops and also an arsenal of things she could pull from the wall—from fishing nets to a varnished swordfish—to defend herself, she’d choose the safest bet. She did play it safe more than she liked to admit.

  But that did not discount the boundary thing.

  In fact, the Road Rage Pharaoh Wannabe had helped cement the idea in her mind.